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+{"text":" \nBEHIND   \nTHE LIONS\n\nPLAYING RUGBY FOR THE   \nBRITISH & IRISH LIONS\nFirst published in 2012 by\n\nPOLARIS PUBLISHING LTD\n\nc\/o Turcan Connell\n\nPrinces Exchange\n\n1 Earl Grey Street\n\nEdinburgh\n\nEH3 9EE\n\nwww.polarispublishing.com\n\nText copyright \u00a9 Stephen Jones, Tom English, Nick Cain and David Barnes, 2012\n\n\u00a9 2012 British Lions Ltd, Polaris Publishing Ltd & Birlinn Ltd\n\nAbridged history \u00a9 John Griffiths, 2012\n\nThe views expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or policies of the British & Irish Lions, the Lions Committee or British Lions Ltd, nor those of any persons, players, rugby unions, sponsors or commercial partners connected with the same.\n\nTrademark and Copyright in the Lions Badge and in the Lions word marks is owned and registered by the British & Irish Lions (British Lions Ltd)\n\nOfficial Website of the British & Irish Lions: www.lionsrugby.com\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be\n\nreproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the\n\nexpress written permission of the publisher.\n\nHardback ISBN: 978 1 78027 098 2\n\neBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 529 1\n\nEnhanced eBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 530 7\n\nInteractive app edition also available.\n\nBritish Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data\n\nA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library\n\nDesigned and typeset by Polaris Publishing, Edinburgh\n\nBIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES\n\nBeyond the original source material found in diaries, letters and articles that were used to\n\nrecall the earliest tours, and the fresh interviews conducted within these pages,\n\nsome accounts have been supplemented with material from the following sources:\n\nAt the Centre; Jeremy Guscott; Pavilion Books, 1996\n\nBrian O'Driscoll: A Year in the Centre; Brian O'Driscoll; Penguin Books Ltd, 2005\n\nThe British Lions; John Griffiths; The Crowood Press Ltd, 1990\n\nBritish & Irish Lions Website \u2013 www.lionsrugby.com\n\nFifty Rugby Stars Describe My Greatest Game; Bob Holmes and Chris Thau; Mainstream, 1994\n\nHigh Balls and Happy Hours; Gavin Hasting; Mainstream, 1994\n\nThe History of the British & Irish Lions; Clem Thomas and Greg Thomas; Mainstream Publishing, 2001\n\nIt's In The Blood; Lawrence Dallaglio; Headline, 2007\n\nJohn Bentley: My Story; John Bentley; Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1999\n\nJoking Apart: My Autobiography; Donncha O'Callaghan; Transworld Ireland, 2011\n\nThe Lions Diary; Jeremy Guscott, with Nick Cain; Michael Joseph Ltd, 1997\n\nLion Man; Ian McGeechan, with Stephen Jones; Pocket Books, 2009\n\nLions of Ireland; David Walmsley; Mainstream Publishing, 2000\n\nLooking Back... For Once; Jim Telfer; Mainstream Publishing, 2005\n\nMartin Johnson: The Autobiography; Martin Johnson; Headline, 2004\n\nRonan O'Gara: My Autobiography; Ronan O'Gara; Transworld Ireland, 2009\n\nRugby from the Front; Peter Wheeler; Hutchinson, 1983\n\nSize Doesn't Matter; Neil Back; Milo Books, 2000\n\nThanks to Rugby; Bill Beaumont; Hutchinson, 1982\n\nVoices from the Back of the Bus; Stewart McKinney; Mainstream Publishing, 2010\n\nWillie John: The Story of My Life; Willie John McBride; Piatkus Books, 2005\n\nPHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS \u2013 PAGE NUMBERS REFER TO THE PRINT EDITION\n\nCOLORSPORT\n\n180, 194, 195, 196, 208, 223, 234, 242, 244, 254, 257, 260, 273, 285,\n\n288, 290, 293, 294, 307, 315, 316, 320, 324, 329, 335, 339, 351, 356\n\nFOTOSPORT\n\n221, 225, 230, 233, 365, 375, 379, 381, 382, 384, 386, 388, 389, 390, 393, 397, 400, 404,\n\n407, 408, 410, 412, 417, 418, 422, 424, 426, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 436, 437, 439, 441,\n\n445, 453, 454, 456, 457, 459, 460, 462, 465, 466, 468, 472, 473, 474, 475\n\nGETTY IMAGES\n\n100, 117, 122, 131, 133, 136, 140, 142, 143, 144, 174, 192, 201, 204, 205,\n\n206, 208, 265, 270, 280, 299, 311, 322, 331, 353, 358, 363, 367, 369, 387\n\nINPHOPHOTOGRAPHY\n\n218, 275, 422, 440, 443, 455, 461\n\nMIRRORPIX\n\n179, 191\n\nTHE ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF NEW ZEALAND\n\n78, 80\n\nPRESS ASSOCIATION\n\n103, 106, 139, 148, 150, 151, 177, 178, 197, 199, 200, 222, 336, 343, 344, 364, 394\n\nThe authors and publisher have made every effort to clear all copyright permissions, but where it has not been possible and amendments are required, the publisher will be pleased to make any necessary arrangements at the earliest opportunity.\n\n## CONTENTS\n\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nCRUSADERS\n\n[CHAPTER ONE  \n1888: PATHFINDERS](009.html#a42)\n\n[CHAPTER TWO  \n1891: CHAMPAGNE AND TRAVEL](010.html#a44)\n\n[CHAPTER THREE  \n1896: GENTLEMEN IN ALL CLASSES](011.html#a47)\n\n[CHAPTER FOUR  \n1899: MANLY PLAY](012.html#a51)\n\n[CHAPTER FIVE  \n1903: HERALD OF DARK DECADES](013.html#a54)\n\n[CHAPTER SIX  \n1904: THE KIWI ROVER](014.html#a56)\n\n[CHAPTER SEVEN  \n1908: TEMPERANCE NATION](015.html#a59)\n\n[CHAPTER EIGHT  \n1910: PUPIL TURNED MASTER](016.html#a62)\n\n[CHAPTER NINE  \n1924: BENNIE'S BOOT](017.html#a66)\n\n[CHAPTER TEN  \n1930: PLAYING TO THE LAWS](018.html#a69)\n\n[CHAPTER ELEVEN  \n1938: TWILIGHT OF THE SPORTING GODS](019.html#a71)\n\n[CHAPTER TWELVE  \n1950: THE FLYING LION](020.html#a75)\n\n[CHAPTER THIRTEEN  \n1955: LORDS OF AFRICA](021.html#a77)\n\n[CHAPTER FOURTEEN  \n1959: KINGS OF RUGBY](022.html#a81)\n\n[CHAPTER FIFTEEN  \n1962: DECLINING FORTUNES](023.html#a84)\n\n[CHAPTER SIXTEEN  \n1966: LAND OF THE LONG DARK CLOUD](024.html#a86)\n\n[CHAPTER SEVENTEEN  \n1968: LEARNING THE LESSONS](025.html#a89)\n\n[CHAPTER EIGHTEEN  \n1971: THE HISTORY BOYS](026.html#a92)\n\n[CHAPTER NINETEEN  \n1974: THE INVINCIBLES](027.html#a96)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY  \n1977: HISTORY IN REVERSE](028.html#a99)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE  \n1980: EXTERNAL PRESSURES APPLY](029.html#a102)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO  \n1983: MONTHS OF MELANCHOLY](030.html#a105)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE  \n1989: THE COMEBACK KINGS](031.html#a108)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR  \n1993: THE TWILIGHT OF THE AMATEUR](032.html#a110)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE  \n1997: GLORY DAYS](033.html#a113)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX  \n2001: THE NEARLY MEN](034.html#a117)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN  \n2005: BLACKOUT](035.html#a120)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT  \n2009: OLD SCHOOL VALUES](036.html)\n\n[CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE  \n2013: WARBURTON'S WARRIORS](126.html)\n\nABRIDGED HISTORY\n\nSTATS AND RECORDS\n\n## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nThe authors would like to thank everyone who has given their time so generously to assist in the preparation of this book. Those whom we interviewed are too many to name individually but their thoughts are included in the pages which follow and we would like to thank them for giving so generously of their time and for being so honest about their great ups and downs with the Lions.\n\nSpecial thanks must go to the following for their expert help in the production of this book: John Griffiths, the world of rugby's premier statistician and historian and its most meticulous recorder. No one attempting a book of this scope could hope to succeed without him; Rob Cole and his colleagues at the Westgate Sports Agency for their input with Lions history and the Welsh element of Lions touring history; Adam Hathaway of the People, rugby and cricket expert; and to Clem and Greg Thomas for their wonderful book, The History of the British & Irish Lions.\n\nThanks also to Peter Burns at Birlinn and Polaris for all his tireless work in bringing this project together.\n\nStephen Jones, Tom English, Nick Cain and David Barnes, 2012\n\n## INTRODUCTION\n\n# CRUSADERS\n\nBY STEPHEN JONES\n\nONE OF rugby's most important distinguishing characteristics is a wanderlust. It takes the form of a compulsion to take the sport on the road, to seek out those who play in neighbouring or distant or foreign or even alien environments, to encounter them on the field, to absorb their culture and, frankly, to have a memorable social outing away from the strains of normal life, safe in the rock-like communal solidarity of a rugby team.\n\nAnd sometimes the most rewarding aspect is that once you have experienced the distant environment, perhaps even clashed harshly on the rugby field, for all the differences in culture and surroundings, you find that so much is the same. Attitudes, outlooks, affections. Experience teaches that even amongst the occasional vicissitudes of modern day professional rugby, there are still such beings as the universal rugby man and woman, with rugby's forgiving balances and love. You can travel 12,000 miles to discover an image of yourself.\n\nAnd so the rugby tour was born. Tours began almost as soon as the sport had become recognisable and codified. Only rock music has anything like it. Even if the tour lasts only a night or two, even if it is just a whistle-stop trip to Cornwall or Devon or the Lake District or Cork or the Scottish Borders or West Wales at Easter, then it has traits in common with even the longest tour. The luckier schools and junior clubs these days are magnificently ambitious, and how marvellously education can be topped up, and how far eyes can be widened, by the months of fundraising leading to the trip of a young lifetime. My school tour was to Newton Abbot. Another planet.\n\nIn terms of distance and time spent, no activity on this planet has longer tours than rugby. At the highest levels, the wanderlust and all the other imperatives of rugby tours become simply the backdrop to a desire to take on the best rugby teams in the world. The challenge is implicit, it never has to be laid down. And it must always be accepted.\n\nIt is an accident of geography and of rugby's history and sociology that from the standpoint of the four home rugby union countries, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the ultimate challenges are those posed by three nations up to 12,000 miles away \u2013 New Zealand, South Africa and Australia. At the top level of the game, these were, and are, the ultimate opponents. They are the destinations, in rotating sequence, for the unique, magnificent beast called the British & Irish Lions.\n\nThe first tour down under made by a conglomerate team from the Home Unions sailed from Gravesend on 8 March 1888 \u2013 125 years ago as I write. Seven more such tours were made in the following 12 years. The wanderlust of these heroic pioneer tourists was so powerful that they were driven to overcome distances and tribulations long forgotten in these days of our shrunken world and flat bed air travel. One account of the 1903 tour to South Africa, led by Mark Morrison, states that often the players were hungry. And simply to leave these shores to play was a perilous expedition.\n\nIn 1888, those pioneers \u2013 26 young men chiefly from the North of England \u2013 departed on the RMS Kaikoura, a steam\/sail ship with three masts, one propeller and a top speed of 15 knots. It was still largely the age of the gentleman player, so the heroes travelled in saloon class. Also available were second saloon class, and a rather grim-sounding emigrant class.\n\nThey took seven weeks to reach Australia, sailing through what were reported as 'heavy, confused seas'. The team was away from home for eight months. They played 16 matches under rugby rules and incredibly, another 19 under Australian rules \u2013 the tour had been organised by private promoters, who needed to make money, hence the Australian rules games against the top clubs of the day. The party travelled enormous distances by stagecoach, charging around the country and stopping only for fresh teams of horses.\n\nGiven the endurance, and the privations relative to the modern day, it was no doubt a relief to so many back home when they returned \u2013 and in fact, they did not all do so. The captain, Robert Seddon, a popular, principled and gentle man, was drowned during the tour while paddling a kind of canoe with which he was not familiar. Accounts of his life, and the reaction of his touring colleagues and friends to his death, suggest strongly that here was a man who typified early the essential calibre of people who were to fill the touring jersey for the following 125 years.\n\nTours continued regularly but it was only on the 1924 tour to South Africa, the ninth made by conglomerate parties from Britian and Ireland, that the name 'Lions' was applied to the touring team \u2013 simply because the official tie for that trip bore a lion motif. The early touring parties were invariably referred to after their captain (for example, Maclagan's team to South Africa in 1891, Bedell-Sivright's team to Australia and New Zealand in 1904).\n\nBut they were also known widely as the 'English football team', a reflection of the dominant influence of the foundation country on sport and life at the time, and disregarding the fact that those early tours usually contained at least a smattering (and often a significant representation) from Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In 1924, the team became known as the British Lions.\n\nPerhaps remarkably, it has only been recently that the full and now accepted description of the team \u2013 the British & Irish Lions \u2013 has come into general usage. No one with a clue of the history of the Lions and the magnificent contribution made by Irishmen on the field of play and in all other aspects of the tour could ever believe that it took so long.\n\nThe early tours tended to be either unofficial (organised by commercial promoters) or semi-official (tolerated by the national unions). But it was not until 1910 when the team went to South Africa that they were first truly representative of the Four Home Unions, with each union supplying individual players. Before that, it was all done by gentlemanly invitation, with a preponderance of Oxford Blues and gentlemen of private means.\n\nFurthermore, in those far-off days the party rarely reflected the true strength of the rugby in Britain and Ireland. There were so many reasons not to be available for tours of such length. For example, of the 28 players provisionally invited to prepare for the tour of New Zealand in 1930, only nine actually embarked for New Zealand. Wilfred Sobey was injured in the first game and never played again \u2013 a distressing tradition sadly observed on several of the later tours.\n\nIt was only for the 1950 tour of New Zealand that the Lions first appeared in their familiar red shirt; until then they had worn dark blue shirts with thin red and white stripes. This change followed the blue\/black colour clash of the 1930 tour to New Zealand that resulted in the All Blacks wearing white shirts for the Test series \u2013 despite the Lions' offer to change colour. The change to red ensured that there would be no future clashes with the host nation. It was also during that tour that the Lions first played with a green flash on their socks \u2013 a recognition, at last, of their Irish contingent.\n\nHowever, what does it matter? Even if every trip was not official, even if there was an ad hoc air around much of the operations of the pioneer tours, even if they did not wear Lion red, and even if the term 'Lions' was not used until such tours had been operating for 36 years, the early tours are so clearly and definitively the foundations of the grand tradition, the pathfinders, that they are true Lions in all but name and absolutely must take their place in any formal retrospective.\n\n*\n\nThe history of the Lions is a pioneer history of sporting exploration, and also a history of travel (it is not, sadly, a story of unbroken sporting success, but we will come to that shortly). The Kaikoura, with its largely open and windswept decks, was the original vessel for the odyssey, and its passage took seven weeks. Gradually, as the steamships became more powerful, the voyages became slightly less prolonged. Lions teams of later years travelled out on such vessels as the Dunnottar Castle, then on the Union steamship Tartar; then on the Edinburgh Castle; and to New Zealand in 1950, the last time the Lions did not fly, the Stirling Castle, with the passage reduced to a mere three weeks.\n\nSince then, they have travelled the intercontinental legs on Lockheed Constellations, on Argonauts, on Skymasters, on Boeing 707s, on DC10s, on jumbo jets and latterly, on Boeing 777s.\n\nThey first flew on tour in 1955, on the Constellation. Clem Thomas, the magnificent flanker who became a celebrated journalist with the Observer and a Lions biographer, and whose hectic approach to life was tailor-made for a Lions tour, recalled that they refuelled in Zurich, Rome, Cairo, Khartoum, Nairobi, Entebbe and finally, Johannesburg. Far less convenient than the fly-by-wire, long-reach jets of today. And yet somehow, ours is a world less glamorous.\n\nTheir internal travel on tour in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was made by stagecoach \u2013 the famous coach and 10 \u2013 sweeping through the country to the next change of horses. In South Africa, they travelled miles by Cape carts, and one account mentioned 'rough unmade roads with endless corrugations.' And then later by giant steam engines hauling them through the wilderness areas of South Africa by night. It is easy to imagine the terror felt by the more reserved tourists in 1968 in South Africa, when the boisterous 'Wreckers' were heard coming compartment-by-compartment down the train in the dead of night, laying waste to the fixtures and fittings as the other faction, the 'Kippers', prepared for the worst.\n\nIt is impossible not to mention that such damage was a feature of many tours, and of rugby everywhere in previous eras. John Reason, the late rugby scribe, once wrote that this was all a legacy of the public school days when people always knew that whatever their bad behaviour, 'Daddy would pay up'.\n\nThen the internal travel took to the air \u2013 successive Lions teams travelled on Dakota DC3s, then on Fokker Friendships, then on Boeing 737s, and some on the frequently windy and bumpy flights around New Zealand must have understood just a little of the sense of unease that the pioneers experienced as they cast off into the unknown.\n\n*\n\nThe tour of Australia by the British & Irish Lions of 2013 will be the 29th in what has become the most magnificent sequence anywhere in sport, a concept, a crusade and a brand \u2013 to use the modern term \u2013 of towering significance. There are many who note the size and prominence of the World Cup, introduced in rugby in 1987 and which now dominates the sport, but who will always see the Lions as the summit; indeed, after the much-feared transition from the amateur era to professionalism, the Lions are now healthier than ever.\n\nBut how can a tradition, and a concept, which began in 1888 possibly be still so thunderously relevant in 2012, so much so that, if anything, the Lions as a golden gladiatorial exercise and sporting brand \u2013 sorry again about the modernist tag \u2013 is actually growing?\n\nThe answer is surely that while so much has changed profoundly, so much has stayed exactly the same. It would be ridiculous to even compare tours of old with the fierce, ultra-dedicated Lions of the modern era, with all their specialist coaches, their medical teams, their analysts peering at computer screens, their mass media profile, their Facebook and Twitter networking, their commercial deals.\n\nThey do not touch their hosts and host country with such easy familiarity, or visit avidly the tourist attractions, or go anywhere much except the airport, the hotel and the training ground. It is a shame because, especially in South Africa, yet also in the slightly more reserved New Zealand and Australia, the hospitality is regularly stupendous and has often passed into legend.\n\nIn 1955 on the tour of South Africa, a rolling, glamorous epic in which the players were treated like film stars (and which really should have been turned into a film), the great Clem Thomas had been invited well in advance to stay at a farm. The farm was being bothered by a leopard, which was attacking livestock. Generously, as Thomas said, the host family held off tracking the leopard so that Thomas, their guest, could shoot it. He did not, but it was the thought that counted.\n\nIn Lions on Trek, an account of 1955, the prolific Lions author Bryn Thomas mentions a grand total of 71 official or semi-official functions to which members of the party were invited during the 99 days that they were away from home. Mention a cocktail party these days and the players roll their eyes in horror. It is not their fault; you can only tour in your own era.\n\nNowadays, Lions tours are restricted to big city stops. In previous tours they would ramble rather sedately around the country, often stopping in one-horse (or one-zebra or one-kangaroo) towns where their arrival was a seismic event, where they were treated, albeit benevolently, as beings from another planet. Before the days of mass media and blanket coverage, newsreel scraps was all either side, host or hosted, would have seen of each other. It is a shame that time can no longer be found for a stopover in Greymouth and Timaru in New Zealand, or Dubbo and Cobar in Australia, or in Oudtshoorn or Springs in South Africa.\n\nSo many differences. Yet it is amazing how many experiences the modern Lions share across the decades with the pioneers, how easily the shyness of the original gathering before the tour gives way to communal resolve in which the enmity of the home internationals are forgotten. The journalist and author John Hopkins famously described a Lions tour as 'a cross between a mediaeval crusade and a prep school outing'. Clearly, the public school element in the parties is now considerably reduced, but otherwise the description is perfect. The bond between players suffering the difficulties of travel and strange environments in the old days must have brought them together, but so too does the shared vision and the pressure of life as a modern-day Lion.\n\nMore common experiences. During the 1888 tour, Bob Seddon was quoted as expressing the view that on tour 'the umpire has strong leanings to the local man', therefore instituting a cast-iron tradition which has spanned the decades in which, rightly or wrongly, the touring team have complained in private or in public about decisions by the referee. Sometimes they changed the series. No tour has ever gone without substantial or even bitter controversy.\n\nEvery tour seems to have one game that lives in infamy, when tempers boil and thuggery breaks out. Taken together as a single history, there have been far too many instances of dirty and dangerous play, and it is a welcome aspect of the professional era that thuggery has declined substantially, with the scores of cameras, the extra match officials and the citing procedures shining a spotlight on miscreants and idiots. Long past time.\n\nSelection, with four unions promoting their own, has often been shaky, and it would be silly to pretend that all the choices of tour captain have worked out well. Some tour leaders struggled badly with the reins of leadership and should have handed them over, while other leaders were magnificent in every respect.\n\nEvery Lions tour projects near-unknowns into the limelight, and finds that more celebrated players simply do not react to the touring environment; injuries are always a factor, with the 1980 Lions in South Africa afflicted badly, and the 2009 Lions in South Africa losing two props and two centres within minutes of one Test.\n\nOne of the grandest traditions (unless it spilled over into causing damage) is socialising, even if it is far less formal these days. In past tours it was done in evening dress and with grace. Sometimes. Even now, in this monastic era, the grand old bibulous traditions established by decades of carousing Lions are still, cautiously, observed. Perhaps Rowe Harding, a member of the 1924 party which toured South Africa under Ronald Cove-Smith, spoke for them all as he tried to account for the lack of success of that team. 'Many unkind things were said about our wining and dining,' he said.\n\nEven Sir Ian McGeechan, arguably the greatest figure in the history of the Lions, as player and coach, sent his players away for a drink \u2013 or even more \u2013 after they had experienced the bitter defeat of the Second Test and the loss of the series in Pretoria in 2009. 'They just needed to get away and chill out,' he said. They did. They had their beers, came back and won the Third Test in Johannesburg.\n\nEvery tour seems to have its Irishman who, while he may or may not be a wonderful player, is seen as a great tourist; this is not a negligible standing when teams are away for so long, under pressure, and need to look inside for their sustenance and morale, their diversion and humour. To be a 'good tourist' is to be revered today, in any rugby community. But every tour has also heard a clash of the steel, and been an epic sporting confrontation. Nothing feels quite as massive in sport as Test rugby matches between the Lions on the one hand and the All Blacks or the Wallabies or the Springboks on the other. On these occasions, the world seems to shift on its axis.\n\nAnd another 'rule' of the Lions is that no outstanding player in Britain and Ireland is allowed by perspective to sit in the panoply of all-time greats unless he has become a great Test Lion. They have to become, as Sir Ian says, 'The Test match animal.' It is possible that Will Carling, the superb England centre who was so vastly influential as player and leader in the revival of English rugby in the late 1980s and early 1990s, will never be placed in the stratosphere because he did not take part in a successful series as a key player. Furthermore, he is still the only big-name player in my memory to declare that he would not be available for a Lions tour. For the overwhelming majority of players, the Lions jersey retains mystical properties; it is the Holy Grail of the sport.\n\n*\n\nAnother aspect binding together so many tours was their amateurism. Those new to rugby may well struggle badly to understand not only why rugby was an amateur activity for so long, but why that amateurism was policed so balefully and even ferociously. Even some people who grew up with the concept find themselves similarly confused. The idea that amateurism was at the heart of the game's unique appeal held just a little water in previous eras, but the game has discovered since that it had precious little to worry about as it stood at the barricades for 100 years.\n\nBut one defining feature of every tour until 1997 \u2013 two years after the game went open \u2013 was the tradition of painful amateurism, with players disappearing on tours lasting six months or more with a mere pittance in terms of compensation. It was not even called compensation; instead, for decades, it was called a 'communications allowance' presumably so that you could ring your family to check how much money you were losing.\n\nIronically, the first tour of all, in 1888, took place under a cloud because it was promoted privately and, therefore, it had to make money, with the promoters brokering deals with the host teams. The Home Unions viewed it with massive suspicion. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the team came from clubs in the North of England, where demands for 'broken-time' payments were already rising and where the grand split of 1895 between the codes was on the horizon, ruffled the feathers of the Rugby Football Union even more.\n\nInquests were launched, questions were asked, and at the end nothing could ever be proved; nothing concrete was ever discovered to uphold or to confound the suspicion that the first Lions of all were closet professionals. Then the unions took over the Lions, and amateurism was the enforced norm for nearly a century.\n\nOver the years, there were some unofficial compensations. Small Welsh communities or groups of friends or local benefactors would have a collection for the local hero to make his tour. There was often a thriving trade in gifts, items of kit and match tickets, and it was never an uncommon sight in the amateur era to see the Lions duty boy anxiously shuffling tickets and notes near the main gate of grounds.\n\nIt now seems all so harmless, but in those days tour managers used to fret for hours if the scent of professionalism, even a few shillings in illegal payments, pervaded the tour. Even the smallest gift from an admiring host had to be valued to make sure that they did not consign the recipient into outer darkness. The younger rugby men and women these days may find it incredible that once, with the Lions, even to train hard was regarded as unsporting, a suspicious step towards professionalism.\n\nYet when the game did cross the rubicon, there were people who felt that the Lions had had their day, so inextricably linked had they always been with the concept of amateurism, of manly sacrifice, of not making sport a living.\n\nThey could not have been more wrong. The Lions were helped across the rubicon by their mighty attraction to the hosting countries. It was estimated that the 2005 Lions tour of New Zealand generated over \u00a3100 million for the host country's economy, and these days the Lions are every bit as big a commercial machine as they are a rugby operation. It was said in 2005 that in the replica jersey market, more Lions jerseys were sold than the uniforms of Manchester United, Real Madrid or the New York Yankees, traditionally the biggest players in the market.\n\nBut it is not the invitation of outsiders which has seen the Lions grow and grow. On the 2009 Lions tour, we saw at the Second Test at the gigantic Loftus Versfeld stadium in Pretoria another modern-day confirmation of everything that the Lions have ever stood for. It was a stupendous occasion and the match ended in what neutrals, and even some South Africans, saw as a victory for South Africa that had more than a few elements of the most outrageous fortune.\n\nBut in terms of underlining an enduring appeal, the most striking aspect was when the Lions ran out into the Pretoria sunlight from the darkness of the tunnel. When they looked up, their eyes were drawn across the pitch to the giant far stand at Loftus, which runs the whole length of the side of the ground. That day, the stand was an almost unbroken, boiling sea of scarlet red with tens of thousands of British and Irish rugby followers wearing their replica jerseys \u2013 on that bank alone, there must have been at least 12,000 of them.\n\nDespite the cost of their trip and the eventual sporting trauma, they clearly felt an urge to be present at the highest altar that a secular environment has ever constructed. Amateur? Professional? Both were water off a lion's back.\n\n*\n\nThere is another and rather unpalatable aspect of history that categorises far too many Lions tours together. Defeat. After early successes, the colonies tended to learn faster and train harder than the touring teams, taking a lead they were never to lose. The majority of tours came to grief then as they still usually do now \u2013 against host teams that were stronger, harder-headed, better coached and organised, uncompromising men who desired victory with more intensity. Teams who left less to chance, less to individual flair. A few Lions tours, if not many, have fragmented when the pressure of the trip exposed fault lines, usually when members of the party realised that their dreams of Test selection were to be dashed.\n\nBefore and after the Second World War, the process continued. Of the 17 Lions tours made since Karl Mullen's 1950 trip to New Zealand, the Lions have won the series on only four occasions \u2013 in 1971, 1974, 1989 and 1997. Otherwise, they have suffered a combination of heavy defeats, and probably even worse, narrow defeats which really should have been turned into triumphs. It would be silly to ignore the fact that wrong choices have been frequently made in terms of captains, some coaches, and many players.\n\nEvery Lions tour sets out with a pervading optimism, but it is an optimism that has rarely \u2013 except in the golden decade of the 1970s, when the Lions dominated \u2013 proved justified, and it is incumbent upon administrators in the game in the present era to study history (particularly recent history) and to conclude that in its support of the Lions, in its granting of windows for proper preparation and rest, they have hampered the team and its history. It is probably the most remarkable sign of the power of the Lions concept, that they have risen so wonderfully in stature without the precious oxygen of playing triumphs.\n\nHowever, experiences cannot always be measured on a scoreboard. Surely, there are few crusaders in the past 125 years whose sporting prowess and whose lives were not enhanced profoundly by their Lions experience. The pulse quickens two years out for all those contending to play, for all those saving to support, and for all those anxious to report, in the most magnificent arena that sport has ever built.\n\nThe memories come in torrents: great matches, controversies, great men and players, great cultures and sights and sounds and tourism and travel and life force. It might be the exultation crackling over the radio into a Welsh dawn as the 1971 Lions drew the final Test and turned history on its head to win the series against the All Blacks; the odd but addictive feeling of crushing the Springboks in 1974 and 1997; the raw pain felt in the soul when the superior 2001 and 2009 Lions lost the series in a welter of ill-fortune. The glorious day, every few years, when the wraps come off the gleaming red vehicle of dreams.\n\nAnd my personal first memory: sitting in the stand at Lancaster Park in Christchurch, in a kind of jetlagged awe, watching the men in red in the flesh for the first time. The next day, we drove from the city of Christchurch, over Arthur's Pass to tiny Greymouth, where we convened with the Lions in one hotel; they were objects of fascination, beings from another planet, and yet just like us. The mystique, fanned by the fact that they never play at home, has been diminished for many just a little because of mass communications, sports channels, rolling news and newspaper blanket coverage. But the awe remains.\n\nThe dedicated professional athletes boarding their plane at the end of May 2013 to begin the 29th tour by the Lions, 125 years after the first and with every bit as much a sense of occasion, become the direct descendants of the pioneer heroes boarding the RMS Kaikoura at the quay in Gravesend in 1888. Their tours are not so long, but still have the air of an odyssey. Lions tours were recently and accurately described as the Last Great Adventure.\n\nWanderlust is a powerful thing. To play rugby at home is just a sporting matter. To tour, well, that takes rugby into the realms of life experience. To become a Lion is one of life's great affirmations.\n\n## CHAPTER ONE\n\n# [PATHFINDERS  \n1888](006.html#a3)\n\nNEW ZEALAND & AUSTRALIA\n\nIN 1887-88, two teams of English cricketers toured Australia. It was before the days of proper regulation, and both teams were gathered together by private promoters. One tour party was led by the former England cricket captain James Lillywhite and organised by Arthur Shrewsbury (England's opening batsman of the day) and Alfred Shaw, the man who ten years earlier had bowled the first ball in an official England\u2013Australia Test cricket match.\n\nThe other touring team, competing for attention and crowds and finance, was captained by Lord Hawke. In the rather bizarre and disorganised fashion of the day, the two parties joined together for the one-off cricket Test against Australia, but otherwise remained separate entities. Debts of the Lillywhite expedition were so large that the promoters eventually defaulted and the debacle caused Wisden to call the twin tours 'a piece of folly that will never be perpetrated again'.\n\nThe outstanding player in Lord Hawke's team was Andrew 'Drewy' Stoddart, one of the most famous sportsmen of the era, arguably the greatest cricketer of his day (apart from WG Grace) and a man who once scored 485 in an afternoon club match, captained England at rugby and cricket, captained the first Barbarians rugby team and, according to John R. Lott, his biographer, relished top-level sport as an aspect of leisure.\n\nThe promoters decided on an even bigger gamble to try to recoup their losses. While still in Australia, they formulated the idea of arranging a rugby tour. Shaw had stayed at home in Nottingham from where he acted as the chief recruiter, mainly in the rugby centres in the North of England. Part of the plan was to sign up some of the cricketers to save costs, since they were already there. Some of them had already played soccer and the promoters believed that they would soon pick up rugby. It was an article of faith springing from the remarkable versatility of leading sportsmen of the era.\n\nAubrey Smith, who had played for Lillywhite's team, refused to stay for the rugby tour, departing for England and then, eventually, America, where he later played for the Hollywood cricket 11 with Boris Karloff and Errol Flynn. Stoddart, who had made his England rugby debut in 1885, agreed to jump ship from Lord Hawke to join the rugby tour.\n\nThe process never ran smoothly. The cricket promoters sent a telegram to an agent, Mr Turner, back in England. He was charged with finding players to tour, and with making arrangements to ship them out. It took him months of diligent work, all against a background of suspicion from the august and true-blue Rugby Football Union, who refused to patronise the tour, although, in the end, they did give permission for it to take place.\n\nMost of the 22 players who formed the tour party were from clubs in the North of England. The debate regarding broken time payments had already begun in the area, and suspicions that the whole venture was tainted by professionalism never went away. Even when the team were asked by the Rugby Football Union to sign affidavits that they were not being recompensed for the trip, suspicions remained.\n\nWhat has never been in doubt, however, is the stoicism and optimism of that first party. They were led by Robert Seddon, a much-respected forward from Lancashire. There was a tiny leavening of non-English players to give the team at least a semblance of a Celtic fringe. There was Angus Stuart, the Welsh-born Scot and former Cardiff three-quarter who played for Dewsbury at the time of the tour, and there was also WH 'Fishguard' Thomas, a Welsh international, who had attended Llandovery College.\n\nAlso included were the Burnett brothers from Hawick and two Scottish doctors, Dr John Smith and Dr Herbert Brooks, of Edinburgh. Brooks was the original vice-captain but by his own testimony was preoccupied by business ventures while in Australia and had to resign the position.\n\nPerhaps business was not his only preoccupation, either. 'Both Smith and Brooks played while intoxicated,' wrote Charlie Mathers, the Bramley forward who kept a diary of the tour. Smith, who had made the tour as part of the management team, was meant to perform medical duties and also be administrator. But such was the shortage of players that he finished off playing as a forward in several games. He had been a reserve for the Scotland rugby team several years earlier but had also played 10 times for the Scotland football team. He was the first man ever to score a hat-trick against England in a football international, and his ability to cross football codes was typical of many players at the time.\n\nSo the rugby men convened in London on 8 March 1888, and headed to Gravesend, where they boarded the RMS Kaikoura bound for Australia via Liverpool. They reached Hobart on 14 April, when Mathers was moved to observe that: 'Hobart is the finest place in the world'.\n\nFive days later, they re-embarked for Dunedin and Port Chalmers, where they were met by Shrewsbury, Lillywhite and Stoddart and even though their party now seems ridiculously small for the monumental list of fixtures that they were eventually to fulfil, the party was as complete as it was going to be.\n\nThe Pioneer Lions.\n\nThey played nine games on the New Zealand section of that tour, losing only to Taranaki and to Auckland in the second match between the two teams and then moved on to Sydney for the Australian leg of their tour. They played 16 matches between June and September, winning 14 and drawing two.\n\nBut still the books would not balance, and it was here that, famously, the team now undertook 19 games under Australian Rules, and even though these were almost all against the leading teams of the day, they still managed to win seven and draw three. They were coached by Jack Lawlor and Frederick George McShane of the famous Essenden and Fitzroy Rules clubs respectively and that part of the adventure even gave rise more than a hundred years later to a book called Football's Forgotten Tour: The Story of the British Australian Rules Venture of 1888, written by John Williamson.\n\nThe sports at that time were not quite so different in their play and Rules then had the kick-off from the middle rather than the bounce off by the referee. Shrewsbury, with an eye to the main financial chance, ordered a 'nice outfit for the team, something of good material that will take them by storm in Australia.'\n\nAustralian Rules was a 20-a-side game so the party was almost fully engaged and, typically, the master all-round sportsman, Stoddart, was so successful in the alien code that he was asked to remain after the tour. He did not.\n\nEventually, the team returned to New Zealand, played another 10 matches under rugby laws between 8 September and 3 October, winning seven and drawing three \u2013 a sequence of matches which marked the beginning and, for nearly a century, the end of any Northern hemisphere dominance over New Zealand rugby.\n\nThe day after their last game, the team re-embarked on the Kaikoura in Wellington harbour, sailed home and arrived in England on 11 November, having been away for eight months, and remarkably, having lost only two of their 35 games.\n\nAnd if there were no Test matches on the tour, there were some sporting significances. The organisers realised that it was important to obtain official patronage and permission for future tours, because the unofficial and commercial nature of the trip had given rise to the allegations of professionalism which soured some of the proceedings.\n\nAs usual, both teams learned lessons from the rugby of the other \u2013 New Zealand and Australia were to benefit from the lessons of the passing game which the tourists played, their heeling from the scrum and their use of the dummy pass.\n\nAndrew Stoddart was probably the outstanding player on tour although John Nolan, a prolific try scorer from Rochdale Hornets, was so impressive that he was offered a job to stay in Australia. Harry Eagles, from Swinton, played in every match \u2013 a feat of endurance which has never been repeated on a British\/Irish tour of Australia and New Zealand, and a record which is safe for all time.\n\nRobert Seddon, one of the few capped players in that tour \u2013 he had played against Wales, Ireland and Scotland in 1887 \u2013 also played in every game up until his death. He had been orphaned early in his life and when he departed on tour, he was engaged to be married. In Australia on the day after the final game of the Rules intermission, he went on a canoeing expedition on the Hunter River with three of his teammates but continued on alone in a Gladstone skiff, a type of craft with which he was unfamiliar.\n\nHe was 200 yards off the bank of the river when the craft capsized and one account held that trailing straps which should have held him in place became entangled. Two onlookers who could not swim watched his struggle. Mathers, the diarist, was not given to emphatic expressions but he reported as follows. 'We had no sooner got to the great Northern Hotel in Newcastle than a telegram comes to Mr Lillywhite, saying 'Your captain is drowned'. We were all amazed. The effect on the team when the news arrived by telegram was devastating.'\n\nSeddon, one of the finest of men and players, was buried in Maitland where the team had played its final Australian Rules match. A procession to Campbell's Hill Cemetery was led by 180 local footballers, and then the team walked behind the Mayor and Aldermen, who were followed by hundreds of local residents. The people of Maitland have maintained the grave there ever since. There is an imposing headstone bearing the inscription: 'In memory of Robert Seddon, captain of the England football team, drowned in the Hunter River at West Maitland, August 15 1888'.\n\nSeddon was buried 'in his flannel trousers, and his British football guernsey.' He had written home to family and friends earlier on the day of his death. In 2008, Maitland Rugby Club announced that they would be erecting a memorial to Seddon in their club, 120 years after his death.\n\nFifteen years after the tour, Joe Warbrick, the captain of the New Zealand Native team (known as the 'Maoris') that toured Britain and Ireland in the winter of 1888-89, and who had played for Wellington against Seddon in New Zealand, was killed when engulfed in a lava flow after an eruption of a geyser near Rotorua. Three others died after ignoring warnings from a guide that they were too close \u2013 ironically, the guide was Warbrick's brother.\n\nNolan, the brilliant back, was killed in a work incident in 1907 and in 1915, the remarkable Stoddart, the wonderful all-round Corinthian sportsman who had taken over as captain after Seddon's death, committed suicide, after financial problems had struck at the Stock Exchange, where he was a member.\n\nAnd so the era of the great inter-hemisphere rugby tours had well and truly dawned with that eight-month odyssey. The trip launched not entirely for sport, but for solvency, set precedent and fuelled the wanderlust.\n\nIncidentally, three months after Seddon and his men had gathered in London in preparation for this tour, the Maoris convened in Napier, North Island, for a worldwide tour. They played nine games on an internal tour of New Zealand, and left Dunedin on 1 August, bound for Australia where they played two games, and then embarked on a six-week journey to England via the Suez Canal.\n\nThe team in New Zealand.\n\nOn 27 September, they reached Tilbury docks in London, and on 3 October they played their first match on British soil against Surrey. All told, those magnificent warriors were to play 74 games in England, Scotland and Wales, including internationals against England, Wales and Ireland \u2013 winning the latter.\n\nThey left Plymouth on 29 March, amazingly sailed to Australia for a further two-month leg of 14 rugby matches, all of which they won, plus eight more fixtures under Australian rules. A year and four days after they left New Zealand, they returned but went straight into another internal tour in which they played eight matches.\n\nOn 24 August, they played their last game, against Auckland. The whole trip had lasted one year and two months, they had played 107 games, of which they won 78. It was a staggering way to mark the era of the great tours, and surely, it remains the greatest sporting journey ever made.\n\nROBERT SEDDON (England)  \nToured: 1888\n\n(Interviewed by the Melbourne Daily Telegraph) After all the games we have played, I must confess to liking the Australian (Rules) system much better than I anticipated when we came to Victoria, but I am of the opinion now that we have finished our tour, so far as Victoria is concerned, that the rugby game is still far and away the best, and for this reason: in the game that is played here one half of the men do little or no work, and for quite half the time they are absolutely idle, so that your game is really carried on with only ten or a dozen men. In rugby such a thing as this is impossible, for out of the fifteen men engaged on each side nine are forwards \u2013 players almost the same as your followers, and the remaining six are so disposed in the field that they are continually engaged.\n\nThis is one of the objections I see, and the next in importance is the very wide power you place in the hands of the umpires. So far as we have been able to see each umpire has a reading of the rules of his own, with the result that they vary considerably in their decisions, which, as you know, are final. We who have studied the game from the rules, remark this perhaps more quickly than local men do, and often to us a gross breach of the rules is perceptible, but to our surprise the umpire passes it over or else gives a decision that astounds us. In nothing is this more perceptible than in little marking, when time after time the ball is handled and never touched with the foot. You have a rule that the player who receives a mark must be at least two yards off from the man who kicks it to him, yet I venture to say there is not one of the many thousands who witness the matches who cannot remember scores of instances when there has not been 12 inches. between men carrying on the little mark game. Either you should amend your rules to bring them in accord with the game you play, or else insist on them being properly interpreted by the umpires. Let me give you an instance of one of their peculiar rulings. In a match we played here, one of the men on the opposite side deliberately threw the ball, which one of our men caught, and claimed a free-kick, but to his, as well as our, surprise, the umpire gave a free-kick against him, because he had held the ball too long. If our man had no right to the free-kick, then the ball should have been thrown up, for it was virtually dead, in play, when the man on the opposite side threw it. From the free-kick which was given in that instance, a goal was kicked, and this lost us that match, for we had no appeal.\"\n\n\"I would like to mention another thing in connection with country matches. When the ground is not fenced in properly the spectators have got a way of crowding into the field, and to meet one of the difficulties which arose from this, our association has a rule that should, in the opinion of the umpire, a goal be stopped in consequence of the ball striking one of the spectators, he (the umpire) may give the goal, notwithstanding that the ball did not pass between the posts. Well, now, this is nothing more nor less than absurd, for how can any man tell what will become of a ball after it has been kicked. It is such a fine point that it should be left in the hands of no man to decide, especially as is the case in the country, when the umpire has strong leanings to the local men. When the ground is not properly protected, and such a thing occurs, the club owning the ground should be punished for not taking steps to keep the spectators out of the road. Shortly before we left home, a somewhat similar case to the one I have mentioned occurred.\n\nIn a rugby match the ball struck a dog, and was afterwards secured by one of the sides which, out of the tussle, was enabled to claim a try. This was disputed by their opponents, who maintained that as the ball had struck the dog it was dead. The dispute was referred to the Rugby Association, who decided that the 'try' was a fair one, because the other side, owning the ground, should not have allowed a dog upon it. But here an umpire gave a decision against us through no fault of our own.\n\nDR HERBERT BROOKS (Scotland)  \nToured: 1888\n\n(Australian Rules) is a very tricky game but as far as football goes it is a mongrel game. It seems to me that it is more handball than football. I do not think there is one man in the team who really likes it... But I am sure that they could bring out a team that could beat the Victorians at their own game. After two or three weeks' practice.\n\nThe tourists before playing a match in Australia.\n\nROBERT SEDDON\n\nYour players are soft. That is the tendency of your game. If they get knocked down they resent it, and ask angrily whether it was done on purpose. If we get knocked down we simply get up again and go on playing, and perhaps, if we are inclined in that way, look out for a chance to treat the man who tumbled us over in the same way. Yes, of course, rugby is rougher. That is just what I say, and perhaps it requires heavier men, although I fail to see it myself, for with scarcely any exception the best players you have are the tallest and the heaviest. Before we play a match we are told to look out for certain men, they being the most dangerous, and invariably we find that they are 5ft 11in or 6ft, and weigh about 12st or 13st. I tell you what I would undertake to do. I would pick twenty men at home who would beat at your own Australian game any twenty you could bring to meet them. All they would want would be about a month's practice, and they would be stronger, faster, and quicker than any I have ever seen here. I am jealous for English footballers, and I believe I am speaking the truth when I make the assertion that they are in every way better than you could produce. The disadvantage which we have had to suffer here is that we have had to think all the time we were playing, whereas our opponents played instinctively. But reverse the positions, and let them meet us in rugby. They would not render nearly so good an account of themselves as we have done under Australian Rules. There we play by instinct, and do things naturally. It has been supposed, that it was because we are heavy that we are consequently slow, but that is not the case at all. As I say, we have to think first. I guarantee under rugby rules that people would say we are quick enough in spite of our weight. I do not know whether the chance is likely to occur or not, but I should dearly like the opportunity of picking twenty men in England just to give you an idea of what Britons are at football. I do not wish to be thought boastful, harsh, or ungrateful, but I honestly believe that the rugby game is far superior.\n\nAndrew Stoddart, an all-round sporting genius.\n\nDR HERBERT BROOKS\n\nWe have had a grand time of it right through the colonies. The hardest game we had was with the Sydney University. They are a very good team and nine of their members are in the representatives. They were, however, very rough \u2013 in fact, they almost equalled Wellington for roughness.\n\nYou may have seen in the Sydney papers the account of the spectators. They were terrible. I never saw such conduct at any other time throughout our tour. Talk of barracking, they were all at it.\n\n[Australians] are not nearly so good as you in New Zealand. They are a very long way behind this colony but they have some very good players.\n\nI did not go to Queensland with the boys as business [intervened] and when the team returned they expressed themselves in high terms both of the football and their treatment. They said it was the finest outing they had had in the colonies and their reception the heartiest, if you can particularise when our reception all-round was so hearty.\n\nCHARLIE MATHERS(England)  \nToured: 1888\n\nA telegram came saying 'your captain is drowned'. We were all amazed and decided to cancel the match with Newcastle the following day. At night everyone was very quiet.\n\nIn the morning we went from Newcastle to Maitland, 20 miles, to bury our poor, unfortunate captain, Mr Seddon. When we got there we found him laid in his coffin. They all broke down but me. We went and had a service. Church crowded. All shops closed.\n\nSeddon had been sculling when his boat capsized. 'His feet were stuck in the straps and when he struck out, he dragged the boat after him,' said an eye-witness. 'In his death struggles he must have tried to loosen the straps under water because they were found partly unbuckled when the boat was found.'\n\nDR HERBERT BROOKS\n\nI and a few others left at the railway station quite jolly and when we got to Newcastle an hour and a half afterwards, we received a telegram announcing his death. It was a terrible shock to us all. I should not care to live through another day like that on which poor Bob Seddon was buried.\n\nThe sympathy extended to us was something wonderful. They had a beautiful choral service in the church at Maitland... And the procession was over three quarters of a mile long. At the front were local footballers numbering around 300, then came the hearse, the English footballers came next, and then followed some 100 carriages... On the morning of the same day a public meeting was held and \u00a3150 subscribed at once to erect a monument to Mr Seddon's memory.\n\nRobert Seddon\n\nIN MEMORIUM\n\nRobert L Seddon\n\nCaptain English Football Team\n\nHis manly form lies stiff in death's calm hash;\n\nNever again upon his men he'll call;\n\nNo more across the turf he'll lead the rush\n\nOf forwards, ever playing. 'on the ball'\n\nNo more we'll grip his honest English hand.\n\nNor hear his cheery greeting as of yore;\n\nAnd they, his comrades in that sea-girt land,\n\nWill watch in vain. They'll meet him nevermore.\n\nBrother and sister, in that far-off home\n\nGrieve not; he is at rest, his spirit free\n\nCalleth so tenderly across the foam.\n\n'Brother, I am but sleeping; sister, comfort ye.'\n\n'It may seem hard to you who cannot see\n\nBeyond the veil \u2013 a bitter, cruel lot\n\nGod knowest best in all things. All that ye\n\nCan know or do is this \u2013 Forget me not.'\n\n## CHAPTER TWO\n\n# [CHAMPAGNE AND TRAVEL  \n1891](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nVARIOUS PARTIES have been labelled the 'Greatest Lions' but the second tour of all, made to South Africa under the captaincy of W E (Bill) Maclagan, and managed by Edwin Ash, past secretary of the RFU, established an early claim, the power of which remains convincing. This time the tour was officially approved by the Rugby Football Union, who maintained the early habits which were to last a lifetime by appointing a sub-committee to pick the touring team, even though it was to be drawn from the four home countries. To be fair, they recommended that Maclagan, a Scot, be made captain.\n\nAmazingly, even though only 8 of the 21 tourists had been capped at the time of the tour (slightly more than half were Oxford or Cambridge Blues), Maclagan's men played 20 matches and won every one. Even more remarkably, after they had conceded a score in the opening tour match in Cape Town, they conceded no more for the rest of the tour. Whatever passed for defensive systems in 1891 worked well.\n\nThe tour, another epic odyssey, was underwritten by Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, and was described by one tourist as 'champagne and travel', and the trip, by all accounts, brought enormous quantities of both. The tour was a bizarre mixture of grace and good living, of dusty privation, of elevation, and endless daunting journeys.\n\nFor the first time, British players encountered the hard-baked grounds at altitude in South Africa \u2013 and in those days they were nothing more than red dust. There were also enormous journeys between playing centres, normally conducted by horse-drawn coaches. It is also true that the magnificent hospitality extended to the team may well have affected their performances. Paul Clauss, of Birkenhead Park and Scotland and one of the finest players on tour, reflected on this in an account he wrote years later: 'Had we overdone things from the social point of view? Too many dinners, dancers, smokers, etc?' Even so early in the grand tradition, it was established that most of the party tended to party as hard as they played.\n\nThe final game of the tour, played at Stellenbosch, was described by Clauss as 'a picnic match', which is not a concept that has survived the years. Most accounts do not include the picnic match in the official records of the tour.\n\nThe first Test match ever played took place at the Port Elizabeth Cricket Ground and was won by four points to nil with Randolph Aston scoring the first Test try credited to a British\/Irish touring team, and the match was refereed by a former Edinburgh medical student and Welsh international, John Griffin.\n\nThe Second Test was played at the marvellously-named Eclectic Cricket Ground in Kimberley. The only score was a goal from a mark, kicked from near the halfway line by William Mitchell, the England fullback.\n\nThe final Test was played at Newlands in Cape Town, and the touring team completed their whitewash on their missionary tour. They were not to know that South African rugby was to prove a remarkably rapid environment for learning.\n\nThe outstanding players on tour were probably Clauss, who appeared in 12 of the games and all three Tests and scored six tries, Randolph Aston, the England centre, who played in every match and scored a remarkable 30 tries, and 'Judy' McMillan, a powerful Scotland forward, who also featured in every game.\n\nAnother point of interest surrounded Sir Donald Currie, the owner of the Castle shipping line, whose ship the Dunnottar Castle carried the team from East India docks in London to Southampton and then to Cape Town in a record time of just over 16 days. Before the team departed, Sir Donald put his steam yacht Iolanthe at the disposal of the team so that they could cruise around the Isle of Wight. He also gave the captain a magnificent gold trophy, to be awarded to the team that produced the best performance against the touring team.The winner turned out to be Griqualand West, who in turn decided that they would put up the trophy for annual competition amongst the South African provincial teams; the Currie Cup became the backbone event of South African rugby, remains a powerful symbol of provincial dominance, and is a competition which is known all over the world today.\n\nThe 1891 tour party. Captain Bill Maclagan holds the ball.\n\nPAUL CLAUSS (Scotland)  \nToured: 1891\n\nMr Cecil Rhodes, then the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, generously guaranteed to pay any loss involved in the expenses of the visit.\n\nOur first week was spent in Cape Town, during which we played three matches, one against Cape Town, one against Western Province and the last against the Cape Colony. What seemed to strike the critics most about our play was the speed and fine dribbling of the forwards and the well-timed passing of the backs.\n\nDuring the first week we were overwhelmed with social engagements, a smoking concert, and dinner given by the Western Province rugby union, Government House ball, a dance at Sea Point, a visit to the theatre, a lunch on board the MS Penelope lying off Simonstown, a picnic at Hout Bay. They were all a glimpse through the doors of hospitality which were flung wide open throughout the tour.\n\nNo match was played in Pretoria, the Transvaal capital, but we paid a visit there and were presented to Mr Paul Kruger, the state president. Kimberley was reached on July 16 after two nights and a day on the train. We stepped into the arena with no little anxiety as, for the first time in our lives, we were going to play on a ground that was absolutely destitute of grass. It was hard and covered with reddish dust so that with a bright sun overhead, there was a considerable glare. Frequently, too, one lost sight of the ball in the pillars of dust that rose up in the wake of the players as they ran. The hard and gritty ground somewhere dampened our ardour. It was no joke tackling or being tackled.\n\nThe first ever Test match between Great Britain and South Africa, in Port Elizabeth.\n\nOn August 8, we left East London in a small tug to join 'over the bar' the coasting steamer, Melrose, bound for Natal. As a fact, the touring at this point nearly ended, for we had a narrow escape of being drowned. It was blowing half a gale. Outside the breakwater the coaster's lights were seen through the darkness and the tug made for them; but she was badly handled and taken right across the bows of the Melrose, which seemed to tower miles above our heads. Luckily she struck us a little astern. Had she caught the tub amidships we should have been sunk with little chance of saving ourselves. As it was we eventually made it on board and reached Durban. After a few hours' stay there we climbed, in wonderful zig-zags, by railway to Pietermaritzburg where we had an easy win.\n\nJohannesburg, though only about five years old at the time, possessed many fine buildings... that was not to be wondered at, seeing that the wealth of the Witwatersrand had attracted some of the most adventurous spirits from all quarters of the globe.\n\nOn Sunday August 26 at 6 a.m., we left this bright spot to return to Kimberley, again travelling by coach and ten. One coach reached Klerksdorp safely but the other lost a front wheel, so we had to get what sleep we could on the floor of a hut, the only one within miles on the barren veld, while the driver rolled off to commandeer another vehicle. That arrived about 1 a.m. and two hours later brought us to Klerksdorp, our destination for the night.\n\nTour captain, Bill Maclagan, in his Scotland livery.\n\nPaul Clauss of Scotland, one of the outstanding 1891 tourists.\n\nNext morning we were off again at 7 a.m. and travelled almost continuously until 2 a.m. the following morning \u2013 when, stiff and hungry, we reached Bloemhof. Next day we had nine more hours coaching until we reached the railhead at Fourteen Streams. There we were thankful to board a train again and in comparative comfort arrived at Kimberley at about 11 p.m. And on the morrow, a football match! This somewhat detailed account of the journey from Rand to Kimberley has been given to show that the tour was not all 'beer and skittles.' One might say that apart from the football, it was all 'champagne and travel.'\n\nDuring our stay we had travelled, roughly speaking, 3,263 miles by rail, 650 by coach and 260 by sea, including the voyage out and home we had covered nearly 16,000 miles.\n\nHad the tour been a success? Judging by the scoreboard, yes. But the measure of our success was not the number of matches won, or points scored; it went further than that. Had we showed them in South Africa how to play the game in true sporting spirit? Had we taught them that self must be subordinated to side, that science and combination are better than brute strength? I feel that we did.\n\nPlaying in Cape Town, with Table Mountain dominating the backdrop.\n\n## CHAPTER THREE\n\n# [GENTLEMEN IN ALL CLASSES  \n1896](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nFIVE YEARS after the invincible first tour of southern Africa came the next grand venture, with a party led by Johnny Hammond of England touring South Africa, this time for four Test matches in a rugby nation that had improved considerably in the intervening period.\n\nIt was the first touring party to include Irish international players \u2013 previous members of the small Irish contingents had never reached that level. The Test series was won by three games to one and the only blot on the playing record was a draw against Western Province and the defeat at the hands of South Africa in the fourth and final Test. It has been something of a tradition of Lions tours throughout history that the final international of any tour, with exhaustion and injury taking its toll and with thoughts of packing and home beginning to dominate, is the most difficult to win \u2013 and has usually been lost.\n\nThere were several other significant aspects about the trip. It proved that South Africa were a coming force, having absorbed the lessons in passing and scrummaging which had been handed down to them by the touring missionaries of 1891. But this time it was the touring team that had also learned lessons. The party discovered the benefits of wheeling tactics in the scrum and what would nowadays be called the 'snap shove', to overcome the scrummaging power of the South Africans.\n\nIt was on this tour that refereeing controversies first began in earnest, after the odd reference to such matters on the two previous trips. The players were often angered by decisions made by the home referees. The tour was an official visit sanctioned by the RFU, although Cecil Rhodes agreed to underwrite all costs.\n\nProbably the outstanding playing figure on tour was Fred Byrne, the England fullback, who scored more than a century of points on tour and played in every match, transferring successfully to centre for the Test series.\n\nAnother tradition which was to stand the test of time was that of great Irish characters forming a powerful and popular element \u2013 in 1896 Tommy Crean was such a character, he was the tour vice captain and played in every game. It was said that he could wheel a scrum on tour through his own strength and it was he who instituted guidelines for the consumption of alcohol on tour: 'No more than four glasses of champagne for lunch on match days.'\n\nWalter Carey, a reverend who in later years became the Bishop of Bloemfontein, was a try scorer in the First Test and is the man who coined the famous Barbarian motto. A year before the tour he said: 'Rugby football is a game for gentlemen in all classes but for no bad sportsman in any class.' Carey wrote a chapter on his tour memories in the book History of South African Rugby Football, published 36 years after the tour.\n\nThe First Test was played at the Crusader ground in Port Elizabeth and was won 8-0 by the Lions, with tries by Walter Carey and Larry Bulger, the Irish wing. The Second Test took place at the Wanderers ground in Johannesburg and was again won by the touring team, this time 17-8. Froude Hancock, the giant English forward who was a veteran of the 1891 series, gave an outstanding performance with a try in the second half. Two late tries by Theo Samuels were the first points scored by South Africa in a Test match.\n\nThe series was sealed at the Athletic Grounds in Kimberley, when the touring team came back from 3-0 down to win 9-3. Bert Mackie scored a try and Fred Byrne kicked a conversion and a drop-goal in a match which showed clearly that the gap was closing between players from Britain and Ireland and South Africa. Don't forget that in only one of their matches in 1891 had the tourists conceded a point.\n\nIt was therefore not a surprise that at Newlands, Cape Town, South Africa won the Fourth Test 5-0. It must be said that by all reports the party was incensed by the refereeing of Alf Richards, the local official, who repeatedly penalised the team for wheeling. Or perhaps the players had not stuck to their four glasses of champagne for lunch on match days.\n\nOne of the better players on tour was Alexander Todd, of Cambridge University and Blackheath who was to be capped for England in 1900. Like many leading sportsmen of the day he was an all-rounder, proficient in football and cricket. After the tour, he was to marry Alice Crean, none other than the sister of the charismatic Tommy. He had already enlisted in the army before making the rugby tour and three years after the trip he was back in South Africa \u2013 fighting in the Second Boer War. He was injured in action but recovered and entered the business world when he returned home.\n\nOn the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he enlisted in the Norfolk Regiment, and was part of an attack on Hill 60 in Ypres. He was seriously wounded and on April 21, 1915, he died of his wounds. In its obituaries later that year, Wisden described him as 'a capital wicket keeper'.\n\nOne of Todd's bequests to rugby is the series of letters he wrote home to his parents from the 1896 tour \u2013 which reflect some of the peculiarly tough and yet gracious ways of the early tours, the mixing with the socialites of the booming new town of Johannesburg in the time of gold fever, and the lengths that players were prepared to go to to get a game of rugby.\n\nALEXANDER TODD (England)  \nToured: 1896\n\n[From on board the union steamship Tartar en route to South Africa] As we are arriving at Madeira tomorrow morning, I thought perhaps you would like to hear from me. So far everything has been first rate and the sea is somewhat like a millpond. The consequence is that everybody is extraordinarily cheerful...\n\nI have always heard that being on shipboard for a long voyage rather tends to make one sentimental, but the steamship company did not look after us in that respect, as I don't think there are more than two unmarried ladies in our part, and they seem pretty full up with acquaintances already....\n\nWe got great cricket matches, sports, tournaments, etc on board... and cock-fighting, winning the large sum of 10 shillings in all. Concerts were in great request, but from a managerial point of view they did not go well because the second class passengers wanted to have everything in our own hands, and also do all the items of the programme, which caused unpleasantness...\n\nOn Thursday morning we got up early and saw the most magnificent sunrise on Table Mountain, the whole range going a bright terracotta. We landed on dock about eight o'clock and had a tremendous amount of speechifying at a special breakfast where all the rugby lights of South Africa were present.\n\nOn Thursday afternoon and Friday we ran about and trained on the field and finally played our first match on the Saturday. Oh goodness, it was awful!! We played 35 min each way on the ground like a brick wall, had a frightfully fast game, winning by three goals and try to a penalty goal and two tries \u2013 that is 14 points to 9. In the last 10 minutes I would gladly have changed places with a corpse. The papers rather slated us next day.\n\nOn Monday we drove out to Cecil Rhodes' place where Miss Rhodes showed us all over the house... Rhodes is not here now as he is watching the Matabele war. In the afternoon we played our second match, against the Suburban team. It was one of the hardest games I've ever played, especially as one of our men, Mackie, got his nose broken and had to go off for about 10 min. But he came back on afterwards and finished the game. The ground was even harder than before and we've lost square yards of skin between us.\n\nLast night feeling very sore and out of sorts, I was asked around to a meeting of the Orols club... in order to meet Mark Twain, who was just completed a tour round the world. They gave him a book of photos and the old chap made an awfully good speech in reply.\n\nIn the evening one or two of us were asked to perform at a smoker. I consented along with the other songsters as we thought there would only be about 40 or 50 people present and no formality. Judge of our horror when we were taken to a place larger than the Queen's Hall in Regent Street, with the best part of 1000 people there... We were after thinking that we had been directed to the Albert Hall or a Handel Festival by mistake but in we walked... the whole place rising and cheering like mad and to think that we had to sing to them on a raised platform. I wish my boots had been sizes larger so that I could have sunk into them.\n\nOn Friday morning we came on here after a miserable railway journey from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and have got into a beastly hotel where there is no water to be had for baths...\n\nMy last letter was from Queenstown, where we had horrid weather and had nothing to do but sit in a smoky little sitting-room all day and look at one another... We started away from there on Sunday night and arrived here at Johannesburg on Tuesday morning, just about sick of the journey.\n\nWe played the Diggers on Wednesday and beat them by seven points to nil. The ground is just the road with most of the stones taken off. For the match today there are only 10 able-bodied men, four crocks and one invalid playing for us!!!\n\nOn Thursday we played South Africa and simply sponged up the non-existent puddles with them, although we won only by one goal and try. Their forwards were laid out absolutely flat several times, although they said they were heavier than we were. It was the finest forward game I've ever played.\n\n[On returning to Cecil Rhodes' house] Miss Rhodes, his sister, presided and gave us a very good spread, with Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin 89 to drink. It was a good job that we had an hour or two to spare after lunch before playing... Against the Western Province team and after a tremendous tussle, this ended in a draw.\n\nJohnnie Hammond's Lions.\n\n[On visiting Kimberley and the diamond mines] There's really very little to see in one of these diamond mines... We managed to spoil all our hands and bruise our noddles in going through the low working tunnels... Kimberley is mostly built of very rusty, discoloured corrugated iron, the land is as flat as a pancake and about 6 inches deep in dust. The football ground has absolutely not one blade of grass on or near it. Before playing they have to put a sort of harrow on it which scrapes out the hard surface to a depth of about 6 inches and then they water it.\n\nThe gloom has just fallen on us as Roger Walker, our manager and president of the English rugby union, has just had a cablegram to say that his eldest daughter is dying, so he's off home, poor chap.\n\n[On the end of the tour] We are all just about played out now, having played 19 matches and travelled 10,000 miles in 10 weeks. The day I sent my last mail to you, we played against Johannesburg town and could only with the greatest difficulty manage to raise 15 men to take the field. Quite unknowingly, I did a neat bit of gallery play as I got to score a try and got winded at the same time and learned afterwards that it had happened within about 20 yards of my favourite partner at the dance the night before. I shan't forget that dance in a hurry, there were about 450 people there and I had 26 dances down on my programme.\n\nJohannesburg people are absolutely the most untiring lot in their hospitality that I ever hope to come across. They would not allow us to pay a thing \u2013 dances, dinners, concerts, native war dances, mines, picnics, tennis parties, drives, theatres, variety entertainment, in fact absolutely everything. You will see me a week after the arrival of this letter. We sail home in the Mexican on September 9.\n\nSouth Africa's Second Test team.\n\nBishop Walter Carey found his own memories vivid, even though he was writing 36 years after the momentous tour, when he was in his second year at Oxford and had played twice in the Varsity match. He revealed that, perhaps surprisingly, the team was made up at least partly of invitees: 'Oxford was invited to send two representatives to go on the tour to South Africa. I was lucky enough to be one of the two.'\n\nAlex Todd.\n\nWALTER CAREY (England)  \nToured: 1896\n\nThe stars of the tour were the Irish and they were brilliant in the extreme... My particular fancy was \u2013 and still is \u2013 Tommy Crean, the Irish forward. Tommy was the handsomest man I have ever seen, he weighed 210 pounds and was always the fastest man on the field. At some athletic contest he did 100 yards in 10 and two fifths seconds, and that for a 15 stone forward is phenomenal. He was the most Irish, the most inconsequent, the most gallant, the most lovable personality one could imagine. And he made the centre of the whole tour.\n\nTommy subsequently won the Victoria Cross at Elandslaagte [in the Boer War]. The story is that... whilst attacking the Boers something hit him and bowled him over completely. Momentarily dazed, he yelled: 'I'm kilt entoirely.' However, he got up and found he was not dead, though badly wounded. But the insult had roused his Irish blood and with a wild yell he led the bayonet charge and thus received the supreme award for bravery.\n\nTommy Crean.\n\n[On wheeling the scrum] We managed to carry screwing to a very high art. If you want to screw to the right, the right-hand man in the front row turns inwards and remains immovable... And the three or four forwards in the back row and on the right of the second row carry the ball round this immovable man into the open.\n\nIn the end we played 21 matches, of which we won 19 and drew one. I am bound to say that the match we drew (against Western Province) was after a lunch... when Tommy Crean's order was that nobody should drink more than four tumblers of champagne. The only wonder is that we were not licked by 50 points. We had our revenge on this team in the return match when we didn't drink champagne and won by 32.\n\nThe last match \u2013 against South Africa \u2013 was to us very unsatisfactory as the referee kept stopping our screwing in the scrum, telling us we were offside.\n\nThe enemy who worried us most was a chap called Alf Larard \u2013 a red-headed, hard-bitten sort of fighter.... And there were hard-bitten fellows from the mines at Kimberley and Johannesburg. At Johannesburg we were told that the great Jack Orr, supposed (I am sure it was libel) to be a regular man-killer, was waiting to put us all in the hospital. He did seem very formidable at first but luckily for us, broke or hurt his ankle in the first 10 minutes, so we survived.\n\nThere were the long treks across the country, such as from Grahamstown to King William's Town. We travelled by Cape carts and took two days jolting over sluits, trying to catch monkeys, and sleeping five in a bed at the inn on the way, as accommodation was limited.\n\nI hope and pray that South African teams will always play like gentlemen... It is so easy to cheat at it (rugby) and so destructive of this wonderful game. If a man wants to do dirty tricks let him cheat at ninepins in his own backyard, but let him keep clear of rugby football. There have been many tours since ours, better football perhaps, but I do not think there's ever been a tour with more fun and more sporting play in it than our long-ago tour of 1896.\n\n## CHAPTER FOUR\n\n# [MANLY PLAY  \n1899](006.html#a3)\n\nAUSTRALIA\n\nTHIS WAS the first tour made exclusively to Australia, with no New Zealand leg. It was to be 90 years until the Lions next made a tour to Australia alone; all the intervening tours until 1989 would see Australia as a short lead-in or as an epitaph to more extensive visits to New Zealand. This time, the tour was an official visit and unlike the pathfinders of 1888, there was no need for extra Australian Rules games.\n\nIt was a feature of the early tours that the party included not only men of the cloth but those who were to win medals for gallantry. Matthew Mullineux was both, because he was to win the Military Cross in the First World War. He became a regimental chaplain, but before the outbreak of war he studied medicine. He was at a field hospital in France, which came under attack from the Germans, and the chief medical officer of the post was incapacitated by his injuries. Mullineux took command, continuing to treat the injured and evacuate the worst cases even though the post was continually shelled by high explosive and gas for 12 hours.\n\nBack in 1899 in Australia he had at his disposal a party which included for the first time players representing each of the Four Home Unions, including the great Gwyn Nicholls, the Prince of Welsh three-quarters who went on to become the first Welshman to appear in a Lions Test, eventually featuring in all four in this series.\n\nAs usual, the party did not reflect the true strength of rugby in Britain and Ireland at the time because less than half the players had been capped. Nicholls was the only representative from a Welsh club and with the split, which formed the rugby league code now four years in the past, the old preponderance of representatives from the North of England had diminished so that only three players came from clubs in the North. However, even though all Four Home Unions contributed players, the party was always referred to as 'the English football team'.\n\nArguably the most colourful player was the roughhouse Northampton and England forward, Blair Swannell. So many legends and myths surrounded Swannell, both for his exploits as a player and away from the rugby field; many of these were not substantiated, although it is said to be true that he wore the same pair of breaches for every game, and that they remained unwashed for most of his career. At a time when good manners on the field were still deemed essential, Swannell's over-vigorous playing style stood out.\n\nHe was to make the next tour, to Australia and New Zealand in 1904, and after settling in Australia was later capped by them. He fought in the Second Boer War, which began later in 1899, and he was killed in the First World War at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, in 1915, when serving in the Australian army.\n\nThe tour party triumphed by 3-1 in the Test series, although they did lose three of the twenty-one games \u2013 they lost the First Test against Australia and also the provincial matches against Queensland and Metropolitan Districts.\n\nThe poor performance in the First Test led to Mullineux making a brave and selfless decision. He was an accomplished half-back, and had been to South Africa with Johnny Hammond's team in 1896, where he played in one of the Tests, but after the First Test defeat in Sydney in 1899, he stood down for the remaining three Tests of the series, with Charlie Adamson taking over at half-back and Frank Stout, a Gloucester boy who would later play for Richmond, leading the Lions in the last three Tests, all of which were won.\n\nThe First Test was played on the famous Sydney Cricket Ground, and Australia snatched the game with two converted tries in the last 10 minutes. The hosts were bolstered by two New Zealand players and there was also a New Zealand referee. However, it would be many decades until neutral referees became the norm in international rugby.\n\nBut the tourists revived. With Stout now at the helm, the Second Test was won 11-0, at the Exhibition Ground in Brisbane, where a crowd of 15,000 was a new record for any sporting occasion in Queensland.\n\nBack at the Sydney Cricket Ground for the Third Test, Alf Bucher, the Scotland wing, scored two tries in a very tight game, although Australia would have won had they landed a late penalty kick. For the Fourth Test, also played at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Australia called on five New Zealanders in a desperate bid to square the series and in a gesture which would now be seen as entirely bizarre. But last game of the tour or not, the gallant British and Irish forwards relished the wet and heavy conditions and the victory was convincing.\n\nThe 1899 Lions.\n\nAt the time, the British devotion to open play was notable and almost unique and it captured the imagination of the Australian public. In later decades, the roles would reverse, with Australian rugby players seen to put attacking rugby first while the British would often resort to stodgy forward power as their default tactic.\n\nThere was also controversy, never far from the scene on such tours. Sharp Australian practises such as pushing at the lineout and obstruction in open play were criticised by Mullineux in his end of tour speech, words which the supporters of the touring party deemed brave and apposite and which Australian rugby men deemed to be rather patronising.\n\nAdamson and Nicholls were seen to be the outstanding players on tour. Adamson, the half-back from Durham, scored more than a century of points on tour and the legendary Nicholls was described by an Australian sporting newspaper as 'possessing intuitively quick judgement'.\n\nFirst-hand accounts of the tour are very scarce, although the slightly more sophisticated state of Australia ensured that communications and travel were marginally more comfortable for the touring team than in, say, South Africa. Seven of the twenty-one games took place at the Sydney Cricket Ground, and there were heavy victories along the way against teams such as Mount Morgan, Bundaberg and Victoria. The series had been close, but no-one in the southern hemisphere had managed to take the Test series from the marauding visitors from far-off Europe.\n\nREVEREND MATTHEW MULLINEUX (England)  \nToured: 1899\n\n[A report from the post-match dinner after the Fourth Test] The guests were toasted with Royal Maximum Champagne and after the Australian captain had made some remarks with some possibly light-hearted excuses as to why the Australians have lost, the Rev Mullineux responded:\n\n'I am here as a representative of English rugby football, and feel it is my duty to speak against anything that was not conducive to the game being played in a sportsmanlike way.' He pointed out that he was a clergyman of the Church of England and 'therefore he should denounce anything in the game that was unmanly.'\n\nWhatever he had pointed out he wished those present to understand that it was simply for the 'purpose of affording them information and would improve the game and that it was not done in any carping spirit.'\n\nHe referred in particular to various examples of cheating he had encountered from the Australians, 'the trick of holding players back when coming away from the scrum; at the lineout, pushing a man who has not got the ball, as, for instance, A and B are Australians, they push an opponent away while another Australian comes along and secures the ball.\n\n'And finally, placing the elbow in an opponent's face in the scrum; and shouting to an opponent for a pass, this being the lowest thing that he had heard of, and was taking a mean advantage. Please block these things from your football for instead of developing all that is manly they bring forth always what is unmanly.' Mullineux added that the tour had been 'one of joy and delight, in which both teams have learnt a lot from the other's play.'\n\nA scrum during the match against Queensland.\n\n## CHAPTER FIVE\n\n# [HERALD OF DARK DECADES  \n1903](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nAND SO the masters became pupils. The British & Irish team were beaten in a Test series for the first time, and a mini-era of success had ended. The defeat of the 1903 team heralded some dark decades because it would not be until 1974 under Willie-John McBride that the British & Irish Lions would win again in what, rugby-wise, had become a dark continent.\n\nIt is also remarkable to realise the historical context of the tour and, perhaps, rugby's ability to cross political boundaries. It was less than a year since the end of the Second Boer War, and yet the welcome for the tourists was as warm as ever. The party visited sites where battles had taken place only a few months earlier, and scrabbled around for souvenirs such as empty shell cases.\n\nBy 1903, and by way of contrast from previous tours, most of the tourists were established internationals instead of the invited former Blues and public schoolboys who had made up the majority of the earlier sides. However, the move towards some kind of merit selection was not a success because, particularly in the forwards, and even though two of the three Tests were drawn, the team were often second-best and in fact won only 50% of the matches on tour. The manager was Johnny Hammond, who had captained the party in 1896, and the captain was Mark Morrison, a powerful forward from Royal High School FP in Edinburgh who was eventually to win 23 Scotland caps. Amongst those who had also toured in Australia in 1899 were Frank Stout, who had led the previous party in the latter Tests of that series.\n\nThere were some notable players. Reg Skrimshire, the Newport and Wales centre, played in all 22 of the tour matches and was the leading try and points scorer. Alfred Tedford was singled out by the South African captain as the best of the forwards, 'the finished article in every department of the game'. Tedford is still regarded as one of the best forwards in Irish history. In opposition, Japie Krige, the brilliant South African centre, is equally still regarded as one of his country's best.\n\nThe tour began in melancholy fashion. The team played all three of their opening games at Newlands, against Western Province Country, Western Province town and the Western Province provincial team \u2013 and lost all three. Soon afterwards they lost twice in succession to Griqualand West, although they did gain a revenge victory later in the tour over the same opposition in Kimberley \u2013 one of the grounds where the hard-baked and concrete-like surface, the glare from the sun and the rising dust always presented alien conditions to any visiting player.\n\nThe First Test was played at the Wanderers ground in Johannesburg and ended in a 10-10 draw, and this after the British team trailed by 10-0, which in that era was not an insignificant margin. But Skrimshire scored a spectacular try at the posts just before half-time and the team drew level in the second half. Among the notable aspects of this match were that Alex Frew, a former Scotland international, captained South Africa and Bill Donaldson, another Scottish international, refereed the game.\n\nThe Second Test also ended in a draw, in one of those 0-0 matches so incredibly rare in the current era, but which were by no means unknown at the time. Patrick Hancock, the English half-back, was outstanding in defence and attack and the touring team came closest to scoring a try when Skrimshire went over, only to be recalled for a forward pass.\n\nIn the Third Test, played at Newlands in Cape Town, South Africa wore green jerseys in a Test match for the first time, and even though there was no score in the first half, South Africa won the match in the second half and the series belonged to them. The try scorers were Joel Barry and Alan Reid, and there were excited home celebrations in a crowd of 6,000.\n\nALFRED TEDFORD (Ireland)  \nToured: 1903\n\nThe British touring side of 1903, which comprised eight Englishmen, seven Scots, five Irishmen and one Welshman, were the happiest crowd that ever left the mother country.\n\nArriving at Newlands. The first thing that struck us was the keenness of the Malay and coloured population. As Hind and I were walking onto the ground together, we overheard the following conversation between two Malays: 'The tall one is fine \u2013 a triple Blue at Cambridge, and the other is Tedford, who played in the last six matches for Ireland.' As neither of us had been in the country before, it was obvious that their knowledge had been gained from the press and showed how closely they kept in touch with the game overseas.\n\nThe 1903 tour party before the Third Test in Cape Town.\n\nAfter our first two matches we came to the conclusion that we were rather a poor side and that our forwards and half-backs alone counted... Outside we were going to get all (the trouble) we wanted with men of the class of Carolin, Hobson, Barry, Loubser and Krige opposed to us.\n\nNext, long journey to Kimberley... as we passed through country where much fighting (in the Boer War) had occurred a few years previously. We saw many block-houses and barbed wire and we had lunch at Stormberg Junction (site of a reverse at the hands of the Boers in what was known as 'Black Week' in the Boer War), and were lucky in having as travelling companions two ex-soldiers who had fought on that famous battlefield.\n\nOur first Test match was played on the Wanderers ground, it was about the best match of the tour so far and we were rather unlucky in only making a draw of it. Our farewell to Johannesburg was a real event, practically the whole town turning out to speed us on our way.\n\nLater came our second Test match and how we managed it to hold South Africa to a draw, I do not know how, as our three-quarters were dreadful. Frank Stout played his best game of the tour and Skrimshire got what we and some of the crowd thought was a try, but it was judged not. There was no score.\n\nWe were also taken to the Magersfontein battlefield, where the Highland Brigade was so badly cut up during the Anglo Boer War. We managed to collect a number of shells and other fragments of war, all of which are still treasured in many of our homes.\n\nWe had great hopes of the final Test match as quite a lot of rain had fallen in Cape Town, and we were to play our first match of the tour on a wet ground. But our hopes were dashed... As South Africa won a good match and with it the rubber. Joe Barry scored early in the second half, and Reid scored the second try near the end and Heatlie converted.\n\nI must put in a word of praise for the referees who controlled our games on the tour. We were more than fortunate to have such men...\n\nAnother thing that is against a team visiting South Africa is that all the players chosen cannot obtain the leave for such a long tour. All said and done, however, we had a glorious time. And the friendships made so long ago still prevail, it has been the greatest pleasure to us all to meet in after years at international matches and have 'a good old craic' about the happy time we spent together in sunny South Africa.\n\nI must pay tribute to our captain, old Mark Morrison. He was always the life and soul of the team... no keener man ever played football, and in my opinion he was one of the great forwards of all time.\n\nReg Skrimshire.\n\n## CHAPTER SIX\n\n# [THE KIWI ROVER  \n1904](006.html#a3)\n\nAUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND\n\nTHE APPETITE for these lengthy rugby tours was such that the next trip in the formative years of the Lions tradition departed for New Zealand and Australia only one year after Morrison's men. The captain, David (Darkie) Bedell-Sivright, had toured in South Africa with the unsuccessful party in 1903. He was described by Clem Thomas, the great 1955 Lion, as: 'a man after my own heart, being a rough handful as a player. He was one of the first in a long line of Scottish forwards to master the art of wing-forward play.' And he led a successful and attractive touring team, with household names of the game.\n\nBedell-Sivright played in 22 internationals for Scotland, and was clearly one of the best forwards to tour in those early trips. Like the formidable Blair Swannell, his colleague in the party in 1904 and who had also toured in 1899, Bedell-Sivright was to die at Gallipoli.\n\nThere were only four capped forwards in the 1904 party, but outstanding talent in the backs, with what might be termed the first generation of Welsh superstars. For the first time, Wales were to make a really significant contribution to a 'Lions' tour in terms of class and numbers as the first Wales golden era was now in full swing \u2013 the year after the tour, Wales were to triumph over New Zealand by 3-0 in Cardiff in one of the most famous games ever played.\n\nFour of their outstanding backs, Percy Bush, Willie Llewellyn, Rhys Gabe and Teddy Morgan, featured on the 1904 tour with the outstanding Bush reaching a century of points on tour, including 11 tries. Llewellyn, Gabe and Morgan scored 19 tries between them. Tommy Vile of Newport, also on tour but then uncapped, would enjoy an international career that spanned 17 years, ending his Wales career as captain against Scotland at Swansea in 1921, before becoming a famous and dapper international referee. The little man's aura and influence was so significant that a book appeared on his life as recently as 2011.\n\nArthur 'Boxer' Harding, the forward from London Welsh, was another who made the tour and who would feature in the Wales win of 1905. He was later to captain the 1908 tourists to New Zealand and Australia. Yet not even he could forge an inexperienced set of forwards into a formidable pack.\n\nThe party was the only one from Britain and Ireland to win all its matches in Australia, with the Test series ending in a 3-0 whitewash in favour of the tourists. In the other tour matches in Australia, the team were rarely seriously challenged, sweeping through the country and playing exciting attacking football \u2013 and only in the final tour match against New South Wales did the team fail to win by a substantial margin.\n\nIn the First Test, played at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Australia held the tourists scoreless until half-time, but two tries by Willie Llewellyn and a drop-goal by Percy Bush set the visitors on the way to a 17-0 victory. In the Second Test, played at the Exhibition Ground in Brisbane, tries by Llewellyn and Bush were the highlights in a match in which, again, the tourists dominated the second half.\n\nBack at the Sydney Cricket Ground for the Third Test, Teddy Morgan scored the only points of the first half with a try, and in the second half, Llewellyn and the formidable Swannell also scored, to complete the dominance of the series with a 16-0 win.\n\nThe British side for the first-ever Test against New Zealand at Athletic Park, Wellington, on 13 August 1904. Tour captain David Bedell-Sivright was injured and the Welsh wing Teddy Morgan captained the side.\n\nAnother feature of the tour was that Denys Dobson became the first British & Irish tourist to be sent off, receiving marching orders in the game against Northern Districts at Newcastle.\n\nIn New Zealand, where Bedell-Sivright broke his leg in the first game in Canterbury, and where only five matches were played, the Test match was played at Athletic Park in Wellington; it was 3-3 at half-time but New Zealand wing Duncan McGregor scored two tries after the interval. The match was described by Mr Rand, a member of the New South Wales Rugby Football Union, as: 'The greatest ever played in the southern hemisphere.'\n\nThe tourists struggled with the forward power of the home teams on the New Zealand leg of the tour and failed to cope with what was called the loose-wing-forward, or 'rover'. Dave Gallaher, the celebrated All Black, was the rover in the Test and caused chaos to the tourists. The rover was a concept, originated in New Zealand, in which one of the forwards stood off the scrum, which packed down in a two-three-two formation, and was deemed by many as illegal. It was not until 1930 that the tactic was outlawed, and three players were required by law to form the front-row.\n\nTour captain, David 'Darkie' Bedell-Sivright.\n\nDuring the Test, one of the British backs \u2013 most likely Bush, who was renowned for his quick wit \u2013 is reported as saying to Gallaher: 'You should be wearing a red, white and blue jersey. You are always on this side.' Bush regularly wrote columns on the tour for the Cardiff newspapers. Bush was an indomitable tour character, brilliant on the field and a magnificent personality off it. In Australia, he built up a collection of pipes, walking sticks and umbrellas which he won as a result of wagers. The pattern of play in that Test match, which drew a crowd of over 20,000, with New Zealand's forward power successfully attempting to stifle the brilliance of the touring backs, was to be repeated frequently down the decades, and it was to be only in 1971 that the British & Irish Lions won a Test series in New Zealand, and only then that the team with the outstanding backs came through.\n\nPERCY BUSH (Wales)  \nToured: 1904\n\nReggie Edwards, the Irish forward, bet that I would not drop-goal in our game against New South Wales in Sydney. 'You Welsh terrier, I'll wager you a new pipe that you can't drop-goal today, if you are game enough to take me.'\n\nThus compelled I accepted the gauntlet. When we had been playing about five minutes Frank Hulme, who was working the scrum, sent me a lovely pass. There were about 60 Australian forwards bearing down on me and only about six inches away, so I decided that I had better get rid of the spheroid. I kicked frantically at it and to my surprise and delight, the ball soared up and up and finally crossed the bar, and won me a pipe.\n\nRHYS GABE (Wales)  \nToured: 1904\n\n[Speaking after the Test in New Zealand] (I object) to the putting down of men after the ball left them... Your men are clever enough to win without indulging in these tactics... it would be a healthier game and the public would enjoy it better. Conditions also helped to beat us.\n\nThe 1904 tour party.\n\nDAVID BEDELL-SIVRIGHT (Scotland)  \nToured: 1903 & 1904\n\n[In an interview after the Test in New Zealand] The better team won... but I think that the British scrum formation is better than the New Zealand 'two-three-two' and New Zealand would be able to feed the backs better, and to score more, if the British style was adopted.\n\n(I have) no fault to find with the British backs, whose attack was rendered very difficult because they were playing behind beaten forwards, and the defence was as good as could be expected in the circumstances.\n\n## CHAPTER SEVEN\n\n# [TEMPERANCE NATION  \n1908](006.html#a3)\n\nNEW ZEALAND\n\nENGLAND'S UNSUCCESSFUL campaign in the 2011 Rugby World Cup in New Zealand was marked by some rather lurid events off the field. The players were criticised for their behaviour, and for incidents involving excessive drinking, and then one of the party \u2013 Manu Tuilagi \u2013 hit the headlines near the end of the visit for diving from a ferry into the waters of Auckland harbour.\n\nThe history of Lions tours from the early years proves that there is very little new under the sun. The party which toured Australia and New Zealand in 1908 had drinking and fraternising with the opposite sex firmly on the agenda and there was also an Auckland harbour incident which might have ended in tragedy.\n\nWhen the team was preparing to depart the harbour on the steamer Victoria for a trip to Australia on the way home to the United Kingdom at the end of the tour, Percy Down, a forward from the Bristol club, leaning over the rail of the steamer to bid farewell to a lady acquaintance on the dock, turned a somersault over the rail and fell into the water below.\n\nOne account says that 'Jackett the British fullback and Francis, of the New Zealand team (some home players had gathered to see off the tourists) jumped in the water to give assistance to the Britisher, who was loudly appealing for help.' Apparently, Down was 'handicapped by his heavy overcoat and crying loudly for help'. The danger of the steamer crushing the swimmers against the wharf was always present. The boat had to swing away from the wharf to facilitate the rescue and eventually, with ropes, Down was brought safely to the dockside. The farewells then continued and the commotion caused by the incident died down \u2013 though it was the subject for cartoonists in the New Zealand papers next day.\n\nAt the time, a clear difference had already grown up between the approaches to rugby of New Zealand and of British players. The All Blacks had not long returned from their epic 1905 tour to the United Kingdom, Ireland and France and despite their defeat against Wales in Cardiff, they had set high standards in their strict training regimes and their play, as well as with their behaviour off the field. In their post-tour comments, Arthur 'Boxer' Harding, the Welsh forward who captained the 1908 party, left no-one in any doubt that he regarded the practice of training hard as unsporting, and unbalancing for the ethos of the sport as British people then understood it.\n\nIn many senses, this was a difference which was to mark \u2013 in perception at least \u2013 much of the time between the start of the 20th century and the passage of rugby from the amateur to the professional era. The post-tour comments of George Harnett, the 1908 manager, complained of the number of hotels on tour which did not serve alcohol. Temperance appeared to play little part in tour proceedings.\n\nOne of the New Zealand writers who covered the tour, R A Barr, expanded on the difference in dedication and focus, and probably spoke, even if he did not know it at the time, for the ages of clashes between the two countries. He wrote of the touring team: 'There was a casualness about the whole proceeding which struck the serious-minded New Zealander as being quite foreign to the subject. 'You take your rugby as a religion,' remarked a Welsh international to me one day... 'While we in England look back upon it as a pastime. With you New Zealanders, it is business; with us a pleasure.' From the cradle, a young New Zealander learns the art of kicking a rugby ball, and he goes to his grave jibbering of the grand old game. The average British footballer, on the other hand, takes his rugby as he takes his bath \u2013 with a great deal of pleasure \u2013 and while he plays earnestly he leaves the theories and tricks of the game on the touchline.'\n\nBarr also observed that the majority of the tour players, 'Landed in New Zealand pounds overweight, ill-fitting to battle up against the highly-trained New Zealand provincial sides, and with only an outside chance against the flower of the Dominion.'\n\nThe class consciousness of rugby was illuminated when some members of the Welsh Rugby Union decided that the selection of Welsh players had not been based on egalitarian principles but on social class. They later stated when the 1910 tour of South Africa was being arranged, that 'players should be chosen... irrespective of the social position of the players.'\n\nClass was also something of an issue with New Zealanders at that time. The 1908 touring team, which actually comprised players only from England and Wales as the Scotland and Ireland unions had declined to participate, probably set new standards in terms of off-the-field shenanigans and celebrations. It is clear from reading between the lines of much that appeared in print at the time that the antics of the tourists came as a surprise to the New Zealand rugby public, who viewed some of the team as Edwardian snobs and upper-class twits. That is not to say that the party was not much loved, because they played some attractive rugby and were socially charismatic. But their playing results were disastrous, and more than one of the touring party called into question in later years their true commitment to rugby excellence.\n\nCertainly, many visitors appeared to find the New Zealand public alluring. Henry Vassall, the Oxford University centre, fell in love with a New Zealand girl and contrived to miss the boat back to England. The couple were married back in London two years later.\n\nTwo other members of this party married New Zealand girls and settled out there \u2013 one was 'Boxer' Harding, the tour skipper, the other Fred Jackson, a big Cornish forward who married a Maori girl and whose son, Everard Jackson, played in six Tests for the All Blacks between 1936 and 1938.\n\nNew Zealand won two of the Tests easily and drew a third, utterly outclassing the Anglo-Welsh team. Bertie Laxon, the former Cambridge Blue half-back (though not an international) commented after the final Test drubbing: 'Why we lost, was because the All Blacks were too good for us. They beat us at all points of the game. They are the best players in the world. The Welshmen can think what they like, but in my opinion New Zealand would beat Wales three times out of five.'\n\nThe background to the tour was unusual. As mentioned, this side was called the Anglo-Welsh team because the Scots and Irish, though invited, refused to participate. Tours were beginning to raise the spectre of tour allowances \u2013 however small they were even by standards of the day, and even though they were meant to cover a few incidental expenses rather than be compensation for money lost. Such allowances had worried the ultra-conservatives of the Scottish Rugby Union so profoundly that they entered into dispute with the RFU that, at one stage, threatened to derail the 1909 Calcutta Cup match.\n\nAs well as declining to take part in the tour, the SRU and IRFU also declined fixtures against Australia, who came to Britain in the winter of 1908-9; incidentally, the 1908 Anglo-Welsh party played no Tests in Australia because the top Australian players had already sailed for Britain.\n\nThis was to be the last tour to Australasia for 22 years, at first because the First World War intervened. Nine games were played in Australia, of which the Anglo-Welsh team won seven, and seventeen games were played in New Zealand, of which only nine were won. There were three Test matches, and while the team managed to draw the second in Wellington, they were comprehensively defeated in the other two.\n\nYet again, the team was not remotely representative of the true strength of rugby even in the two unions who were represented, and at the time that the tour took place, only 11 of the 28 tourists had played international rugby. A further point of interest is that six of the party were former pupils of Christ's College, Brecon. As usual, injuries bit deep into the party strength as the tour progressed.\n\nThe tour brought an early outbreak of crowd trouble. The interest in rugby in New Zealand had grown even higher after the exploits of the All Blacks team which toured in Britain in 1905 and the local population had been infuriated when tickets for the First Test in Dunedin had gone on sale at the exorbitant price of two shillings each. Fences at the ground were torn down and several hundred entered the ground for free, boosting the attendance to over 23,000.\n\nThe 1908 Anglo-Welsh tour party.\n\nVery few Lions tours in history have ever taken place without some kind of dispute between tourists and hosts on the philosophy or application of the laws and bylaws of rugby, and the 1908 visit was no exception. If a team lost a player to injury, it was a common occurrence at the time in Australia and New Zealand for the opposing captain to offer to allow a replacement. It was strictly against the laws of the game but it was frequently done and when Jackett, the fullback from Falmouth, left the field in the match against Wellington, the Wellington captain offered the touring team the facility to bring on a substitute. The offer, sporting though it was, was declined because it was against the laws of rugby at the time. In several parts of the world, and especially France, the replacement of players was condoned decades before replacements became officially allowed in the 1960s.\n\nThe Dunedin Test was lost 32-5, an enormous score in those days. The Anglo-Welsh forwards were overwhelmed in the lineout and hardly won a scrum against the New Zealand two-man front-row. The All Blacks were still employing the rover, as they had done on the previous tour in 1904, and the tactic was still causing mighty controversy.\n\nThe Second Test was played at Athletic Park, Wellington, and the conditions were wet and muddy \u2013 hardly a rare situation in that historic but windswept ground over the years. New Zealand took the lead with a penalty before Jack Jones, the centre from Pontypool, scored an excellent try. The final score was 3-3, giving the touring team some hope of rescuing the series.\n\nA souvenir programme from the 1908 tour.\n\nThis hope was shattered when, at Potter's Park, Auckland, the team were overwhelmed 29-0 in the Third Test and their strict adherence to the laws cost them yet again when Boxer Harding, the captain, suffered a serious injury as early as the third minute and the team had to play with only 14 men.\n\nOver the tour as a whole, and while the party could not call on anything like the glorious back division talent of the 1904 party, there were two outstanding players in Jack and Tuan Jones, brothers from Pontypool. Fred Jackson, the giant West Country forward, was ranked as high as Harding, but the team was short of depth and quality and duly subsided, and already the triumphs of the pioneer tours were becoming something of a distant memory. Life experiences were plentiful, but sporting glories were becoming thin on the ground.\n\nARTHUR 'BOXER' HARDING (Wales)  \nToured: 1904 & 1908\n\nThe first point that struck me on landing at Wellington was the intense interest taken in rugby football by the men, women and children of the Dominion. In Wales we are sometimes accused of giving too much attention to the game, but the Welsh people cannot for one instant be compared to New Zealand where enthusiasm is concerned.\n\nThis indicates a keenness of the public which to us appears to be practically approaching a religion, whether this is beneficial to the sport or not is open to doubt. Personally I think that it tends to make the game far too keen... it seemed to us quite a common thing for a considerable amount of money to be exchanged over here in the way of wagers, which is decidedly of no advantage to the sport.\n\nComing to the players themselves, we could not help noticing the fine state of fitness in which every man appeared to take the field. Teams in New Zealand are in much better training than at home... where a man practises twice a week only... and such thing as getting a side to live together for a week prior to a match \u2013 no matter of what importance \u2013 is absolutely out of the question and unheard of, and would not be tolerated by the governing bodies.\n\nForward play in New Zealand in the loose is very good, dribbling rushes being a strong feature of many of the best packs. Lineout work is also in high order throughout, however, in scrummaging, I think I can claim without any self-conceit, that we are superior to them....\n\nThe team line-ups for the West Coast and Buller match.\n\nUnfortunately, with regard to the New Zealand backs, in many instances our players have been prevented from receiving the ball by opponents standing over him and in some cases tackling him. At times when we have been in our opponents' territory, their backs are lined up actually on our side of the scrummage ready to bring down our men before the ball has left the forwards' feet.\n\nWe have also repeatedly had our attack nipped in the bud by the wing-forward getting on our scrum-half before he received the ball, and have been astonished by the latitude allowed to this player in almost every game... he is responsible for spoiling much open play after possession has been fairly gained by his opposing forwards and when defending he is breaking the rule governing obstruction on the field by deliberately preventing the opposing half getting round the scrummage.\n\nEvery important rugby man here seems to be anxious to make the wing-forward position a thing of the past, admitting that it is harmful for the game. Yet funnily enough, they look to the English Union to take action when at the same time they know that the position only exists in New Zealand.\n\nA cartoon depicting Percy Down falling into Auckland harbour.\n\nGEORGE HARNETT (Manager)  \nToured: 1908\n\nWell... I have been very much impressed with the prosperity of New Zealand; with the beauty of its country, hospitality of the people and the enthusiasm displayed for sport, particularly in the direction of rugby football.\n\nGenerally speaking, the hotels were very comfortable. There was one thing, however, that struck us very much, and that was the difference between the hotels in the prohibited districts and those where licence rules. The comparison is all in favour of the licensed places, notably this was the case in Invercargill, where we were surprised to find that no licensed houses existed \u2013 they were all temperance boarding houses.\n\nI have also been very impressed with the loyalty of the New Zealanders to the sovereign, and this also applies equally to the Maori people.\n\nTo start with, (rugby) it is your religion... For so it has struck me after touring the colony. The whole soul of New Zealand, young and old, seems centred around that bit of inflated leather when it gets going... There is a tendency to roughness but this should be dealt with by the strong hand... And certainly, that wing-forward (rover) is nothing but an obstruction in some districts, and is always off-side.\n\nI do not consider that the practice of teams leaving the field at half-time is a good one. At home, this being quite unknown, both sides merely taking a breather at 'lemon-time'.\n\nCrowds at the Auckland match.\n\n## CHAPTER EIGHT\n\n# [PUPIL TURNED MASTER  \n1910](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nCLEM THOMAS, the great Lion of 1955 in South Africa who became an outstanding rugby journalist, wrote of the growing dominance of the southern hemisphere teams over the Lions: 'No longer was it a question of missionary work, and spreading the message that rugby was the best character building game of all, with its huge demand on physical and mental bravery. These, together with its more intellectually stimulating requirements, were all qualities which saw the colonials, tempered in hard and tough environments, taking to the game like ducks to water. It has often occurred to me that rugby always seems to find its spiritual home where life is at its toughest and most unsophisticated, as in those southern hemisphere places.'\n\nBy 1910 as the Lions prepared to travel on another heroic South African odyssey, they knew they were no longer travelling as favourites and teachers. This brought about a few improvements in emphasis. The team, captained by Dr Tom Smyth and managed by Walter Cail and Walter Rees, was the first fully representative British\/Irish side to tour and the first under the official auspices of the Four Home Unions.\n\nThe team wore a distinctive blue jersey with the Home Unions quartered crest. A concession was also made to the severity of the fixtures because Test weeks became largely fallow, with no midweek game to sap the touring party. However, even though it was an official party in every respect, it did not mean that the finest players could all take a leave of absence from their working lives and their families.\n\nThe party that eventually mustered was 26-strong and was reinforced by official replacements when injuries struck; but of the original party, less than half were international players and, indeed, arguably one of the most talented tourists turned out to be Jack Spoors, the Bristol centre or fly-half who scored a try in each of the three Tests, but who was uncapped.\n\nBut the dominant figure of the tour, in the eyes of both teams, was C H 'Cherry' Pillman, who was a back-row forward with Blackheath and England. It is recorded that the South African captain, Billy Millar, considered Pillman to be the greatest back-row forward of all time and Clem Thomas wrote that Pillman 'revolutionised the South African concept of forward play.' Thomas also suggests that Pillman was the template for brilliant back-row forwards of the Springbok future in Hennie Muller, Doug Hopwood, Jan Ellis and others.\n\nRemarkably, with injuries decimating the squad towards the end of the tour, the redoubtable Pillman was pressed into service at fly-half, from where he played a wonderful role in a famous win in the Second Test.\n\nPerhaps the other remarkable aspect of the party was that there were seven players from the Newport club, which was to become one of the finest nurseries for the Lions throughout history. The tour was typically gruelling in terms of travel and opposition strength, with three Test matches against South Africa and most of the most powerful provincial teams were played twice \u2013 notably Transvaal, Western Province, Border, Natal and Griqualand West.\n\nThe trips to Kimberley to play the Griquas were always an experience for the touring team. By 1910 the hysteria of the diamond era in the town was lessening, but the alien conditions, the dust swirling thickly over the bare pitch, never failed to cause a sense of wonder in the visitors, whatever the tour.\n\nThere was a very fine early win on tour against a Western Province team that had been practically invincible for several years and this hinted that had the team managed to stay intact and more rested, then they could have been competitive. But those injuries took their toll, the team declined and of the 16 games they played before the First Test match, they lost five and drew one.\n\nThe First Test took place at the Wanderers ground in Johannesburg and the touring team gave a monumentally brave performance. They played in the absence of the great Pillman, who was injured. They trailed by 11-3 at one stage but Spoors scored a try and Jack Jones, who had made the previous Lions tour, dropped the goal and this rally left the match balanced there at 11-10. But then a late Springbok rush brought a try for Carl 'Cocky' Hahn. It came after a clever kick ahead from Douglas Morkel, who was from one of South African sport's most famous families \u2013 ten of the clan won South African caps between 1903 and 1928.\n\nThe 1910 tour party.\n\nThe Second Test match took place at the Crusader ground, Port Elizabeth, and ended in a memorable victory, inspired by the restored Pillman playing at fly-half. South Africa led 3-0 at half-time but then tries by Spoors and Maurice Neale, both inspired by Pillman, and a conversion by Pillman, gave them victory, one of the finest in Lions history.\n\nMillar, the South African captain, paid an amazing tribute to his illustrious opponent. 'My memories of this game are all dwarfed by Pillman's brilliance. I confidently assert that, if ever a man can be said to have won an international match through his own unorthodox and lone-handed efforts, it can be said of the inspired, black-haired Pillman I played against on the Crusader ground on August 27, 1910.'\n\nThe deciding Test of the series took place at Newlands in Cape Town, and yet again the luck of the touring party was almost brutal. They lost Stanley Williams, the fullback from Newport, who was later to be capped by England, to a serious injury early on in the game and had to play the rest of the Test with 14 men. It may seem odd to the younger rugby follower, to whom the system and concept of replacements are a given, that the aspirations of a team could so easily be ruined.\n\nSouth Africa took full advantage and even though Spoors maintained his record of a try per Test, it was not nearly enough. South Africa scored tries through Gideon Roos, Percy Allport, Freddie Luyt and 'Koot' Reyneke, while Dougie Morkel converted three of these and landed a penalty goal for a convincing 21-5 victory that secured the series.\n\nCharles Henry 'Cherry' Pillman.\n\nThe Lions' failure had been, in many respects, gallant, but the suspicion through history's perspective is that the sheer length and severity of the tours had begun to mitigate against victory for the Home Unions' teams; but also that the discipline and dedication of the players from the hosting countries exposed the cavalier and socialite approach of those who travelled so far south to play their rugby.\n\nIt was to be 14 years until the Lions toured again. Eleven young men who had taken part in the pioneer years were killed in the First World War, and from the 1910 party, three players were to be lost in battle within a few years of returning home from their South African sporting adventure.\n\nNoel Humphreys, who played five matches on tour, was born in Bridgend and became a captain in the tank corps and won a Military Cross, before dying of wounds in 1918. Eric Milroy, nicknamed 'Puss', played four games on tour as a replacement. He was a lieutenant in the Black Watch and was killed during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The third was Phillip Waller, who played no fewer than 23 games on tour. He was born in Bath, stayed in South Africa after the 1910 tour and served in the South African Heavy Artillery. He was killed in action at Arras in 1917.\n\nOne of the other fine forwards in the 1910 party was also to die soon afterwards. Harry Jarman, one of the Newport seven, threw himself into the path of a runaway coal wagon at a South Wales colliery as it rattled towards some children playing in its path. He was badly wounded, and contemporary accounts hold that he saved lives. He died shortly afterwards from his injuries.\n\nIt had been a long time since one of the touring teams had been successful on the sporting field. But it is no exaggeration to say that the early tours were full of the finest of men.\n\nALEX FOSTER (Ireland)  \nToured: 1910\n\nWe boarded the Edinburgh Castle at Southampton, all full of joie de vivre and eager to see the world...\n\nMy impressions tend to be blurred but much still remains perfectly distinct \u2013 the glorious sweep of Table Bay and the lift of Table Mountain, a star throwing a path of light across the bay to the liner at 4 a.m.; the brown, rolling veldt; the Buffalo River; sea bathing at Durban; Groot Constantia wine farm; the South West Cape ostrich farms; the valleys and heights of the Tugela; the mines at Kimberley and Johannesburg; Sunday mornings in the kaffir compounds with tom toms booming and war paint ablaze; the dust storms that plagued us in training as we worked our way up country; the grand line of the Drakensberg; the battlefield at Magersfontein strewn, after all those years, with cartridge cases and scraps of shell; and last and chiefly the stupendous sight of the Victoria Falls and the boiling gorge below.\n\nThe first match was played at Mossel Bay and we then had to face the opposition of four first class sides in Cape Town. The famous Western Province team had not... been beaten for 13 years. Excitement ran high in Cape Town that fortnight as we won the first two matches, drew against Cape Town and won the last and toughest, against the Western Province itself. That was a glorious game \u2013 I think I have never played in a keener one \u2013 and we just managed to win by the narrow margin of a goal to a try... We left Cape Town in high feather.\n\nThe First Test team. 1924.\n\nThe hopes were soon to be dashed. At Kimberley against Griqualand West, we were astonished to see the field there devoid of grass and still more astonished to find that for the first 15 minutes of the game we were completely puffed and could not raise a gallop. We had reckoned without the altitude and lost by eight points to nil. Another effect of the altitude which we found disconcerting was a great length of the kicks. I well remember dropping a goal in practice at Kimberley, from over the halfway line. I can hardly do it in Ireland from 40 yards out. Douglas Morkel had all our hearts in our mouths in any match he played against us for a penalty might produce the uncanny spectacle of Douglas sniping at our posts from his own 25 yard line.\n\nConditions under which a South African team (plays) in the British Isles are... easier than those which a British team in South Africa has to face. First, many South African grounds were so hard that our list of casualties was always heavy. Elbows and knees were skinned in spite of elbow guards and reinforced kneecaps; you were lucky if the wounds did not fester... Eric Milroy, who joined us late... contracted dangerous poisoning from gravel rash. I would strongly urge all touring teams to travel accompanied by a medical man...\n\nThe First Test was as fine a spectacle as anyone could wish to see, a bright sky with play surging from end to end and each side scoring in turn, more than once. My chief recollection of that afternoon is the superb play of C H Hahn on the left wing (for South Africa). He ran like a buck.\n\nIn the Second Test on the grassy ground in Port Elizabeth, we were back in our element and won a fine game by eight points to three. But in the final Test at Cape Town, we suffered a heavy reverse by 21 points to 5.\n\nTour captain, Tom Smyth.\n\nCharles Pillman and Tom Smyth were wing-forwards as good as any who have since appeared and the wing-forward has not been born who could stop J. Ponty Jones from darting through the opposition when things were looking black...\n\nIn 1910, the standard of South African football was high. The players were almost all fast and the game was fast. The forwards attempted little or no dribbling but they were formidable in the scrum and at the lineout. We, on the other hand, played a mixed game, combining forward rushes with back play.\n\nI cannot conclude without a word of grateful appreciation not only for the kindness which South Africans conspired to show us, but the high sportsmanship we found during the game in every district of the Union. I would not have missed the tour of 1910 for a fortune.\n\n## CHAPTER NINE\n\n# [BENNIE'S BOOT  \n1924](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nTHERE HAD been seven tours in the 22 years since the first in 1888, but after the 1910 party returned home, there were to be only three more tours in the next 40 years. The privations in Britain after the end of the First World War, not to mention the enormous number of casualties who were rugby men of all levels, may for a time have depressed the appetite, and at times of economic hardship it was even more difficult than it had been before for the team to be representative of the strength of rugby at home.\n\nIndeed, the fact that the 1924 team was missing such a large number of top players, that they lost heavily and that one of the players (Rowe Harding) doubted the value of such tours unless a full side could be chosen, may also have contributed to longer gaps between tours and the general loss of confidence. Defeats were now commonplace, attitudes of hosts and visitors vastly different.\n\nBut the 1924 team at least continued the Lions heritage under the captaincy of Dr Ronald Cove-Smith, a noted physician, and an England lock first capped in 1921. Cove-Smith, a character and a grand forward, was on the winning side in 22 of his 25 appearances for England.\n\nHowever, it was not an era of any great strength in the Home Unions and the 1924 tour was immersed in mediocrity, with only nine wins from the 21 games, and with a defeat in the Test series by three matches to nil, with one draw \u2013 although it must be said that the tourists put up a terrific fight in the series, which is reckoned in South African rugby history to be one of the most attractive to have been played on their shores.\n\nThe list of the players who were not available to make the tour was lengthy, and probably doomed Cove-Smith's men from the start. Wavell Wakefield, the great and influential English forward and later Lord Wakefield, was among those who could not spare the time and it is a telling fact that Wakefield was never to make a Lions tour. George Stephenson, of Ireland, and Leslie Gracie of Scotland were among the other giants of the day who could not travel. The older days of the gentleman adventurer tourist were receding.\n\nThe other problem was that because of the gap between tours, none of the players had any experience of South African conditions and so were, like the pioneer tourists, taken aback by such aspects as the dust of Kimberley, the length of journeys in between matches and the sheer size of the country.\n\nThere were several significant aspects to the visit and the first was that the team were called, officially, Lions. They still played in blue jerseys, but the fact that the tour tie bore the crest of a lion gave them the name that was to resonate through history. They were called the British Lions, even though there was a strong Irish element in the team led by James Daniel (Jammie) Clinch, then in his early twenties but to go down in history as one of rugby's most vivid characters and hardest forwards \u2013 though the injury problems of the tour party were such that he also played in the backs. Tom Voyce, the versatile England wing forward also turned out at fullback and on the wing, was the top scorer on tour, embellishing his reputation as one of the finest players in the game.\n\nLions tours had now been going on for long enough for the sons of earlier Lions to make tours \u2013 Jammie Clinch was the son of Andrew Clinch, who toured with the 1896 team.\n\nThe tour was not the birth of the Lions, as we have seen that took place in 1888, whatever that party was called. But now it was official. The new status, however, did not improve their fortune. 29 players set out but the team was cruelly afflicted by injury throughout, and at last the authorities realised that more cover should be taken on tour, especially in the specialist positions of hooker and scrum-half.\n\nThe itinerary was heavy and onerous, with 21 games in all, with midweek games in the week of Test matches. With all the travelling involved, it left the Lions on a hiding to nothing and underpowered yet again.\n\nAnd yet gain, the question arose as to whether the Lions had really come to dedicate themselves absolutely to victory in the Test series or whether they had come in part for a social event. Most of them clearly played their hearts out on the field but famously, Rowe Harding, the Swansea and Wales three-quarter who was later to become a judge, did point out that 'many unkind things were said about our wining and dining.'\n\nIt was Harding who wondered if the tours were all they should be at the time. He said that attitudes had to change, and that 'poor performances damage the respect you receive from the country you are visiting.' He added: 'There has always been too much condescension by the British rugby authorities about our attitudes, both to our continental neighbours and to the colonies.'\n\nHarding's main reservation was the weakness of the tour party relative to the strengths of rugby at home, but he was raising an important point in the difference in perception in the attitudes of the visitor and the visited which, if he only knew, remained a salient observation of practically every tour until the advent of professionalism. In one sense, it was gentlemen versus players.\n\nThe South African teams they met had few such problems. The Lions began in defeat against the Western Province town and country team and although they won their next four games on the trot their weaknesses were found out. In a melancholy period in the middle of the tour, they played eight games, including the First Test match in Johannesburg, without winning one of them.\n\nThe Lions also met a man who was to become a legend in South African history \u2013 Bennie Osler, one of the greatest kickers that the game has seen. He had the ability to kick penalties and drop-goals from vast distances, and he probably began the lineage of great Springbok kickers to break the hearts of so many opposition teams over the years, right to the present day. And, as ever, there is a resonance in history. Through the decades South Africa's great kickers have always been controversial, with many questioning whether their emphasis on kicking denied opportunities for their backs. Cove-Smith brought up this very question in his published thoughts after the tour.\n\nAlso in the South African team for the 1924 series was Pierre Albertyn, one of the greatest attacking centres of the era, and another man who gave the Lions more trouble then they could handle.\n\nBut it was Osler who dictated the tactical course of the First Test, played at Kingsmead in Durban. His early drop-goal gave his team a lead that they never relinquished. Even though Arthur Blakiston, a forward from Blackheath, scored a try for the Lions, and although they attacked for long periods, the Springboks held out.\n\nThe Second Test of the series in Johannesburg was remarkable for the interest it stirred after so long without a Lions visit. As had happened on a couple of occasions on the past tours, the crowd broke down one of the surrounding fences and poured through, taking the stadium well beyond its advertised capacity of 15,000, and it was to be the home spectators who left happier. South Africa won by a thumping 17-0 and, with what was to become a familiar combination of Osler's tactical kicking and the power of the home pack, the Springboks demolished the touring team.\n\nThe best performance by the Lions came in the Third Test at the Crusader ground, Port Elizabeth, which was drawn 3-3. The match demonstrated some of the realities of touring life with the Lions and their ill luck with injury because the try scorer in the match was Bill Cunningham, a former Irish fly-half. He had emigrated to South Africa but was called up when a rash of injuries cost the Lions some leading backs.\n\nThe 1924 tour party gathers at Waterloo before departure.\n\nThe Fourth Test, played at Newlands in Cape Town, was won by the Springboks but the game went down as one of the most exciting seen on South African soil. The great England forward, Voyce, scored a try, as did Stanley Harris. The Lions tried to take on the Springboks' power with their own pace and deftness and it was only when Jack Slater scored on the final whistle for South Africa that the victory was guaranteed.\n\nStatistically, the Lions had the worst record of all touring parties and scored the fewest points. After so long without a tour, the tradition had revived strongly but on the field, the defeats had become worrying.\n\nDR RONALD COVE-SMITH (England)  \nToured: 1924\n\nOn June 30, 1924, the first British rugby touring team to leave the British Isles after the Great War set sail from Southampton to visit South Africa. There was considerable difficulty in selecting the representative side but in the end 29 players were selected, and the forwards formed a formidable array. Behind the scrum, there was less experience, but it was hoped that the useful blend of youth and enthusiasm would soon settle down into a prolific scoring machine.\n\nUnfortunately, none of the players, nor even the manager, Harry Packer, had any knowledge of the climatic conditions that have to be faced and before long our store of stalwarts was considerably depleted....\n\nWith the exception of Griqualand West, who were surprisingly weak, close games were played in all the first seven matches and we returned from the dusty track into Rhodesia to draw with Transvaal. It was here that the staleness of the overplaying of such stalwarts as (Herbert) Waddell and (Dan) Drysdale became apparent but without adequate reserves little else could be done. Against Natal on the eve of the First Test match, only seven forwards were available so Vincent Griffiths was deputed to act as a rover and a draw was eventually forced.\n\nLions captain, Dr Ronald Cove-Smith, with the captain of the Edinburgh Castle en route to South Africa.\n\nIn a grand game in Durban that was in doubt right to the end, the robust (Wally) Clarkson scored a very fine try... Here again, ill luck told as (Reg) Maxwell dislocated his shoulder and left us with only two centres and two fly-halves for the remainder of our visit.\n\nHad it not been for the graciousness of the SA board in allowing us to bring out Harold Davies and also to include Bill Cunningham, who we met in Johannesburg, the tour might well have come to a sudden stop through lack of personnel... Looking back, one cannot help but laugh at the subterfuges to which we were forced to resort in order to place 15 fit men in the field.\n\nTours such as this, where everything is new and fresh, live long in the memory. The veritable kaleidoscope of ever-changing impressions would be liable to produce mental indigestion, even though the high standards of South African hospitality strain the most robust gastric organs. The hospitality extended to us throughout was extraordinary \u2013 in fact, almost excessive.\n\nSome incidents stand out sufficiently strongly to dwarf the others... Perhaps the most noticeable of these was the quietly efficient captaincy of Pierre Albertyn in the Test matches. He always seemed to have his players well in hand and able to produce the requisite thrust at the right moment.\n\nBennie Osler was just making a name for himself but even then tended to kick more than was warranted... I was astounded to see (in later years) to what extent these kicking propensities had stultified South African three-quarter play... The main glory of the team lay in its pack.\n\nThe inherent weakness of our team could not be covered up for long and manfully though the fellows tried, they were no real match for South Africa in the Test games, where superior speed and experience outside the scrum eventually took its toll. The impossibility of coping with such a heavy programme... travelling upcountry, sleeping on trains and too little exercise are enervating and soon sap the strength of an athlete.\n\nThe tourists gather for a photograph before training.\n\nROWE HARDING (Wales)  \nToured: 1924\n\nThe long train journeys (often of 48 hours' duration), the hard ground and a heavy casualty list had taken a heavy toll of players unaccustomed to such conditions.\n\nIt is not difficult to analyse the reasons for our failure. Dissipation had nothing to do with it. I will not deny there was occasionally what was termed a 'blind' when we were thoughtless and careless of what other people said or thought of us and that contributed to our unpopularity. The real reason for our failure was that we were not good enough to go abroad as the representatives of the playing strength of these islands. It is not sufficient to send abroad some players of international standard and others who were only second class. Every member of the team must be absolutely first class or disaster is bound to overtake it.\n\n## CHAPTER TEN\n\n# [PLAYING TO THE LAWS  \n1930](006.html#a3)\n\nNEW ZEALAND AND AUSTRALIA\n\nBY NOW it was firmly established that the Lions tradition gave the journey and the experience of a lifetime to those taking part. But some of the other realities of life as a Lion were underlined again on this tour where, once again, too many of the Test and other major matches were lost for the venture to be termed anything other than a sporting failure. This after a win in the First Test against New Zealand, which had briefly raised hopes.\n\nOne recurring difficulty was the fact that the touring teams in this era between the wars were often effectively reduced to their second or even third best team by the end of the tour and, in fact, sometimes even at the start. In 1929, 28 players were provisionally invited to make the tour, carefully chosen from the best of the home nations. Of those 28, only nine actually embarked for New Zealand. When they got there, they lost Wilfred Sobey, the outstanding scrum-half and the tour vice-captain, in the first game. He never played again on tour. Sobey's partnership with Roger Spong, the superb fly-half, was meant to be the driving force of the party.\n\nWavell Wakefield, one of the great men of England rugby history, had not played for England since 1927. But such was his enormous status in the game that he was invited to captain the tour party. George Stephenson, the Irish captain, was also earmarked as a leading player. But both Wakefield and Stephenson had to withdraw from consideration as they could not spare the time and, as mentioned previously, Wakefield was never to make a Lions tour.\n\nSo Doug Prentice, the forward of Leicester and England, a future secretary of the Rugby Football Union, was chosen to lead the party in their absence. His philosophy is enshrined in an article he wrote after the tour, which would hardly resonate with the driven and dedicated young men of the modern day. Touring sides, he said: 'Do not make the journey with the sole object of winning all its matches, or setting up new scoring records. The principles and ideals which guided the founders of the Rugby Union cannot be stressed too forcibly. Rugby should and must be played for the love of the game.'\n\nPerhaps oddly (or perhaps not), it was to be another 50 years before the next Englishman was chosen as Lions captain \u2013 Bill Beaumont in South Africa in 1980. At least Big Bill had more notice than Prentice. He was told that he was to captain the tour in the lounge of the Hotel Metropole in London on the night before the party sailed to New Zealand. 'Look here Doug,' one of the officials said. 'We think you'd better skipper this side.'\n\nOf the 29 players, all but six had been capped before departure, so there was at least a leavening of experience, but class was lacking, and especially power and organisation up front. A familiar refrain. The tour was also famous, as were many other tours, for strident disagreement and controversy surrounding the laws of the game \u2013 especially a tendency for New Zealand and Australia to tinker with international rugby law to suit their own particular environment or preference. Not unknown in the 21st century.\n\nSome examples: it was at the time not permissible for teams to leave the field at half-time and replacements were categorically not allowed \u2013 if they had been, then the course of several Lions tours may well have been different. Yet both the half-time practice and the use of replacements were commonplace throughout the tour and they infuriated the Lions and especially the hawkish James 'Bim' Baxter, the manager, who conducted a campaign of rectitude against the New Zealand authorities throughout the tour.\n\nAnd as on the previous Lions' visit, the antics of the New Zealand wing-forward\/ rover and their two-three-two scrum were bitterly contentious. In 1930, the home team used Cliff Porter, the back-row forward, as a disruptive rover.\n\nThe 1930 tour party.\n\nFamously, Baxter, a stickler for the law, enlisted the support of the RFU on returning home and succeeded in forcing through the International Rugby Board a scrummaging law which made it compulsory to have three men in the front-row, forced New Zealand rugby to abandon their old diamond-shaped scrum and returned the rover to his position in the scrum where he belonged.\n\nOn tour, the height of the dispute was reached when Baxter accused Porter of being 'a cheat'. Ted McKenzie, a selector of the New Zealand team, was to strike back later in the tour at a post-match function in which he accused the Lions of illegalities. Carl Aarvold tried to interrupt the speech and McKenzie angrily remonstrated. Some historians have seen the laws disputes of the era as akin to the Bodyline controversy in cricket.\n\nThere were successes on the field. The party raised those high hopes by winning a thrilling First Test against New Zealand in Dunedin, and in general the team were popular in the two hosting countries for the brand of exciting rugby they played and for the thrilling individual bursts that roused the home crowds.\n\nClem Thomas wrote that the tour was still essentially a middle-class escapade, and that each tourist had to take a dinner jacket, chiefly to wear on a six-week boat journey to New Zealand when players were required to dress for dinner on board. Tourists also had to take \u00a380 spending money, so the tiny working-class Welsh element on tour were effectively sponsored by their clubs, who in that era would have an informal (and top-secret) collection to ensure that their local heroes could tour.\n\nThere is no doubt that socialising was again a high priority, forcing some players to defend some of the behaviour on tour in later years. Clem Thomas wrote that they were 'a team popular with the opposite sex due to the number of very good-looking men in the party.'\n\nThe 1930 Lions meet at Waterloo Station before departure.\n\nThe trip out was made via the Panama Canal and, as Thomas pointed out, there was no coach, no doctor, no physiotherapist, no back-up of any kind. Prentice was expected to act as coach.\n\nAs often happens on Lions tours, the captain was not one of the outstanding players and indeed, Prentice played in only one of the four Test matches against New Zealand plus the one Test in Australia. The tour allowance was three shillings a day and this was not doled out in cash, but in the form of vouchers that could be exchanged for goods and services in the team hotels. Professionalism was still 65 years in the future.\n\nThe party was the first to be known as 'the Lions' from the very start \u2013 the 1924 tour had been christened 'Lions' during the trip. The 1930 party wore a badge bearing three Lions on their blue shirts and they carried Lion brooches to present as gifts to well-wishers.\n\nEven though at the time it tended to be the host nations who took the lead in new tactics, the Lions at least unveiled one new ploy on tour \u2013 they used the blindside wing in attack, running off an inside pass from the fly-half after the set piece. The move became known as 'The Morley' after Jack Morley, the Newport and Wales wing who played in three of the Tests against New Zealand on the tour.\n\nThe outstanding players on tour were Roger Spong, the England fly-half and the mainspring of a strong attacking back division, and Ivor Jones, the great Welsh back-row forward who had a rare turn of speed, who could fill in at scrum-half and who was also a useful place-kicker. Harry Bowcott, a back from Cambridge University, went on to become a distinguished administrator in Welsh rugby and the chairman of selectors for his country. Bowcott had led Wales at the age of 22. Carl Aarvold, the England wing who was at Cambridge University, had a distinguished legal career and went on to become Recorder of London and the president of the Lawn Tennis Association.\n\nCarl Aarvold.\n\nJack Bassett\n\nThe First Test, which was played in Carisbrook, Dunedin, had been eagerly awaited as it was the first time the Lions had been seen since before the First World War, and although New Zealand seemed likely winners before the game, the Lions played with great resolve and courage \u2013 against an All Black team playing in white, because of a clash between the dark blue jerseys of the touring team.\n\nThe great George Nepia, the remarkable Maori fullback, took part in the match, although he missed the conversion of a try by George Hart, and since James Reeve had scored a first half try for the Lions from a diagonal kick from Spong, it was still level in the dying seconds.\n\nThen the remarkable Jones made one of the most dramatic individual runs in the history of the Lions, bursting from near his own line through the defence, running up to draw Nepia and passing to Jack Morley, who raced on to score the winning try. It was a dramatic moment, one of the finest in Lions history, and it saved the team from being whitewashed.\n\nThe Second Test was played in front of a huge crowd at Lancaster Park, Christchurch and although the Lions lost only by 13-10, over the course of the match it was not quite as close as the score suggests. Jones had made another late break leading to a try by Carl Aarvold which Prentice converted and the Lions were pressing at the end. But the series was levelled.\n\nAnd yet could it have been different? Yet again, the Lions were to rue their misfortune with injury \u2013 or perhaps their wish to stick to the rules regarding replacements. Paul Murray, their scrum-half, left the field with a serious shoulder injury in the first half, leaving the Lions to play the rest of the Test with 14 men. Ivor Jones had to move to scrum-half and senior members of the touring party always believed that they could have won had they remained at full strength.\n\nThe Lions took the lead in the Third Test when Bowcott's clever approach work led to a try by Jones, but New Zealand pulled clear at 15-5 and eventually went on to win 15-10. As was to happen often, New Zealand won the final Test by a convincing margin, 22-8, scoring four tries in the second half in Wellington and six tries in all.\n\nBy now, the Australian leg of the tour was not seen to have quite the status of the former days, which was rather odd since interest amongst Australians still seemed to be high and over 30,000 attended the only Test in Australia, played at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Disappointingly, the Test was won 6-5 by Australia, with Tom Lawton masterminding the victory. Tony Novis scored a try for the Lions, which Prentice converted and in the dying seconds Jones was tackled just a metre short of the try line by Cyril Towers of Australia. Close. But yet again, not close enough.\n\nJack Bassett looks to evade New Zealand's Don Oliver during the First Test in Dunedin.\n\nMajor provincial games were also lost \u2013 to Wellington, Canterbury and Auckland, and to New South Wales in Australia. Another chance had slipped by, another team with a certain creativity, a certain style, and a certain attitude to their sport at odds with that of the more stern and dedicated home teams, had been out muscled and beaten.\n\nHARRY BOWCOTT (Wales)  \nToured: 1930\n\nAt the time of the party announcement I was considered the one certainty to go but when the selection was announced my name wasn't there. I was so fed up that I went with the Cambridge team to France a few weeks before the Lions were due to leave. Then an Irish chap dropped out of the original party. Lo and behold, I was chosen. I'd have been quite happy to have said no. I asked my father, 'Should I go?' He said: 'Of course, you must go.'\n\nI got back from France on the Monday, my father gave me the \u00a380 we all had to pay before departure because I didn't have a penny and I was off to London to join the Lions the following morning for a farewell dinner attended by the Duke of York. Excellent meal, as you can imagine, with more courses and more wine than you get nowadays, and we all shook hands with the future King.\n\nThere were no journalists. There would be no urgent messages flashing back to London saying that we'd been naughty boys. We had the place to ourselves.\n\nNobody had any idea of flying around the world at that time because flying was still a thing of the future. We travelled first class and every player had his own berth for a voyage that lasted five weeks. We had the usual sports on deck. There was the mock court run by the players, but I suppose eating took up most of our time...\n\nDOUG PRENTICE (England)  \nToured: 1930\n\nI suppose most people think that a rugby football tour in New Zealand is just a lovely six months holiday. It is, but at the same time there is a great deal of really hard work confronting one. Furthermore, let us remember that a British tour does not make the journey with the sole object of winning all these matches, or setting up new scoring records.\n\nThe principles and ideals which guided the founders of the rugby union cannot be stressed too forcibly. Rugby should and must be played for the love of the game. Some are likely to think that this is an unattainable ideal, but I believe that it is a wonderful ideal. Well worth the striving for.\n\nOn our first day out we felt a happy little family, and as the tour progressed, so our friendship was cemented. A happy team in which all the men are friends is generally a good one, for each man likes and trusts his fellows and knows they will not let the side down.\n\nWhen we had rested for a few days (on the voyage to New Zealand) and found our sea legs, arrangements were made to commence training... Physical training classes were organised... and we were pretty thoroughly put through our paces by Lt Tony Novis and Flight Lt George Beamish, who acted as instructors. At 11 a.m. we had scrum practice, where many knees and elbows were grazed through falling on the hard decks.\n\nHARRY BOWCOTT\n\nFor a team of young men, there were times when it was a fairly dismal journey. There weren't many other passengers on ship and the youngest woman on board must have been about 50. I would have to say that it wasn't terribly exciting.\n\nJack Bassett (the Penarth and Wales fullback, who was to play outstandingly on the tour) was seasick as soon as he got on board. He didn't get out of his sick bed for 10 days. It was entirely mental, if you ask me. No one else suffered.\n\nDOUG PRENTICE\n\nWhen we finally arrived in New Zealand, we listened to speeches of welcome from various members of the New Zealand Rugby Union at the harbour and later that night we broadcasted to the country. This was easy for me, as I had taken Jimmy Farrell to give them a few Irish-isms, I had Ivor Jones to talk to them in Welsh and Jock Welsh to bring in a few 'Och-Ayes' from Scotland.\n\nThe first match was at Wanganui... and proved the most unlucky one for us. Our vice-captain and a very fine scrum-half \u2013 Wilfred Sobey \u2013 damaged his knee so badly that he did not play a game all throughout the rest of the tour. This was indeed a terrible blow.\n\nI suppose the most exciting game of the tour was the First Test, played in appalling weather at Dunedin; Great Britain scored a try early on from a well-placed cross kick by Spong, taken by Reeve, who after beating Hart, crossed in the corner. Black missed the kick. New Zealand scored soon after, Hart getting a lovely try in the corner after skilfully eluding Reeve and (Jack) Bassett en route. Nepia's attempt at a conversion struck the upright.\n\nAmid tense excitement, a ding-dong struggle was fought right to the last minute, and just when everyone was resigned to the draw with Great Britain defending her line like grim death, Ivor Jones suddenly burst from the scrum with the ball in his hands. He ran like a deer, very cleverly into George Nepia's arms, and just at the right moment passed to Morley, who anticipated the move and was perfectly placed. Then off went Morley on a run of 80 yards, with (Bert) Cooke of Wellington coming across like an express train. It was a thrilling race, with a huge crowd on its feet, and with barely a yard to spare, Morley touched down amidst terrific applause!!! Great Britain had defeated New Zealand.\n\nWe had many more exciting and thrilling games, and all were played in the hardest and best spirit.\n\nHARRY BOWCOTT\n\nIt was a very cold day for the First Test. There were snow showers before the game and a blizzard during it. We trained at the hotel and it was entirely due to Ivor Jones, the king of the tour, that we got off to a winning start. He broke clear and went all the way down the field so that there was only George Nepia left to stop him. He drew Nepia and slipped the ball to Jack Morley for him to get over in the corner. We had beaten this wonderful team called the All Blacks, much to their disgust. We were delighted. We lost the next three Tests, the third when we were down to 14 men, but if it had not been for poor Sobey, I think we'd have seen them off over the four matches.\n\nDOUG PRENTICE\n\nGolf was played by most of the team and a very fine side we were! I'm not quite sure whether we were not a better golf side than football team. Tommy Knowles had not brought any clubs with him and being left-handed, he had difficulty sometimes in borrowing some. So he bought a set in Dunedin, and one day, when the whole team were on the links, he started off, very proud of his new clubs. On the first short hole, he did a hole in one, amid loud cheers on all sides.\n\nShooting, too, we found time for. At the dinner after our first game I was asked if I was fond of shooting. I replied that I had shot a rabbit or two in England and loved it. My friend then said: 'Well, come out tomorrow to my place and we'll shoot a few deer.' In a very short time, we had shot a deer each. Deer are vermin in New Zealand and one is paid for shooting them. Very different from deer stalking in Scotland. Wild-pig hunting is also grand sport. George Beamish and I used to get as much of it as we could.\n\nWe arrived in Sydney in glorious sunshine and were met by Gordon Shaw, the manager of the Waratahs (party which had toured) in Great Britain in 1927-28, and Ted Thorne, one of that team. I had played against Thorne at Leicester and in that particular game we had 'looked after' one another in the lineout. We had a battle royal that afternoon and the same night, over a friendly pot or two of beer, we discussed the charm of our delightful feud.\n\nI saw him off from the station at Leicester. The following morning as we said goodbye, and the train was steaming out, he shouted: 'We'll meet again some day and when we do we'll have a beer together!' He was as good as his word. Four years later, and 12,000 miles away! These rugger friendships are things which make not only tours worthwhile, but life itself.\n\nHARRY BOWCOTT\n\nWe were no better and no worse than the young men of today in our behaviour. We drank a bit and enjoyed female company but we tended to carouse only after matches. Wives would be chasing us and their husbands would be pleased if we looked after them. There was one woman who followed me all over both islands with the permission of her old man. He thought it was an honour, and I never abused it. All the fun of the fair.\n\nThe New Zealand public worshipped us. Entertainment and hospitality were laid on for us and I can't ever remember having to buy a drink. After every match we had a dance. There were no bars in the dance halls and no bars outside because they were all shut so we'd go to the tables, which were heavily laden, knowing that a lot more liquor would be stored underneath.\n\nWe enjoyed ourselves at the right time. We were never denied alcohol but I don't recall any wild boozing. We had just one law before every game: in bed by 10.\n\nDOUG PRENTICE\n\nEveryone enjoyed every minute of the tour and I believe that the people of New Zealand, and indeed everywhere we went, also enjoyed having us with them. The hospitality shown to us was wonderful in the extreme and I am quite sure that every member of the team has nothing but the happiest possible memories of the tour of 1930.\n\nIvor Jones.\n\n## CHAPTER ELEVEN\n\n# [TWILIGHT OF THE SPORTING GODS  \n1938](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nTHE 1938 tour to South Africa took place in the shadow of rising tensions in Europe and elsewhere, with the Nazi party in power in Germany and with the air of menace afflicting international relations. On the sporting front, it was a tour which brought yet another defeat of the Lions in a Test series, on what was their last tour for 12 years, and the last time that they would be decked in blue, before the transition to the fiery red jersey for which they are now famed throughout the world.\n\nBut if it was ultimately a failure, it was also an epic tour, and the Test series against the Springboks restored credibility to rugby in the Four Home Unions and to the whole concept of Lions tours. It was a tour with extraordinary characters on both sides, with magnificent Test matches and great courage in the play of the British and Irish players as they tilted at a magnificent Springbok team while contending with all the usual alien conditions and dusty privations of life on tour in that country.\n\nIncidentally, some of the travel was almost as onerous as it had been for the pioneers in the previous century. As the great Vivian Jenkins wrote: 'More often than not we found ourselves (travelling) on rough, unmade roads with endless corrugations over which the cars had to \"skate'\"at top speed to avoid the occupants being shaken to pieces... I recall spending no fewer than seven nights out of eleven on trains during the Rhodesian part of the tour.'\n\nThe Test series was lost by two games to one, with all three matches remarkable in one way or another. There was no shame to lose to the South African team of that era, because they were a team regarded as one of the greatest in South African history, and had just returned from a long tour to Australia and New Zealand with victory in both Test series, having suffered defeat in only one provincial game (against New South Wales) and one international (the First Test against New Zealand). There were no World Cups in that era, of course, but clearly South Africa were world champions.\n\nThe South Africans were captained by Danie Craven, who was already seen as a brilliant rugby thinker and tactician, and who in New Zealand had become famous for the development of his dive pass at scrum-half. Craven remains after his death both a celebrated and controversial figure in South African history and society. He was to go on to become vastly influential as a South African coach, as a lecturer and a professor of the laws, and to be arguably the most famous rugby administrator the game has seen, especially as the man at the forefront in the years when South Africa were barred from international rugby, and in the years when they returned to the fold.\n\nAlso in the team met by the Lions was the great Gerry Brand, the fullback and a monstrous kicker who had scored 209 points in Australia and New Zealand and who, even with the relatively basic rugby balls of the era, could regularly put over kicks from 60 yards or more. There was also 'Boy' Louw, the great South African forward who, like Craven, is still regarded as one of the all-time greats. Brand and Louw were in their twilight career years, but still outstanding players.\n\nAgainst this array of formidable talent, the young touring team \u2013 selectors at the time still retained the nonsensical notion that players who had reached 30 were probably over the hill \u2013 was led by Sammy Walker, the Irish forward (who played both prop and second-row for Ireland and the Lions). It almost goes without saying that many leading players were unavailable to tour \u2013 among them were Wilf Wooller and Cliff Jones, two outstanding backs from Wales; Ray Longland and Fred Huskisson, grand England forwards, plus the celebrated Wilson Shaw of Scotland.\n\nYet the Lions could also field all-time greats of the game. Among their own celebrated contingent were Vivian Jenkins, then a young fullback from London Welsh, who was in the class of Brand as a goalkicker, and who was later to become one of the most respected writers and commentators in the history of the game. There was also Bill Travers, the hooker from Newport and Wales, whose father, George, had hooked for Wales in their famous win over New Zealand in 1905. Travers established a friendship with the giant and vivid Irish forward, Blair Mayne, who was later to become a war hero, winning the Distinguished Service Order and three bars \u2013 each bar awarded for separate acts of heroism. He was also awarded the Legion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre by the French Government for his work in the liberation of France. He is seen now as one of the founding troops of the Special Air Service and is the subject of a campaign to posthumously upgrade his DSO to a Victoria Cross for an action after which his citation was signed by Field Marshal Montgomery. He remains one of the most decorated soldiers of the Second World War.\n\nThe 1938 tour party.\n\nBy all accounts, the combination of the two forwards set new standards in rumbustious behaviour on the field. However, both Jenkins and Mayne were to suffer injury, with Jenkins missing the Second and Third Tests.\n\nThe Lions also had in Haydn Tanner at scrum-half a player with claims to be one of the finest in his position in Welsh history. Yet Tanner did suffer injury on tour and the contribution of Jimmy Giles, the Coventry and England scrum-half, was essential to tour momentum. His versatility saw him play at centre in a Test, and also at fly-half in the provincial games.\n\nAnd, perhaps oddly, there were three players who were to go on to have distinguished careers in rugby administration \u2013 Bill Clement of Wales, became a powerful secretary of the Welsh Rugby Union; Stan Couchman, became a president of the Rugby Football Union in the 1970s; and Harry McKibbin, from a famous Irish rugby family, was also to serve the game in several top administrative posts.\n\nMost Lions tours tended to bring some kind of technical advancement to the game and the gift from 1938 was South Africa's development of the 3-4-1 scrum formation instead of the 3-2-3 formation. They found that to move the flankers up to pack on the props, and developing the role of the Eighthman, or No 8, made the pack far stronger.\n\nAs far as the Lions were concerned, one of the lessons they learned yet again was that injury will always be a problem on the hard and fast grounds of South Africa and that cover for the specialist positions of hooker and scrum-half was absolutely essential. It was still the era when the team travelled by ship. No rapid replacements were available.\n\nThe touring team played 24 matches in all, losing two Tests and four other games in their provincial programme. They played two brutal games against Transvaal, one of which they won; but even to this day it still seems staggering that they would undertake a tour of such severity with only 29 players. In other words, they did not even have cover for every position, nor did they have any prospect of rapid reinforcement from the old country.\n\nAboard the Stirling Castle, en route for South Africa.\n\nThe Lions were kept in the hunt in the First Test in Johannesburg with three fine penalties from Jenkins. It was a tremendous game, played in front of a crowd of 36,000, and South Africa eventually ran out winners by 26-12. They scored four excellent tries, two from Dai Williams on the wing and one each from Fanie Louw and Tony Harris.\n\nThe ball soared through the thin air of the high veldt. One of the penalties by Jenkins came from eight yards inside his only half and one of the constituent parts of the 14 points scored by the prodigious Brand was a drop-goal kicked from way out on the touchline. The absence of Travers, who had been concussed in the previous match against Transvaal, may just have been the decisive factor.\n\nThe Second Test, played in Port Elizabeth, was easily won by South Africa by 19-3 although arguably the most memorable aspect was the ferocious heat. Jenkins always asserted that the temperature was well into the 90s, somewhat freakish even for the resort city of Port Elizabeth.\n\nSouth Africa's juggernaut pack dominated proceedings in the furnace-like conditions and the series was lost, but considerable consolation came at Newlands in Cape Town when the Third Test was won 21-16 by the Lions in a match still regarded as one of the greatest in the histories of both South Africa and the Lions.\n\nAt half-time, the Lions trailed by 13-3, in those days a considerable margin. Yet gradually, they began to make inroads up front, and a converted try by Gerald 'Beef' Dancer followed by a penalty by McKibbin brought them to within two points. Bob Alexander scored another try for the Lions to put them ahead, Freddy Turner of South Africa regained the lead with a penalty but then Charlie Grieve, the fullback from Oxford University and Scotland deputising for the injured Jenkins, dropped a goal \u2013 in those years worth four points.\n\nThe Lions scored again in their wonderful second half revival when forward Laurie Duff, of Glasgow Academicals and Scotland, forced his way over the line. In a dramatic finale, a South African try by Williams was ruled out for a forward pass and the Lions held on for a magnificent victory.\n\nVivian Jenkins kicks a penalty to touch against Transvaal.\n\nIn the final analysis, with key players left at home and others injured, they had fought a magnificent battle against the best team in the world, they provided wonderfully attractive play and were highly popular around the country. Lions tours and most forms of top sport now went into cold storage for the duration of the Second World War and its aftermath.\n\nBut there were enough warm memories in the hearts of touring teams and hosting nations alike, to ensure the resumption of the grand traditions was to be a formality.\n\nVIVIAN JENKINS (Wales)  \nToured: 1938\n\nThe team travelled to and from South Africa by sea and internally in the Union almost solely by rail. I recall spending no fewer than seven nights out of 11 on trains during the Rhodesian part of the tour.\n\nOur shorts were so long \u2013 they reached almost down to the knee \u2013 that they caused a certain amusement and were given a rude nickname by the South African public.\n\nAt Cape Town, a well-known Springbok forward appeared (by invitation of the Lions management) to take charge of a scrummaging practice. Eventually Bill Travers would have none of it. 'What I learned from my father is good enough for me,' he said. Travers had always packed down with his arms over those of the men outside him. The Springbok was advising that he should use the arms-under method. Anyhow, Travers did not change his methods, and proved to be one of the most successful hookers ever to visit the Union.\n\nVivian Jenkins.\n\nHARRY BOWCOTT (1930 Lion, recalling the 1938 tour)\n\nBlair Mayne and old Bill Travers, the Welsh hooker who was a very tough boy too, would put on seamen's jerseys, go down to the docks in Cape Town, wait until someone would say something rude about them and then demolish them! That was their idea of a night out. Blair was the heavyweight champion of the Irish universities. Magnificent physique, and a very quiet fellow you thought wouldn't hurt a fly \u2013 until you saw him roused. Mad as a hatter.\n\nVIVIAN JENKINS\n\nBoth games against Transvaal were tremendously hard and in the first the British team ended the match with only 12 men. Fly-half Jeff Reynolds, left-wing Bill Clement and centre Basil Nicholson were all injured. Thus hooker Travers had only five forwards with him at one time but miraculously still managed to hook the ball. In the second match, which was equally fierce, Travers himself was badly concussed. As a result he had to miss the First Test which we lost 12-26. There is no knowing what a difference the presence of Travers might have made.\n\nBoy and Fanie Louw.\n\nGerry Brand played opposite me in the First Test. He was the most accurate goalkicker I have ever known, and admits that his longest of all was the one he put over in the First Test at Ellis Park against the 1938 Lions. It was a penalty kick on the halfway line and on the edge of the touchline. 'I wanted to kick for touch,' Gerry told me, 'but Danie Craven said: \"Have a shot at goal. You can do it all right.\" So I took a belt at it, and over it went.' I know, for I was under the crossbar when it did so.\n\nAt half-time in the Third Test, the Springboks were leading 13-3 but the British team scored 18 points in the second half with only three against. That was memorable rugby, if you like. How Dai Williams (the South African wing), still the greatest wing I have seen, failed to score for the Springboks in the closing minutes is something I shall not forget. He ran 45 yards to touch down under the posts, only to be recalled for a forward pass! It was bound to have been a goal and anything could then happen. A wonderful game of rugby, by any standards, and at the end of the match the defeated Springboks carried Sam Walker shoulder high from the field. That was the most pleasant memory of all.\n\nThe crowd at the Transvaal game.\n\nThe 1938 Springboks.\n\n## CHAPTER TWELVE\n\n# [THE FLYING LION  \n1950](006.html#a3)\n\nNEW ZEALAND, AUSTRALIA & CEYLON\n\nLEWIS JONES, aged 19 and a young naval rating, won his first cap for Wales against England in 1950. He had just been on the point of departure for Hong Kong on an aircraft carrier when news of his selection came through and he was released to play. He went on to appear 10 times for Wales and then switched codes to rugby league, launching a magnificent career with Leeds and Great Britain which was to make him arguably the most brilliant convert ever to move from union to league, and the loss of his glorious running and kicking talents was keenly felt in the union game at the time.\n\nBut he made history of a different kind later in 1950. Lewis Jones became the first man ever to fly to a Lions tour. The 1950 Lions, under Karl Mullen, had departed at the end of March via the usual means of transport used by Lions parties since 1888 \u2013 ship. The party had sailed from Liverpool on the Shaw Savill line flagship, TSS Ceramic. One of the tourists was to observe that the ship normally carried livestock.\n\nThe precocious Jones had not made the original selection for the party, who had fine fullbacks in George Norton of Ireland and Billy Cleaver of Wales, and Jones was preparing for a season of top level cricket. However, Norton, from Bective Rangers, was injured in an early tour match. Jones was called up, rushed back to his native Wales from a cricket match to pack his bags, and then rushed back to London. There, heady with excitement, he boarded a BOAC Stratocruiser. Effectively, in one take-off run, Lions tours of the future were transformed. Even though the Ceramic was a vastly more advanced ship than the RMS Kaikoura, which conveyed the heroic 1888 touring team, it still took Mullen and his men 32 days to reach New Zealand and roughly the same on the return voyage.\n\nAdmittedly, the flight option to New Zealand involved an enormous number of hops which, as Jones was later to testify, took him through a kaleidoscope of exotic locations. But in the future around nine weeks could now be lopped off a Lions tour to the Antipodes and around five weeks off a South African trip, and it meant the parties would be stronger. No Lions party before the Second World War ever toured in the southern hemisphere without missing a considerable number of elite players because of the sheer time involved.\n\nThe 1950 team also made history by wearing red jerseys, now inextricably linked with the Lions tradition and mystique. Even though the tour still involved two long sea journeys, the party had fewer absentees than most \u2013 John Gwilliam, who had captained Wales to a Grand Slam, was unavailable, but for the first time in Lions history every one of the touring team was an international player for one of the four home countries \u2013 good news considering that they faced a fierce 30-match playing itinerary, with four Test matches in New Zealand, two more in Australia and even a fleeting visit on the way home to play in Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka).\n\nThe party boasted class in several positions. The great Jackie Kyle was at fly-half, and for his performances on tour he was to go down in history as one of the finest and best-loved players that New Zealand had seen. On the wing, they had Ken Jones, the international sprinter and a sensational attacking runner, who until he was overtaken by Gareth Edwards in the 1970s was the most-capped Welsh international \u2013 the excellent Ken Jones: Boots and Spikes by Steve Lewis, reveals a sporting character of ability and richness. On tour, Jones was to score 16 tries in 16 games.\n\nAnd in the centre, a complementary partnership was forged between Dr Jack Matthews and Bleddyn Williams, two great friends from Cardiff \u2013 who remained almost inseparable friends throughout their lives \u2013 with the pugnacious Matthews providing the defensive hammer and the incisive Williams the kind of attacking brilliance which was to see him dubbed the 'Prince of Centres'. He created countless tries for the touring team backs with his sidestepping and also led the Lions in Mullen's absence in three of the six tour Tests.\n\nThe glorious Tom Clifford, a prop from Munster, was clearly the core character of the tour, with Jim McCarthy of the Dolphin club and Jimmy Nelson from Malone running him close. The top points scorer was the young Welsh three-quarter Malcolm Thomas, who scored 96 points and who was to return to New Zealand with the 1959 party.\n\nTour preparation once again came into sharp focus after one Lions prop used to living on rations in the austerity of post-war Britain, ballooned by two stone after tucking into the first-class travel fare on the outward sea journey. However, the team took fitness more seriously than some of their predecessors, with many other players recounting weeks of hard work, even scrummaging, aboard ship.\n\nOne of the features of the tour was the use of the ruck as an offensive weapon in New Zealand, and particularly in the Otago province, which became known as the home of the ruck. The Lions found that rucks were deliberately set up by the home teams as a means of winning quick second phase possession with a tackler buried at the bottom. The tactic was exceedingly difficult to combat, as was proved when Otago heavily defeated the Lions at Carisbrook, 23-9.\n\nAnd in the final analysis, despite the strength of the Lions and despite the excellence of their crop of world-class players, they still lost the series \u2013 they were beaten by 3-0 in New Zealand, with one draw, though they did do well to recover to gain convincing wins in the two Tests in Australia. Yet at no time did they appear likely to end their melancholy run against the All Blacks.\n\nIt was a feat in an itinerary of such intensity, that they only lost two provincial games \u2013 against Otago and Southland, both deep in the south of the South Island; and in Australia, they lost only to a New South Wales XV. The 32-9 win over Auckland, with Lewis Jones in wonderful form with his kicking and dazzling running, was a high point, and it showed what could be done when the forwards stood their ground and allowed their backs to play. The match was a Lions classic.\n\nThe failure in the Test series can be put into stark perspective because the New Zealand team which romped to victory had been whitewashed by South Africa the previous year. Ultimately, the level of fitness and organisation amongst New Zealand forwards was too much. They were more aggressive than the Lions, the new rucking tactics were irresistible in some games and, in the end, the Lions were left licking their wounds.\n\nHowever, the Lions party was one of the most popular of all time, because they were the first British team to visit New Zealand since 1930 and the two countries had been brought together by their common cause and losses in the Second World War. It was to become known as 'the friendly tour'.\n\nMullen was a quiet leader; one of his own Irish colleagues was mildly critical in later years of the tactics that were employed, particularly with the feeling that the Lions concentrated on their backs at the expense of their forward play.\n\nThe manager, Ginger Osborne, was not a disciplinarian, and in an austere period may have made himself unpopular if he tried to be one. One of his tour party offered the opinion that he knew 'bugger all' about rugby but, for many managers, being liked and respected by his players was a start.\n\nOne of the most unfortunate players on tour was Doug Smith, the Scotland wing, who was recovering from a broken arm and did not play until the 18th game of the tour. However, Smith put his down-time to good use, and when he returned to New Zealand in 1971 as the manager of the celebrated party, he had learned many lessons about the difficulties of life as a Lion in the country.\n\nRemarkably, there were only three English players in the party, and this after decades when the tours had been dominated by the English. Perhaps this was an indication that strict merit selection was now in place, because England had finished bottom of the International Championship in 1950. Wales provided the bulk of the touring party, with 14 in all.\n\nScotland's representation was led by Gus Black, a clever and articulate scrum-half who was expected to strike up a fine partnership with Jackie Kyle. He did play in the first two Tests, though first Gordon Rimmer and then Rex Willis took over the berth.\n\nThe 1950 tour party.\n\nThe Test series was competitive at the start, with the Lions drawing the First Test in Dunedin, 9-9. Indeed, late in the second half, the Lions were leading 9-3 after John Robins kicked a penalty and Kyle scored a memorable individual try. Ken Jones also scored after chasing a kick by Kyle, but with six minutes left, Bob Scott, the great fullback, came into the line for New Zealand and kicked ahead; from the resulting ruck, Ron Elvidge, the New Zealand captain, forced his way over for the draw.\n\nThe Lions were never to get so close again, and their forwards were second best in the series from then on. As Bleddyn Williams once told Clem Thomas, 'It was as if they had burnt themselves out in that one game!'\n\nNew Zealand won the Second Test at Lancaster Park, Christchurch, by 8-0 with their forwards well on top, and only courageous defence by the Lions kept the score down. New Zealand scraped home 6-3 in the Third Test at Athletic Park, Wellington, with John Robins putting the Lions in front with a first-half penalty before Elvidge scored a try and Bob Scott a penalty, giving New Zealand the match and the series.\n\nThe final Test in Auckland was won 11-8 by New Zealand, and again the Lions showed courage to the very end, with Bleddyn Williams launching two attacks which came so close to a try. It was during this match that Lewis Jones and Ken Jones conspired to create what the well-known New Zealand rugby critic Terry McLean was later to describe as 'the greatest try of all'.\n\nBy now the New Zealand section of the Australasian tour was seen as the more significant but that should not detract from the achievement of the Lions of beating Australia in Test matches in both Brisbane and Sydney, and by thumping margins. This achievement by a tired team was memorable.\n\nBy this time, Lewis Jones was established as a tour star and in the First Test in Australia at the Exhibition Ground, Brisbane, he went through the card of scoring actions to collect 16 points \u2013 try, two conversions, two penalties, and a drop-goal from 50 yards. The 16 points was a new record for a Lion.\n\nRoy John, Rees Stephens and Billy Cleaver disembark the Ceramic upon arrival in New Zealand.\n\nAnd this time, their grievous ill luck with injury did not cost them too badly \u2013 Malcolm Thomas broke a collarbone early on, yet the touring team still came home 19-6 with 14 men. Bleddyn Williams scored a captain's try and Doug Smith, belatedly coming up to speed after his injury, played his first Test match.\n\nJimmy Nelson, the Ireland lock, scored two of the Lions' five tries in a record win against Australia in Sydney. There were 25,000 at the match, although by this time rugby league was making greater inroads and it is said that a bigger crowd watched a rugby league match played at the same time at a nearby stadium.\n\nOn their passage home, which took them through the Suez Canal, the Lions played an unofficial game against Ceylon which they won 44-6, and yet another tour had ended with fine memories but, in the end, disappointing results.\n\nYet the friendly tour had enraptured New Zealand crowds with the creativity and pace of the tourists' play. In his description of the 'greatest try' scored in the Fourth Test, McLean said that when the ball reached Lewis Jones, 'rugby lore commanded that Jones should kick for touch. A whimsical rugby genius commanded that he should feint and dummy and start to run...' McLean described the passage of the young genius through defenders, until he was in the clear. 'What lay in front of Lewis Jones was not a tangled mass of All Black jerseys, but a green field and faraway, Scott, the lone sentinel. Lewis Jones ran, Lord how he ran!'\n\nMcLean goes on to describe the process and the ingenious way in which Jones drew Bob Scott, the final defender, altering the height of his pass to Ken Jones so that it would not be intercepted. 'The ball reached Kenneth at chest height. He ran at all times with the sinuous grace of a greyhound and now his long legs stretched forth, flashing over the green and driving onward toward the goal....\n\n'What a sight! Modest maidens, stout matrons, gawking schoolboys, the long and the short and the tall, were jumping, throwing paper and hats and bags, waving scarves and programs and yelling, bellowing, making any kind of noise that seemed proper as an expression of total joy.'\n\nBLEDDYN WILLIAMS (Wales)  \nToured: 1950\n\nIt was the first tour since the war and a great honour to be selected in the first place. They hadn't had a Lions side travel to New Zealand and Australia since 1930 so there was a lot of interest. I didn't know I was going to go because I was injured. I didn't play in a Wales game in 1950 \u2013 I missed all four internationals \u2013 so it was a great surprise.\n\nI had to prove my fitness before I went, though. I had to play for Cardiff against Bath on the day that Wales were playing at the Arms Park against France. I was only out of plaster the week before I played the game. Can you imagine what my muscles were like? I just went through the motions but, thanks to Cliff Morgan, I scored a try in the last few minutes of the game. I think the media were fooled by that because they thought 'Williams is fit'. There were five weeks aboard ship, though, so I did a lot of exercise and I was alright for the tour.\n\nJACK KYLE (Ireland)  \nToured: 1950\n\nIt was all so different, life in those days. The furthest I had ever been from my home in Northern Ireland was Paris, for a Five Nations international against France, and that journey took 24 hours via Liverpool, London, Dover and then the English Channel. When we got to Paris, I stood in awe at sights like the Champs Elysees, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. People didn't travel.\n\nThere had been a war, times were still tough and for the lucky ones where I lived who could afford a holiday, it was maybe a week on the sands at Portrush, on the County Antrim coast. Suddenly, we were presented with what was an unbelievable concept. We were being offered the chance to go to the other side of the world to play one of the best teams in the world.\n\nGUS BLACK (Scotland)  \nToured: 1950\n\nI was a student so I took a year off and didn't have to worry about lost wages. The only problem I had was that I was fairly recently married and had a young child, who was only 18 months old, and I wasn't very sure whether it was going to do damage being away for that period of time.\n\nBut my wife said I should go. And later on she met another wife at a dinner down in London, whose husband had been selected for the Lions tour of 1936 to Argentina and she'd objected to him going so he hadn't gone, and she regretted it for the rest of her life. So I think that reassured her \u2013 but it wasn't just a matter of packing a bag and going. There were a lot of things to be thought about.\n\nThe team arrives in New Zealand.\n\nJACK KYLE\n\nWe sailed on the Ceramic from Liverpool. I think normally it carried sheep and lambs. It took us about 31 days to get to Wellington. We had three in one cabin. I was with Bill McKay and Jim McCarthy. I being the youngest had to take the upper bunk.\n\nWe were the first Lions touring team in New Zealand for 20 years and the reception we received everywhere we went, even the brass band at 5.30am in the morning, left an indelible impression on every member of the party. We set sail from Liverpool on 1 April, voyaged across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans before arriving in Wellington Harbour on 2 May. Only hours after we left Liverpool we hit rough seas and we turned into a pretty miserable group. Our only Naval man was Malcolm Thomas, but he was struck by seas sickness more than anyone. Dr Jack Matthews, my Cardiff and Wales centre partner, worked wonders with some inoculations at sea that stopped us from feeling ill, but he was dealt with by the ship's doctor and carried on feeling unwell.\n\nJIM McCARTHY (Ireland)  \nToured: 1950\n\nTommy Clifford (Munster and Ireland prop) was undoubtedly the character of the tour. He was from Limerick. A magic man.\n\nJACK MATTHEWS (Wales)  \nToured: 1950\n\nThe tour cost me a lot of money! As a doctor I had to pay a locum doctor over \u00a35,000 and we were given seven shillings a day expenses by the International Board. It wasn't very easy but my wife said, 'Yes, you can go.' I enjoyed the rugby and that was the main thing. I think it is the ultimate for any rugby player, whatever nationality, English, Irish, Welsh or Scottish. There was lots of training on board the ship on the way over as two of the players, John Robins and Ken Jones, were Physical Training officers. We also had lots of meetings together daily so the bond was good.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nWe got \u00a312 a week, which was to return hospitality we got from New Zealanders. But each of us had to find \u00a3100, I think, before we went on the tour. That was our financial contribution to the whole thing. In some cases, such as with Cliff Davies, the people of Kenfig Hill raised the money.\n\nI think the blazer was provided, but we all had to have a dinner jacket, and in some instances that was again funded through local donations. So apart from the \u00a312 a week to repay local hospitality, which I'm not sure was properly within the rules, it was strictly amateur.\n\nBLEDDYN WILLIAMS\n\nWe got to know each other on ship as we knew we were going to be away for a long time. There were only 72 of us aboard ship in total. There was lots of training on board \u2013 we were exercising and we even had scrummaging on ship. We didn't lose any balls overboard, though, as our passes were accurate!\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nThe leader of the choir was Cliff Davies. He was an extraordinary chap. He was a miner, and after a couple of pints he could sing all night in Italian, or perhaps it was Welsh, I don't know, maybe they are similar. But it certainly wasn't English.\n\nQuite apart from his dedication to rugby, as a human being he was a truly democratic sort of person. It didn't matter who we were meeting \u2013 whether it was a governor or a local man from the pits \u2013 he treated them exactly the same way. Whether this was particularly a Welsh trait, I don't know.\n\nWe had a very good manager \u2013 Ginger Osborne \u2013 who used a very loose rein. He wanted each country to represent their heritage, so the Scots did their dancing, the Welsh did their singing, there wasn't enough English to make a noise and I don't recall what the Irish did \u2013 stood around being amusing, I suppose.\n\nI had a photograph at one time of us doing an eightsome reel on the deck of the boat going through the Panama Canal.\n\nHine Awatere and Karl Mullen share a traditional Maori welcome.\n\nJACK KYLE\n\nThe Welsh formed us into a choir. Tom Clifford's song was 'O'Reilly's Daughter'. 'As I was walking down the street, who should I meet but the one-eyed Reilly, with two pistols in hand, looking for the man who married his daughter, yiddy aye oh, yiddy aye eh.' I stayed clear from the singing. Couldn't sing at all.\n\nBILLY CLEAVER (Wales)  \nToured: 1950\n\nWe discussed back play in attack \u2013 variations on the plan \u2013 and forward play around the scrummage. These topics caused infinite arguments and never seemed likely to stop until the meeting was adjourned for the laying of tea.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nThere was a daily training routine on the journey out which consisted of running round the deck, doing press-ups, playing violent games and that sort of thing \u2013 but nothing like the sort of effort you made at home and some of the forwards may have put on a bit of weight.\n\nJIMMY NELSON (Ireland)  \nToured: 1950\n\nTom Clifford arrived on the boat with three trunks when most of us had two suitcases. One night, about midnight, when we had a drink or two, Tom says: 'Would anyone like something to eat?' When we got down to his cabin he opened up one of the trunks and it was stuffed with fruitcake and biscuits.\n\nTOM CLIFFORD (Ireland)  \nToured: 1950\n\nMy mother said, 'You're not going to be going short of food. I'll give you this to tide you over.'\n\nThe first training session of the tour.\n\nJIM McCARTHY\n\nWhen Tommy got on the ship he saw the menu and there was about 12 items on it. We were going through the Bay of Biscay and the ship was very up and down. Well, Tom ate every item on the menu. Three types of dessert, three starters, three main courses. He shovelled the whole lot in.\n\nJACK KYLE\n\nBill McKay was a runner-up, six courses behind.\n\nWhen we got on board I think it was George Norton who suggested to us, 'Lads this is an opportunity we'll never get again, we're a month or more on this ship and I'm told if you get your hair all shaved off right down to your skull with only a quarter of an inch left, by the time we get to New Zealand your hair will be thick and luxurious.' We said to George: 'You go and try it out.' George came back with a quarter of an inch of his hair left. By the time we got to New Zealand, George's hair had only grown about another eighth of an inch. I don't think his hair ever recovered from the shock.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nI think the success of the 1950 Lions tour \u2013 and it was a success \u2013 was the impact we had socially. Not as a whole group but as 30 individuals who went out there and got to know the people. We met a lot of New Zealanders and I think a big part of the reason why the Lions has evolved into this hugely popular phenomenon had a lot to do with the good impression we made in 1950.\n\nWe landed in Wellington then sailed from there to Nelson on the South Island \u2013 which was really a shack town with a main street in those days \u2013 for our first game. It was quite markedly Scottish, and I met a family called the Campbells, with whom I became quite friendly and they introduced me to a lot of locals.\n\nAfter playing there we headed down the West Coast through places like Westport and Greymouth, which were predominantly mining towns. Now, I come from west Fife which is a big mining area, and the number of people who had emigrated there from my neck of the woods was astonishing.\n\nI remember speaking to the barman in one pub and asking if there was anyone from Dunfermline in the house, and he opened the door to the back parlour and shouted the question. Well, the next minute there was this line of people coming through to greet me. It made the world seem an awful small place, for a wee while at least.\n\nIt's funny the things that stick in your memory: there was a strong Catholic presence and as we went from place to place the first person to greet us was the president of the local rugby club \u2013 but not two paces behind him was the local priest, as often as not. It didn't interfere in any way, or cause any tension \u2013 it was just one of those peculiar little things you notice.\n\nBLEDDYN WILLIAMS\n\nWe couldn't have had a better captain or nicer man than Karl Mullen to lead us. He was a fine player and he was marvellous off the field. He was not a tub-thumping type of skipper. He knew his game and he was a very positive sort of guy. We were all coaches on that tour and he leaned on me pretty heavily as his vice-captain because we had so many Welshmen in the squad.\n\nHe took care of the forwards and I looked after the backs. He was very good to me and it was a very good and happy tour.\n\nKARL MULLEN (Ireland)  \nToured: 1950\n\nWe had a good out-half in Jack Kyle, and Jack Matthews and Bleddyn Williams, the two famous Welsh guys were in the middle of the field. We had Ken Jones on one wing and we had Lewis Jones on the other. We had a magical backline. I'd say it was the best backline ever to play for the Lions. Before we went to New Zealand I met the Rugby Union at Twickenham and I was told specifically that we had to play open football.\n\nJACK MATTHEWS\n\nWe had a great post-war side with Cardiff. Our home gate was 35,000, that was the average. Cardiff soccer were in the first division then and we were getting more than them. Bleddyn and I had been playing together since 1938 and we've been friends ever since. It was such a pleasure playing with him for the Lions as well because we knew each other's play so well.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nI spent rather longer going through medical school than I should have done and that meant I had eight years playing for Edinburgh University, which was great rugby. And for most of that time I played with the same outside-half, a chap called Ranald Macdonald, who was on the tour as well.\n\nIn Edinburgh we didn't have a coach as such, but the director of physical education was Charlie Usher, who captained Scotland back in the 1920s, and he trained us to be physically fit. And he also introduced a lot of ideas about how we should be playing rugby with the natural advantages we had.\n\nHe used to get Ranald and myself to train together blindfolded, passing the ball. So we'd get in position, then blindfold ourselves and he'd shout, 'ready \u2013 go'. Then Ranald would start running while I reached down for the ball, and nine times out of ten I would smack it into his chest. You don't have to see the outside-half. In fact, if you can see him it's a slow pass. You pass it into space and it's his job to run onto it.\n\nSo, Ranald and I were a great half-back pair. We knew each other inside out, by instinct by the time we were thoroughly bedded in. But the Scotland selectors never picked us together. He was capped on the wing, and played on the wing for the Lions as well \u2013 and for the life of me, I can't understand the sheer stupidity of not playing an established pair of half-backs. Ranald playing at outside-half in New Zealand would have been a great advantage.\n\nNow, I was suddenly being paired up with Jack Kyle, who didn't play the same way. He stood absolutely stock still until he saw the ball coming to him, but he had the agility to get up to speed very quickly whilst also avoiding the onslaught from any forwards who had the nerve to go for him. I don't think I could really come to terms with that \u2013 it was a waste.\n\nI don't think the Scottish members of the Lions selection team chose me. I think it was the Irish selectors who turned it in my favour, in the belief that I would team up with Jack Kyle to form a very good half-back partnership. I had a longish pass and Jack Kyle, who was at the top of his form at that time, was pretty mobile. But it didn't work out \u2013 at least not as it should have done.\n\nKARL MULLEN\n\nWe travelled by train through the South Island and every station we stopped at we had a full band to meet us and we all marched up to the hotel. Tom Clifford always said the band was especially for him. On the way home I wrote to the Lord Mayor of Limerick saying how proud they should be of Tom Clifford and mentioned the band. So when he got home and got off the train from Dublin, the Lord Mayor had arranged a different band on every street and he was chaired to the town hall and made a freeman of Limerick.\n\nJACK KYLE\n\nWe had one journalist with us, a lovely man, Dai Gent, who wrote for the Sunday Times. A wonderful, delightful little man. The only reporter on the trip. I can remember him reading us poetry on a train. Dai wasn't a man who enjoyed going out with the boys, so you can imagine after he'd written his piece he'd go back to his hotel on his own. Dai played scrum-half for England but he had Welsh connections. You remember that controversial 1905 try in the Wales versus All Blacks game? (The Kiwis played 35 games on tour in 1905, won 34 and had a try disallowed in their one defeat, to the Welsh). Well, everywhere Dai went he got attacked because of the try. I have a notion he got a bit tired listening to the locals going on about the try. I think he got homesick. He went home after about five weeks.\n\nThe First Test team before kick-off in Dunedin.\n\nJIMMY NELSON\n\nWe had a very good manager, Ginger Osborne, who knew bugger all about rugby. He was a charming man but that was a real problem because we didn't have a coach. It was impossible for Karl to coach 30 people and be a captain at the same time. We trained hard, but it was basic stuff. We should have had a lot more technical training.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nIf we'd had a pack that could give us the ball at the right time in the right way, we would have had a tremendous advantage. With Bleddyn Williams, Jack Matthews and plenty of pace on the wings \u2013 it should have been good, shouldn't it?\n\nOf course, all the teams we came up against were liable to be playing well above themselves \u2013 so it wasn't easy. The Test matches were fairly stodgy affairs. There wasn't much running rugby, they were battles for possession and territory.\n\nSome of the rugby was pretty good, but I don't think I'll be the only one who thinks the weakness was in the forwards. They just weren't up to it. And there had, of course, been many New Zealanders across during the war, playing Services rugby for the country where they were stationed, so they had knowledge of how the game was played in Britain, and I wouldn't doubt for a minute that they transferred that knowledge back home.\n\nThere was training every day, but Ginger Osborne gave us a long lead, which meant that if I didn't turn up he wouldn't bother me. I think he realised that there were psychological circumstances that contributed to me behaving not quite as well as I should have. So I missed training quite a lot \u2013 I'd lost interest.\n\nScrum-half Gus Black makes a break during the First Test.\n\nThe Lions team hadn't played much rugby before the war, and I think wartime rugby didn't have this vigorous physicality that everyone talks about now. It was more gentlemanly. So our forwards hadn't been tried and tested, while the New Zealanders had looked a bit further ahead, and dominating in the forwards was already a big part of their philosophy. They introduced us to a new way of playing rugby.\n\nThe dominant team in New Zealand at the time was Otago and we played them in Dunedin the week before the First Test. They had discovered that if you heeled the ball quickly and passed it wide quickly with everyone running full speed when they got the ball, then the winger would be going at full speed and when he was eventually tackled the forwards would find it easier to get up to the ball and heel it again, and the whole process could then be repeated coming the other way. The idea was that you would eventually get an overlap.\n\nIt's almost childish \u2013 when you think about it now. But it was very effective and we weren't quite into that level of fitness and coordination. We tended to rely more on individual skills and the combined skills of a handful of players linking together \u2013 but not a whole team working in unison.\n\nUnfortunately, I don't think we learned any instant lessons from being beaten by Otago to take into the First Test.\n\nJIM McCARTHY\n\nKarl was a quiet captain. You probably wouldn't know he was captain unless you were told. He had a quiet authority.\n\nJIMMY NELSON\n\nIt must be very hard for a captain to monitor all these players especially if you're the hooker in the middle of it. That's where we missed a coach and a manager. Somebody from the outside looking in and saying, 'This is where things are going wrong.'\n\nThe Lions defence pushes up quickly to smother the All Black attack.\n\nKARL MULLEN\n\nI could see where it was going wrong. We weren't jumping at the lineout or marking the fellas who were jumping, so we got very little ball at the lineout.\n\nJIMMY NELSON\n\nAs much as I liked Karl, he was a boy among men, if you know what I mean. He wasn't hardened. He was a very good man to get you going, to get your enthusiasm up but in the Irish team at that time the tactical chap was Des O'Brien. One person who should have been in that Lions team was Des. To me, he was the one forward in the Irish team I looked up to.\n\nKARL MULLEN\n\nThe physicality was a big shock, I can tell you. I went on the ball in one match in Whangarei, I think, and I got a kick and if it didn't break all my ribs I was lucky. They were letting us know, 'Get off the ball otherwise we'll kick you off!' So we got off it pretty quick the next time.\n\nBleddyn Williams leads the Lions out for the Third Test after Karl Mullen withdrew.\n\nLEWIS JONES (Wales)  \nToured: 1950\n\nLooking back on my career, I cannot recall that things ever went better or more effortlessly for me than on Eden Park when we played Auckland. When the end came we had piled up 32 points to Auckland's nine, my own personal tally was 17 (four conversions and three penalty goals).\n\nEven so, the day belonged to Jackie Kyle. The great little Irish stand-off played one of the most wonderful matches I have ever seen even him play and that despite being kicked about at the feet of the Auckland forwards. I've seen some dirty play in my time but nothing so ruthless and deliberate as the kicking of Jackie on the ground right in front of the grandstand at Eden Park that afternoon.\n\nJIM McCARTHY\n\nEvery Welshman was born with a side-step. I don't think there was anybody in Ireland who could do a side-step, not even Jack Kyle. Jack was not a side-stepper. Bursts of speed and swerves, but Jack was such a pure player, and a pure person, that he'd think selling a dummy was a mortal sin and he'd have to go to confession.\n\nLEWIS JONES\n\nI was able to sit in the stand at the famous Athletic ground in Wellington and enjoy the spectacle of Bleddyn Williams at his peerless best. What a spectacle it was, for the famous jink flashed in and out like a neon sign to elude Wellington players with its brilliance.\n\nNoel Henderson and Peter Johnstone clash during the Third Test.\n\nJACK KYLE\n\nBefore the First Test I think people had written us off. They were thinking, 'Well, Otago have beaten them and they were beaten by Southland in Invercargill.' We pulled the stops out and drew it. I scored a try and it was one of those where you never know how you scored it. Subconsciously something happens. I think I got a stray ball from somewhere and started running and managed to get round a few guys. I would say that was one of the most important tries I ever scored because we really were up against it and it was nice to do something to put the tour on a sound footing. But then we lost the next three Tests. There was so little in it. But that's the way sport goes. Small things.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nWe would have won that First Test if I had only looked to my right. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Ken Jones was right there ready to take the ball, and he was yelling his head off, but I wasn't looking and didn't hear him. All I had to do was make a simple pass and he would have been in under the posts. There are a few things I really regret in life \u2013 and that is one of them.\n\nI played in the first two Tests, and I think the New Zealand chaps were being kind in the first one \u2013 but not in the second one when I spent more time in the bloody air than I did on the ground. Pat Crowley was in the back-row for New Zealand that day, and he attended to me quite admirably.\n\nNew Zealand had re-evaluated the way they were going to play the game \u2013 and a virile defence was going to be a part of it. The physicality they talk about now I think maybe started with them, and the South Africans didn't need a second invitation to adopt the same approach.\n\nJIMMY NELSON\n\nNew Zealand had a certain amount of ruthlessness and that really was the problem with our team. We weren't ruthless enough. That team should have been much better. When it came to tactics they were all 'get the ball to the centre' and in my opinion that was all very well but I thought our forwards were very quick and we should have used the forwards around the field a lot more.\n\nWe had a tremendous backline and that was the problem. That was the only tactic. I'm still angry about it. We should have used the forwards more because the forwards were very quick. Even until the day he died I argued with Karl about that. If anybody would agree with me it would be Bill McKay. He'd have agreed with me.\n\nJACK KYLE\n\nHe was a boxer, Bill. A very hard man. McKay had been in the army in the war and fought in the Burmese jungle along with the Gurkhas. There was a man in New Zealand called Charles Upham who had won two Victoria Crosses and McKay knew roughly where he was and asked the management if Upham could come and have lunch with us, which he did. We met this very quiet sheep farmer, this man with two VCs. McKay sat beside him. I think Bleddyn Williams had been in the air force during the war and then we all went over and shook hands with him. He didn't look like he wanted the limelight, a guy who said he only did what was necessary. You remember the rugby but you remember all the other things as well.\n\nBLEDDYN WILLIAMS\n\nI came into the side for the Second Test as one of two changes, but we were undone by the Auckland breakaway Pat Crowley. He turned into a scrum-half killer as he tormented Angus Black and stopped him producing his normal service. In one strategic blow the All Blacks had thrown a spanner into our attacking machinery. In the end, everything in the series boiled down to the fact that New Zealand had a better pack of forwards than the Lions, won continual possession and so smashed our more polished attacking back division before it could even purr into action. We lost the Second Test 8-0 after losing Bill McKay with a broken nose just before the interval.\n\nI was captain for the Third Test, when Mullen was injured, and the All Black pack hit us with sledge-hammer force. At one stage they played with only six forwards through injury yet were still winning the ball against the Lions' eight! It was our chance, and we should have taken it, but New Zealand took the glory against all the odds with a 6-3 victory.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nWe lost Bill McKay during the Second Test, and that was quite a loss because he was a really rangy sort of forward who was a real pest amongst the opposition three-quarters \u2013 so that maybe contributed to what happened.\n\nI was replaced by the Englishman Gordon Rimmer for the Third Test. He was significantly bigger and probably more robust than me. I was 5ft 10in and lucky if I was pushing 10st 10lbs, which would be a laugh today. So I think it was an attempt to beef the team up. But he had only one Test, and in the Fourth Test they brought in Rex Willis, who was the Welsh scrum-half at that time, and he didn't have a particularly happy time either \u2013 so I'm inclined to believe it wasn't a remotely sympathetic environment for a scrum-half. The ball was coming back slowly and the half-backs were minced meat, really. In a nutshell, the forwards were taken by surprise and they never recovered. They weren't fit enough, they weren't hard enough and in some instances they weren't big enough.\n\nThe programme from the FourthTest match at Eden Park.\n\nKARL MULLEN\n\nI was advised that I should move sideways and give the other hooker a game, so I feigned injury. I wasn't injured at all. I gave the other hooker, Dai Davies, three of the six Test matches. I wouldn't do it again.\n\nJACK KYLE\n\nThe last Test was a regret. We were so near. Ken Jones' try was one of the highlights of the tour. From a long lineout, I got it, Lewis Jones burst through the middle and ran to the halfway line and gave it to Ken who had wonderful anticipation. He got the ball and went charging, chased by the wing three-quarter, but Ken having won a silver medal in the Olympics was not going to be caught. I can still see it and feel it and remember thinking, 'We have a chance here.' He was a wonderful player, Ken.\n\nBLEDDYN WILLIAMS\n\nThe Fourth Test was notable for Ken Jones' unforgettable try. Rex Willis sent out a cannon-ball pass to Jackie Kyle. He was preparing to pass to me when Lewis Jones sliced between us and took the pass intended for me. We were as flabbergasted as the All Blacks and Lewis freed Ken to side-step Bob Scott and race three-quarters the length of Eden Park to score. What a try!\n\nWe ran the All Blacks off their feet in the last 20 minutes and twice I got within inches of scoring. We took every risk and tried every ruse but still they won 11-8.\n\nLEWIS JONES\n\nWe failed in the final Test, but gloriously and the crowd knew it. How they cheered as we made for the dressing room and how sweet and plaintively the strains of 'Now is the Hour' sounded across that vast stadium. It was almost like being back again on the Arms Park and for us Welshmen especially it was a link with far-off home.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nThe last game we played in New Zealand was against the Maoris and, you wouldn't believe it, I was winding down in somebody's house, it was well after midnight and we were all well and truly relaxed, when somebody appeared at the door to say I was playing the next day. Rex Willis was injured and Gordon Rimmer was ill so neither of them was available \u2013 and that was the longest game of rugby on the tour as I was concerned. I was a bit hungover, I must confess. But we won.\n\nBLEDDYN WILLIAMS\n\nWherever we went we were treated royally and, at Ashburton, I had never before seen so much food on one table in my life. Eventually the hospitality we were getting became so lavish that our manager, Ginger Osborne, requested that after games other than Test matches there should be no official dinners.\n\nOf the things I would never forget were seeing a sheep with five legs in Gisborne and the scene at the end of our final game against a Maori XV. The whole crowd seemed to pour onto the field at the end of a game we won 14-9 in typical 'windy Wellington' conditions and sealed off our path to the dressing rooms. They clutched our arms and sang 'Now is the Hour' and 'Auld Lang Syne', many of them with tears in their eyes. 'If rugby football could do this,' I thought, 'it must be the greatest of all games.'\n\nMICK LANE (Ireland)  \nToured: 1950\n\nI remember the send-off from New Zealand. It was tremendous. Goodbye on the quayside. Thousands there singing.\n\nKen Jones breaks away to score a spectacular try at Eden Park during the Fourth Test.\n\nJACK KYLE\n\nLeaving Wellington to cross to Sydney, we had these big long paper ribbons. People on the shore held one end and we held the other and as the ship pulled away people were singing 'Now is the hour when we must say goodbye.' I think a few tears were dropping. After about 60 or 70 yards the ribbons broke and we waved farewell.\n\nKARL MULLEN\n\nAustralia was a big contrast. The Australians were a bit brash like the Americans. It wasn't a country village place like New Zealand, it was a brash place. We had upped our game physically. We were tougher. They might have been a bit surprised. We had no trouble in Australia.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nAustralian rugby wasn't much cop. I only played once there, against Newcastle on the hardest surface I ever played on \u2013 I think it was just sand. It was a bit of an afterthought. We were already winding down, and the Wednesday team briefly became the Saturday team.\n\nWe had one particularly unpleasant match against a Metropolitan XV, the captain of which was a chap called 'Jika' Travers, who had been a troublesome bugger at Oxford and had played for England during his university days; he was determined that whatever else happened he was going to slaughter us, and he did quite a good job of it as I recall.\n\nJIMMY NELSON\n\nI scored two tries in the Second Test in Sydney. It should have been three in actual fact, because I fell over the Australia fullback going for a third. I'm the only second-row to score two tries in a Test, I think. I have to admit, it was a moment in time when I was the fittest I'd ever been. In the second half of the tour I played nearly every match so when I got to Australia I was absolutely fighting fit. I'm 90 years old and you're asking me questions about things that happened more than 60 years ago. But one abiding memory of 1950 is that the team didn't live up to its reputation. That's true.\n\nLewis Jones kicks for goal, Fourth Test.\n\nGUS BLACK\n\nOn the way home we played in Ceylon, on the racecourse. And the crowd all seemed to have been to Aberdeen Grammar School. After the game we were divided up into three groups to go to three different clubhouses \u2013 one was all British, one was all Ceylonese, and one was mixed \u2013 and I was in the group that went to the all-Ceylonese clubhouse.\n\nWell, they were interested in only two things: dirty songs and beer. And I had never seen such a mess of beer in my life. For some reason they didn't hold their glass by the handle, they had a thumb inside the lip, which meant it was getting spilled everywhere.\n\nSo we were all enjoying the beer, and suddenly this gecko fell off the roof and onto the counter in front of me \u2013 which was, of course, covered in beer. I remember thinking: 'Good God, it's finally happened \u2013 I've got the DTs [delirium].' Then the gecko got up and ran out the room \u2013 and as I looked round I noticed that there were geckos all over the place, climbing the walls and crawling across the roof.\n\nLooking back, I don't think I was 100 per cent enthusiastic about the tour. It began to be traumatic about halfway through... living out of a suitcase, travelling by bus, getting roughed up by the All Blacks at regular intervals. It was six months of new experiences every single day \u2013 and I suppose in a way we began to draw the curtains on what was going on around us unless it was quite dramatic. I can remember a bus trip through some beautiful countryside, and we were playing cards and what was going on outside didn't seem to matter very much anymore.\n\nSix months is quite a long time and certainly during the second half of it I wasn't feeling the same enthusiasm as I was at the beginning. I can't remember feeling like I was riding on the crest of a wave or anything like that.\n\nIn retrospect, I wouldn't have missed it \u2013 but at the time I was glad and relieved to get back. Was it a life defining-experience? I don't think so. I am just glad I was chosen, glad I decided to go \u2013 and like most people I am not loath to the idea of leaving my own small mark on history. We left at the end of April from Liverpool and it took about three weeks to get there by sea. We went via the Panama Canal and home via the Suez Canal, so we went right round the world and were away for six months altogether, which I think would break a lot of today's young men in two.\n\nBLEDDYN WILLIAMS\n\nI've still got vivid memories, even after all these years. It was a marvellous tour and a great side to play with. It had to be, though, as there were 14 Welshmen on tour! There was a Welsh society in New Zealand, as there was in Australia, so we had a great following. When I was over in New Zealand three years ago, I was told that the 1950 side would have given the 1971 team a good run for their money.\n\nWe weren't quite strong enough up front but we had a great back division and we played some lovely rugby. The idea was to entertain. It was instilled in us that we must play entertaining rugby and we were very successful at that.\n\n## CHAPTER THIRTEEN\n\n# [LORDS OF AFRICA  \n1955](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nIN MANY ways, this was the ultimate Lions tour. It was not so much in the results that the significance springs, even though by coming away with a drawn series in an epic quartet of matches, the Lions avoided defeat for the first time in decades of touring; it was not even the class shown by both sides in the matches or the sheer style of open rugby played by the Lions, and it was more than the enormous crowds at the four stadiums. It was the sheer glamour, and from the moment that the party hopped their way down from London as the first Lions to fly, South Africa welcomed them with a reverence, entertaining them at every turn and treating them like film stars.\n\nThe tour was ferocious in the sense that it included 25 matches against aggressive home teams, including the four Tests, but it was also played in a wonderful spirit, with so little of the rancour which tended to mark Lions' visits to New Zealand. Catapulted into the limelight were the extraordinary 19-year-old Irish prodigy, Tony O'Reilly, later to become a stratospheric businessman, and Cliff Morgan, the mesmeric Wales fly-half, small in stature but who towered over events on tour both on and off the field.\n\nThere were many other great players in the Lions team, and a torrent of great play and memorable stories surrounding the team's frantic social life of the trip. In his book On Trek, the late author, Bryn Thomas, unveils a panoply of cocktail parties, home visits, official receptions, dances, parties, game drives and a general social whirl.\n\nSouth Africa hadn't lost a Test series for nearly 60 years when the Lions arrived at Jan Smuts airport, late on the evening of 11 June. The side, led by Irish forward Robin Thompson, went on to thrill South Africans and followers back home with their adventurous running rugby in the Test series and came away in a blaze of glory by sharing the four-Test rubber. It was the best British & Irish performance in South Africa since Johnny Hammond's side of 1896.\n\nThompson was barely 24 and had captained Ireland only three times \u2013 all defeats \u2013 in the Five Nations, so was regarded as a surprise choice. His big presence belied his quiet bearing. He became a popular leader and won many plaudits for the manner in which he fulfilled his duties as skipper, though there are some who believe that he lacked the extra edge of the true Test forward.\n\nAs soon as the side stepped off the plane in Johannesburg they entertained the large welcoming party which had endured a five-hour wait with an impromptu concert. The irrepressible Cliff Morgan was choirmaster and launched the Lions into a repertoire of hymns and arias that had been practised at Eastbourne during the tour party's preparations. The Rand Daily Mail next day greeted them with the banner headline: 'This is the greatest team ever to visit South Africa.' As Morgan pointed out, this was before they had played a game.\n\nAs on previous tours, the selectors had, bizarrely, put a strict age restriction on players with the result that no one the wrong side of 30 was considered for the tour. Many aspects of the old tours baffle us today, but quite why the Lions would deny themselves their most experienced players in a ferocious environment like South Africa is astonishing.\n\nThis ruled out former Lions Ken Jones and Jack Kyle, though Wales and Ireland still exercised a strong influence on the team. Behind the scrum Cliff Morgan was the tactical spearhead of the side with the teenaged Tony O'Reilly a strapping presence on the wing to score the tries.\n\nFor the first time in the modern era the Lions possessed a pack capable of holding its own against the Springbok juggernaut. An all-Welsh front-row of Billy Williams, Bryn Meredith and Courtenay Meredith (no relation) provided a strong platform for Thompson and Rhys Williams to flourish in the Test second-row. Scotland's Jim Greenwood was the brains of a back-row that had a good balance of speed and skill in Reg Higgins of England, Tom Reid of Ireland and Russell Robins and Clem Thomas of Wales. Hugh McLeod and Ernie Michie led the Scotland forward contingent.\n\nEngland's Jeff Butterfield, a former Loughborough PE student, took charge of the squad's fitness and prepared the side to a very high standard. The late Tom Reid always reckoned he was never as fit in his life as on that tour. Butterfield formed with Phil Davies, his England colleague, a creative midfield partnership that helped O'Reilly finish the tour with a record 16 tries.\n\nThe Lions lost their tour opener against West Transvaal and were trounced 20-0 by Eastern Province, their only reverses in the dozen provincial matches before the First Test. Cliff Morgan suffered an ankle injury early in the tour and was on the sidelines for the provincial setback in Port Elizabeth. Following their dominating performance, the Eastern Province front-row was selected for the First Test.\n\nMore than 95,000, then a world record for a rugby union international, arrived at Ellis Park to witness one of the most exciting Tests ever staged in South Africa. Morgan, Butterfield, Davies, Cecil Pedlow and O'Reilly were outstanding on the hard ground. Bryn Meredith, well supported by his tight five, gave a masterly hooking display and the back-row of Higgins, Robins and Greenwood did their bit in the loose.\n\nThe match turned out to be a cliff-hanger. The Lions trailed 11-8 at half-time and soon after lost Reg Higgins through injury. Yet again, they were forced to play a major match with a denuded team. Playing with 14 men they reacted positively to adversity and Cliff Morgan, with a lightning break, swerved past flanker Basie van Wyk to inspire the Lions with a try. Next, O'Reilly ran hard to create the opening for Greenwood to score and the big red-headed Irishman's speed to a lucky bounce brought him the Lions' fifth try of the match.\n\nScotland's Angus Cameron, the tour vice-captain, converted four of the tries to give the Lions a 23-11 lead, but back came the Springboks. Eleven points from a penalty, a converted try and a late try brought the score to 23-22 with the conversion attempt to come. Then came one of the most famous kicks, or more precisely, famous misses, in rugby history.\n\nUp stepped fullback Jack van der Schyff who, to the joy of the Lions and despair of South Africans, sent his kick wide and the Lions were one up with three to play. The Springboks had been considered invincible. The result sent out shock waves around the rugby world.\n\nSpeaking at the post-match dinner skipper Robin Thompson summed up the Lions' feelings at beating South Africa: 'To win a rugby international is fine, but to beat the Springboks is really something.'\n\nThe tourists were well-beaten 25-9 in the Second Test and were plagued by injuries in the run-up to the Third Test in Pretoria, where they were without their captain and vice-captain. Cliff Morgan took over as leader. His team talk, by all accounts, was stirring and his masterful tactical control on the day guided the tourists to a 9-6 win. It was a test of their character which they passed with flying colours.\n\nThe Lions showed they could tough it out against the 'Boks and win ugly, abandoning the flowing rugby that had characterised their earlier tour games and First Test win. Doug Baker, a fly-half for England, who had the unenviable job of understudying Morgan, which he did with dignity and team spirit, filled in for Angus Cameron at fullback and kicked the penalty that put the tourists 6-0 up early in the second half. Butterfield was the Lions' other scorer. He contributed a left-footed drop-goal in the first half \u2013 the only one he ever kicked in his entire career he always claimed \u2013 and he crossed for the try that put the Lions a score clear. The end came with the Lions 9-6 ahead and thus 2-1 up with one to play.\n\nThe traditional forward strength of South African rugby was evident in the last Test at Port Elizabeth where the Lions were worn down, conceding seven tries in a 25-9 defeat. There were no excuses from the party. Manager Jack Siggins, disappointed with a tied rubber, conceded: 'On the day's play we were thoroughly beaten by an extremely good side.'\n\nThe 1955 tour party.\n\nHowever, in later years some players were to express the opinion that the post-match schedule counted against them. The Lions had to pack before the game and departed very soon after the post-match festivities. Some players believe that the organisers should have elongated the tour just a little so that they could have given total concentration to what was, after all, arguably the game of their lifetimes.\n\nOne of the Lions' unsung heroes on this tour was the English scrum-half Dickie Jeeps from Northampton. There were no uncapped players on the 1950 tour to New Zealand and Australia. Jeeps had been a surprise choice when the tourists for South Africa were named, for he had never played international rugby. It was expected that he would be the third scrum-half behind Wales's Trevor Lloyd and the England team incumbent, Johnny Williams.\n\nBut Jeeps hit it off perfectly with Cliff Morgan from an early stage in the tour and the tough little Englishman was named as the Welshman's partner for all four Tests. He was a brave defender in the face of oncoming forwards, had a fast, accurate service and kicked well in defence. He would go on two more Lions tours and when he finished his career, back in South Africa in 1962, he would have 13 Lions Test caps to his name, a record that only Willie-John McBride has overtaken.\n\nThe 1955 tour engaged the wider sporting public's interest back home. Short agency reports had been the only source of first-hand Lions details on previous tours, though Dai Gent (off his own bat) had covered part of the 1950 visit to New Zealand as a freelancer. For the first time British newspapers sent their own correspondents to cover an entire tour, Vivian Jenkins of the Sunday Times and JBG 'Bryn' Thomas of the Cardiff Western Mail sending back evocative reports of the Lions' progress through South Africa.\n\nThe great media tradition of a large press corps following the tour was therefore instituting, although those few pathfinding journalists of the 1950s would be absolutely staggered by the size of the media party following the modern tours. Modern journalists would be similarly amazed to read in On Trek that Jenkins and Thomas, the two writers, clearly had an influential say in some aspects of Lions selections as the tour progressed, with the ear of manager Jack Siggins.\n\nThe 1955 Lions were the first required to sign a form of tour contract. Benefits covering injury were among the clauses favourable to the players though there was a restriction on writing books or giving press interviews until two years after the end of the tour. Despite that, Viv Jenkins and Bryn Thomas were fully embraced by the tour party, often travelling with the team on non-match days and becoming akin to father figures to many of the players.\n\nGerald Davies, a later Lions legend, remembered his imagination being captured by Jenkins's post-tour book, Lions Rampant. It was the first time a British journalist had distilled the excitement and events and the essential rhythm of a full-blown overseas tour into book form. It was instrumental, Davies said, in converting him to rugby. It was clearly a landmark tour, one that heralded the beginning of the modern Lions era.\n\nPHIL DAVIES (England)  \nToured: 1955\n\nThe Lions as an experience was second only to getting married to my wife, Nancy, and having our son, Simon, and our daughter, Judy. But it was still a hard situation for us both. Nancy and I were married in 1954 and lost our first child on the Thursday before the Calcutta Cup match in 1955, with the Lions team selection announced on the Monday.\n\nNancy insisted that I played (and we won), and then I went on tour for four months.\n\nMy headmaster at Christ's Hospital, where I was teaching, wrote that the Council of Almoners had approved my absence for four months and that the replacement costs (\u00a350) had been donated by one of the governors. So I was very grateful, but at the same time naively unaware of what was involved and what was to come. I knew little of South African rugby.\n\nMy salary was maintained by the school, the \u00a328 a month still came in. Nancy went back to work as a nurse, so we had no worries. Other teachers were only given unpaid leave. I took \u00a325 of my own money and we were allowed 7\/6d. (37.5p) a day to be able to return hospitality. This was impossible such was the generosity, so it came as pocket money (the same daily wage that I had earned in the RAF) \u2013 so, no hardship in those non-inflationary days. I saved and bought a camera for Kodak colour slides, which was the latest thing. My best investment was a \u00a33 nylon shirt, which I washed each night and sold the following year in Romania.\n\nWe had left practically unnoticed with two travelling journalists, Vivian Jenkins (a 1938 Lion) and JBG Thomas. The media pack gradually strengthened as we were surprisingly successful.\n\nERNIE MICHIE (Scotland)  \nToured: 1955\n\nThe decision was made to only take players under 30 and there were some very good players at that time who didn't qualify, like Jackie Kyle, Bleddyn Williams and Ken Jones. They were really top class players, so I suppose I was lucky to get on the tour in that sense. It was a complete surprise to me when I was selected. I didn't know a thing about it. I wasn't asked if I was available or anything like that \u2013 I don't know, I think I may have been a late selection.\n\nI was actually on a bus travelling down to London with the Aberdeen University rugby side for our Easter Tour to play four games in the capital. There was no Forth Road Bridge and no motorways in those days so it was a long, long trip. It must have taken 15 hours to get down.\n\nWe had stopped on the outskirts of London and I was half asleep at the back of the bus when one of the chaps, Dr Doug Robbie, came in and said: 'You're in the Lions side.' He had a newspaper and it said that I was in the squad. I didn't believe it. I thought it must have been a mistake and I think I went off to sleep again.\n\nCLIFF MORGAN (Wales)  \nToured: 1955\n\nI never really thought twice about accepting Jack Siggins' invitation to join the Lions tour of South Africa in 1955. It was an offer you couldn't refuse, a chance and a challenge to play the best rugby in your life. I felt that once I had been a Lion I would have done everything I could in the game. I looked at the company I would be keeping. The other nine Welshmen I knew well, of course, but the buzz I got was from the thought of playing with Jeff Butterfield in the centre and Tony O'Reilly on the wing.\n\nHUGH McLEOD (Scotland)  \nToured: 1955 & 1959\n\nBilly Williams told me that before the tour that the Welsh Rugby Union had a special dinner for the nine players they had going on the trip and after the dinner they all got an envelope with \u00a3100 in it. We got bugger all. They suggested you have \u00a340 in your pocket before you went away. Now, I got out the army five weeks before my time was up to go on the tour and I had nothing saved, so \u00a340 was a lot of money for my family to come up with.\n\nWe got blazers, towels and socks \u2013 but you had to have your own flannels, your own shoes, your own boots (although we got a free pair from a company called Elmer Cotton when we got down there), your own shirts, your own shorts and plenty more. All of that cost money \u2013 so even after you were selected you had plenty to think about before getting on the tour. When you were out there, you got \u00a33 10s a week and three badges.\n\nThe party gathers in front of their tour bus.\n\nDICKIE JEEPS (England)  \nToured: 1955, 1959 & 1962\n\nI was selected for the 1955 tour before being considered for England, so I was an uncapped tourist. I understand that Haydn Tanner, the great Welsh scrum-half, had recommended me to the Lions selectors in a railway carriage. Northampton had played Cardiff pre-Christmas and we had won, 22-9, against a wonderful side that included Cliff Morgan, Bleddyn Williams and Jack Matthews. And if I tell you that the ball went into touch just four times in that match it is no word of a lie. It was a brilliant game of rugby. I was lucky because I had a good game and Cliff was playing, so he saw me at first hand. I think Cliff got me on to the party because he liked my service \u2013 they said I could always make something out of bad ball. That was the reason I was asked to play in an invitation match with him in Cornwall a few weeks before the Lions tour. It got me on the ladder, and although I'd had trials for England, I didn't get in \u2013 but I got picked for the Lions instead. Brilliant!\n\nERNIE MICHIE\n\nWe flew out by one of these big Lockheed Constellation aeroplanes and we literally hopped all the way out. Our first stop was in Rome, then Cairo, and then Khartoum at two in the morning, and because these planes didn't have the air conditioning and so on that they have now, we were all very hot and bothered in the plane, so we were desperate to get off and get some fresh air. And we stepped out and it was like stepping into an oven. So we literally ran to the airport lounge where they had these big fans going and we stood under them to try and cool down. Then it was through Nairobi and I think we might have had a quick stop to refuel in Entebbe and onto Johannesburg.\n\nI was meeting a lot of these chaps for the first time, the likes of Cliff Morgan, who was a tremendous little personality. Because he was Welsh he loved to sing, so on the way out he taught us songs to sing to our hosts. So we practised and practised, and when we arrived we sang 'Sarie Marais', which was an Afrikaans song, to the welcoming party \u2013 which seemed to go down well.\n\nCLIFF MORGAN\n\nWe came to the decision that we were going to be a singing team. I was appointed choirmaster, with first call on the hotel piano, and every day for a week we practised, English, Scottish and Irish songs in English, Welsh songs in Welsh and, in a four-part harmony, 'Sarie Marais' in Afrikaans, which we thought would go down well with the people over there. We learned this parrot-fashion, and the words of the Welsh songs I wrote on a blackboard.\n\nIt paid off eventually because, although there are always some hurt feelings when players are competing for a place, we were an extremely happy side.\n\nComing down the steps of the plane, we were amazed at the crowds who had waited so long to greet us. I turned round and said, 'OK lads, look at the people.' So we all came to a stop and sang practically our full repertoire from 'Sospan Fach' to 'Sarie Marais', cheered on by the crowd. And that was the spirit of that trip, everybody together.\n\nLater that week the Rand Daily Mail carried a front page headline: 'This is the greatest team ever to visit South Africa'. And we hadn't even played a match!\n\nCLEM THOMAS (Wales)  \nToured: 1955\n\nThe South Africans were kindness personified to us... They were always in my view aware of the flaws in their politics with their appalling policy of apartheid. They wanted us to ignore the bad elements and love them for themselves, their country and their great hospitality... It was not surprising, therefore, that some rugby people were beguiled by it and became so ambivalent over their racial politics.\n\nIt was to have a profound effect on many of us and the first time that I really began to think about apartheid and worry about our role in it was when female members of the United Party organised themselves into an anti-apartheid organisation called the Black Sash Women, and picketed our hotel in Port Elizabeth. I also observed at the games how the black people were segregated behind the goal posts, and I saw how they were treated in so many other aspects of normal life.\n\nDOUGLAS BAKER (England)  \nToured: 1955\n\nRegarding political issues, the place was very strongly policed. Black people were very much subservient and in the background, and we were sheltered from the differences between blacks and whites.\n\nThe First Test team at Ellis Park.\n\nHUGH McLEOD\n\nWe had a good manager in Jack Siggins. He was a major in the army and he spoke about us being on parade. He wouldn't put up with any nonsense \u2013 we weren't even allowed to sunbathe because Jack didn't like you taking your shirt off.\n\nThe pitches were that hard out there that we were all getting grass wounds, and Jack Siggins would insist on putting this pink iodine disinfectant on the cuts. I'd never seen anything like it before, and I haven't seen anything like it since. He'd dab it on with cotton wool and you'd be about hitting the roof because it stung so much. It got to a point that the boys would rush out the showers and put their flannels on as quickly as they could so that he couldn't get at them \u2013 but he'd come in and demand to see our cuts.\n\nERNIE MICHIE\n\nWe had a fortnight before our first game, which was against Eastern Province \u2013 and we were beaten. We just didn't gel. I didn't play until the third game. I maybe shouldn't say it, but there seemed to be a little bias against the Scots. We didn't seem to get the benefit of the doubt that the English and Welsh got. But as far as I was concerned I was young and I was light for a second-row. Robin Thomson was the captain and Rhys Williams from Wales was about 16 stone, so they were paired up right away because of their weight, to counter the heavy South African pack.\n\nAction from the Western Province match at Newlands, Cape Town.\n\nPHIL DAVIES\n\nThe tour character was Tony O'Reilly, a 19-year-old with a very bright mind and tremendous speed and elusiveness on the wing, allied to an Irish sense of humour. Over the years he has so eloquently teased and properly caricatured my forthright approach and last-second off-loads in the centre, with accompanying public school\/BBC speech. But it was the wings that scored the tries, as they continued to do in New Zealand in 1959, so I've always felt that he could say what he liked.\n\nJeff Butterfield, my great centre partner for England and the Lions, a Loughborough PE teacher working at Worksop, the great Midland rival of Denstone (my old school), ran the training. This was a mixture of warm-up exercises for muscle groups and intense, stamina-testing repeated sprints. This I had been used to at Cambridge, where the Austrian coach, Franz Stampl, had introduced 'fartleks', or repeated sprints with jogs in between. The athletics scene at Cambridge included Chris Brasher (steeplechase gold medal) and Angus Scott (half mile), who were later Olympians with Roger Bannister. Although winning my event (440 yards) in the University sports selection procedure, I did not win a half Blue.\n\nDICKIE JEEPS\n\nTony O'Reilly was a great player \u2013 he was so young, but the quickest winger any of us had ever seen.\n\nDOUGLAS BAKER\n\nCliff Morgan was a wonderful character who skylarked a lot, and could play the piano perfectly by ear. He had never learned the piano, yet could just pick up a tune and play it. I remember we went to an ostrich farm and Cliff got on the back of one of them and rode it, then we went to a corn farm where he put a cob between his legs and stood behind the farmer. Tony O'Reilly was a young god, very handsome, and the girls swooned over him, so he enjoyed himself thoroughly.\n\nHUGH McLEOD\n\nWhen the boys went out on a Saturday, some of them would find a girl, and sometimes another one of the boys would whisk her away. Well, Trevor Lloyd, the Welsh scrum-half, objected to this \u2013 so he brought it up at a Sunday meeting and from then on we called that Lloyd's Law (a term still used decades later).\n\nCECIL PEDLOW (Ireland)  \nToured: 1955\n\nTony O'Reilly and I would be lent a car and we'd cruise around the best areas of Johannesburg on a Saturday night after a match. When we saw a lot of cars, we'd stop, knock on the door and ask if that was where the party was. If it wasn't a party then, it was once the people had seen Tony standing at the front door.\n\nCLIFF MORGAN\n\nAll the girls used to come up and say, 'Oh, I touched Tony O'Reilly!' because they adored him. Tom Reid used to joke and say, 'It's all immoral. It's like Our Lord, oh, I touched his feet!'\n\nCLEM THOMAS\n\nThe hospitality was overwhelming. One farmer, whose wife was the daughter of my tutor at St John's College, Cambridge, actually kept a leopard \u2013 which had been decimating his cattle \u2013 alive for a couple of weeks so that I could shoot it. Jack Siggins heard about it and decided to ban my involvement but the farmer shot it anyway and gave me the cured skin. It was not so politically incorrect in those days... On another occasion, a farmer came to our hotel in the centre of Johannesburg, and presented me with a lion cub. Siggins insisted on my donating it to a local zoo, which I did with some relief.\n\nDOUGLAS BAKER\n\nSocially it was magnificent, and we were feted wherever we went. We got on very well, there were no schisms between English, Welsh, Irish or Scots, and although it was three months long, it was a very happy tour. The Welsh contingent were really social, had good voices, and always organised the choirs. We visited Table Mountain, the vineyards, and the old Dutch settlement in the Cape.\n\nHUGH McLEOD\n\nPhil Davies only had one shirt with him. He washed it in the sink every night and hung it up in the room to dry. At the end of the tour we all chipped in and bought him a new one. Phil objected to having to wear an overcoat or a pullover at night, so the manager told him he could be exempt from that rule, but if he got a cold and couldn't play then he would be on the first plane home.\n\nThe South Africans used to ask us how we liked their country and Billy Williams would say: 'Bloody awful, I wish I was home for a fish supper in a paper poke.' He was that sick of eating steak and lamb and chicken. You'd be sitting having a meal and the waiter would come up and ask: 'Is everything alright, boss? Is everything good, master?' And Robin Roe, who was a church minister, objected to this. 'I'm not your master,' he'd say.\n\nBut Courtenay Meredith, the Welsh tight-head prop, quite liked being called boss and master, so they disagreed on this and I thought there was going to be fisticuffs. So there was friction there.\n\nI was very friendly with Dickie Jeeps. We trained together and we talked about rugby a lot, but Dickie was a fearless bugger when he got the worse with drink. We were at the dinner after the First Test in 1959, and were served oysters, and Dickie started throwing them about, and he hit the president at the top table with one. I thought there was going to be big trouble then. There was plenty of drinking and I was teetotal, but that didn't bother me. As a matter of fact, I quite enjoyed watching them play their drinking games.\n\nFelt boots were the fashion of the time, and I remember Angus Cameron threw one into the pool, and it happened to belong to Dickie. So he grabbed Angus and dragged him into the pool fully clothed. That served him right.\n\nTom Elliot was a hell of a man. I didn't go to bed early but I didn't last as long as Tom, who would find some locals to go drinking with until all hours. He'd come in at two or three in the morning and lift my whole bed up, so that I would come out like a bundle of tatties. I'd climb back into bed and go to sleep, and in the morning I'd be up, fresh and ready to go out, while Tom was still passed out. So I'd get my own back. I'd lift the bed up and bundle him out, and when I came back in for lunch he'd still be passed out on the floor. He'd never moved.\n\nWhenever you went out for a meal with the Welsh, you could tell when they'd had enough. You'd hear them jabbering a bit of Welsh and that meant they were ready to go home.\n\nBryn Meredith throws out a protective screen as Dickie Jeeps gets the ball from a lineout in the Third Test in Pretoria.\n\nDOUGLAS BAKER\n\nCliff Morgan's speed off the mark was electric, and he was often past his marker before they could move. He was an incredible dynamo, and had a very good rugby brain, linking well with his centres and putting them away. The only downside was that he wasn't a great tackler \u2013 it was not his fort\u00e9 \u2013 but his wing-forwards looked after him. For the South Africans it was Tom van Vollenhoven. He was not the biggest wing, but he ran very hard, and in the last Test he went through me to score when I thought I could put him into touch. Dickie Jeeps partnered Cliff in all the Tests, although he didn't have the flair of Johnny Williams, who was brilliant at times, but erratic. Jeeps would be the feeder, and absolutely reliable \u2013 he rarely made a break himself, but he fed Cliff very well, and that's why he outdid Johnny.\n\nCLEM THOMAS\n\nIt was a magnificent experience, I always saw it as the peak of my rugby career, even though because of appendicitis, I missed the first 10 games of the tour. South Africa could still be a rough place in those years, you still came across dirt roads quite near the middle of the big cities. But it was also fine and glamorous, and it felt like a crusade. Decades later, whenever I met fellow tourists, the stories would flow and the years would fall away.\n\nPHIL DAVIES\n\nI became very friendly with my final room-mate Jim Greenwood, then teaching at Glenalmond in the wilds of central Scotland. To train he would sprint alternate telegraph poles down the glen and back. We would talk about literature and music as well as the poetry book, Comic and Curious Verse, that kept me more or less sane. Once we watched opera in Afrikaans. He spoke English in a soft Scottish accent with fervour and enthusiasm, though on the pitch without his teeth he was incoherent. No mouth guards then.\n\nHe later, after teaching at Cheltenham and Tiffins, became Professor of English at Loughborough University, and, with John Robins, transformed attitudes to attacking rugby. He was also very instrumental in putting the women's game on the map. He would have enjoyed seeing how far it has come these days.\n\nDefence was not coached on the tour, and this was usual for the day. We did practise a few attacking moves \u2013 the wings and the fullback joining in as an extra man, scissors, and long lineout throws, but there was little co-ordination with the pack. Jim Greenwood, captain of Scotland, and a back-row forward, said, 'It was the only team I played for in which you broke going forward,' rather than covering to the far post. He later changed attitudes with his seminal coaching book, Total Rugby, which so influenced Clive Woodward.\n\nThe truly great player for the Lions was Cliff Morgan at fly-half. So quick off the mark and so elusive, leaving Basie van Wyk (his great rival and the South African flanker) for dead in the First Test. For South Africa, it was Karel (Tom) van Vollenhoven, a policeman and ruthless side-stepping wing or centre who went on to play for St. Helens in Rugby League with great success. I still carry a split-cheek scar from his elbow when we beat Northern Transvaal, with 14 men again, and value my picture of him sprawled on the ground as I went in under the posts. There is no love lost there.\n\nThe great social experience was the food \u2013 for breakfast, they would ask: 'One or two steaks, eh man?' Rationing had only just ended in the United Kingdom. We were generously entertained, often privately on farms where the hosts were delightful. More formal occasions were more stilted, and occasionally unpleasant as political issues emerged. This was hard dutiful work, and often dull. The visit to the Kruger Park and Victoria Falls were memorable scenic high points which much appealed to my biology background. Generally, I was, I suspect, rather aloof and withdrawn \u2013 hardly surprising as a newly-wed.\n\nPhil Davies leaves Tom van Vollenhoven in his wake as he sprints in to score.\n\nGARETH GRIFFITHS (Wales)  \nToured: 1955\n\nI wasn't in the original tour selection but, happily, they sent for me within about three weeks.\n\nIn many ways, the ball bounced at the right time then. They'd had a number of injuries and I seem to remember playing a lot of games on the trot, Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday. I played close to three games a week for four weeks.\n\nI was a sprinter so I could play wing, centre or full back because I could run and catch a ball, and I wasn't a bad kicker either. The rugby was great. I think it was the toughest rugby I'd ever played.\n\nA lot of those South Africans were farmers and were very tall and strong. Their forwards were better than our forwards, I think, because of their background. I think we had the better three-quarter line because we could all sprint a bit and we played fairly regularly.\n\nIt was 2-2 at the end \u2013 but it was like a dream in many ways.\n\nDOUGLAS BAKER\n\nI had great admiration for Cliff Morgan, my rival for the stand-off position, who was a great player, and a great person. He was mercurial, really quicksilver, and you could rarely get your hands on him, whereas I was cumbersome, a couple of stone heavier, and much more solid. So, I had no thought of usurping his position, and was delighted to play in two Tests. I had been selected for the Lions because I covered inside-centre, fly-half and fullback.\n\nI played in the Third and Fourth Tests, both times at fullback. I had played four games at fly-half for England in the 1955 (Five Nations) Championship, but I could never possibly outdo Cliff Morgan. So, I was lucky enough to play fullback, where I had played quite a lot for East Midlands and Middlesex \u2013 while poor old Angus Cameron (vice-captain and fullback), who was injured after the first two Tests, had a great tour in terms of enjoying it, and put on a bit of weight.\n\nGareth Griffiths is caught by Roy Dryburgh inches from the line early in the Third Test.\n\nERNIE MICHIE\n\nFor the First Test, all I did was play the bagpipes and lead the team onto the pitch. When I was sent all the details of the tour I asked if I could take my pipes with me, and they were quite happy with that. The only problem was that it was so dry and hot that it was difficult keeping them blowing properly. We had some good fun when we were letting our hair down, and I'd get the pipes out and the chaps would prance around and try to dance.\n\nHUGH McLEOD\n\nThe Welsh front-row (Courtenay Meredith, Bryn Meredith and Billy Williams) had been successful so I couldn't see myself getting in. They were good players and they were older than me \u2013 so I was happy playing in 13 of the 25 games \u2013 and I would have played in 14 but I got dysentery and couldn't play the last match, against East Africa in Nairobi.\n\nWe won the First Test, and we had the backs to win the series \u2013 Tony O'Reilly, Jeff Butterfield, Phil Davies, Cliff Morgan and Dickie Jeeps could have held their own in any company \u2013 but our forwards couldn't match the Springboks. They had bigger and better-equipped guys.\n\nThe Lions offer up a brick wall of defence during the Fourth Test.\n\nCLIFF MORGAN\n\nThe South African Rugby Union took us to see one of their own games and put us in seats on the touchline which were below ground level. We were looking up at the players, who all seemed 15 feet tall, and they frightened us to death. We looked at each other and, in comparison, we were all little fellows: how could we compete?\n\nYet on the field in the months to come, the Lions team proved that size and weight weren't all-important, particularly in winning a reasonable share of the ball against the odds.\n\nProbably the most glorious sight in rugby was to see O'Reilly in full flight. Like the rest of Tony's life, not one of his tries he scored was ordinary. Everything was slightly spectacular. He was only 19, but he had the wit and wisdom of someone 20 years older. He gave the tour a touch of class. It made you feel slightly inadequate that you weren't in the same mental bracket. He towered over you in every sense.\n\nTONY O'REILLY (Ireland)  \nToured: 1955 & 1959\n\nThe First Test in Johannesburg was the most striking Test of its time. It was the biggest attendance ever seen at a rugby match. South Africa led 11-3 and we lost our flanker Reg Higgins with a broken leg. There were no replacements, of course, so we had to play with 14 men, three scores down at 6,000ft up in front of more than 100,000 Afrikaners baying for our blood.\n\nThen Morgan scored one of the great tries of his life, Jeff Butterfield made a beautiful break and Cecil Pedlow shot away to score, and then I scored and we had got to 23-11 from 11-3 down. But suddenly we ran out of puff and they came back at us. And in the very last minute Chris Koch crashed over and they had a very easy kick to win.\n\nVIVIAN JENKINS  \n(Writing in the Sunday Times)\n\nJack van der Schyff to take the kick at goal. Van der Schyff, the automaton, the robot, the kicker fantastic, who earlier in the game had put over two penalty goals and two conversions from all angles like a mathematician going about his work with a set-square. Although the kick was out towards the touchline, it seemed inconceivable that he could fail. As he placed the ball and walked back for those few deliberate paces of his, the visiting heart stood still.\n\nTONY O'REILLY\n\nTom Reid, the big second-row from Limerick, said: 'Jesus, if he kicks this I'm turning Protestant.' So that was the magnitude of what he felt about the kick. There was audible silence, van der Schyff came up and just pushed it to the left of the post. It was amazing, but we had won.\n\nVIVIAN JENKINS\n\nThe gods were on the Lions' side and the ball hooked, by a surely trembling foot, went sailing far away to the left of the uprights and the spoils were ours. The groan rising from over 95,000 throats had to be heard to be believed.\n\nCLIFF MORGAN\n\nPlaying in the First Test would have been an extraordinary experience whatever had happened on the field. It drew the biggest crowd ever to watch a rugby international \u2013 officially 96,000. But thousands more got in without paying, since tickets were pushed back over fences to people waiting outside to re-use them. There was a grandstand on only one side of Ellis Park at that time, so the rest were crammed into standing areas. Their impact was almost overpowering as you came down the flight of steps on to the field.\n\nAnd another thing that staggered us was that, on the touchline 20 yards out from the front of the grandstand, the Springbok selectors sat in a row of chairs on their own. Everybody knew who they were, and so they were there to be booed, cheered, heckled or whatever took the fancy of the crowd.\n\nDOUGLAS BAKER\n\nI had a pair of plastic lenses which I bought in Germany playing against the British Army. An officer suggested I buy some \u2013 you bought them off the shelf in Hamburg. Contact lenses were not really known in the UK, but I couldn't read a blackboard at school in the back row, and it made all the difference when I played rugby being able to see the ball coming out of the scrum, or a high ball, a split-second earlier. Unfortunately, prior to the Third Test in Pretoria, a cleaner knocked them off my bedside table and trod on one, shattering it. Jack Siggins, our manager, got hold of the British High Commissioner and said, 'See what you can do for this man.' I was told that an optician in Johannesburg could make me a pair, so I went down to see him on three successive days \u2013 they fitted my eyes perfectly, and I wore them for the Third Test. They fitted under the eyelid with lubricant fluid, and were not especially comfortable, but they made a big difference. The South African Rugby Board very kindly paid for them.\n\nThe first time I used my instep to goal-kick was against Western Province in Cape Town, and it was a fairly new approach to kicking. It was a spur of the moment decision \u2013 I had an intuition that if I used my instep I could hook the conversion over, and it worked. However, I didn't use it for the penalty in Pretoria in the Third Test, which was a pressure kick about midway from the centre to the touchline, 30 yards out.\n\nPHIL DAVIES\n\nWe were to draw the series 2-2 with two good wins at high altitude. The First Test, dubbed 'the Greatest Test ever', played with the Lions reduced to 14 players, was on my 27th birthday. It was the tenth anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan. The lovely Welsh forwards and Cliff Morgan agreed, 'It was just as well we went to chapel last Sunday.'\n\nIn Durban and a wet Cape Town we seemed stolid. Hard grounds and grazed knees suited our running, which completely tore apart the all-conquering Orange Free State, something not before witnessed.\n\nGradually defences were tightened and studied. Defence analysis had begun \u2013 how unfair to use cine cameras! I injured an ankle and lost form just before the last Test, playing in a dismal game against Border. We did everything but score. What would have been a winning try in the last few minutes was knocked out of my hands over the line. 'The tackle of the tour' it was said. I was not amused, and very downcast. Correctly, I was not selected for the last Test. I would not have made a difference.\n\nDOUGLAS BAKER\n\nI don't think we should have won the series, and part of the problem with the Fourth Test was that we were due to fly out on the Sunday immediately after playing on the Saturday. We had to get packed up beforehand and were a bit brow-beaten, so we didn't have our minds focused on the game as much as we should. In terms of organisation, the Home Unions should have given us a bit of leeway, and time to relax after the final Test.\n\nCLIFF MORGAN\n\nThe Lions party had such a strong family spirit that the friendship within it survived even the strain of arguable team selections and inevitably unfair shares of the limelight.\n\nWhat you realise now is that bonds are created and people stick together when they haven't got too much to spend. In our case, the bond held too, as our reunions afterwards proved.\n\nI find it sad to contemplate a rugby world with no more Lions tours, and none of the opportunity they provide to play alongside former and future opponents, sharing their lives and their views on life.\n\nThat tour to South Africa did a great deal to teach me that you had to have confidence in your fellow man and faith that he wasn't going to let you down. Your life was enriched by a feeling that everybody wanted everybody else to do well, which is what made the whole experience for me. I hope that the Lions continue to tour for ever more.\n\nPHIL DAVIES\n\nThere are not too many of us left, and we have not had a reunion for some while. We last met in Ireland staying with Tony O'Reilly, watching his wife's racehorses and his pedigree herd of Belted Galloway, which, as we sipped wine on the terrace in the evening, slowly meandered across the lime tree avenue down to the Liffey river for a drink. As it got dark we withdrew to the two drawing rooms to admire the Picasso and the Monet of Rouen Cathedral. Wonderfully civilised.\n\nWe were a very civilised and friendly bunch of lads back in 1955, many abroad for the first time. We learned rapidly and became very good lifelong friends, sadly now very reduced in number.\n\nHUGH McLEOD\n\nIn 2007, Tony O'Reilly organised for a group of us to go to the World Cup Final in Paris, and we stayed in Le Bristol Hotel, which was about \u00a3600 a night. Because we were both by ourselves, I was put in a room with Courtenay Meredith and I wasn't that pleased about it.\n\nSo when I went in the room I said: 'Right, Courtenay, I'm going to tell you from the start, I've not shared a room with a man for fifty years.'\n\nAnd Courtenay said: 'Well, you're alright with me, Hugh, because I'm in the same boat.'\n\nAnd you know it was the funniest thing, you would have thought we had never been away. Straight away, it was like we were back on tour. We were in and out of the shower, and just got on with it \u2013 just like we would have back in 1955.\n\n## CHAPTER FOURTEEN\n\n# [KINGS OF RUGBY  \n1959](006.html#a3)\n\nAUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND & CANADA\n\nONE MAN dominated the press coverage of the 1959 Lions tour of Australia and New Zealand, another tour when the Lions played magnificent rugby that thrilled even home supporters, and another when, agonisingly, they fell short. His name was Don Clarke of New Zealand. The All Blacks' fullback was a hefty figure, and far from the fastest mover with the ball in hand. But he was a match-winner with the ability to land goals from anywhere in an opponent's half and, sometimes, even from inside his own. His feats in the Test series and the dominance of the penalty goal led to an outcry for a change in the laws. At the time, every penalty could give rise to a kick at goal, even those awarded for relatively piffling offences. Furthermore, the try in 1959 was still worth only three points.\n\nEventually, the International Rugby Board introduced the concept of the differential penalty, rugby's indirect free kick, into the game. They have never been famous for rapid decisions and the move came 18 years after the tour. Gradually, the value of the try was also increased \u2013 first, three points to four then upwards to five. Both moves can be traced, indirectly, to one day in Dunedin in 1959.\n\nClarke's kicking broke the tourists' hearts in the First Test. New Zealand's hero was the Lions' villain, landing a then world record six penalty goals. The Lions, living up to their tradition for running rugby, scored four tries. But with tries and penalty goals valued at three points each at the time, the All Blacks ran out 18-17 winners. As the Lions licked their wounds, the world's rugby columns were filled with calls for rule changes. The debate over what many felt was a travesty expanded to include questions as to the nature of rugby itself, and what kind of sport it was supposed to be. Terry McLean, the leading New Zealand rugby writer, called it 'a day of shame'.\n\nIf there was not enough controversy surrounding the day, the Lions were also privately incensed at the refereeing of the New Zealand official, Allan Fleury, refereeing not only in his home nation but in his home province. Fleury was never to take charge of an international match again and his performance gave fuel to a debate in the game as to whether neutral referees should be introduced. Eventually, they were \u2013 but not until the late 1970s.\n\nAt Athletic Park, Wellington, the tourists were 8-6 ahead with barely two minutes of the Second Test remaining. The All Blacks launched a last-minute attack, Clarke moved up to join the three-quarters to add an extra man and, sensing an overlap, cut in, surprised the defence and crossed near the posts. It was the first time a New Zealand fullback had scored a try in a Test and his conversion put the All Blacks 11-8 in front. Victory had been prised from the Lions' jaws.\n\nThe Lions could not quibble at Christchurch where they were crushed 22-8 in the Third Test. Clarke kicked four goals but the All Blacks scored four tries to one and the tourists were overwhelmed in both the forwards and backs.\n\nThe usual round of injuries and tiredness had taken its toll on the tourists so it was a wonderful surprise when the Lions finally played to their full potential at Eden Park in the final Test and secured a 9-6 win, with three tries to two Clarke penalties. There the running of Tony O'Reilly, the brilliant Irishman who had come sensationally to the fore in South Africa in 1955, Peter Jackson, the mesmeric England wing, and Bev Risman, later to enjoy a stellar career in rugby league, thrilled the huge crowd with their pace and power, and when the final whistle brought down the curtain on the tour the visitors were given a standing ovation.\n\nDon Clarke had missed a late penalty that would have equalised the score, but the relief among New Zealanders at that miss summed up the feelings about the series. Jack Griffiths, a noted All Black of the 1930s and later a respected NZRFU council member, spoke for many of his compatriots when he wrote two days later: 'It has amazed me to hear so many voice the opinion, genuinely, of how pleased they were that the last kick did not go over. I don't think we could have lived it down.' The Lions were left to reflect on what might have been had it not been for that man Clarke and his devastating accuracy with the boot.\n\nThe 1959 tourists were managed by former Scotland internationalist Alf 'The Manager' Wilson and captained by the young Irish hooker, Ronnie Dawson. They included the usual mix of youth and experience. Malcolm Thomas, who had been to Australia and New Zealand with the 1950 party, became the first Lion to make a return visit there since 'Boxer' Harding in 1908, and although England's Peter Robbins, an original choice, had to withdraw after breaking his leg against Newport on the Barbarians' traditional Easter tour of South Wales, every member of the original tour party was an established international.\n\nThe Scottish prop Hugh McLeod had been a dirt-tracker in South Africa in 1955, while Rhys Williams, Bryn Meredith, Tony O'Reilly, Jeff Butterfield (nearing the end of his career) and Dickie Jeeps (who had actually been dropped by England for the winter's Five Nations) survived from the Test side that had shared the spoils with the Springboks. O'Reilly, as in 1955, finished as top try-scorer with a remarkable 22 in 23 appearances and captured the imagination of the hosts with his strong running and searing pace. Indeed, it was always said of the future business tycoon that the best was seen of him in a Lions jersey: somehow he never quite matched his tour form wearing the green of Ireland.\n\nThat the Lions came anywhere near competing with the All Blacks in 1959, was arguably a miracle. So too was the fact that they played with such rare style. The Five Nations had been dominated by France who won the title outright for the first time. It's true that the laws of the game at the time were heavily stacked in favour of defensive tactics, but in the six games played among the Four Home Unions that year only 50 points, including just seven tries, were scored. Two of the matches yielded no tries and England had been try-less in five international matches dating back to March 1958.\n\nSo it was a pleasant surprise to see the Lions hit the ground running (literally) when they arrived in Australia for the opening leg of the tour. They won five of their six matches \u2013 losing 18-14 when playing with only 14 men for 77 minutes against New South Wales \u2013 but were convincing winners of the two Tests. O'Reilly scored a classic try in the Brisbane Test, leaving several defenders trailing in his wake as the Lions powered to a 17-6 win. A week later they won the Sydney Test 24-3, O'Reilly crossing again, and the party set off in high spirits for New Zealand.\n\nThe only setback up to this point was a serious injury sustained by Niall Brophy. The Irish wing had had the uncomfortable experience of having to take his accountancy examinations as soon as he stepped off the plane when the Lions arrived in Melbourne for the start of the tour. Then, in the third minute of the game against New South Wales, he turned on his heel gathering a loose ball, fell to the ground and took no further part in the tour. What at first was diagnosed as a badly twisted ankle showed up on X-ray to be a broken instep bone.\n\nLife on the field was much tougher in New Zealand, where the Lions were invariably held or bettered by the provincial packs. The 'long ruck' had become part and parcel of the New Zealand game by now but was a mystery to the Lions. Neither the ruck nor maul were then defined in the laws of the game and there was a tendency among European referees to blow up for a scrum almost immediately play broke down in the loose. Not so in New Zealand. Forwards arrived in force, often all eight together to pack in a scrum formation around the ball where they would heel it back on the floor (ruck) or wrest it free from a man holding it (maul).\n\nThe 1959 tour party.\n\nYet despite their forwards' unfamiliarity with this aspect of loose play, the Lions resolved to use such morsels of possession that came their way for attack. In O'Reilly and Jackson they had wings who were electric opportunists. Jackson in particular went down well with the locals for his mazy running. One commentator said that when play swept away from Jackson's wing he should be given a unicycle to amuse spectators. Crowds had come specifically to see him perform and expected to be continuously entertained by the Coventry man his teammates had nicknamed 'Nikolai'.\n\nBig Rhys Williams' lionhearted performances at lock, particularly in the Tests, won him immortality. He so impressed the All Blacks that they called him 'one of us' and New Zealand's rugby Wisden, its Rugby Almanack, named him one of the five outstanding players of the year. In fact four of the five so honoured were Lions, testament indeed to the impression they made. Williams' Llanelli and Wales team-mate Terry Davies, the Lions' fullback, Ken Scotland (also a fullback who appeared at centre, fly-half and scrum-half during the visit) and England's fly-half Bev Risman were the others recognised for the star quality they brought to the tourists' back-play. Davies and Scotland provided rare quality for the Lions, with Davies more of an old school fullback of substance, and Scotland a regal footballer.\n\nThe Lions were a lively and personable party off the field and made many friends in Australia and New Zealand where hospitality was once again unbelievable. Viv Jenkins, who made eight Lions visits as player or journalist, maintained that the class of '59 were the most gifted and talented \u2013 academically, socially and in business \u2013 that he toured with. The tour also gave Jenkins grist to his mill; he espoused the cause of the indirect penalty and neutral referees in columns in many publications until both measures were brought in.\n\nThere was a great camaraderie among the party. Ray Prosser, the famous Pontypool bulldozer driver and later coach and mentor of ferocious Pontypool club teams, and Alan 'Neddy' Ashcroft, were natural comedians. O'Reilly and Andy Mulligan, a scrum-half replacement, provided amusing Irish banter while Cambridge Blue-turned-City-gent, David Marques, was the friendly butt of some of the party's humour.\n\nMarques, the Harlequins and England second-row, stood 6ft 5in \u2013 the tallest man ever to have played international rugby up to then \u2013 and took everything in his stride with a whimsical sense of humour. He was such a gentleman that even when he was duffed up in the shocking roughhouse match against Auckland before the First Test he stood up, dusted himself down and simply smiled at his assailant. Asked by a puzzled team-mate why he hadn't retaliated, Marques is said to have replied: 'I wanted to make him feel a cad.'\n\nPeter Jackson scores the Lions' second try against Auckland at Eden Park.\n\nRough play was often an issue in New Zealand. Obstruction, late tackling, what would today be called lazy running and sheer brutality were rife. There was a vicious match in Auckland near the end of the tour against the Maori and Terry McLean of the New Zealand Herald pulled no punches in his post-tour summary: 'It is of the highest importance to the future of New Zealand rugby and its reputation in world affairs that there should be a disinterested and objective inquiry into the incidents of rough and obstructive play in matches of the Lions' tour.'\n\nOne internal issue caused the tourists angst. Manager Wilson had to enforce the strict ruling that injured players be sent home. Brophy and the Irish fly-half Mick English were early casualties and though invited to stay for part of the tour as guests of the NZRFU, both were eventually requested to depart for home. The team felt aggrieved at this and there was even talk of a mutiny. At length the issue was resolved, the two Irishmen departed but still managed to get the last laugh. English, a great wit and engaging story-teller to his dying day, used to tell with relish how he and Brophy left mid-tour, travelled halfway around the world on the Four Home Unions' expenses and contrived to get home after the main Lions tour party had returned.\n\nAll three of the Lions tour parties which toured in the 1950s were referred to by the great Clem Thomas as 'Buccaneers'. There was something thrilling and fine about all three teams. However, yet again, and after months of entertainment provided to the New Zealand public, they had come up short, feeling the rough edges \u2013 or more precisely, the toe \u2013 of Don Clarke's boot. Pausing to play two games in Canada, the Lions nursed their memories and their regrets on their way home.\n\nOne of the younger tourists was with the Lions for the first time. He propped in the Second Test against New Zealand, missed the other three but played in both the Tests in Australia. He was from Ballymena, in Northern Ireland. His name was Syd Millar, and the name would resonate in Lions stories of the future.\n\nAndrew Mulligan spins the ball away from the scrum to launch an attack against Auckland.\n\nSYD MILLAR (Ireland)  \nToured: 1959, 1962 & 1968. Coach: 1974. Manager: 1980\n\nI played for Ballymena for a year and then I went to sea. I was a cadet and in 1955 I was in the Indian Ocean in a tanker delivering fuel in Beira, in what was then Portuguese East Africa. The only entertainment we had on board was the radio and when we went off the coast of Africa there'd be commentaries of the 1955 Lions and that was really the first interest I ever had in Lions rugby.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON (Ireland)  \nToured: 1959. Assistant Manager\/Coach: 1968\n\nI got a letter from Mr Bradforth, honorary secretary of the Home Unions Tour Committee and it was just a brief letter. It started with your surname. 'Dear Dawson...' It went on to say, 'You are invited to join the tour... blah, blah, blah... of Australia, New Zealand and Canada,' and when I got it I was absolutely delighted and didn't really finish the letter, I just put it down with a big 'Yippee!' The last few words when I went back to look at it again said '...and to be its captain.'\n\nThe players inspect the pitch before the First Test in Dunedin.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND (Scotland)  \nToured: 1959\n\nIt was very much a player-driven tour. There was a manager, a secretary and a guy looking after the bags \u2013 but on the field it was Ronnie Dawson and the senior players who decided our tactics. The management had a say in selection, but they never appeared on the practice ground or anything like that.\n\nDICKIE JEEPS\n\nI've never written a book about it, but, if I did, I'd tell you about the bad management on Lions tours. We didn't have a coach, we largely trained ourselves \u2013 Jeff Butterfield being a good fitness 'coach', he worked on us in that department and got us fit. We had to work everything out for ourselves, because the management wasn't capable of working it out.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nRonnie was captain and had to play, coach, make speeches, be the bag manager, the lot. He was very focused. A clear thinker. He was a very good captain and deserved better. He was a very good analyst of the game. He had the respect of the boys.\n\nBILLY MULCAHY (Ireland)  \nToured: 1959 & 1962\n\nHe was ahead of his time in that he'd done a lot of research on the opposition.\n\nThe 1959 All Blacks squad.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nWe had three particularly experienced players with us. Bryn Meredith had been the hooker in South Africa in 1955, Jeff Butterfield had been one of the stars in 1955, and Malcolm Thomas had been in New Zealand in 1950, so he was able to tell us a little bit about what to expect. Sadly, neither Bryn nor Jeff had any luck with injuries or selection.\n\nBryn Meredith must have known when he went that he was going to struggle to get games given that his rival hooker, Ronnie Dawson, was the captain, but he couldn't have been more supportive. Jeff Butterfield had a lot of niggly injuries and he had also started to lose his pace. So, although he was still a lovely rugby player, he had virtually no impact on the field. Where he was of great value to the tour, however, was in taking the training sessions. He was fantastic socially, was the life and soul of the party in a sensible way, and never complained about his rotten luck.\n\nMALCOLM THOMAS (Wales)  \nToured: 1950 & 1959\n\nEach team member had his part to play in the way of personality, character and ability, in making the party vitally alive. It has always been very difficult for me to imagine a bad rugby tour, such has been my good fortune in my playing career.\n\nALAN ASHCROFT (England)  \nToured: 1959\n\nI was made up about being selected for the tour, but there was a lot of competition. It was a hell of an experience touring Australia and New Zealand, and people there were very welcoming. It's bound to be one of your most cherished memories because you cannot have a better one in rugby \u2013 you met so many good people, no baddies. It was great.\n\nI was a teacher on unpaid leave, and the tour allowance didn't cover you. It was about 50p a day, enough for an odd beer, but fortunately my wife worked, and we lived in the flat that came with my job.\n\nRonnie Dawson and Wilson Whineray lead out their teams before the First Test.\n\nSTAN COUGHTRIE (Scotland)  \nToured: 1959\n\nIt was a great cross section of people, from David Marques, who came off the plane in the full attire of a city gent \u2013 white shirt and military tie, dark suit, bowler hat and rolled umbrella \u2013 and his great pal Ray Prosser, this gnarled Welsh prop, who Rhys Williams said had to be coaxed out of Pontypool to go on the tour because every time he crossed the bridge to leave town he felt he couldn't cope.\n\nHaydn Morgan was a mechanic, and Tony O'Reilly swore that when they were sharing a room he woke up one night to find Haydn under his bed fiddling with the springs \u2013 dreaming that he was back in the garage fixing cars.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nIt took us three days to get there. We went from London-Zurich, Zurich-Beirut, Beirut-Bombay, Bombay-Calcutta, Calcutta-Singapore, Singapore-Darwin, Darwin-Sydney and Sydney-Melbourne. Ray Prosser didn't like one bit of it. He hated flying. When people went walking around the plane he used to get nervous.\n\nSTAN COUGHTRIE\n\nOur first game (in Australia) was in Melbourne and they still had the six o'clock swill there in those days. If you went into a bar just before 5 p.m. they would have these little glasses, they called them ponies, lined up along the bar, and a guy with a hose would go from one end to the other filling them up with beer. Then all of a sudden the locals would appear and go: wallop, wallop, wallop, wallop; because they only had an hour to drink before the bars closed at 6 p.m.\n\nWhen we stayed in Melbourne, which was serious Australian Rules territory, it was like we were on a missionary quest to spread the rugby union gospel. And I remember we had this meeting in the hotel to discuss all these important issues crucial to the tour, and at one point Alf Wilson, the manager, asked if anyone else had any serious points to raise, expecting important issues like tour discipline and team selection to be on the agenda.\n\nThere was silence, then Noel Murphy, who had this wonderful Cork accent, piped up, 'Alf,' he said. 'In the morning, can we have a pot of tea and not a cup of tea?'\n\nIt was hilarious. The rest of the squad fell about laughing \u2013 but I'm not sure Noel could quite understand what was so funny.\n\nTERRY DAVIES (Wales)  \nToured: 1959\n\nThat 1959 tour was huge for me. I got injured early on and then had to climb back into the team again. It was magnificent playing for the Lions. It meant you'd reached the top of the ladder. It was a very long tour, six months practically. I had to give up my business to go on the tour and very few people had any wages out of it. We lived on 10 shillings a day, which is 50p in modern money, but we managed and we had an absolutely magnificent tour.\n\nThe welcome that we had when we arrived in Auckland is the abiding moment that I feel when I look back at the tour. There must have been 40,000 people in the airport waiting for us \u2013 we were the second Lions party to fly. We were then transported by these antique, open-top cars to our hotel and we passed through streets laden with people. It seemed that the whole of New Zealand had come out to meet us. New Zealand was definitely one of the places I would have emigrated to if I was that way inclined.\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nI had to put off my final medical examinations to go on the tour much to the distress of my mother, who was widowed. She wanted me to get my exams and get the hell out. I had an elderly uncle who was a parish priest in Kilmallock, County Limerick, and he was a sort of father figure because my old man had passed on and he said I should go, so she pulled back her objections and I travelled. He was 89 at the time and wrote her a nice letter. The finals were put off but I had a big medical book with me on the tour.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nI think everything about New Zealand was about a decade behind what we had to come to know. The housing was all single-storey buildings with corrugated iron roofs. Very pleasant, though. The geography was the thing that interested me most. The Bay of Islands up in the north and the volcanic agricultural lands and then the southern Alps and the Canterbury plain \u2013 and in the southern Alps you had Queenstown, a beautiful part of the world \u2013 and then down to Invercargill, next stop the South Pole. I learned a lot about Maori culture and their people and their meeting houses and their wonderful wood carvings and schoolgirl choirs and of course the Haka. The big thing was the 12,000 mile difference. You had to book a telephone call about a week ahead or otherwise we sent postcards \u2013 and we arrived home before they did.\n\nRoddy Evans takes a lineout against Waikato.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nWe had a week in Eastbourne before we went, where we looked at an overall strategic plan, based on the fact that we knew we had a very quick set of backs. Dave Hewitt was only 19 years old and was the quickest thing on two legs I'd seen, John Young was a sprinter, Niall Brophy sadly didn't play very much because of injury but he was another really quick player.\n\nSo with these guys we wanted to move the ball as much as we could. Of course, you are always limited by how much possession you get and the weather conditions that you play in, and we were lucky on both those counts in 1959.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nTony O'Reilly had looks, intelligence, was very articulate, could play rugby, could sing, could play the piano, and was a good cricketer. We were at a reception and the prime minister of New Zealand was there and they'd just announced the budget, so O'Reilly had him in the corner and after a while we saw the PM nodding. O'Reilly was telling him where he'd gone wrong in the budget. The ladies loved him. He'd turn up in his short shorts. He and Mulligan were a pair.\n\nALAN ASHCROFT\n\nOur outstanding players were Tony O'Reilly and Peter Jackson who could score tries and create total havoc among the opposition. I had to do all the tackling, covering behind them in defence, but that was no problem. The New Zealanders were all good basic players, and their fullback Don Clarke kicked the goals, although a few of the penalties in the Tests were a bit dubious.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nApart from that week in Eastbourne, we did very little serious training while we were away. We played virtually every Wednesday and Saturday, and travelled Thursday and Sunday, so you had a run-out the day before a game and that was about it. I kicked a ball about a lot with Terry Davies.\n\nThe New Zealanders were, as always, extremely focused and really hard to beat, but they played to a pretty limited game-plan. It was nine and ten man rugby. But, although they didn't do very much, what they did, they did with conviction and pace \u2013 so even if you knew what was coming, it was very hard to cope with. Apart from the performance of their pack during the Third Test, I wouldn't say that they were anywhere near the best side I played against \u2013 they had some good players but their tactics were limited.\n\nALAN ASHCROFT\n\nBasically, we tried to play open rugby, which was stupid, really, against the All Blacks. They just knocked down our backs and then played it through the pack, and went for a kicking game. We were told to play 'open attacking rugby' by Alf 'The Manager'. He didn't know much about rugby... and one of the problems was that he wouldn't let us get stuck in up front. Open rugby is all right, but if you're getting knocked down in the backs, you need to find other ways of going about it.\n\nNOEL MURPHY (Ireland)\n\nToured: 1959 & 1966\n\nIt was tough, hard and brutal rugby.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nVery, very tough. No quarter asked or given. It was quite strange, one of the basic skills we learned was getting off the ball fast because if you stayed on it your back was in tatters. It was just the hard way the New Zealand forwards won possession from the ruck. It was most impressive. There were a few nasty incidents. We had a ferocious match with King Country. That was a tough one. I remember somebody dragged O'Reilly about a metre by his hair, which wasn't accepted. There were some punch-ups, but they were inevitable.\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nSome matches were very tough and of their time. I think it was my first game back after a long period out injured. Wanganui \u2013 a game we were expected to waltz through. We won 9-6 and I scored a try. I remember being the recipient of a lot of hospitality on the ground in that match. We had a situation where they awarded us a penalty and Bev Risman was lining it up when a policeman, who was walking up and down, tapped the ref on the shoulder to point out to him that the touch judge on the far side had his flag up. The ref told Risman to go ahead. He kicked the goal, then the ref went over and discussed it with the touch judge and they gave New Zealand a lineout instead.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nWe played Hawke's Bay and they kicked off with us in the normal formation to take the kick. The three of us in the front-row turned round as the ball flew over our heads to go and get in the ensuing maul and as we did I remember being hit flat on my face by the following-up New Zealand forwards. I looked round and there was Hughie McLeod flat on his face as well. Neither of us were anywhere near the ball but that didn't matter. They just stormed through, took the ball and within a relatively quick succession of maul and ruck they scored a try within the first two minutes. I remember thinking, 'Bloody hell, what's this about?' We went on and won the match well, 52-12, but clearly we had a lot of work to do.\n\nCaulton scores in the Second Test.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nSome of the matches could be hard. Most were okay. We had not a very good game with the Maoris. A bit nasty. We were a bit naive in many ways. They had their coaches, we didn't. Ronnie did a superb job but you can't expect one man to be captain, coach, after-dinner speaker, man-manager, press officer. We weren't allowed to talk to the press, you know.\n\nHUGH McLEOD\n\nWe used to train at the universities, and Dickie Jeeps and myself were desperate to do our own thing \u2013 we didn't have time for the students who came out and wanted to run around with us. I was young and it was all about rugby for me. But Peter Jackson had time for everybody. You'd see 20 students around him, or running up and down with him passing the ball.\n\nLooking back, that is what I really admired about the great Peter Jackson: he had time for everybody.\n\nYears later, when Colin Deans was going on tour in 1983, I went up and saw him before he left. I said: 'I'm not going to tell you how to play rugby, but take this advice: have a bit of time for the boys that come out and all they want to do is run with a Lion.' My one regret was that I grudged them that.\n\nDon Clarke dives over to score in the Second Test.\n\nMALCOLM THOMAS\n\nThere was one aspect of the tour, which was given little publicity but which was of immense value. The management insisting at the outset that as many schools as possible should be visited in all the countries that we played. In all, over 1,000 schools or institutions were visited by members of the team.\n\nSTAN COUGHTRIE\n\nPeter Jackson was amazing. I remember him receiving the ball on the left wing in the first game in New Zealand against Hawke's Bay and coming inside with a sidestep, and he then sidestepped past six or seven more players before scoring in the opposite corner of the pitch. It was absolutely magical.\n\nHUGH McLEOD\n\nWhat a player Peter Jackson was. He'd get the ball on the touchline and take off with it, and everyone would be having heart attacks but he'd keep going and keep going. He could beat a man on a sixpence. He was big and elusive and had good players inside him.\n\nAfter the first game of the tour, I came off exhausted. And I said to Peter, 'The hardest job I had today was keeping out your road.' He'd be going back and forward, beating a man and beating him again. His only weakness was his kicking, but when you can run like that then what do you need to kick for?\n\nThe boys used to say he slept with one eye open in case he missed something, so they christened him 'Nikolai the Russian Spy'.\n\nAn aerial view of the Third Test at Lancaster Park, Christchurch.\n\nTERRY DAVIES\n\nI recall one game when we came on the field first and received a good cheer. The home team came on and they had an even bigger cheer. But then the referee ran on and got the biggest cheer of the lot. We scored a couple of tries and were refused two more. Then there was a long drop-out and it went to Tony O'Reilly. He'd been practising his sidestep all tour so, with 50 yards to go, off he went. He sidestepped all the way across the field until he reached the other touch line, beating about four men. Then he found he was boxed in and so he started coming back again. He reached the other side and then had to change tack.\n\nHe shot up the edge of the field, handed-off a few players, and then went in between the posts and put the ball down. The poor referee who had chased him all over the place arrived and Tony turned to him and said: 'Jesus ref, I nearly scored that time.'\n\nAfter the game Ray Prosser said to me: 'Ter, did you see that O'Reilly? He passed me twice. He sidestepped me once, and then he gave me a dummy.' They were two great characters and players.\n\nNOEL MURPHY\n\nRay Prosser was one of the great characters of all, some of his sayings were wonderful and he'd slag anybody. He was great. Tony O'Reilly and Andy Mulligan as well. Andy had a guitar and he'd entertain us on trains, planes and on the bus. They were a double act. If they went into the opera house in Auckland they'd have filled the place.\n\nKen Scotland.\n\nPeter Jackson.\n\nALAN ASHCROFT\n\nOff the field Ray Prosser and I would do a double act, taking the mick out of each other. He was my closest mate, and we were known as 'Ned and Ray \u2013 The Immortals'. Ray was a bulldozer driver by profession, Welsh as you like, and very basic, but when spirits were low we would make the boys laugh. One of the social highlights was when I trained the lads to do a Maori dance and sing one of their songs, 'Epo-e-tai-tai-e', in Maori \u2013 and because we had taken the trouble to learn the song it went down a storm. We were very popular, and would sing it on request.\n\nHUGH McLEOD\n\nI roomed with big Roddy Evans from Wales. I had him for about 18 rooms. He was allowed a phone call every week because he'd just got married before he came away and he was hellish homesick. I think he was going to bail out if he didn't get his call.\n\nOne night at dinner the receptionist came and said he had this phone call, so off he went. And when I got back to my room he was writing her a letter. So I dragged him out to the pictures \u2013 because he would just have sat there feeling sorry for himself.\n\nThe Junior All Blacks and the Lions march out before their match at Athletic Park.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nWe were playing a Wednesday match and I left my overcoat in the hotel room, a new overcoat that my mother insisted I buy before I went and I left what few quid I had and I came back and it was gone. Burgled. This was headlines in the paper. A few days later our manager, Alf Wilson, called me down and there was a pile of letters. He said, 'Those are for you and I've opened them.' I said, 'What do you mean you've opened my letters?' He said, 'They're all addressed from New Zealand and they're all full of cheques and money for you. You'll write a letter to every one of them and send the money back.' I said, 'Oh, all right Alf.'\n\nWe called Alf 'Magoo' after the little cartoon character. He was hard but fair and he was obsessed about things like that. I had to write the letters and send the money back. One of the guys who had sent me a cheque came to the hotel and brought me a transistor radio which was very, very expensive at that time. So I did rather better out of it. There was also a case of whisky stolen. Alf had whisky sent at regular intervals from Scotland. As the boys said, there was a bigger investigation into who stole the whisky than there was into why we lost the series.\n\nNOEL MURPHY\n\nI remember the First Test and the man I was marking was a fisherman who came in from the sea, tied up his boat on the Thursday, played his rugby on the Saturday and went back out to sea. A fella called Peter Jones. He was 17st 2lbs and about 6ft 3in or 6ft 4in. I remember being at a lineout and I couldn't see the scrum-half. He was huge and an incredible All Black. They had a great pack.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nThey had a wonderful back-row; 'Bunny' Tremain was terrific but there was a smaller guy and an immense player called Red Conway, who had an absolutely extraordinary game that day.\n\nKen Scotland crosses the line against the Maoris, but his try is disallowed.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nThe First Test was the one that got away. We lost it 18-17, scored four tries and had a fifth disallowed. Don Clarke kicked six penalties. In the last quarter of the game, the crowd usually shouts, 'Black, Black, Black!', but they were actually shouting, 'Red, Red, Red!' There were headlines about the unfairness of it.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nIn those times the refs were always from the country you were in and we had a few problems, but the most painful of all was in the First Test. You could say, 'We wuz robbed'; 18-17. I feel it badly. We should have drawn that series instead of losing it 3-1.\n\nNOEL MURPHY\n\nYou never talked about a referee as a player, but the New Zealand public and the press talked about it. We were looking like we were going to win the First Test and it was taken away from us and whether the penalties were right or wrong, we still were beaten by six penalty goals.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nI have never forgotten his name!\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nFleury from Otago. Lovely man, God bless him.\n\nBev Risman breaks down the left wing on his way to the line in the Fourth Test at Eden Park.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nI was chairman of the Northern Ireland sports council and I was in New Zealand for the Commonwealth Games in 1990; I was walking down the street in Auckland and there was a big crowd outside a bookshop. There was a man with a microphone and he was asking sports questions.\n\nHe said, 'The 1959 Lions versus New Zealand, score 18-17, who was the referee?'\n\nAnd I piped up: 'Fleury.'\n\nHe said, 'By the name of God, how did you know that?'\n\nI didn't tell him. I just said, 'I'll remember that name until the day I die.'\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nIn that First Test every time they got in our half it seemed like a penalty would result. Even when we went 18-17 behind we scored another try and he found reason to disallow it, whereupon Roddy Evans threw the ball at him with a few expletives.\n\nBev Risman dives over the line to score the decisive try in the Fourth Test.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nEvery referee we had out there was a New Zealander and they were all okay. I didn't think any of them were biased, particularly. But these little niggly things were frustrating. I don't think Fleury refereed again on the tour, which was a bit unfortunate because I'm not sure that any of us, at the end of the day, blamed the referee totally. We only converted one of the four tries we scored, and we had been sufficiently on top to win the game \u2013 even with these marginal calls going against us.\n\nHUGH McLEOD\n\nThe referee was bent. Colin Meads once said that 'referees decide who is going to win a match' and he was right. That day proved it. We should definitely have won that game. It was robbery. During the game I knew he had it in for us. Any chance he got he gave them a penalty, and Don Clarke just booted them over. It was hard to take \u2013 but there was nothing we could do.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nWe were hugely disappointed, and there were tears shed in the dressing room, which was very rare, and we weren't terribly well behaved at the dinner afterwards. That was the only bad publicity we got on the whole tour. We had one notorious roll thrower amongst us, who will remain nameless, but in Dunedin we were fed oysters and oyster throwing is a bit more dangerous than roll throwing \u2013 so the New Zealand hierarchy weren't too chuffed about that.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nWe should have won the First Test and we threw away the Second by our own stupidity. There was a touch kick missed and we were leading 8-3.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nI was standing beside Dawson when he said to Terry Davies, 'Terry, put it in touch,' and we would have stayed up in their corner and that would have been it. Terry said, 'No, I want to kick at goal.' And Ronnie said, 'Put it in touch,' and Ronnie was absolutely right. Maybe he wasn't concentrating as well as he might, but Terry missed touch, the ball came upfield, Clarke came on the blindside, scored the try, kicked the goal and New Zealand won.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nI think Don Clarke was underrated as a fullback. He had a reputation as a kicker, and as a lumbering player \u2013 but he tackled well, his positioning was excellent, and had much more all-round ability than he was given credit for.\n\nDickie Jeeps clears the ball against Waikato.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nWe were hammered in the Third Test. Absolutely hammered. That was when we really, really felt the power and the excellence of the New Zealand forward play. We were leading and we had a brilliant piece of back play on a lovely hard ground in Christchurch, David Hewitt made a marvellous break. He was a marvellous player on that tour, so fast \u2013 the fastest we had over the first 20 yards. He made a break and only had Clarke to beat with O'Reilly outside him on the left wing, and David was sort of caught by the collar when passing the ball and it went forward. That was going to be a try and we'd have been further ahead. You could feel the pin going into the balloon. New Zealand went on and hammered us. It was the worst forward beating I ever experienced.\n\nPETER JACKSON (England)  \nToured: 1959\n\nBy the time the final Test had come along Gordon Waddell had gone home for a knee operation and Roddy Evans had gone home injured as well. In terms of team spirit and commitment, winning the Fourth Test was by far and away the most uplifting experience I ever had in rugby. It would have been so easy to be down \u2013 it was game 31 on tour and we had already lost the series \u2013 but there was this collective will to win.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nThe week before we had played Auckland, and they had a huge side who were pretty physical, nasty and cheap \u2013 but we beat them quite comfortably. So we were in reasonably good shape, but psychologically we had been through the wringer. The weather couldn't have been worse, there had been thunderstorms and rain all night, and they had played a couple of warm-up games on the pitch so it was a bit of a quagmire. Despite this, we played really well and scored three very good tries, to their two penalties, so for everyone playing and in the stand as well, we took a lot out of that. It was the first time we had won a Test in New Zealand since 1930.\n\nAnd with that, Hugh McLeod and I became the first Scots ever to win a Test match against the All Blacks. Not many Scots have added to that number since: Ian McLauchlan, Gordon Brown, Andy Irvine, Ian McGeechan and Gavin Hastings.\n\nTERRY DAVIES\n\nWe scored three tries in the final Test and they didn't score any; it was a great way for us to finish and we felt we deserved something out of the series.\n\nMALCOLM THOMAS\n\nThe rugby loving public of the three countries visited will, for many years, have remembered brilliant variations of three-quarter play, intelligent combination in the half-back play, the driving enthusiasm mixed with individual brilliance of the forwards, and not least of all the portrayal of the art of full-back play, as demonstrated by Terry Davis and Ken Scotland, each in his own particular way.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nI went as number two fullback and five months later I came back still as number two fullback \u2013 but I'd had the most fantastic time in between. Everything went right for me. Terry Davies started off with an injury and that allowed me to stake a claim, and we were playing on hard grounds with a lot of quick three-quarters moving the ball around all the time, and that was my game, not Terry's.\n\nHe was a traditional fullback. Very good under the high ball, kicked well, tackled well, was brave with the ball on the ground \u2013 and that was really what the fullback should be doing. I learned a lot from watching him play, and we had a reunion after nearly 50 years and he was kind enough to say that he learned some things from watching me play as well, which I took as a great compliment.\n\nBy the time we got to the end of the tour we were playing on heavier grounds and I had been playing in different positions \u2013 and I'm sure he was selected for that final Test on merit, and I'm quite happy with that.\n\nMALCOLM THOMAS\n\nIt said much for the team spirit that after a severe hammering in the Third Test, the team could summon a series of such great displays. It must also be remembered that the team was beset by a crop of injuries which severely upset planning in the crucial stages of the tour.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nHugh McLeod was a fantastic tourist. He had been to South Africa in 1955 and hadn't made the Test team, but in 1959 he was one of our anchor men. He didn't drink, he was first up for breakfast, he was first on the bus, he was first to every scrum and every lineout, and did everything he was ever asked to do. He was just a perfect guy to have on tour \u2013 I have always had a huge regard for him. He was an incredibly strong and clever rugby player.\n\nHe was pretty popular in a dour sort of way. He was called 'the Abbot', of course, referring to his monastic lifestyle. But he was by no means unique as a teetotaller \u2013 I would think six or seven of the guys in the squad were non-drinkers. It wasn't a hugely boozy tour at all.\n\nTONY O'REILLY\n\nIt was a very exciting experience trying to beat Ken Jones's try-scoring record; I equalled him four matches from the end and then had to try to find a way to beat his record. I finally got the try to do it in about the last minute of the final Test, which was the great game of the tour for me. First of all we beat them fair and square and we beat them in Auckland, which was really their home ground, and I got that vital 18th try that I had been trying to get for the previous four matches. I can still feel the heavy ball and the mud on my face as I went through the last tackle of Don Clarke.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nI would like to think that there were a lot of stars in that side but because of his record Tony shone brighter than the rest.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nAlthough we were known for our attractive back play, the forwards deserve a huge amount of credit. Hughie McLeod was a tower of strength, Rhys Williams in the second-row was rock solid, and Ronnie Dawson at hooker was a great captain who led by example.\n\nThese guys were being tested time after time, with no breaks to recover and regroup \u2013 it was constant punishment.\n\nTERRY DAVIES\n\nI'm still a big fan of the Lions. I think there should always be a British & Irish Lions team. The tradition has to go on because it brings together all the countries. That's what the spirit of rugby is about.\n\nKEN SCOTLAND\n\nPrincipally, it was the fun we had and the friends that we made for the rest of our lives. That was the big thing about touring, everybody became a personal friend. To meet some of those guys almost 50 years later might seem strange to outsiders but for us it is like we have never been away.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nSomething the New Zealanders told us at the end of the tour. They said, 'If you guys were organised we would never have got near you.' They were right. We were the better team in three of the four Tests, but they were more worldly-wise and had Don Clarke as a kicker. That was the difference. That was the best rugby-playing side I ever played on. Ken Scotland was the first attacking fullback; Jackson and O'Reilly on the wings; Hewitt and Malcolm Price in the centre. You had Jeff Butterfield. A very attacking side. A bit naive at times, but I think that side had the capacity to beat any Lions side if they were as organised as the great Lions sides we saw years later. Terry McLean called us the Kings of Rugby.\n\n## CHAPTER FIFTEEN\n\n# [DECLINING FORTUNES  \n1962](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nTHE MIX of six Scots, seven Irishmen, eight Englishmen and nine Welshmen originally selected to visit South Africa in 1962 \u2013 all of them international players \u2013 stands to this day as the most uniform Home Unions distribution for any Lions tour. The balance was fine on paper, but no Test wins resulted, and the optimism generated by the heady tours of the 1950s evaporated. In no sense did the 1962 tour live up to the sensational 1955 trip in either glamour or results. The players seemed to enjoy the tour, but as a rugby exercise, it was a disappointment.\n\nThey were always likely to be up against it. In the previous year, a South African team led by Avril Malan had cut a swathe through British and Irish rugby, losing only to the Barbarians in Cardiff in their last game.\n\nFor the first time the Lions management was entrusted to a pair of well-known and highly respected former international players. The side was managed by Brian Vaughan \u2013 Commander DB Vaughan R.N. to give him his full title \u2013 a former England forward who had been a Lions contender in 1950. Harry McKibbin, a popular Irish rugby administrator who had played centre for his country between the wars and toured South Africa with the 1938 Lions, was his assistant manager.\n\nIn his professional life Vaughan was involved with the commissioning of the early nuclear submarines. On tour he led from the front. Jeff Butterfield had been responsible for team preparation and fitness on the two previous Lions tours. This time it was the manager who saw his role also include head coach, and he made a stab at drilling his forwards and conceiving match-plans. His approach paved the way for specialist coaches to assist future British & Irish tours. Whether this was effectively by default is hard to say.\n\nArthur Smith, the Scotland wing, skippered the side, breaking an Ireland monopoly of the Lions captaincy that stretched back to Sammy Walker and the 1938 tour. Off the field he was an academic high-flyer with a first in mathematics from Glasgow University before studying for a PhD at Cambridge. As a player he was a powerful runner with a deceptive change of pace. Smith was injured in South Africa in 1955 but turned his down time to good use, spending hours learning to place-kick on the hard, dusty grounds. It gave him an extra string to his bow and he went on to kick many goals, often as the long distance option, in a distinguished career during which he won 33 caps for Scotland.\n\nHe had returned to South Africa in 1960 as a member of the Scotland side that created a small piece of history by becoming the first individual home union ever to undertake an overseas Test tour. On the field he had an ice-cool rugby brain and with his unparalleled knowledge of South African conditions he was the ideal choice to captain the Lions. Bryn Meredith and Dickie Jeeps, the Welsh and English captains, were the only other survivors from the previous Lions visit to South Africa.\n\nAmong the other notable tourists were Mike Weston, the accomplished back from Durham City, Derek 'Budge' Rogers, the flanker from Bedford, who for many years held the record as the most-capped England player and who was later to be chairman of selectors for England; there was also David Rollo, who for Scotland held the record as the most-capped player for an equally long period of time. Also on tour, frustrated and storing away the hurt, were the Northern Ireland pair of Willie-John McBride and Syd Millar.\n\nYet a shadow was cast over the tour in the opening match. Stan Hodgson, the Durham City and England hooker, broke his leg 15 minutes from the end of the game against Rhodesia in Bulawayo. This immediately put pressure on Bryn Meredith, the only other specialist hooker in the party, who had to play in three of the next four matches before Coventry's Bert Godwin arrived as a replacement.\n\nEven Meredith, however, needed some rest, so prop Syd Millar was press-ganged into the middle of the front-row for the narrow win against the Western Province Universities in the fourth match.\n\nDisappointingly, dirty play was a feature of many of the provincial and Test matches. Richard Sharp was the outstanding back in the 1962 Five Nations, viewed by many as the paragon of attacking fly-halves. The Lions' hopes for a successful Test series rested heavily on his shoulders. But in the last match before the First Test he suffered a broken cheek bone when crash-tackled by 'Mannetjies' Roux, the well-known Springbok three-quarter. The pack was rearranged to cover a gap in the back division and the Lions, with only 14 men for 75 minutes, fell to their first defeat.\n\nThe tackle by Roux was criticised then and since, and was seen by some, perhaps wrongly, as a typical home team gesture in targeting the key touring players before the Test series. It was also very far from the only nasty incident in which Roux had been involved in his career.\n\nSharp was out for five weeks, missing the opening two Tests of a series that was lost 3-0. The Lions showed character to draw the First Test at Ellis Park. John Gainsford's first-half try for the Springboks was cancelled out ten minutes from time. For the Lions, centre Ken Jones made a lung-bursting 55 metre run, sidestepping and changing direction before scoring a spectacular try in the corner. The visitors had held their own with the much-vaunted Springbok pack and the press view was that the result was a moral victory for the Lions. Yet another.\n\nThere was nearly a month between the first and second internationals. The Lions were unbeaten during this spell and went into the Test at King's Park, Durban, with high hopes of scoring a win and going one up. The main action was distilled into the last two minutes. Keith Oxlee kicked a penalty goal from the touchline but from the restart the Lions threw everything into attack. Welsh lock Keith Rowlands appeared to touch down in a pushover, but the referee was apparently unsighted and immediately blew the whistle for full time. It was one of the most controversial officiating incidents on any Lions tour, which is saying something.\n\nBeaten by the referee again \u2013 that was the view of many of the Lions' camp followers \u2013 but the series was still alive as the tourists, with Sharp restored, headed for Cape Town and the Third Test a fortnight later. Sharp had proved his fitness by finding his best form in the 24-3 win against a Transvaal side that included four Springboks and three Junior 'Boks. He scored 15 points as the Lions prospered in ideal conditions.\n\nThe week after at Newlands, Sharp opened the Lions' account in the deciding Test with a neat drop-goal after 25 minutes but the celebrated Keith Oxlee, his Springbok counterpart, levelled with a penalty before half-time. Oxlee had been the tactical brain behind the Springboks' heavyweight pack during a Grand Slam tour of the Home Unions two winters earlier, and now he was to be the British and Irish nemesis again, scoring the winning try eight minutes from time.\n\nDeep in his own half Bryn Meredith won a strike against the head and Dickie Jeeps served Sharp. People will argue for the rest of their lives about whether he should have sought the safety of the touchline. But the blond Cornishman decided to open up in a last-gasp bid to break the deadlock. The ball went across the three-quarter line. Sharp to Weston, Weston to Jones, but then Melville Wyness, the Springbok centre, caught the Welshman with a big tackle. The ball spilled loose, Oxlee gathered and jinked his way to the line for the winning try and with it a 2-0 series lead with one to play.\n\nOn tour the Lions management adopted a policy of packing their back-row with heavy forwards \u2013 second-rows were used at No 8 and No 8s as flankers. Budge Rogers of England and Haydn Morgan of Wales, a Lion in 1959, were chosen as specialist opensides for the tour, but no out-and-out blindside had been selected.\n\nMike Campbell-Lamerton played all his rugby for Scotland as a second-row but he was used at No 8 for the Tests. Alun Pask, arguably the first of the modern breed of No 8 in British rugby, was used on the flank. The idea was to bring ballast to the Lions scrum and match the South Africans pound for pound. This was all very well, but it was too much. It compromised severely the pack's overall mobility.\n\nMike Weston and Arthur Smith.\n\nEven so, apart from the 14-6 loss to Northern Transvaal on the eve of the Test series, the tourists came a cropper only once more against provincial sides. Eastern Province beat them 19-16 in the penultimate match in South Africa, winning with a converted try from the last move of the match.\n\nPask was one of the finds of the tour. He was such an intelligent all-round rugby player that he adapted easily to blindside duties and played the game of his life in the victory over Transvaal. For a man who had a passion for running rugby he put paid to the criticisms that he shunned the donkey-work. He showed that he could perform defensively in a match that was approached as a full dress rehearsal for the Third Test. Alas, he cracked a rib at Newlands and never again played on tour.\n\nHis absence was sorely felt at Bloemfontein for the Fourth and final Test where Dickie Jeeps, making a then-record 13th Test appearance for the Lions, was captain for the day, Arthur Smith standing down the day before with a pulled muscle. The Springboks were a developing side with the series in their pocket and in the finest match of the series they gave a superb exhibition of fast, open rugby. Their forwards ran and handled like backs and all told the side scored six tries to three, exploiting some sloppy Lions tackling to crush the visitors 34-14.\n\nBy 1962 the British travelling press party had grown to eight, Pat Marshall (Daily Express), Terry O'Connor (Daily Mail), Uel Titley (The Times), Tony Goodridge (Daily Telegraph), John Reed (Sunday Express) and Ian Todd (Daily Herald) joining Viv Jenkins and JBG Thomas, who were making their third Lions tours. Unlike in the modern era, press and players frequently mingled and one fascinating joint-interlude took place at the Kruger National Park game reserve. A round trip of some 500 miles by road from Springs via the Park and on to Bloemfontein before the final Test proved to be one of the most memorable experiences of the tour for many.\n\nDickie Jeeps clears the ball upfield against Griqualand West.\n\nThe 1962 tour also marked the Lions debut of Willie-John McBride. He appeared in ten of the matches including the last two Tests. He faced tough competition for the Test spot from Keith Rowlands and Bill Mulcahy (who had to play blindside in Bloemfontein) but the young Ulsterman showed good technique and with his big hands and huge upper-body strength was already a redoubtable mauler.\n\nSouth African and Lions rugby would see and hear a lot more about him in the years to follow.\n\nMIKE WESTON (England)  \nToured: 1962 & 1966\n\nThe Lions were the peak of my career. I played in six Tests overall on two tours and only won one and drew one, but it was a fantastic experience. I was only 22 when I went to South Africa in 1962, and the highlight for me was getting in the Test team and experiencing the huge crowds and the excitement that surrounded those games.\n\nBUDGE ROGERS (England)  \nToured: 1962\n\nIt was something I would not have missed out on for anything. To play alongside players you have only ever played against before was something really special, in particular to see the friendships coming together with people from different backgrounds and countries. It meant a huge amount, and was a wonderful experience, just marred by a couple of injuries that probably kept me out of two Tests. And of course, the series defeat.\n\nWe may have lost the series but we weren't hammered, although we lost heavily in the last Test when I was really our only true back-row forward. However, it was a very good South African side at that time, and we also had significant early injuries losing David Nash, the Welsh No 8, with a neck injury, Richard Sharp, our fly-half, with a broken cheekbone, and Stan Hodgson, who was a bloody good hooker, with a broken leg against Rhodesia in the first game.\n\nBut winning and losing was not quite as dramatic as it is today because there was not the same media coverage, and if you lost, you lost. It wasn't a great success in terms of results, but it didn't ruin the tour.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE (Ireland)  \nToured: 1962, 1966, 1968, 1971 & 1974. Manager: 1983\n\nIt was the national game in South Africa and we went there and we had nice people, we had a nice manager who was ex-navy, and we had a nice captain, Arthur Smith. A nice man, a quiet man. Nice men don't survive in South Africa. Or New Zealand for that matter. There was no such thing as a coach. I used to joke and say, a coach is a thing that brings us to the match. We did it all ourselves. It was the captain and the senior players who put the tour together.\n\nWe had good players but we weren't organised. Not only that, there was a lot of snobbery and I'm not scared to say that. A lot of snobbery in the game in those days \u2013 in England. It's not the winning and losing it's the taking part and all of that rubbish. There was snobbery from the point of view that we were sending out, in some cases, ambassadors. When you go to do a job, you pick the men to do the job. And if there's a discipline problem you deal with it. There were guys you felt that should have gone who weren't picked.\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nWe had some sort of briefing from an embassy individual before we left London about the situation in South Africa. Some of us threw a couple of awkward questions at him which he batted away. I asked him about some South African fella who'd written a book about his mixed-race marriage and how he had to leave the country. I asked him what he thought of the book. He wasn't too pleased with the question.\n\nNorthern Transvaal lock forward Stompie van der Merwe and British Lions' Bryn Meredith leap high during a lineout.\n\nDAVID ROLLO (Scotland)  \nToured: 1962\n\nWe'd all been asked whether we were available for the tour and on 26 March 1962 (which was nine days after Scotland had drawn 3-3 in our last game of the International Championship against England at Murrayfield), this letter appeared addressed to myself stating that the Lions committee 'have the pleasure of inviting you to take part in the above tour which assembles at Eastbourne on 13th May 1962.' I was a farmer and I wasn't sure I would be able to get away, but I discussed it with my brother \u2013 who I was in business with \u2013 and we decided that it was an opportunity of a lifetime.\n\nWe had to take our own flannels and shoes with us, but the rest of the kit was supplied, including a dress blazer and an everyday blazer. We went down to London, met up at the Wellington Hotel in the West End for two nights, then went down to Eastbourne for a week's training \u2013 which was pretty tough going.\n\nInstead of getting an orange slice when we took a break we got a lemon slice \u2013 and I think that was to try and help us get used to the dry conditions we were going to encounter out in Africa. There were no water jugs or anything like that.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nIt changed in 1962 in terms of the press coverage. In New Zealand we had people like Terry McLean, JBG Thomas, Viv Jenkins and a few others and they actually travelled in the team bus. Imagine that now! There was about six or seven of them and nothing came out. They heard many things they could have printed but they didn't print them, other than the rugby. It changed in '62. We had a fairly large number of press.\n\nBritish Lions captain Arthur Smith steps around two Northern Transvaal defenders.\n\nBUDGE ROGERS\n\nWe didn't have a coach, just the manager, Brian Vaughan, and our captain, Arthur Smith. Arthur was a wonderful man and he and Dickie Jeeps, the England scrum-half, ran the playing side. It was the first time you could give as much to the game as you wanted to because you weren't having to work. So, if you loved training like I did, it was great \u2013 and I was always checking to see if I beat Haydn Morgan, my fellow flanker, in the sprints.\n\nAs for the journey out \u2013 I hadn't been on a long haul flight before, and, as I was interested in planes, it was pretty amazing to be in a Comet. We stopped in Khartoum and walked into a wall of heat, and then later the pilot let me and Richard Sharp into the cockpit for the landing at Salisbury. We were still in the cockpit when we hit the runway, which was a completely new experience.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI had broken a bone in my leg in the French game in the Five Nations and it was in a cast and I only got it off a couple of weeks before we went, so I had a lot of work to do. Keith Rowlands, he was the big man in the second-row at the time. I remember having a bit of a barney with him. It was my first tour. He threw this at me at the start: 'Why did you come on this tour, you're not fit.' I thought, 'I'll target you and I'll put you out of the team,' which I did.\n\nBryn Meredith watched by David Rollo attempts to get the ball away from scrum half Popeye Strydom during the game against Eastern Province at the Boet Erasmus Stadium in Port Elizabeth.\n\nMIKE WESTON\n\nThere weren't any great players in 1962, but there were some very good ones. Dickie Jeeps was always in the Test team, and had a good tour. Also, Willie-John McBride was making his first tour, and before we left I had a dodgy ankle, and the two of us were having to see the medics. I asked him what was wrong with him and he replied, 'I've got a broken leg.' He had a broken fibula, but it was not long before he was playing. The ankle bothered me throughout the tour, but before going I had trained with Sunderland FC, where they taught me how to strap my ankle. I got through the tour thanks to that.\n\nBUDGE ROGERS\n\nArthur Smith was already a great wing, and Alun Pask and Richard Sharp could be brilliant. But, for me, Dickie Jeeps stood out. He was a fantastic player. He wasn't that quick, and he didn't have a long pass, but he always gave his fly-half good ball and took a hammering if he needed to. I will always remember his tigerishness and ebullience \u2013 as I got off a scrum or lineout I'd hear him shout, 'Tackle! Tackle!' And he was still doing it years later when we were watching England play from the stands at Twickenham. Jeeps had tremendous guts, and every bit of the scrum-half game he did right. He would never match Gareth Edwards for innate ability, but he was a huge competitor.\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nWe played Northern Transvaal the week before the First Test and there was some debate about whether Richard Sharp should be played or not because he was the golden boy at fly-half; a lot of the South Africans who were well disposed to us and looked after us said, 'Don't play Sharp in this match, don't play him.' We played him. What we said to him was, 'Don't attempt anything for the first 15-20 minutes, just move it on.' We thought their fellas would want to put a stamp on him and, usually, if that kind of thing doesn't get done early it probably doesn't get done at all. The game settled down, but then, unfortunately, Sharp was going openside and then changed his mind and came on the short side and he met Mannetjies Roux who hit him high and caused a depressed fracture to his jaw. That was our golden boy gone for quite a while.\n\nMIKE WESTON\n\nSharp was a marked man, and before the game against Northern Transvaal I said to him, 'Just move it.' So, instead, the first time he got it he dummied and went for the gap, and the second was the Mannetjies Roux tackle. The South Africans were not dirty, but they were bloody hard, and the grounds were rock solid.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nMannetjies Roux was a fighter pilot who literally dived on Sharp and smacked him and down he went. He wasn't fit again until the Third Test. Roux was a madman. I suppose fighter pilots are. You don't tackle like that. You'd be off the field now if you did it.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI always admired Roux as a player. He wasn't a big man but he was a committed player. Tremendous. He was on the verge of danger all the time, but he was damned good. And I know he hit Sharp and maybe hit him illegally but he was a very good player. The South African game was based entirely on the scrummage. In one way I enjoyed that because I loved scrummaging and I loved the physical part of it.\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nWe had an infamous match in Potchefstroom against the Combined Services and it was like another Test match. It was very nasty. I think Roux played in that one as well. Lots of fisticuffs on either side. The guy coaching them was the same guy who coached Northern Transvaal. He seemed to have a certain ethos about how the opposition should be treated. Mayhem. Fists flying, boots flying. It was dangerous. The crowd were baying for blood.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\n'The Battle of Potchefstroom' they called it. They had everybody in a uniform \u2013 postmen, army, air force \u2013 they took them into a camp about two weeks before the game and one of them told me they started off saying, 'These people (the Lions), their great-great-grandfathers put your people into concentration camps in the Boer War.' So they came on the field and Keith Rowlands, who was our biggest forward, got the ball from the kick-off and his feet didn't touch the bloody ground until he was about 10 metres from our line. Mad. This went on the whole bloody game and the referee let them get on with it. It was an all-Afrikaans crowd. My opposite number was pulling me down in the scrum, so I smacked him. The referee said to me, 'Millar, you do that again, you're off.' I said, 'Well, if you don't look after me, I'm going to look after me.' I said to Wigs (Billy Mulcahy), 'Next scrum, you smack him.' I went up and Wigs put his fist through. Bang! Hit me right on the bloody nose. And the referee said, 'Penalty to the Lions!'\n\nThere was digging, raking, late tackling. It was an horrendous scene. We never played them again. Our press were terribly critical and the South African press were critical, saying, 'This can't happen again.' But at the end of the day, their objective was to win the Test series and they would do these things.\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nRugby football is a game, not organised warfare.\n\nBUDGE ROGERS\n\nThe Springboks had some really good players, and the one who always comes to mind is Frik du Preez. He ran 40 yards in the last Test in Bloemfontein, and bumped off about six tacklers. He was not especially tall, about 6ft 2in, but was very thickset, quite similar in build to Colin Meads \u2013 however, he was a huge athlete, more athletic than Meads. Avril Malan, Keith Oxlee and John Gainsford were also very good players.\n\nMIKE WESTON\n\nIn the First Test I missed a fairly easy penalty, and then I hit the post with a drop-goal from just inside our own half which would have won the match. In the Second Test we had a try awarded to Keith Rowlands, but then the referee was besieged by South African players \u2013 on the grounds that we had handled the ball at the scrum \u2013 just as John Willcox was about to take the conversion. He then awarded a penalty to South Africa, which was one of three that they were given in succession, including the winner in injury time. We never got the rub of the green with the referees, and we could have been 2-0 up. In the Third Test we paid for trying to run the ball from our own line, and in the Fourth Test they overwhelmed us physically \u2013 we were out on our feet.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nIn the Second Test we were being penalised so often for Bryn Meredith allegedly having his foot up early in the scrum that we just tried to hold and push. We lost a few as a result but we were being penalised so often that we just couldn't afford to strike. We drew the First Test and went to Durban for the Second Test and put the Springboks over the line from a scrum, there is no question in my mind that the ball was over the line and that Keith Rowlands scored. The Springboks actually turned to go under the posts and the referee called them back and said, 'I was unsighted.' Danie Craven said afterwards that everybody in the ground except the referee saw the try. It was hard going.\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nWe had a big heavy pack and, remarkably it might seem to a lot of people, we hooshed them over their own try line. The press photographers with their zoom lenses had the clearest picture of the pack and the ball over the white line and then the ref found a reason not to give it.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nThe Third Test, we lost it in the last bloody minute. There was a little guy called Keith Oxlee, an outside-half, somebody missed a tackle and he scored. They beat us 8-3. It was the biggest day of my life at that stage and one I'll never forget because it was such a huge occasion.\n\nDAVID ROLLO\n\nThere was no scrummage machine so we did a lot of live scrummaging in training \u2013 and I felt I had established myself as the Saturday tight-head prop by the start of the tour. I played the first two Saturday games and then I injured my back. We had very little medical back-up \u2013 we had someone to call upon if you wanted a massage but that was it \u2013 and I didn't discover until I got home that this floating rib in my back was cracked and that was where all this pain was coming from when I bent down to scrummage.\n\nI struggled on with it for six weeks, during which time I was constantly getting massaged on this sore bit, and I soon found out that that was the worst thing I could have done. What I should have done was put a strap around it and rested, and it would have been fine within a fortnight. Looking back, it is frustrating that we didn't have the wherewithal to treat these things properly. To young ones playing now, it must seem like complete madness.\n\nBILLY MULCAHY\n\nWe didn't have the same depth of talent in the back division that we had three years previously. We had a big heavy pack in 1962 but not the talent of 1959. I ended up on the blindside flank in the last Test because we were running out of players through injury.\n\nDICKIE JEEPS\n\nTo answer why we won, lost or drew is too complicated to answer simply, other than the losses were against better sides on the day... Although the loss of final Test against South Africa in 1962 was a fixture too far on a very hard tour.\n\nMike Campbell-Lamerton, right, tries to stop Springbok Fanie Kuhn as he blasts his way through with the ball in the Second Test.\n\nBUDGE ROGERS\n\nThe tour was four months long, and when we weren't playing or travelling we spent a lot of time at parties in people's houses. There were so many wealthy South Africans, with servants and swimming pools, who were happy to entertain us. As a tour it was remarkably well disciplined, and I can't think of any inappropriate behaviour. It was just good fun.\n\nI remember one trip when three of us were invited to go shooting guinea fowl with a couple of Afrikaners, and we sat in the back of the car and they hardly spoke. We thought they were pretty dour people, but they turned out to be extremely hospitable \u2013 after we had done a bit of shooting it broke the ice, and we had a wonderful braai with them afterwards.\n\nLater in the tour we had a trip to the Kariba Dam and Victoria Falls in two Dakotas, and we were terrified when the pilot zoomed towards the ground \u2013 but he was just doing it to give us a better look at a herd of elephants! Victoria Falls was out in the wild and uncommercialised at that time, and the only hotel was shut. Overall, we were well looked after, staying at the Arthur's Seat hotel in Cape Town, and playing the wonderful golf course at the Durban Country Club, where I've still got a picture of me chasing a monkey that picked up my ball on a fairway.\n\nDAVID ROLLO\n\nWe got 70 shillings a week, which was quite a lot of money \u2013 especially as you didn't need to spend a penny while you were there. We all had an official fixture card, which was a pretty basic little piece of folded card with the Lions logo and a diary of the matches in the middle, and that would get you anything you wanted: a round of drinks, a crate of whisky, you name it. Everything was available to us. The South Africans really looked after us well. If your case began to look a bit worn out they would take you away and get you a brand new one, without a word being spoken.\n\nAny gifts you got were collected by the South African Rugby Union, and once you had a trunkful they would send it home by sea and it would be delivered to your door. I had quite a lot of stuff and it arrived about three months after we got home \u2013 so that was a nice belated surprise.\n\nBUDGE ROGERS\n\nI was training as an engineer in Bedford and it was unpaid leave for me, but we hardly needed the 70 shillings a week allowance we were given. There were a few characters who stood out: Jeepsy was an engine on the field, and never stopped shouting or talking to you, and then there was the wonderful friendship between Bill 'Wigs' Mulcahy, our Irish lock, and Dave Rollo, our Scottish prop. After a few drinks Rollo, who never wore a jock strap when he played, and Mulcahy would both be talking simultaneously in their broad accents, with neither able to understand the other.\n\nDAVID ROLLO\n\nRonnie Cowan always seemed to have money to spend, he had a camera then bought a second one, and they were a real luxury in those days. And when we got back to London, the Monday morning papers had this headline: 'Lion goes north.' And it turned out Ronnie had signed to play rugby league for Whitehaven. He must have signed up before he went away, and they had given him a wee bit extra pocket money.\n\nI don't think any of us knew about it. All I knew was that he was a good player. He didn't get in the team for the first three Tests because he played the same position as Arthur Smith, who was captain. Then, in the final Test, Arthur stood down and let Ronnie get a Test place \u2013 and I'm sure he did that out the goodness of his heart.\n\nBUDGE ROGERS\n\nI pulled stomach muscles playing a game of football at the end of training and had to miss the Second Test. Thankfully, I was fit again by the Fourth Test, when, despite the result, I played out of my skin. It's something I'd never have missed.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI can remember setting out for the tour in 1962 and having no idea what to expect. What I discovered very quickly, as we all did, was that rugby in South Africa was superior to ours in just about every way. They were fitter, better organised and more committed; they had a pride and a will to win that totally outstripped us.\n\nDickie Jeeps lets go of the ball as he is brought down in a flying tackle by Springbok Hannes Botha, during the Second Test.\n\nBUDGE ROGERS\n\nWe never had a reunion until we got together in 2002 \u2013 a 40th reunion \u2013 and almost everyone that was alive came. We held it at the East India Club in London, and I had a client who made lovely enamel boxes. So I asked him to make everyone a two and a half inch square red enamel box with the Lions badge on it, and the names of the team engraved on the inside of the lid.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nMy first boy was born while I was away and he was three months old before I saw him. Peter. Because we moved from Joburg down to Windhoek our mail was held in Cape Town and I was down there four or five days before I knew. I think my wife felt I'd deserted her.\n\nArthur Smith, Syd Millar, Bryn Meredith, Dickie Jeeps, Mike Campbell-Lamerton and Ken Jones celebrate scoring during the Second Test \u2013 but the try was disallowed.\n\nDICKIE JEEPS\n\nThe Lions was the pinnacle of my career achievements, particularly the opportunity to play with and against the best players in the world at that time. It was also a chance to see parts of the world I would never have experienced, and to meet sportsmen from the southern hemisphere, particularly Don Bradman in 1959. It was an immense privilege to be involved.\n\n## CHAPTER SIXTEEN\n\n# [LAND OF THE LONG DARK CLOUD  \n1966](006.html#a3)\n\nNEW ZEALAND\n\nNOT EVEN the most fervent Lions supporter could deny the gulf in class between Kiwi and Lion down the years, since they first met at Test level in 1904. With the sole exception of 1971, the Lions have finished on the losing side in every series played.\n\nNever, however, was that gulf as wide as in 1966 when the tourists were whitewashed in a four-Test series for the first time. It is a series which continues to be discussed, a tour which in many ways repeated and illuminated the essential failings of Lions tours in terms of a lack of organisation, realism and of hard-headed sporting judgment, which often seemed to revert too readily to old-fashioned norms.\n\nThe tour was doomed from the outset. The selectors convened to name the party on the weekend of the Calcutta Cup match in March 1966 and dropped several bombshells. First and foremost, Mike Campbell-Lamerton, an Army captain and 1962 tourist in South Africa, would be captain. Second, Brian Thomas, the fierce Welsh lock, the toughest forward in the Home Unions at the time, was considered unsuitable for a tour to New Zealand, as was his uncompromising Welsh team-mate at hooker, Norman Gale. Finally, no genuine openside flanker was chosen.\n\nControversy reigned during the tour after many incidents of foul play and also the suspicion that the Lions in general were not tough enough to absorb the onslaught of the home teams.\n\nEyebrows were raised because Campbell-Lamerton was not seen as a certainty for a position in the Test second-row. The argument was that the tour skipper should be a player who was an automatic Test choice in his position. The outcry was loudest in Wales for apart from the omission of Thomas, Campbell-Lamerton's appointment robbed the Welsh skipper, Alun Pask, of the honour.\n\nPask, a classic No 8, was too good to leave out of the party, but many felt he had been cruelly slighted over the captaincy. He had been an integral member as pack leader of the 1965 Welsh side that won the Triple Crown and led Wales to the Five Nations title in the year of the tour. It's true that Wales lost narrowly (9-6) to Ireland in Dublin the week before the tour party was announced, but it was felt that his credentials for the job were impeccable.\n\nThe omission of out-and-out opensides such as Budge Rogers and Haydn Morgan, both experienced internationals and past Lions, deprived the Lions of speed to the ball in the loose.\n\nThe original party comprised 11 Welshmen, eight from Ireland, six from Scotland and five Englishmen. Another curiosity was that Delme Thomas, an uncapped Llanelli lock on the verge of the Welsh team, was surprisingly selected ahead of Brian Thomas. Delme was to be a great servant of Wales and the Lions in later years, but the fact that the management turned him into a prop for one of the New Zealand Tests added further grist to the critics' mills.\n\nFor the first time the Lions' assistant manager was a designated coach. Previously the assistant had been merely to preside over administrative matters and any 'coaching' was done by a manager, often with no deep grasp of the game, or the players themselves.\n\nThe coach was John Robins, a Lion in 1950, who won 11 caps for Wales in the early 1950s before embarking on a distinguished physical education career and was lecturing the subject at Loughborough Colleges at the time of his appointment. Loughborough was an institute of excellence that was to give the lead to elite coaching in many sports and disciplines throughout the years.\n\nHowever, at the time, the pre-eminence of the captain remained paramount; coaching was a concept new to rugby and Campbell-Lamerton clearly believed that the technical guidance of the team was his responsibility, in addition to that of leading the team and performing a whole raft of onerous ceremonial duties. Robins was sidelined and it is said that he became ever more frustrated as the weeks in New Zealand went by.\n\nThe tour opened in Australia where the Lions emulated the 1888 and 1904 pioneers by winning every game, including two Tests. The first international, at the Sydney Cricket Ground, was a fast, open affair. The Lions came from 0-8 down early in the second half to win 11-8 thanks to tries from Irish front-rowers Ray McLoughlin and Ken Kennedy, and two successful goal kicks by fullback Don Rutherford.\n\nA week later at Lang Park in Brisbane, the famous rugby league stadium better known today as the Suncorp Stadium, the Test side had its best day. The floodgates opened in the second half with the Lions scoring 28 points, including five tries, to rack up their highest score and biggest-ever win in a Test. Stewart Wilson kicked 13 points from a first-minute penalty goal and five second-half conversions as the Lions handed out what was then the fourth biggest hiding ever suffered by a team in a Test between the major rugby-playing nations.\n\nThen the Lions came down to earth with a heavy thud in New Zealand, losing their first three Saturday games. They lost 14-8 in their opener against Southland, not one of the country's strongest provinces, but who have always given touring teams a harsh welcome at their Invercargill base \u2013 and there was a 17-9 defeat to Otago a week later.\n\nThe Lions forwards were unable to sustain any control in the set piece and brittle tackling among the backs gifted away soft tries at critical times. It was the same story at Wellington where, for the third Saturday in a row, the Lions were comprehensively beaten up front; they lost 20-6 and prospects for the Tests looked grim.\n\nThere were flashes of brilliance as the side improved in the matches leading up to the First Test. David Watkins and Mike Gibson, the fly-halves, and Allan Lewis and Roger Young, the scrum-halves, featured prominently as the Lions backs began to fire in the matches against Taranaki, Bay of Plenty and North Auckland. But at Carisbrook, Dunedin, one of the best sides to represent New Zealand dominated the opening international from the start. The only Lions score was a first half penalty kicked by Stewart Wilson and the final scoreline of 20-3, was then the biggest margin the All Blacks had ever achieved against the tourists.\n\nOverwhelmed in the rucks and on the back foot for most of the game the folly of omitting Brian Thomas was becoming apparent. The Lions' lineout hopes rested with Brian Price, the Newport and Wales giant who had formed such a successful second-row partnership with Thomas in three successive Welsh Five Nations-winning sides. Price was easily the most productive lineout ace of his day in Europe. His two-handed catching and timing were phenomenal at home. In New Zealand, where the lineout was a jungle of barging and obstruction, he looked uncomfortable against the Meads brothers, Stan and Colin, in the All Blacks' second-row.\n\nAs usual, home refereeing didn't help. Lineout interpretations differed and barging, blocking and petty indiscretions were condoned. The sorry fact was that the Lions' skipper and team did not think to employ a 'When in Rome' strategy to exploit the refereeing until too late in the tour.\n\nRough play was frequent and led to some famous outbursts. The Lions manager, Des O'Brien, was a former Irish No 8 who had missed out on selection for the 1950 tour. He hit out after the England centre Colin McFadyean had his nose broken during the Lions' 8-6 win in a brutal match against Canterbury. Neither the first nor the last such game against that province.\n\nAfter a game which had included a scene of open warfare in which 15 or 16 players engaged in a sustained slugging contest a frustrated O'Brien delivered his invective: 'We have found obstruction, stiff-arm tackling and other illegal tactics. We are sick of it. We have enjoyed the hospitality of New Zealand, but the most unenjoyable part of it is the 90 minutes on the field \u2013 I add ten minutes for the usual injuries.'\n\nScotland's Jim Telfer was the captain on that occasion and he was characteristically direct in his post-match comments. 'I am not going to say today's game was dirty, because every game we have played in New Zealand has been dirty.' Duggie Harrison, the incoming president of the RFU was out there at the time and he expressed his disgust at the spectacle, saying, 'I never thought I should feel physically sick watching a game of rugby.' It was an irony that Brian Thomas had been left at home as he was considered 'too rough' for New Zealand rugby.\n\nFighting again broke out in the early stages of the match against Auckland where David Watkins was captain. He showed the New Zealand public what his back division could achieve and steered his side to a 12-6 triumph, dictating the game tactically and contributing two drop-goals.\n\nDavid Watkins deputised when skipper Mike Campbell-Lamerton finally dropped himself for the Second Test in Wellington the following weekend. The Lions lost 16-12 but Watkins led the side admirably, his drop-goal and three Stewart Wilson penalties keeping the tourists in the hunt after they had surrendered their one-point half-time lead. Delme Thomas was called up to play in the second-row alongside Willie-John McBride for this match. Delme's jumping and the play of Ireland's Ron Lamont in the loose inspired the Lions to their best performance of the series. The teak-tough Lamont was consistently the best of a strong back-row. Despite carrying an arm injury for much of the tour the Irishman's dogged defence and speed to the breakdown made him the unsung hero of the Test series.\n\nThe Lions' midweek game after this Test was against Wanganui-King Country and they were defeated by a side led by Colin 'Pinetree' Meads. It was the first time that a combined provincial team had won a match against a major touring side and Meads took 15 minutes to reach the dressing room after the final whistle. The great man signed hundreds of autographs for delighted fans before leaving the scene of what he later described as one of his fondest moments in the game.\n\nDelme Thomas moved up a row to prop to allow Campbell-Lamerton to return to the second-row for the Third Test in Christchurch. But the Lions were deprived of possession, Watkins was suffocated by tight New Zealand marking and the series slipped away with a 19-6 defeat. Watkins was captain again for the final international at Auckland, but was ruthlessly tackled out of the game by an outstanding All Black back-row. The Lions lost 24-11 but in mitigation had to play for nearly an hour with only 14 men after Alun Pask was upended at a lineout. The Welshman fell awkwardly and broke his collar-bone, prompting calls for substitutes to be allowed for injured players.\n\nIt was evident on this visit that the warm relationship that had existed between the Lions and the British press on the three previous tours was beginning to cool. A more formal separation between the management, team and journalists was clear. This was probably as a result of the Lions' poor showing in New Zealand, particularly the ensuing welter of criticism thrown at the management over selection.\n\nBy the end of the tour, the early promise of the eight unbeaten matches in Australia was a distant memory, and the first whitewash of a Lions team in the Test series had become a fact. The battered party even managed to lose against British Columbia on one of those old clock-in visits, which some Lions parties undertook.\n\nPerhaps strangely, the Lions remained a huge draw, with nearly 60,000 attending the final Test in Auckland. New Zealand were certainly an excellent team, with the traditional combination of tough forwards and solid and powerful backs, augmented by an excellent kicker in Mick Williment at fullback. But the tour remains something of a low point in the proud history, marking the transition to a new era when British and Irish rugby finally became serious on the field \u2013 but painful at the time.\n\nMike Campbell-Lamerton addresses the welcoming party at Christchurch airport.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN (England)  \nToured: 1966\n\nThe travel logistics were amazing. On the flight out we stopped in Germany, the Middle East, India, Singapore, Fiji and then Perth, which was about 36 hours. On the way back four months later we flew to Hawaii, where the sun was out. We hadn't seen it for a few months, and we all got sunburned \u2013 Dai Watkins' skin peeled off \u2013 and none of us wanted to tackle. Which is why we lost to British Columbia, although there were only 12 fit players left in the tour party by then.\n\nJIM TELFER (Scotland)  \nToured: 1966 & 1968. Head coach 1983. Assistant coach 1997\n\nOnly three players who went were not paid, and that was the three teachers \u2013 Alun Pask, who sadly died in a fire in 1995, Brian Price and myself. The rest were paid for by their employers or by their community, which happens a lot in Wales. I remember Gary Prothero coming into the room in the London hotel we were staying in with his pockets stuffed with pound notes and fivers, which he had received walking through the streets of Bridgend before he left.\n\nMIKE WESTON\n\nI was a student in '62, penniless really, and we got about 10 shillings a day tour allowance. By my second tour in '66 my estate agent business was beginning to flourish, and, although we were away for six months, I had a partner who looked after things while I was gone.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nPlaying for the Lions was something I had dreamed about. I had first read about the Lions in a mobile library in Saltford \u2013 it was a book on the 1959 tour and I was inspired by Bev Risman's try-scoring feats. I had been playing at Loughborough, and was part of the same team as Gerald Davies and John Taylor there, and getting in the England team was more predictable because I had played in the trials. But it was my first season of international rugby, so it was a big surprise to be in. I didn't think it would be possible. When I got a phone call from a friend telling me I'd been selected by the Lions my first feeling was elation, and my second was fear \u2013 was I good enough? I was aghast, but the concerns didn't last long.\n\nIt was the highest accolade as a rugby player, and it is my greatest rugby achievement \u2013 and I was helped because I had a good tour. I was the fourth choice centre, and started as a second team player behind Mike Weston, DK Jones and Jerry Walsh. However, when we got on the heavy grounds in New Zealand my tackling got me into the Test team. Mike Gibson came out late on and we played together in the last three Tests, with him at inside centre and me outside, which was rare in those days because centres tended to play left and right.\n\nDON RUTHERFORD (England)  \nToured: 1966\n\nLooking back, I was never convinced that the manager, coach, and captain ever sorted out a clear command structure. Who was to do what, and why, was never worked out. I had the strong impression that the captain thought he was running the playing side; I don't think the relationship between John Robins and Mike Campbell-Lamerton was ever acrimonious. I just don't think they communicated much.\n\nMeanwhile, Des O'Brien, who was a delightful bloke, was on a trip of his own. For instance, Des had a bike lined up in every town we went to, and went off for a spin by himself. Then he disappeared mid-tour for a trip to Fiji. It really was amateursville, but for all of us it was a great experience. It was also a watershed, because the lessons we learned were all filtered through to the 1971 Lions at a meeting I attended the year before they left.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nIt was all total nonsense. Total nonsense. The two guys in the running for the captaincy were Ray McLoughlin and Alun Pask and the committee said, 'No, we'll pick Mike Campbell-Lamerton, he's a leader in the British Army.' It was total nonsense and bullshit. 1966 was a sad scene. A good bunch of boys, and it was never the players' fault, it was the selection. The manager and the coach were divorced from the game, they weren't part of the game here, not part of the living game day-to-day, they'd lost touch with it. They didn't realise what was required.\n\nNOEL MURPHY\n\nLovely captain, Mike. He was a surprise choice. He was picked and did his best. He did his best.\n\nColin McFadyean scores against South Canterbury-Mid Canterbury-North Otago Combined.\n\nDAVID WATKINS (Wales)  \nToured: 1966\n\nWe were forever torn between wanting to be a true running Lions side, and one which could take on all-comers up front. Our inability to decide on our tactical strategy led to chopping-and-changing in selection and it undermined us.\n\nBRIAN PRICE (Wales)  \nToured: 1966\n\nMike Campbell-Lamerton was a decent man and much maligned. We knew how hard he was working, and it was because we respected his efforts that we stuck together. Despite the defeats it was never a downcast tour.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nJohn Robins could have done a terrific job, but he was usurped. Robins was a PE lecturer at Loughborough, and was our coach, so I knew him well. But, great coach that he was, he didn't have a free hand. He was the assistant to the assistant, with Des O'Brien the manager number one, and Mike Campbell-Lamerton the captain number two. Robins, at number three, was not able to pick the team and, I gleaned from him later, he felt like a man without a role. At the time I was unaware of the politics, and, as a 23-year-old who was a junior member of the tour party, I concentrated on the rugby and the social side of things.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nThere's a certain amount of bitterness in me about all those years. There was no medical attention, there was nothing. I have friends in terrible agony with new hips and knees and so on and rugby has done nothing for them. We were just inadequate. We picked the wrong people, we had the wrong leader.\n\nDES O'BRIEN (Manager)  \nToured: 1966\n\nRay McLoughlin should have been captain of that side. He would have made a hell of a difference. The captaincy was a problem. Mike Campbell-Lamerton was a delightful character and a really good man but his playing days were nearly over \u2013 in fact, I don't think he captained Scotland that year \u2013 and the one thing I said to the selection committee was that they were electing a captain who wouldn't play in the Tests, and they said that they accepted that.\n\nKEN KENNEDY (Ireland)  \nToured: 1966 & 1974\n\nRay McLoughlin was a thoughtful tactician who brought a radical change into the way Irish teams prepared for games and this discipline brought very tangible rewards. Until then, preparation had been a little haphazard. Unfortunately, he put a few noses out of joint at committee level and because of this they fired him from the Ireland captaincy just before the Lions were picked and that effectively ruled him out of captaining the 1966 Lions.\n\nRAY McLOUGHLIN (Ireland)  \nToured: 1966 & 1971\n\nDes had a philosophical approach to management and in my view did the job well. One of the difficulties about that tour was that it was the first occasion that there was a coach. Previously the captain was everything \u2013 captain and coach. But on this occasion there was a complete vagueness over what the coach's role was and who was the boss. In the eyes of some officials back in England the coach would have been seen as just a trainer, a physical fitness man. John Robins saw himself as more than that. He was a good rugby technician and thought he should run the show. Mike Campbell-Lamerton thought differently because no one had told him otherwise.\n\nBrian Lochore and Mike Campbell-Lamerton lead out their sides ahead of the First Test.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nWe got a hell of a thrashing, losing every one of the four Test matches to suffer the ignominy of a whitewash, but it was no surprise because in my view the whole composition of the touring party, and also the attitude, was wrong. Des O'Brien had been a wonderful back-row forward for Ireland at the end of the 1940s and was one of the nicest men you could ever meet in your life. He was courteous, charming and delightful company and hardly ever uttered a cross word in anyone's direction. Once again, the Lions selectors could not have chosen a better diplomat to represent the public face of the Lions, but if you wanted a man who was a winner, who would crack the whip and make sure every player in the squad was determined never to take a backward step then O'Brien was never going to be your man.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nThe last thing I want to do is run it down, but some crazy things happened. It was so amateur it was unbelievable, and, when I look back, I wonder sometimes how we managed to be competitive at all. For instance, when Terry Price came out to replace Don Rutherford he was not fit, and came down the steps of the plane limping with a leg injury. That's why on a couple of occasions in the Maori game when there was a high ball he called out, 'Your ball!' because he couldn't run freely. With regards to Des O'Brien's mid-tour trip to Fiji, to be quite honest I'm not sure I knew he had gone. That's what the tour was like \u2013 you didn't necessarily know who was missing.\n\nRAY McLOUGHLIN\n\nOn the tour there were no rows or politics but there was a lack of focus as far as leadership was concerned with each man not wanting to step on the other's toes. It would have been better if any one of them had had total control and run it with an iron fist. But there was nothing the manager could do about it because he didn't have a mandate from home.\n\nI loved the tour. Despite the defeats it was a happy occasion. Undoubtedly the team had a lot of potential, undoubtedly we could have done better in New Zealand if we'd been more focused and, undoubtedly, the lack of focus and clarity at the top had a lot to do with that, but I would regard that as a fault of the system and organisation rather than of any of the individuals involved.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nIf you were going to the other side of the world in 1966 then you might as well go for a while. So we went to Australia first, then New Zealand and stopped off in Canada on the way home, playing 35 games altogether.\n\nWe left on Jedforest Sportsnight, which was 21 April. I went down to watch the tournament, came home to Newtown St Boswells where I was living at the time, to pick up my bags and get on the train. Frank Laidlaw had already got on at Melrose, Derrick Grant got on at Hawick and together we went down to London. We were away all May, June and July before coming home on 20 August \u2013 and straight back to work.\n\nNOEL MURPHY\n\nWe won all our six matches in Australia and they were talking about us being one of the great Lions sides. The New Zealanders sent us down to Invercargill for our first match and it was very cold down there. We never thawed out.\n\nDAVID WATKINS\n\nIn scheduling terms we were pulled from pillar to post. Imagine the culture shock of swimming in the warm waters of subtropical Queensland one minute and being in Invercargill in the cold, wet and windy south of New Zealand the next.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nDes O'Brien was the manager. A very nice man. Full stop. Had no connection with rugby at that time. John Robins was very quiet and introverted. His Achilles tendon snapped and he ended up in hospital and all sorts of things. He was assistant to the manager and tried to do a bit of coaching but it went out the window because he was in hospital.\n\nBruce McLeod scores the All Blacks' first try, with Brian Lochore and Kel Tremain in support.\n\nMIKE WESTON\n\nI speak very highly of Mike Campbell-Lamerton. However, he didn't come over well to the New Zealanders, mainly because he had theatrical movements on the field, and their press got stuck into him. In terms of organisation there were mistakes. We went to Queenstown, which was snowy and icy, and then when we tried to train the ground wouldn't take a stud. Campbell-Lamerton would take us for a run through the trees every morning \u2013 but it was a place we should have avoided. Things like that were very wrong.\n\nJack Hazlett grounds the ball, but his try is disallowed.\n\nMIKE CAMPBELL-LAMERTON (Scotland)  \nToured: 1962 & 1966\n\nI haven't read the books on the tour because one got so hurt. But what I regret most is that because of the criticism my children got hurt at school, and now my grandchildren have to hear about it. It doesn't give them a fair break. One didn't ask to be captain. There was strong feeling among the Welsh for Alun Pask, and maybe they were right. There was no one more surprised than myself when two press men phoned to inform me of my appointment.\n\nAlthough I'd captained Scotland, it had never entered into my head that I would captain the Lions, and my first response was tentative. If you look at the wood for the trees, I was probably the compromise choice when the selectors couldn't agree on either Pask, Mike Weston or Ray McLoughlin.\n\nThe criticism is not very flattering, and some of it nasty, but obviously you have to take it if you lose a Test series. However, it's off the mark in many areas, and it was not balanced because we never got credit for winning the two Tests in Australia, where some of the running lines by our backs were brilliant. We won the Second Test by a record 31-0 against a side that had beaten South Africa and New Zealand in the previous two seasons. Nobody had gone through Australia unbeaten, and we remain the only Lions to have done so.\n\nIn New Zealand there were mistakes made, certainly, and the rucking took us all by surprise. Some of us sustained welts on our backs which came out as bruises on the chest weeks later. The All Blacks were formidable, but even so our pack was never juggernauted and the Second Test could easily have gone our way.\n\nSelection was often difficult because of injuries, and many of us played injured because there was no option. We didn't have a medical officer with us. As far as dropping myself for the Second and Fourth Tests is concerned, it doesn't take courage to do that if you loved your team, and you knew someone else could do a better job.\n\nDes O'Brien and John Robins were charming men. I don't know where the story about strife with John Robins has come from, although a lot of senior players did come to me with concerns about the lack of game plans and the PT style of training, rather than skills. So as captain you are the go-between, and it seems to me that Joe Soap here carried the can. All I can tell you is that I ended up doing a lot of administration, because it was not in my nature, or in my training as a soldier, not to help out when help was needed.\n\nMIKE WESTON\n\nI thought David Watkins was great in difficult circumstances. Piggy Powell stood out too, not because of the quality of his play, but because he was a character. He went down well in New Zealand because he could talk to all the school kids about his farm. It was also unwise to play cards with Ray McLoughlin \u2013 he was a mathematical genius who could remember all the cards.\n\nThe irony for me was that on the 1963 England tour of NZ we were stuffed by JP Murphy \u2013 and guess who was refereeing in 1966? You should not criticise refs, but they are so important to the outcome. John Willcox was at my house recently, and it was still a talking point for us.\n\nDAVID WATKINS\n\nPat Murphy, the New Zealand ref who had charge of the last three Tests, whistled to stop the game when we would almost certainly have scored a try in the Second Test in Wellington after Colin McFadyean had broken clear. He then awarded us a penalty 65 yards back! We were trailing 8-6 in the mud with 20 minutes left, and a try then would have put us in a very strong position.\n\nWe complained bitterly afterwards to the New Zealand Board and asked them to replace Murphy, but they refused. Before the Third Test began at Lancaster Park he came into our changing room and assured us that he was a fair ref. Then, at the first scrum two minutes into the game, Allan Lewis, our scrum-half, asked him whose put-in it was. His response was, 'Ours \u2013 whose do you think it is?'\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI remember one match and they scored and the referee jumped up in the air with delight. The bastard's name was Murphy. That was the sort of stuff that was going on. We were totally lost, there was no organisation. Campbell-Lamerton was what they called a devout Catholic. He came from church and said that he had lit a candle for the Lions and I said, 'Mike, there's only one thing that works with these bastards and that's going out on the field and kicking the shit out of them. It's nothing to do with lighting candles.' And then Terry McLean wrote something about McBride not believing in God!\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nWe had a culture of never blaming the referee at home, but we were naive. We didn't respond to the punching and holding down after the tackle, and lived in a fantasyland of 'God would look after us' and make sure the refs did too.\n\nDewi Bebb speeds around Ron Rangi in the Second Test.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nThe background to my speech after the Canterbury game was that we were sick of being intimidated in provincial games where we were constantly coming up against dirty teams. They made me captain for that game and we played well and won 8-6 in front of 50,000 wild Canterbury fans. But it was a dour match with several nasty skirmishes from the first scrum onwards.\n\nDes O'Brien came out to me and said, 'Look Jim, I'm going to lambast them today. You behave yourself and be nice about them.'\n\nBut I couldn't and I said at the post-match function that, 'I wouldn't say today's game was dirty because every match we have played on this tour has been dirty.' I started on about the referee. Derrick Grant was urging me to sit down before I caused any more trouble, but I felt that was what I had to say. I never regretted it, because I am one of those fellows who has to say what they believe. I had played in some of the midweek games and because I was the kind of player who ended up at the bottom of rucks, I had been kicked to death...\n\nIt certainly didn't change the way they approached their provincial games against us, as Auckland proved the following week in a game of absolute thuggery on the same day as England were winning the football World Cup at Wembley.\n\nWhat really annoys me was that a number of New Zealand reporters came up to me after the speech, shook my hand and told me that was exactly the right thing to say, that the rugby there was filthy. But when I read their report the next day they gave me dogs' abuse.\n\nFrank Laidlaw is caught in possession by Ken Gray in the Second Test.\n\nJBG THOMAS (writing about Jim Telfer's comments post-Canterbury, in Lions at Bay)\n\nMr Blazey (president of the New Zealand Rugby Union) called Telfer's outburst 'peevish and ill-mannered' and perhaps it was not in keeping with the right diplomatic approach, but the men from the Scottish Borders are inclined to say what they think and apologise afterwards. The strange thing is that many a New Zealander said to me later that there was much truth in what Telfer said, but the furore that followed in the 'Readers' Letters' columns of all the papers was quite amazing. Most of the letters, strange as it may appear, said that New Zealand rugby was over-vigorous and they consequently disapproved.\n\nMIKE WESTON\n\nJim Telfer was not right to launch into his tirade against the New Zealanders in 1966, but it did highlight the problem, because their main plan was to intimidate. The Canterbury game turned into a fight, and beforehand the call was, 'If they fight, we all fight.' I was playing against a guy called Bruce Watt, and we both stood off and watched. After the First Test defeat Kenny Jones and I were left out, and it was quite right because the rest of the series was played in mud and was very physical. It was not my strength, and I had no complaints about being dropped.\n\nBRIAN PRICE\n\nThere was a definite attempt to intimidate. Against Canterbury I have a picture that shows me fighting Alex Wyllie, and that's all I remember of the match. You can forget running, jumping, and pushing.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nI had my nose broken twice in the Canterbury game. There was a little red-headed guy called Derek Arnold playing opposite me for Canterbury who I knew already from 1963 when the South West Counties played the All Blacks, and he had taken me out by obstructing me time after time. So, I went on the pitch determined to fight fire with fire, and after I'd barged into him he elbowed me and broke my nose. Ken Kennedy came over and straightened it up, but then later in the game I was on the ground in open field after a tackle and Fergie McCormick came past and kicked me in the face, breaking my nose again and knocking me out.\n\nRAY McLOUGHLIN\n\nNew Zealand played with great drive and determination and had the philosophy that a guy who lies on the ball and prevents good second-phase ball is a criminal of the worst kind \u2013 and if the referee can't get him out of there then the thing to do is walk on him and there's a fine line between walking and kicking.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI got a thoroughly unpleasant reminder of what it was like for a visiting rugby player in New Zealand on the tour in the provincial match against Canterbury. The local team kicked off and I caught the ball. Suddenly, I was surrounded by the physical hurricane of their pack, which started punching, kicking and assaulting me because I'd had the temerity to hang on to the ball. They got hold of me and took me thirty or forty yards downfield towards my own line, the blows raining down upon me as we went. What maddened me was that not one of my fellow Lions players came to my aid to help me hold on to the ball and give the New Zealanders some of their own treatment back. When the referee eventually blew the whistle to end this spell of physical torment I was bloodied and bruised and bloody angry, but when I looked up the nearest Lions forward was about twenty yards away. 'Where the hell were you bastards when I needed you?' I shouted at them. And their reaction? Well, they laughed and one of them said, 'Why the hell didn't you let go of the ball you bloody fool?' I knew then that we had no hope of winning the series.\n\nRONNIE LAMONT (Ireland)  \nToured: 1966\n\nIn the Auckland match, one of their flankers kicked Noel Murphy, right across the kneecap.\n\nNOEL MURPHY\n\nYeah, I had a few words with the fellow \u2013 Keith Nelson \u2013 when he did that.\n\nJim Telfer closes in B Milner of Poverty Bay.\n\nRONNIE LAMONT\n\nNow the thing I liked about Murphy was that he was keen to share his problems. Once the obvious and immediate pain had left him he took me aside and muttered, 'We're going to get him.' And we did. That was the start of the inglorious battle of Auckland... Which we managed to win 12-6.\n\nThe final whistle was relief all round, and as we trooped off the field a spectator suddenly assaulted me. She was at least 5ft nothing and 80 years old. While she berated me with violent swipes of her umbrella, she used a lot of expletives that grannies would not be expected to use. Directly behind me, bloodied but unbowed, was McBride. 'Do you always need to be looked after?' he growled, snatching the umbrella from supergran before breaking it in two and handing it back to her, then shoving me through the crowd to safety.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nThe training programme before the First Test was conducted on a grass runway at Queenstown airport. I remember someone suddenly shouted, 'Plane! Plane!' and we all ran off the runway and rushed to the hangar until the plane taxied in. We had to run into the hangar three or four times and in the end I thought, bugger this, and I went in and had a smoke with my pipe beside the hangar.\n\nDAVID WATKINS\n\nIn one of the Tests, Ken Jones got the treatment at the bottom of a ruck. It looked like a red shirt going round and round in a spin dryer.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nThe All Blacks were a good side. They demolished us in the First Test, and they had a good goalkicker in Mick Williment, who was a very accurate torpedo-style kicker. But we contested two Tests very closely and there was mitigation for us losing all four. In the Second Test in Christchurch I was running from half-way with two men in support, including Dewi Bebb, our top scorer, and only one man to beat... only to be called back for a penalty to us with an almost certain try on.\n\nRay McLoughlin.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nWe got New Zealand at the wrong time. They had Waka Nathan, Brian Lochore, Kel Tremain, Stan Meads, Colin Meads, Bruce McLeod and Jack Hazlett. The only one there who would not be regarded as an all-time great is Hazlett.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nColin Meads was a great player, but also a filthy player. There was one incident where Waka Nathan tried to tackle Dai Watkins, who side-stepped and put a kick into touch, only for Meads to pile in and punch him on the chin, knocking him to the floor. Mike Gibson and myself were standing next to Dai, who was only 5ft 7in tall, and stood there open-mouthed as Meads told the ref, 'He hit me first,' and got off scot-free.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nWe had some good players. Ronnie Lamont of Ireland must have been the bravest I ever saw. He had an injury that affected a nerve in his arm, he couldn't lift it properly. He took cortisone injections and used a leather harness so he could play openside flanker and he was out of this world. He became the hero in New Zealand because they realised how tough he really was.\n\nMike Campbell-Lamerton in a happier moment with Peter Stagg.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nThe big characters? Willie-John McBride was all-round popular. A laid-back Ulsterman with a lovely accent who could sing \u2013 his party piece was 'Scarlet Ribbons'. Noel Murphy was so cheerful all the time I thought he was an alcoholic, but he was tee total instead.\n\nDai Watkins stood out on the field for the Lions because he would always do something. So often he beat two men off bad ball, but then was forced to kick. He was very nimble, and the fastest man in the tour party over 25, 50 and 75 yards \u2013 only Dewi Bebb could just beat him over the 100 yards. Alun Pask had fantastic hands, and was a great player. He seemed to care about everyone, and was generous in helping other players, myself included. The outstanding New Zealander was Waka Nathan, another great All Black open-side. He was everywhere, all the time, and I've got a photo of him getting out to me on the wing off set-piece play.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nEvery player was adopted by a school during the trip, and my school was Papakuhu High School in Auckland. They produced this wonderful scrapbook of my tour and the lad who presented it to me near the end of the tour was called Bob Lendrum, who went on to play for the All Blacks in 1973 against England. I've still got the scrapbook.\n\nMIKE WESTON\n\nWe had flights mostly \u2013 and a very bumpy one coming into Wellington one time which was frightening \u2013 but we did also travel by train. My memory was of school pitches on the outskirts of each town with hundreds of kids out there practising their goal-kicking because they wanted to become the next Don Clarke or Mick Williment.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nAs we went around the country, we realised that out there, rugby was much better organised than back home. They had fully established provincial championships, whereas our district structures were very much in their infancy.\n\nEvery time you went to a new town it was a huge festival, with street parades and all that stuff. It is a shame that places like Gisborne and Napier are no longer on the schedule anymore. Those places took the Lions to their hearts and really treated us well.\n\nSandy Hinshelwood dives in to score in Fourth Test.\n\nBrian Lochore.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nI found special friends in Australia, with (Australian flanker) Jules Guerassimoff, and in our own tour party, with Derrick Grant. Sometimes you just hit it off with someone. In New Zealand it was Ron Rangi. He was my opposite number in the Tests and took me to one of the All Black drinking sessions where I remember Meads talking about rugby, and what was wrong with the Lions mid-tour. When Fred Allen found out that Rangi had been socialising with us he rewarded him by putting him opposite Meads at the next training session.\n\nNOEL MURPHY\n\nWe were trying and trying and trying to get ourselves into a winning formula. The enthusiasm was great going out onto the field. Young lads who went on tour for the first time would say it was one of the greatest experiences of their lives.\n\nCOLIN McFADYEAN\n\nThe phrase we found most annoying was, 'When are you Lions going to come good?', because most New Zealanders wanted it to be competitive. We got a ticket allocation of two for each game, but someone sold a ticket, which was splashed all over the local newspapers because, as amateurs, it was a big deal. The UK press men on the tour, Vivian Jenkins and JBG Thomas, were part of the team, but the reporting of the tour back home was minimal. A one-inch by one-inch cutting was all I saw. I listened in bed to the 1966 World Cup final on the radio at three in the morning. I think we were in Wellington, and the reception always seemed to fade just when a goal was scored!\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nWe went to the west coast, Greymouth. Unbelievable place. They couldn't put us all up in the one hotel. The hotels in those days were dreadful. We were in a doss house and the other half were in another one at the bottom of the street. There was only one street in the place. And there was nothing to do. Literally nothing to do. I said, 'Why did those buggers get into the good hotel and we're in this dump?' And somebody said, 'We'll go down and rough it up.' There was a bicycle and I took the bike and Ronnie Lamont was on a horse. There was a horse grazing in the green and we went down and roughed this place up, threw stuff out the window, coz they were sitting in the bar. The next day there was murder because they thought bandits had come in and wrecked the Lions hotel.\n\nRoger Young attempts to clear the ball against the Junior All Blacks in Wellington.\n\nNOEL MURPHY\n\nAn abiding memory: I was in bed on tour when a telegram came to say that my son, Ken Murphy, had been born. It was August 1966. I spoke to my wife that night and sent flowers and everything was grand. I came home and I had a strapping young lad. It wouldn't happen now. You wouldn't be allowed to go on that tour, it wouldn't be the thing to do. Imagine your mother-in-law!\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nHaving been kicked and stood on by folk the three months, I came back like a caged animal. In my first game back for Melrose, I charged into this ruck, drove into somebody and knocked the living daylights out of them. Barry Laidlaw, the referee, blew his whistle and shouted: 'Penalty, you can't do that.'\n\nI said, 'I've been doing that three months in New Zealand.'\n\nAllan Lewis shows audacious skill to send out a reverse dive-pass as (from left to right) Chris Laidlaw, Stan Meads (both NZ) and Ronnie Lamont and Alun Pask (Lions) look on.\n\nMIKE CAMPBELL-LAMERTON\n\nFunnily enough, it was a very happy tour. It was an incredible journey, and when we had our 25th anniversary dinner, unsponsored, at The Savoy, only five couldn't come. That was the esprit de corps of the 1966 Lions. But really, we weren't quite strong enough.\n\n## CHAPTER SEVENTEEN\n\n# [LEARNING THE LESSONS  \n1968](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nTHE MOST positive aspect of the Lions' very disappointing results in the sixties was the soul-searching it provoked among the Four Home Unions; so at least there was eventually a positive outcome, for in overall results, the 1968 team were as poor as their predecessors of 1962 and 1966, who had been so badly beaten.\n\nThe team were captained by Tom Kiernan, the Irish fullback, and coached by Ronnie Dawson, and after the unhappy events of 1966 when the coach was not allowed to coach, and the chain of command became hopelessly tangled, Dawson at least took charge of the playing side as befitting a man who had captained the 1959 side in Australia and New Zealand.\n\nYet the Lions were beaten 3-0 by the Springboks in the Test series, managing a draw in Port Elizabeth in the Second Test. They also lost 14-6 to Transvaal in the midweek match before that Test, their only setback outside the series. But in the record books the reading is stark: the Lions sides of the 1960s failed to win a single Test against the superpowers of New Zealand and South Africa. British and Irish rugby had let the rest of the major unions pass them by \u2013 France had dominated the Five Nations for most of the seasons between 1959 and 1968. It was long past time for action.\n\nThe analysis that followed was more by accident than by design, each of the Home Unions planning their own approaches to the changing demands of the game more or less in isolation. There was broad agreement that a more focused approach to coaching was needed. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales embraced the national squad concept and each ended the decade with its own coach taking charge of team preparations.\n\nThe upshot was fitter players with sharpened basic skills at international level. Coaching was becoming rugby's fastest growing industry \u2013 although even as late as 1971, a leading official of British rugby said in a Lions meeting, 'Of course, I don't believe in all this coaching nonsense.'\n\nDawson, who had led the 1959 Lions, was among the most respected of this breed in the Home Unions and in 1968 he was appointed assistant to manager David Brooks, a former Harlequins forward, for the visit to South Africa. Dawson thus became the first Lion to make tours as a skipper and as a coach. The captaincy also returned to Ireland, where it has always enjoyed mixed success, with Kiernan, their popular fullback who had visited the Republic with the 1962 team, leading the side.\n\nIn some ways, Brooks was the most remarkable figure of all. The fun-loving Harlequin was as far removed from the normal style of disciplinarian as it is possible to imagine, so much so that he was a willing participant in many of the legendary nights out enjoyed on tour \u2013 and it is said that he even took part on the side of the 'Wreckers', those tourists who caused damage late at night, against the 'Kippers', who simply wanted to go to bed and sleep undisturbed.\n\nIt was a tour that yet again exposed British and Irish forward weaknesses. Giving away considerable weight and power to the South African scrum containing such great forwards as Frik du Preez, Tiny Naude, Tommy Bedford and Jan Ellis, the Lions found themselves living off morsels in the Test series.\n\nThey were only really outplayed in the final Test, but without attacking ball they failed to score tries. Indeed, 35 of the Lions' 38 points in the series came from the boot of their skipper, Kiernan, a sad commentary. Their only try was a forward breakaway by Willie-John McBride at Pretoria \u2013 ironically, the Lions' opening score of the rubber.\n\nA contributing factor to the try-drought was that the tourists' strike runners were cut down by a dispiriting run of injuries. Hamstrings seemed particularly vulnerable to the South African conditions. When the side was originally named it was expected that the natural runners like Gerald Davies, Billy Raybould, Keith Jarrett and Keri Jones among the three-quarters would flourish on the hard, fast South African surfaces. Yet all were sidelined and none of them reached double figures on the appearance list.\n\nBarry John and Gareth Edwards were also invalided out. The pairing, who were to ascend to rugby immortality, carried huge responsibilities on their young shoulders; but John was injured early on in the First Test when he was tackled by Jan Ellis and broke his collarbone, and Edwards had to miss the last two Tests.\n\nThereafter, the Lions were unable to find an attacker capable of regularly breaking the strong defensive formation deployed by the Springboks. Until his injury in the 15th match of the tour, Edwards had been a star attraction. It was on this visit that he refined his passing technique, developed the confidence in his ability to beat opponents with his explosive strength and mastered a strong kicking game.\n\nThe 1968 Lions party.\n\nBob Hiller \u2013 'Boss' to his colleagues \u2013 was the England fullback who understudied Kiernan. The unsung hero of the adventure, he was the model tourist. He was a positive and lively influence behind the scenes and notched up 39 goals (and two tries) in the midweek matches. He only played eight times but with 104 points he was the tour's top scorer. With the skipper in the form of his life, Hiller had no chance of making the Test XV, but he accepted his fate as second-mate with dignity. Arguably never was a Lions tour party so strongly covered by its fullbacks. Hiller, loyal as ever, performed the same key role in 1971 in New Zealand as understudy to JPR Williams.\n\nThe British & Irish forwards did improve as the tour progressed. The great Lion Jim Telfer led by example. He was the fittest member of the pack and enjoyed unswerving support from his back-row compatriot, Rodger Arneil, who had joined the Lions at the last minute when England's Bryan West, an original selection, had had to drop out on the eve of the visit. Arneil was the find of the tour, but the forward who really made his presence felt was Willie-John McBride. It was his third Lions trip and though held back by minor niggles he was the outstanding performer among the tight forwards. On the hoof with ball in hand he was as threatening a sight as Colin Meads or Frik du Preez. His mauling was renowned and his lineout presence \u2013 standing at three or five \u2013 was a thorn in the side of opponents. If only the Lions had had two or three more forwards of the same calibre as these three, the series result could easily have been overturned.\n\nThe rubber opened with a 25-20 Springbok win in Pretoria. The IRB at its meeting the previous March had finally caved in to pressure to allow replacements in international matches for injured players and Mike Gibson guaranteed himself a footnote in the game's history by becoming the first sub to appear in a Lions Test when he replaced Barry John. How many more Test results might have been different over the decades had replacements always been allowed?\n\nKiernan kept his side in touch with five penalty goals and the conversion of Willie-John McBride's storming try. For South Africa, Frik du Preez matched McBride, scoring a try in the second half which momentarily put clear water between the sides.\n\nBob Hiller.\n\nSyd Millar.\n\nIn the Second Test, Kiernan landed two penalties from two attempts for the Lions but the Springboks landed two from eight in a 6-6 draw at Boet Erasmus Stadium in Port Elizabeth. Scottish winger Sandy Hinshelwood pulled off a match-saving tackle on Corra Dirksen in the second half to save the Lions from another agonising defeat.\n\nKiernan was his side's only scorer again in the third international at Newlands, Cape Town. The penalty-goal deadlock was broken after half-time when Thys Lourens, the flanker, scored the only try of the match and Piet Visagie converted on the way to an 11-6 Springbok win.\n\nBut at Ellis Park in the final Test the Springboks broke free to win 19-6, scoring four tries and underlining their forward power and the effective finishing of their backs.\n\nThe dominance of the penalty goal, unusual law interpretations that yet again confused the tourists and objections to the referee nominated for the Second Test led to renewed calls for the introduction of the differential penalty and neutral referees. The tour also sparked a debate about raising the value of the try to four points (finally introduced in 1971).\n\nPolitics were never far behind the rugby on this tour. Back home the Lions' controversial decision to undertake a visit to Rhodesia after that country's Unilateral Declaration of Independence was a talking point, while for many of the players making their first visits to South Africa, especially the cohort of fresh-faced students in the party, the first-hand experience of the country's apartheid laws caused revulsion.\n\nJohn Taylor, the young flanker from Loughborough, was so perturbed by the situation that he was eventually to turn down the chance to play for Wales against South Africa two seasons after the tour, before declining his invitation to return to South Africa with the Lions in 1974. The issue of sporting contacts with South Africa gradually caused greater debate and, eventually, the severing of connections for a time.\n\nGareth Edwards and Billy Raybould practise their dive passes.\n\nFor the first time the Lions were subjected to disagreeable media coverage back at home. The nature of the relationship between press and players was beginning to change, with some journalists intent on describing the high jinx off the field as well as reporting the events on it. It's true that the Lions divided into Kippers and Wreckers but most of the high jinks were good-humoured \u2013 though they did cause damage, and eventually the tourists who wanted to take their rugby far more seriously began to tire of the endless partying. One wrecking party caused a very irate hotel manager to accost the tourists' manager in no uncertain terms the next morning, with accusations that fire hoses had been unlashed in the middle of the night and non-rugby guests soaked.\n\nBrooks, blithely unconcerned, asked the hotel manager how much the damage cost. On being told he flourished his pen, wrote out a personal cheque and handed it over with the riposte: 'Couldn't have been much of a party.'\n\nMock courts are a feature of Lions tours. The players appoint a judge who each week imposes a series of fines on players for petty misdemeanours. John O'Shea, the Cardiff and Wales prop, was judge in 1968 \u2013 and had to rule punishment against himself after he was sent off by referee Bert Woolley against Eastern Transvaal at Springs. (O'Shea was actually assaulted by a spectator as he marched off and was absolved after the post-match enquiry.)\n\nAlso on the lighter side, John Reason (Daily Telegraph) solved once and for all one of the game's greatest contemporary mysteries. Peter Stagg of Scotland was one of the locks on this tour. He was the first international player to scale over 6ft 6in but was very guarded about divulging his true height (which was a few inches more). Reason found him asleep on the beach during the side's stay in Cape Town and later revealed all to his readers. 'Carefully marking the points [in the sand] at each end of him I sneaked out later and measured them. They were 6ft 9in apart.'\n\nThe tourists prepare for departure.\n\nThe decade was over. Three tours and three defeats, and victory in the Test series \u2013 any Test series \u2013 seemed as far away as ever, even though in the background, key technical experts in some of the Home Unions were plotting a future with less damage to the fixtures and fittings of the hosting nations, and more damage on the field of play.\n\nBOB TAYLOR (England)  \nToured: 1968\n\nWhen I was picked for the Lions I had to go to the school (Wellingborough Grammar) to get permission for time off. I went to see the headmaster, Harry Wrenn, and I told him I'd been asked. He said straight away: 'You tell 'em you're available. I plan to bask in your reflective glory.' At the next governors' meeting he stood up and said, 'Mr Taylor will be away for a while, he's been selected for the British Lions. He'll be on full pay.' There were other schoolmasters who came with us on that tour, but some of those were released without any pay. Most of us were very lucky that we could wrangle it.\n\nWe were a motley crew when we turned up. We all had different shirts and shorts on and we all wore different tracksuits. There were no Lions tracksuits back then. We were genuine amateurs. We were asked to buy two pairs of shorts, a pair of boots and a Lions shirt \u2013 which I actually swapped for a South African one so I don't even have one of those anymore. And you had to provide receipts for everything if you wanted the money back.\n\nBryan West turned up in Eastbourne with a broken ankle. We knew straight away he wouldn't be able to play until late on in the tour, but he gave it a go anyway.\n\nJim Telfer feels the impact of his pack of forwards in training.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nI'd been to South Africa before in 1967 with the Borders so I knew about apartheid. I knew that black people walked along the road and had to cross over if they saw a white person coming. I knew they were treated like slaves. But I wasn't politically motivated enough to make a song and dance about it. I was never not going to go. But there were two kinds of apartheid: white against black, and also Dutch white against English white.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nPlayers are very apolitical and we never thought much about that; 1968 was when the first pressure started to come, but it wasn't too bad. Of course we were aware of the problems but people just wanted to play rugby against the best. I wasn't thinking much about politics. Sometimes I look back and say, 'Were we right or were we wrong?' You'll never know.\n\nBOB TAYLOR\n\nTo be quite honest we were young rugby players and we weren't particularly interested in the political scene back then. We had a presentation from the South Africa embassy where we were told not to associate with women of a dark skin. And we were told quite clearly there were areas that were white only and areas that were black only. One or two of the players had a hang-up about going, but I had no hang-ups at all.\n\nBOB HILLER (England)  \nToured: 1968 & 1971\n\nI enjoyed South Africa, but we were aware of Apartheid. It was much more obvious on the high veld than in the Cape Town area. You accepted it was the status quo, but also knew that it wasn't right and that it probably would not last. All the blacks and coloureds wanted us to win \u2013 and at fullback I was always very close to them because they were in the cheap seats at the end of the grounds. That's where my nickname 'Boss' Hiller came from, because they would shout out to me, 'Boss!', and I would give them a few waves or a clenched fist salute. I think we were popular because we treated the non-white staff in our hotels well, and always had a laugh and a joke with them.\n\nGERALD DAVIES (Wales)  \nToured: 1968 & 1971. Manager 2009\n\nThe Welsh team had recently toured South Africa and apparently, so we were told, they had been rather homesick and cliquish, so in 1968 we all had to share rooms with somebody from another nation, the English could not share with the English and so on. That was the factor that brought us all together.\n\nBOB TAYLOR\n\nNo supporters travelled to watch in those days. We had a press pack of about 15, and four or five from BBC2, who were providing the first ever live television coverage of the Lions. The only support we had were representatives from the Four Home Unions, who came out because it was a duty. We didn't suffer, because we weren't expecting it. It was low profile back then.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nIt was a mind-blowing experience to be out there. I grew up with the 1955 Lions in South Africa. I used to read Lions Rampant by Vivian Jenkins. If you wanted to see the Lions play or follow the tour, there was nothing on television and nothing on the radio so I had to go to the Regal Cinema in Llanelli and watch it on the Path\u00e9 News. Sometimes, you would only get about a minute of it.\n\nWhat appealed to me, even though it was in black-and-white, was that they were playing in sunshine; in black-and-white the pitches looked white with the kikuyu grass. I saw pictures of matches with palm trees in the background, and I found that exotic. My rugby was Welsh rugby \u2013 cold nights, cloudy and sometimes dark and gloomy. That glimpse of the Lions in 1955 had something exotic about it. I always wanted to be a Lion, where palm trees grew.\n\nWhen I went to South Africa in 1968, it was the culmination of a dream I had ever since seeing the pictures at the cinema. That's the way it was for me. I wanted to be a Lion and even then there was a magic attached to it. It was wonderful, you experienced the four nations knitting together very well.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nWe didn't have a particularly strong team in '68. Ronnie Dawson was the first coach and he did a very good job. The coach before was John Robins in '66 and he was not allowed to do his job because Campbell-Lamerton didn't like the idea of a coach.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nI had done a lot of reading, spoken to a lot of people in South Africa whose opinions I respected and produced an overall concept of what South African rugby was.\n\nBOB TAYLOR\n\nIt was always fierce in the pack, no matter who we played. And it was all pretty ruthless. If you did something that was gaining you an advantage the opposition would take measures to stop you. The fist was commonplace. And they had a lot of good footballers too. But we actually did well in the forwards, we got quite a lot of ball. If anything our backs lacked an extra bit of pace. We had the players, but I'm not sure the backs were as well organised as they should have been.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nThe Second Test was a draw and we had problems with the referee in the scrum. JP Schoeman was the ref. I said to John Pullin, 'Stop striking, John,' because every time he was penalising us. The games were close, up to a point. The referee was a significant factor at times. You can't dispute that; that's life.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nThere was the same old syndrome of home referees, and there were a few dreadful decisions. After the match you had an opportunity to talk to the ref but there wasn't any mileage in slagging him.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nThe refereeing of the lineouts and scrums was what really affected our play right from the outset of the tour. The South Africans played with all sorts of different interpretations to us, from hooking early and the scrum-half feed in the scrum, to putting a forward outside the lineout to receive a tap-down, which was illegal in Britain and Ireland at the time.\n\nAs a result, we gave away umpteen penalties a game and struggled to create any sort of platform. In almost every scrum our hookers, John Pullin and Jeff Young, would be penalised. Our scrum-half, Roger Young, was penalised so often for his scrum put-ins that he didn't know what to do.\n\nIt emerged later that Dr Danie Craven had used his influence to tell the referees to keep us in check in these areas.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nI used to say to Doc Craven, 'People have come here under great pressure and we don't expect to be treated like this.' The referee was biased and prejudiced and they picked the referees. It was very difficult. We expected that we weren't going to get a fair deal and we knew that we had to be better than them. You went and said we hope we'll get a fair deal and we hope the ref will be fair but we always knew there was a fair chance that when things got tight the decisions would tend to go the other way. You had that feeling about it. Schoeman was penalising us for feet up in the scrums or collapsing the scrums. It was always our fault in his opinion, which it wasn't. I said to John, 'Just scrum, don't put your foot up, so they can't penalise us.'\n\nThere were two hard places in South Africa \u2013 Port Elizabeth, against Eastern Province, and Springs, against Eastern Transvaal. 'Tess' O'Shea was having a go at some player and then he hit him and got sent off. Then a spectator had a go at Tess. I was sitting in the stand. What could we do about it? Willie-John McBride jumped over the fence.\n\nJBG THOMAS (Writing in On Trek Again)\n\nAs O'Shea and friendly escorts reached the mouth of the tunnel, bang, a spectator leapt to the gate and punched O'Shea full on the side of the face! This was the spark that set the situation alight. In a split second, several spectators from both camps were in action. Willie-John McBride was first there and a right-cross virtually stopped the spectator in his tracks; the police managed to stop McBride applying the KO, although he did well to follow up with his left!\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nIt was entirely wrong that John O'Shea was sent-off. He threw a punch but there was a hell of a lot of punches that had been thrown beforehand, most of them by their guys. There was a sort of acceptance of foul play and misconduct that was allowed to take place in the game. It's terribly, terribly tough now and hard and vicious at times but there was a lot more nasty play back then, no doubt about it. Punches would come through a front-row from a second-row in the set-scrum, players would be hit off the ball, and there was always a vicious use of the boot on players lying on the ground.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nI remember going to see O'Shea in the dressing-room afterwards and he was crying because he felt he had let everyone down. He apologised to the powers that be and he was let off with a reprimand. Bert Woolley, the referee, later wrote to Tess saying that he regretted sending him off \u2013 and Tess gave him two tickets for the Third Test.\n\nJohn O'Shea is sent off by Bert Woolley against Eastern Transvaal.\n\nWILLIE JOHN McBRIDE\n\nIt was a piece of nonsense that O'Shea was sent off. There was lots of niggly stuff and they had set out to annoy and niggle and it was successful because O'Shea belted somebody. It was a disgrace that he was sent off because this nonsense had been going on for ages and he had to walk all the way around the pitch to the tunnel and the South Africans were throwing oranges and beer cans at him. Then this bugger ran out and belted him and I had taken enough at that stage. I jumped in and hit the guy. I'm not that sort of person but I couldn't take any more. Poor O'Shea was left on his own with nobody looking after him and it was wrong. I hit the spectator and he had glasses and the glasses went flying. The police got me and took me away. I had a laugh because they tore my Lions sweater and I said I was putting in a claim for a new Lions sweater. I said, 'It's your responsibility, you didn't look after that player.' Och, we had a bit of fun. It was all right.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nI'm not sure whether the 1968 tour was the birth of the Tour Court, perhaps we inherited it, but it was certainly the tour when court became more defined and regular. We used to have every Sunday off and the court would sit. The judge was John 'Tess' O'Shea from Cardiff, who now lives in Australia. The charges would only be daft things \u2013 not wearing the right blazer, etc \u2013 but it was always a great day off and great relaxation.\n\nFor some reason I was asked to be the prosecuting counsel, so I would draw up a list of eight or nine cases and compose the list of charges in legal jargon. Tess was a Harry Secombe figure, with a high-pitched laugh and a high-pitched voice, and was very, very funny. It was great fun, one of the bonding things which happen.\n\nBOB TAYLOR\n\nThe drinking on that tour was fantastic, absolutely fantastic. But it wasn't terribly sociable with the opposition. We'd meet for the reception and obviously we'd chat. But you could sense their focus was more on the game and how they were going to win it. We'd often be kept separate too, staying in different parts of the city.\n\nThe players' court session. John O'Shea as judge, with Gerald Davies and Syd Millar.\n\nRONNIE DAWSON\n\nThe legend of the Wreckers and the Kippers has obviously gone down in history, but it wasn't as bad as it has been recorded; having said that, there were occasions when things happened that shouldn't have happened. We had a marvellous character as manager called David Brooks who was the proverbial guy who never grew up. He was a brilliant character, a pilot in the Second World War. We had great fun with him. But there were one or two occasions when things got right offside. There was a problem in a hotel and it became legend.\n\nJBG THOMAS\n\nAfter an early breakfast there was a rush to the news stall at the railway station to obtain copies of the Jo'Burg Sunday Times. Even VIPs on holidays were in the hunt for the sensational news. When we got the paper, there it was, across the top of the front page in a banner headline \u2013 'Lions Behaviour Shocks City'... 'Hotel man tells of \"unmitigated drunken revelry\". The opening paragraph read, 'The touring Lions rugby party have left a trail of havoc and stunned incredulity after three days in East London marked by severe drinking bouts and riotous behaviour at hotels and night clubs. They left broken hotel doors, broken glasses by the dozen, unpaid liquor debts and girls in tears because of outright rudeness'. After a lifetime of travel, and of meeting players in all countries, I was amazed at this attack. This front page story almost made them appear to be international criminals. It was a most controversial form of journalism. I am most ready to admit that such stories on sport sometimes appear in the British press, but I felt the Sunday Times lost prestige in the eyes of many of its readers after this sensational story.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nThere was an awful lot of exaggeration about the Wreckers and the Kippers. Some of the team were quieter than others. You had a few party boys in there but the ones who were quieter were called the Kippers \u2013 they went to bed early. And the guys who partied a bit were called the Wreckers. In any tour there's a bit of nonsense goes on.\n\nGareth Edwards receives attention during the Test at Loftus Versfeld.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nIt was quite an unhappy tour in many ways. Quite quickly we were split into factions with the Kippers and the Wreckers. I was in the Kippers, naturally.\n\nIt started off when we were on our way to a short break at Kruger National Park, when we were on a long train journey from Johannesburg to Nelspruit, and you'd be sitting in your carriage and you'd hear the song roaring down the corridor shouting: 'The Wreckers are coming, hurrah, hurrah; The Wreckers are coming, hurrah, hurrah!' And your heart sank.\n\nJOHN TAYLOR (Wales)  \nToured: 1968 & 1971\n\nThe Wreckers and the Kippers sounds like a bit of horseplay but as a Kipper myself it can still bring back rather anxious memories. Imagine going through South Africa behind a steam locomotive in the middle of the night, locking yourself in your compartment and hearing the Wreckers coming closer and closer, door by door!\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nIt was originally a small group of about eight or so enthusiastic Wreckers, led by the captain and manager, and more than 20 Kippers, but people started realising that resistance was futile and swapped sides.\n\nThere was little you could do about it and you just accepted that you'd be woken up if you tried to sleep \u2013 but I think overall it actually helped team spirit.\n\nWILLIE JOHN McBRIDE\n\nSome parties got out of hand. The most famous occasion was on the night sleeper train to the Kruger Park. The tour itinerary permitted a few days' break which was a splendid idea, but I'm not sure the Lions' behaviour on the journey was so commendable. A lot of drink had been spilled and eventually Syd Millar and I said, 'Let's get out of here,' and rushed down the train to our cabins. The next thing we heard was the beat of war drums, crying, 'The Wreckers are coming, the Wreckers are coming!' Syd and I were hiding in the corner of our compartment and somehow they missed us. Inadvertently, they launched a raid on the next-door compartment, which was occupied by an old lady and gentleman. Both were turned out into the corridor by the mob before the blunder was realised. The commotion during the night had caused such a fuss that the train authorities had unhooked our two carriages and dumped them into a siding while the rest of the train proceeded on its way. There was one hell of a mess in those carriages.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nDare I say it, but it was the worst kind of public schoolboy behaviour. No regard for other people's property. They would say: easy come and easy go \u2013 but that's not good enough.\n\nI remember David Brooks coming up to me during a night out early in the tour and saying, 'I knew when we picked this squad that there would be three of four guys who would be different and not approve of this sort of thing, and I knew, Jim, that you would be one of them.' But he had got me wrong. I don't mind people letting their hair down and enjoying themselves. I'm not a monk. I enjoyed going out for a drink and occasionally got drunk, but it shouldn't affect your performance on the pitch \u2013 and it doesn't need to be ignorant towards other people. So I said that I understood what he was trying to do and it was fine by me so long as the focus was on winning the tour.\n\nIt wasn't malicious \u2013 it was just stupidity. You've got to remember that in those days there was a lot of drinking that went on, but they weren't getting drunk every night or anything like that. The manager was a bit if a drinker and he maybe led on some of the youngsters at times.\n\nBut sometimes it did go too far. I remember sitting after a function in Cape Town, and two Lions were picking up glasses and throwing them into the fire, one after the other, dozens and dozens of them. I remember looking at them and thinking: 'What are you doing? Is this really entertaining you?'\n\nThe Lions management were given a bill for damages \u2013 which was reported to have been half of the true cost, and then halved again, before a bill for \u00a3900 was handed over. David Brooks wasn't too concerned by it all \u2013 apparently he looked at it and said, 'Is that all? It couldn't have been a very good party!'\n\nAn aerial shot of the First Test in Pretoria.\n\nWILLIE JOHN McBRIDE\n\nOch, if you had seen the places we were put in... It was frustration. The hotels we were in were rubbish. Terrible places we were in. There was just a crowd of guys who had a bit more fun than others. When I say we had fun, we always knew when to have a bit of fun. It wasn't that we were out every night on the rampage. If you were playing you stayed in and you were ready for the game. When you had a couple of days off you had a bit of fun. There was nothing that was all that serious. I slipped on a floor and there was a broken bottle and I went down on the piece of glass and cut my knee and got stitches. It was all stupid, innocent stuff. David Brooks was probably the leader of it all. I remember one Sunday coming back from somewhere and he'd fallen into the fish pond outside the hotel. He was a good manager.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nYeah, there was one incident on a train when there was a bit of damage done and occasionally things got broken. Of course they did. But there was a lot made out of it. The press, you see, get hold of this stuff. Always when we went to East London, whoever the press guy was there he used to write rubbish. He was talking about naked scrummaging in 1974.\n\nGerald Davies in full flight as he races in to score a sensational try against Boland.\n\nBOB HILLER\n\nWhen you look back at the Kippers and Wreckers it was a bit childish, but it was also great fun. It started on the train to Kruger Park, which was a bit like something out of an old Western. It took forever to get to Nelspruit, which was not that far from Johannesburg, and we had a few beers. There was a bit of a rumpus during the night when a couple of blokes started raiding the carriages chanting, 'The Wreckers are coming, hurrah, hurrah!', but when we got up in the morning it was rather quiet. It soon became apparent that there was no train and that the carriages we were on had been unhooked and left out on the veldt. We thought we had been abandoned \u2013 but then some vehicles arrived to collect us and we were taken to Skukuza game park where we had a marvellous three days with beers and barbecues.\n\nI was the 'King of the Kippers', and always trying to get some sleep, and by the end I was almost left on my own. We were split about 50-50 to start off with but then there were a lot of defections, mainly to the Wreckers. All our games of touch in training were Kippers v Wreckers, and it was the same when we played golf. I knew David Brooks very well, and he was a great character. Brooksy was always loads of fun, and all the high jinks were done with great humour and no malice at all \u2013 and the press travelled as part of our party, and joined in.\n\nWILLIE JOHN McBRIDE\n\nIt was my third tour and I had more hope that we might win than on the previous two because Ronnie Dawson was involved, but we still weren't good enough. Ah, I was disappointed. That's why I more or less made up my mind about 1971. You reach a stage in life when you get sick of losing. The reason the Lions lost the Test series 3-0 with one match drawn was because of us forwards. We were inferior to the hard-grafting South African packs that dominated possession and played a tough, physical game. We were not good enough. I was probably not the lineout forward that some of the guys I played against were. Our players started questioning themselves when things started going wrong, which is why the mind is so important in rugby football. We crumbled. We had this feeling of being inferior. Physically we could prepare, but mentally we were not strong enough. Mankind discovers the power of his mental faculties in adversity. Ours were insufficient to handle the task before us.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nAll that Wreckers and Kippers stuff took away some of the lustre of the Lions ethos, I think, and the incident certainly seemed to affect our display in the Third Test at the end of the week. To be honest, we should still have won that Test match.\n\nI knew Danie Craven very well, and got on well with him because he looked after us when we toured South Africa with the Borders in 1967. But he was ruthless, absolutely ruthless. He would do anything to win a Test match. He made sure we had this crazy itinerary where we were up into the high veldt for one match, then down to sea-level for the next, then across to the other side of the country, and back up into the high veldt. In those days, the Home Unions would just accept what the South Africans scheduled \u2013 they wouldn't want to argue about something like that.\n\nThe thing I remember most about South Africa was that the landscape was so different to anything else I had experienced before; the pitches were also as hard as rock and we played on cricket wickets, so injuries mounted up fairly easily.\n\nBOB TAYLOR\n\nLoftus Versfeld was an incredible ground to play rugby. The whole place was open. The stands went up into the sky. They just went up and up and up. As a player the best thing you could do was to get somewhere near the middle of the field and orientate yourself, because you could lose track of where the game was taking place if you weren't careful. They were hostile crowds in South Africa. They'd throw things at you.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nThe Springboks team was full of great players, guys like Jannie Engelbrecht, Dawie de Villiers and Frik du Preez. I remember du Preez catching a kick-off and going on a run that took him all the way down the pitch to score. But they were so forward-dominant, and so reliant on kicking most of the time. They could have done so much more, have been so much more, if they had broadened their thinking and opened their minds a bit more.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS (Wales)  \nToured: 1968, 1971 & 1974\n\nThat was my first Lions tour. You look back on the Test records and see that we drew one Test and lost the others, but with some better finishing, we could certainly have won the Third Test in Cape Town. But the big thing about that tour was that we went unbeaten in the provincial games, and that certainly takes a bit of doing in South Africa.\n\nMatches against the likes of Northern Transvaal, Transvaal and Western Province are not far off Test status and I guess we built on the respect and enjoyment that the 1955 Lions established through players like Cliff Morgan, Tony O'Reilly and Jeff Butterfield \u2013 something that was still talked about as fervently then as it is today. South Africans don't forget the great players.\n\nDespite the Wreckers and Kippers fiasco, which spoiled the way the tour is remembered by some, a lot was put in place under David Brooks and Ronnie Dawson that has perhaps not been fully recognised or appreciated in the histories of the Lions. You could see the beginnings of a more professional approach in preparation and training \u2013 and although, when compared with later tours, it was still pretty naive in its overall approach, you could definitely begin to see the genesis of a change of attitudes.\n\nJohn Taylor shows off his souvenirs upon the Lions' return home. \n\n## CHAPTER EIGHTEEN\n\n# [THE HISTORY BOYS  \n1971](006.html#a3)\n\nAUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND\n\nTHE WAIT had been interminable, and there had been very little evidence on the most recent Lions tours that British and Irish rugby was about to turn history on its head. Yet suddenly, it happened. The remarkable 1971 group, beautifully managed and beautifully coached (such a contrast with history on both counts), with an inner core of players who will go down amongst the all-time greats, and a squad which had depth in terms of ability and self belief, downed the All Blacks on their own paddocks.\n\nThey gave rugby itself a magnificent boost and as a result of some thrilling and tense months in New Zealand, catapulted rugby into the affections of a whole new audience and gave rugby in the four home countries an unfamiliar swagger. There are the people of a certain age who will never forget the excitement of following the momentous matches over the radio in a British dawn.\n\nIn the first part of the 1970s, and for the first time in the 20th century, British and Irish rugby ruled the world. The Lions won the series in New Zealand in 1971 and then, spectacularly, in South Africa in 1974, and England, the only home union to tour overseas in between, stunned rugby followers by winning one-off Tests against South Africa in Johannesburg in 1972 and New Zealand in Auckland in 1973.\n\nAt home, moreover, spectators saw a Barbarians team \u2013 a Lions XV in all but name \u2013 carry off a sensational 23-11 victory over the All Blacks at Cardiff in January 1973. These were heady days.\n\nThe coaching revolution in the Home Unions reaped dividends, with the likes of Ray Williams at the Welsh Rugby Union revolutionising the way the sport was played and organised at the top level. Forward play improved beyond recognition and, in New Zealand in 1971, the Lions pack won sufficient possession for a talented back division to run riot. The forwards had mastered the art of efficient rucking and applied the theories of good body position to hold their own in mauls and scrums. They also realised, from the sorry example of past tours, that they could not afford to be intimidated.\n\nCareful planning was the secret to the success of the tour. Everything was precise. Dr Doug Smith, an Essex GP who had played for Scotland and toured with the 1950 Lions, was their charismatic manager. He smoothed the path for the players and coach. Carwyn James, an erudite, cerebral West Walian, was able to concentrate on the playing side.\n\nSmith forged good relations with the media and New Zealand administrators, was firm yet understanding with his players, and turned out to be a remarkable sage \u2013 he predicted that the side would win the rubber 2-1 with one Test drawn. And they did.\n\nWhere Smith was big and outward-going, James was scholarly and thoughtful. Yet he commanded unwavering respect among his squad. His rugby philosophy was simple: he saw himself as the players' guide, not their commander; players should take responsibility for their actions on the field and adapt tactics to the situations presented. His technical approach was equally straightforward. Rugby was a handling game. The basic skills of passing and running were the tools for success.\n\nAs a schoolmaster at Llandovery in the sixties he had applied these tenets to make the college's 1st XV the most exciting school team in Britain. He copied the template successfully as Llanelli's coach and extended it triumphantly to the 1971 Lions. Yet for all his encouragement of freedom of expression on the field, he still spent hours in garnering the thoughts of his senior players before carefully preparing his match plans. It is said that he chose the first five Lions teams of the tour before he left London.\n\nIn John Dawes, the first Welshman to lead a fully representative British and Irish tour, James had a like-minded skipper. Dawes believed in the unpredictability of counter-attack as a powerful tactic and at London Welsh had been among the first to appreciate the potential of the attacking fullback in the wake of the law change that, since September 1968, had restricted direct kicking to touch when outside the 25-yard line. By a happy coincidence, he had found in the young St Mary's Hospital medical student, JPR Williams, the perfect prototype for the counter-attacking game.\n\nJPR was at the height of his powers in New Zealand, as were the entire back division. Dawes was an unobtrusive centre who perfectly complemented the penetrating attacking potential of his co-centre, Mike Gibson, not the first Irishman to reach a career peak wearing red rather than green, and whose midfield performances caused New Zealanders to regard him as among the greats. As a pair they exercised perfect judgement to bring the best out of outstanding wings Gerald Davies, John Bevan and David Duckham, who replaced Bevan in the Test side after the first international.\n\nThe 1971 Lions party.\n\nThen there were the Welsh half-backs, Gareth Edwards and Barry John \u2013 John was christened 'The King' by admiring team-mates. He broke records by scoring 188 points, but it was his tactical acuteness allied to an astonishing self-confidence that was the real key to the Lions' success. His line-kicking and tactical punting reminded critics of a chess-master moving his pieces into checkmate positions around the board. At Dunedin in the First Test, he tormented the New Zealand fullback Fergie McCormick so cruelly, pushing him from one touchline to the other, that the famous All Black never again played for his country.\n\nThe outstanding forward was Willie-John McBride, the Irish lock whose ability to impose himself physically and mentally on the opposition challenged the aura of invincibility surrounding All Black forwards. McBride, who had endured three grim and losing Lions tours, at first intended to make himself unavailable for the tour.\n\nCarwyn James was the first to admit that tight forward play was not his strong suit, but he made good use of the knowledge he had at his disposal. Prop Ray McLoughlin, mathematician and pack professor, had such a depth of knowledge about scrummaging that James handed early responsibility for the planning of the tight aspects of the game to him.\n\nThe Lions lost only twice. There was a stopover in Australia \u2013 matches against Queensland and New South Wales with no Tests \u2013 before the side moved on to New Zealand. The Lions were beaten in Brisbane in their first game. The refereeing was questionable but in the post-match conference Dr Smith was in great form. The side had arrived only two days earlier long haul from Hong Kong and when put on the spot by the press, Smith was brilliant. There was no whingeing about officials, the team was suffering 'circadian dysrhythmia', he said. The press fell silent as they wondered what he was talking about (jet lag, apparently). Smith was on the front foot and remained so for the rest of the trip.\n\nIncredibly, in the cauldron of New Zealand provincial rugby, the Lions were to win every provincial game. The thrashing of Wellington early in the tour by an incredible 47-9, arguably the greatest non-Test performance in Lions history, set the tone.\n\nCarwyn James.\n\nAnother keynote performance in the provincial games came at Napier against Hawke's Bay, when the local team tried to strong-arm the Lions out of contention. The response of the touring team was a brilliant display of attacking rugby in which Gerald Davies scored four glorious tries.\n\nIt almost goes without saying that the tour was not marked by the same excesses of drunkenness and high spirits associated with the 1968 tour, and with many of the previous excursions. The tour did a service of sorts to the Beach Boys by making their 'Sloop John B' the regular tour song, and soon it was being sung by rugby touring teams the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland \u2013 and it was even played at the end-of-year sports awards programmes when the Lions, fittingly, were named the sports team of the year. They also popularised the term LGT (large gin and tonic), as it was the drink of choice for many of the players.\n\nAnother point worth mentioning is that Bob Hiller, the Harlequins fullback, passed into Lions folklore not only with his humour off the field and his expert kicking at goal in the midweek games, but with the selfless manner in which he backed up JPR Williams, even though he realised that his chances of appearing in the Test series were slim.\n\nOne other pleasant surprise was that the refereeing during the tour was at least adequate in most of the games, with one man, John Pring, taking charge of all four Test matches, the first time this had happened on the Lions tour.\n\nThe tourists swept through New Zealand, racking up the points before the First Test in Dunedin. The week before the Test they played Canterbury, fierce and controversial opponents for Lions teams down the decades. It was a game that became notorious. The Lions won 14-3. If the 1966 Lions match there had been dubbed 'World War One', the 1971 return might easily have been 'World War Two'.\n\nThe home side carried on matters where they had left off five years earlier, and the Lions lost both their front-line props as a result of calculated thuggery. Sandy Carmichael was punched out of the tour, suffering a multiple fracture of the left cheekbone, and Ray McLoughlin broke his thumb in an altercation with Alex Wyllie. Carwyn James described his team's dressing room after the match as resembling a 'casualty clearing station'.\n\nColin Meads.\n\nAnd so the Lions suddenly faced the All Blacks in the First Test with two new props, Ian 'Mighty Mouse' McLauchlan on the loose-head (for McLoughlin) and the Dublin vintner, Sean Lynch, on the other side for Carmichael. Remarkably, it was McLauchlan who crossed for the only try of the match to open the scoring in the first half. Fergie McCormick equalised before half-time but two Barry John penalties sealed a 9-3 victory for the Lions. They had to defend with mighty courage as the All Blacks, led by Colin Meads, tried desperately to recover. The tackling of Peter Dixon, Mervyn Davies and John Taylor in the back-row was extraordinary. So too the play of Ray 'Chico' Hopkins, who arrived as replacement for Edwards early in the second half.\n\nThe only defeat the side suffered in New Zealand was in the Second Test in Christchurch. Syd Going and the New Zealand pack dominated to such an extent that the All Blacks had a commanding 22-6 lead in the second half. The Lions were badly missing McLoughlin, who had returned home, but a late try by Gerald Davies and drop-goal by John gave Carwyn James the optimism to predict that the Lions would bounce back. Dawes always claimed that the late Lions rally convinced him that they could win the series.\n\nIn the Home Unions there had been a move to abandon the old blind- and openside flanker style of back-row play when the law restricting touch-finding was introduced in the late sixties. Many sides switched to using left and right flankers and the Lions had adopted that system for the early part of the tour. It had let them down in Christchurch, and for the all-important Third Test in Wellington, the blindside\/openside convention was restored. Derek Quinnell, who was an uncapped player at the time, came in on the blind with Fergus Slattery chosen to play open.\n\nOn the eve of the Test Slattery, who had been suffering with a cold, was struggling with his breathing so John Taylor was recalled. The London Welshman had the game of his life and the threat of Syd Going was effectively strangled by an effective pincer movement from the flankers.\n\nJames's legendary attention to detail was evident. Shortly before the toss he phoned the local met office to check the windy Wellington conditions. Assured that the wind would not increase as the afternoon progressed, he passed a message to John Dawes and, on winning the toss (for the third time in the series) the skipper chose to play with the wind (whereas they had opted for the kick-off in Dunedin and Christchurch).\n\nIt was one of the games of Lions history. Gordon Brown had been called in to beef up the Lions pack and the tourists started with a blitz, scoring 13 points without reply in the first 18 minutes. Edwards, playing one of his great games, made a try for John with a charge, and then another for Gerald Davies. Their forwards took charge and John kicked with precision to exercise a tactical stranglehold as the wind steadied in the second half. The Lions won 13-3 and could not now lose the series.\n\nVivian Jenkins waxed lyrical in his cable for the Sunday Times. 'Glory Be! The day \u2013 the unforgettable, almost unbelievable day \u2013 has dawned at last. Mark well the date. It marks a turning point in Britain's rugby story.' After so many long years covering the Lions in New Zealand he could be forgiven, perhaps, for rejoicing. His longstanding colleague JBG Thomas was even quicker into print, the Western Mail match report appearing on the Cardiff streets by 6am that morning \u2013 barely an hour after the end of the match.\n\nThe Lions only had to draw in Auckland to fulfil Dr Smith's prophecy and become the first British & Irish side to win a series Down Under. The All Blacks established an 8-0 lead in a rough opening quarter before the Lions bounced back to equalise with a John penalty and a try by Peter Dixon just before half-time, converted by John. Near the end JPR Williams dropped a goal from 40 metres (winning a bet he had made with Bob Hiller) to put the Lions 14-11 ahead and all the New Zealanders could muster was a late penalty goal by fullback Laurie Mains to draw the match. Some of the Lions looked back in later years with a sense of frustration, because they felt that they could have signed off in style with a convincing win. But in the end, they had made history and had secured their legend.\n\nThe live middle-of-the-night radio commentaries of the earlier Tests had been followed closely by millions of enthusiasts at home. Satellite arrangements were relatively primitive at the time, but through special efforts the second half of that final Test was broadcast live on television. The thrill of seeing the grainy black-and-white pictures of that historic rugby match unfold from the other side of the world will remain in the memories of all those in Britain and Ireland who witnessed them.\n\nIt would also be far too easy and far too dismissive of the Lions' efforts to claim that it was simply a weak New Zealand team that they faced. History has shown before and since that there is absolutely no such thing, especially when they are playing on their own grounds. Meads may have been past his best or, more to the point, the likes of Willie-John McBride and company no longer feared him as Lions teams had once done. Syd Going and Bob Burgess were a half-back combination as good as any in New Zealand history, and the idea that New Zealand had suddenly become feeble is ridiculous.\n\nThis was still well before the days of mass communication and few of the Lions really grasped the sensation they had caused back in the home countries by their exploits. Many of them only realised the impact they had when they returned to Heathrow to find that thousands of people had come to welcome them \u2013 the conquering, history-making heroes.\n\nIt was no exaggeration to say it: rugby would never be the same again.\n\nIAN MCLAUCHLAN (Scotland)  \nToured: 1971 & 1974\n\nI didn't have much of a clue about what the Lions were. I put my name down because somebody told me I should, but I didn't think about it again until a month before the tour when a London journalist told me that he'd heard they were going to pick me. Then I went to Paris for the France match and met this funny little man called Carwyn James, who invited me out for a cup of tea. So I spoke to him for a while and he finished by saying, 'I'm looking forward to touring with you in the summer.' And I didn't know what to make of that. Then, later, Norman Mair of The Scotsman said to me, 'How did you get on with Carwyn James?' And I said, 'Fine. He's quite a funny little man, isn't he?' And Norman shot back, 'Don't say that \u2013 he's the coach of the Lions.'\n\nMERVYN DAVIES (Wales)  \nToured: 1971 & 1974\n\nSome people laughed at us for even daring to dream. Being invited to be a Lion brought with it considerable fear. It may sound melodramatic, but the only comparison I can give to getting ready to face the All Blacks is preparing for some kind of war. So many of the All Blacks forwards were heroes of mine, men like Colin Meads and Ken Gray. There were 30 of us and a whole nation of them, no Barmy Army to give us comfort from the side. The last Lions team that went to New Zealand, in 1966, had been massacred.\n\nPETER DIXON (England)  \nToured: 1971\n\nI was sitting in the Bodleian Library writing my BLit social anthropology thesis \u2013 'Some West African Mortuary Rites' \u2013 when someone told me I had been selected for the Lions. It was a complete surprise, as England had not shown much interest in me, and, by the time of the tour, I was 27 and had won just one cap (in the RFU Centenary game against a President's XV). I was playing for Oxford University as a postgraduate \u2013 and Harlequins after Christmas \u2013 and recall that John Reason had written in the press that I was the sort of 'rugged NZ-style forward' the Lions ought to look at. I knew a little about New Zealand rugby because we had a good team at Oxford with Chris Laidlaw at scrum-half. He had already played for the All Blacks and was a superb player, helping Oxford to victories over Northampton and Leicester. I imagine that Doug Smith, the manager, and Carwyn James would already have done their homework by the Varsity match.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI remember Carwyn James came and talked to me because I wasn't going to go in 1971. I thought it was time I gave my career a bit of attention and I remember Carwyn came over and it was one of those moments that hits you. I'm in my 70s now and it was one of those moments that comes back to you. He came to Belfast and said, 'I want to talk to you about who we should take to New Zealand. Who do you think will stand up to this?' Then at the end he said, 'I heard a rumour you're not available'. I said, 'It's about time I gave it a rest.' I'd been on three tours. He sat back and he took a big puff of his cigarette and looked at me and said, 'But I need you.' And you know, nobody had ever said that to me before. It makes you sit up when somebody says that. I tell you, when I came away from that lunch I was going to New Zealand. He said, 'This time it will be different.' When he said it, it was very powerful and very simple.\n\nJohn Bevan.\n\nJOHN DAWES (Wales)  \nToured: 1971. Coach: 1977\n\nMany people outside Wales did not really know much about Carwyn before the tour, but the success of the Lions made people sit up and take notice of him, and then Llanelli beat New Zealand soon afterwards. The coach in those days was not the all-important individual he is today. But going out to New Zealand and winning a massive series as part of a 26-match tour, it was Carwyn who set the standard for those who follow, and all the praise levied on him is still thoroughly deserved. You also have to have a top-class manager. Doug Smith managed the tour, and Carwyn never tried to interfere with that side of things. There was never a moment of doubt as to who was number one man on tour and that man was Doug.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nFor the first time we were on the right lines. We said, 'We're going to run at them.' It was a whole new philosophy and, of course, the backline was superb. I wouldn't have gone otherwise. I knew we had it in us. I always had faith. If you look at the backline: Gareth Edwards, Barry John, Mike Gibson, John Dawes, David Duckham, JPR, Gerald Davies. If you can't win with that you're not going to win anything. I thought, surely to God we can get eight men who can get them the ball!\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nMaybe in the past the Lions were a bit slow in admitting that they really wanted to win, maybe they were always a little bit apologetic about that. The early tours had very much an amateur ethos and even though we were still amateur in 1971, there were players who had been there before and they brought in the need to have a professional outlook, by which I mean they wanted to get serious.\n\nMervyn Davies.\n\nMERVYN DAVIES\n\nWe were the first breed of professionals with a small 'p' to come out of the United Kingdom and Ireland. We didn't consider the Lions tour to be a bit of a jolly \u2013 we wanted to go there and prove ourselves and win this series. We had a genuine desire backed up by ruthless commitment, real determination and no little skill. Everyone has this image of the 1971 Lions playing wonderful, expansive rugby throughout New Zealand, but the real truth was that the method was not important to us, it was just the result we wanted.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nGlasgow council said that no matter what happened I couldn't get any more time off for rugby. My second son was a week old when I left. Eileen has always said, 'If you get an opportunity take it.' Even when they said they weren't going to pay me, she said, 'Ach well, I'll just get a job.' We sold the car. I said to the bank to leave the mortgage until I got back, and we just made it happen.\n\nDOUG SMITH (Scotland)  \nToured: 1950. Manager: 1971\n\nWe went into selection incredibly thoroughly. Carwyn and I must have travelled about 12,000 miles each in the build-up, going to scruffy games, big games, getting to know all the possible contenders. We knew what we wanted and we sought advice from experienced men like Dawes, McBride and Gibson. Carwyn was the rugby brain, I backed the boys to the hilt and they knew it.\n\nJOHN DAWES\n\nDoug Smith said before the tour that we would win this series 2 -1 with one Test drawn. That was a bit frightening to hear at the time and we were all embarrassed by that more than anything else. Everyone was well aware that the Lions never won in New Zealand.\n\nDOUG SMITH\n\nI got respect from the boys and I respected them. Above all, you have to get the right gel, the right spirit. I went on determination, dedication and discipline. The first day in New Zealand I stepped out of the lift and saw four Welshmen with Prince of Wales feathers on their chests. I told them I'd give them two minutes to put on the Lion and when they came back and went to sit together I split them up among players of other nationalities.\n\nPowerful All Blacks winger, Bryan Williams.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nA lot of the party had been to New Zealand before either with Wales or the Lions, so there were no real surprises. Carwyn James was brilliant at feeding off the experience of those seasoned players. You have to be so mentally strong to prepare for an itinerary facing Canterbury, and then New Zealand, and then Wellington, then New Zealand again and so on.\n\nPETER DIXON\n\nIn our warm-up week training in Bournemouth, Willie-John McBride and Ray McLoughlin said it would be tough in New Zealand. So in training they deliberately had people standing on your feet and holding you down at the lineout, which Colin Meads had been doing for years with impunity. If we hadn't done it, we wouldn't have been prepared at all, but it was still a shock because the physical challenge when we got there was so different to a week in the sun in Bournemouth.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nThere had been a setback in our first game when we were beaten by Queensland \u2013 we had to play two games in Australia on the way out. But in all honesty we were so jetlagged. We had no idea what time, day or place it was.\n\nJOHN TAYLOR (Wales)  \nToured: 1968 & 1971\n\nThe previous two Lions tours were fairly disastrous... and the worst fears seemed more than justified when Queensland beat us in the very first match. Jet lag, or as we found after our medical lecture from Dr JPR Williams, circadian disrhythmia, was an impressive curtain to hide behind.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nIt meant that we were written off before we had even set foot in New Zealand. A lot of the younger boys like Barry, John Taylor, Gerald Davies and myself had gained earlier Lions experience and along with Carwyn's quiet method of bringing everyone on and building up the winning mentality, there was plenty of self belief.\n\nDOUG SMITH\n\n'Get your retaliation in first' was one of Carwyn's little inventions. We had a side with huge character, you had to be tough, physically and mentally, to take it.\n\nJOHN DAWES\n\nCarwyn like to talk to the players individually and dine with them; his man-management was excellent, and also being a professional man he had a rapport with the media. I can't remember him ever losing his temper and he was also a great listener, especially to a forward like Ray McLoughlin. Ray was a great 'probability man'. To him, rugby was like a game of chess and Ray had to work out all the options on offer in any particular situation, and then explain them to whoever was listening. When he roomed with Barry John, Barry would say that he just used to go to sleep with Ray going on and on about some aspect or other about the game.\n\nPETER DIXON\n\nJohn Dawes was a very easy captain, who did not need to shout. He was so relaxed, and nothing fazed him, to the extent that he'd even have a joke on the field during matches. He was also a good player, with his weight of pass and softness of hands benefiting the players around him. He always seemed to know what Barry John would do, and he brought out the best in Mike Gibson, forcing him to fade at just the right time when we were bringing JPR into the line. But Willie-John McBride was one of the rocks around whom we stood. The backs scored the tries, but the forwards still had to win the game, and you sense that whatever happened, Willie-John would have punched us home and made us bloody win.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nDawes was a great passer of the ball, it was a delight to play on the wing outside the man. What he always had was confidence in the people outside him, he was always willing to deliver a good ball to the next man and he would never just shovel it on. If he couldn't give a good pass to you, he would hold onto the ball. And Barry was always on the lookout for something. They were all very special players.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nCarwyn must have spent whole months preparing for that tour. Before one of the games, for example, we played football. The press couldn't believe it \u2013 there wasn't a rugby ball in sight, because he wanted to have a change of focus so that the constant intensity of the tour didn't have a negative effect. He also sent boys on holiday mid-tour to take them out the firing line. Before the Otago game we all trained on one side of the pitch and Barry John was over on the opposite side with a bunch of kids. He was the goalie and they were kicking penalties at him. Every now and again we used to go out on a cross-country run, and Barry would just say, 'Oh no, I don't believe in that.' I remember one time we ran into this wood and when we came out the other side to go along a wee stretch of road back into the field where we had started, a flatbed lorry drove by with Barry sitting on the back. If anyone else did that Carwyn would have lost the plot but Barry got away with it. He used to say, 'I play with my brain.' And that was the way it was.\n\nJOHN DAWES\n\nBarry John went from the Prince to the King in New Zealand. People forget that he toured New Zealand with Wales in 1969 and really hadn't established himself. During the Wales Grand Slam in 1971 he was adequate, but in New Zealand, his tactical appreciation and general game were astonishing. He really came of age on that tour, and he developed an incredible self-confidence that he could do what he wanted and he knew that we would react to him. People forget that he played 17 games on that tour, he wasn't held back. He just took New Zealand by the scruff of the neck \u2013 and it was the New Zealanders who gave him the title King John.\n\nBARRY JOHN (Wales)  \nToured: 1968 & 1971\n\nI was ready to turn down the chance to tour because it had been a very physical Five Nations. We won the Grand Slam but I had been knocked around against Scotland and then broke my nose against the French. I felt I needed the summer off to recover and so when I got the call-up for the tour, I didn't answer it. A concerned Carwyn came to see me, told me how important I was to his plans and eventually his words persuaded me. I am glad they did, because that kicked off three of the most magical months anyone could ever have had. That tour completely changed my career and our victory made the Lions, and rugby union. It was front-page news everywhere, we got national television airtime, we were asked to do magazine interviews and we found ourselves in the gossip columns. The triumph in the Test series was not only historic, but it also made rugby union more appealing to the general public.\n\nJOHN DAWES\n\nMike Gibson was also so influential on that tour. Barry John and Mike were like chalk and cheese. Barry was a total extrovert and Mike was much quieter, but the way they were similar was in their extraordinary skill levels. JPR and Gerald Davies might have been regarded as two of the tour's real superstars but Barry and Mike were the ones who really stood out for me. Mike went out on tour as the second fly-half and not a centre, and I don't think it was a deliberate thing with Carwyn that Mike ended up in the centre. It just happened. Mike had a very serious attitude to rugby but the main thing was that he and Barry thought at the same level. Their partnership was really key.\n\nGareth Edwards hands-off Bob Burgess during the Third Test in Wellington.\n\nBOB HILLER\n\nAbove all, the 1971 Lions had wonderful players. It was a great backline \u2013 Gareth Edwards, Barry John, Gerald Davies, John Dawes, Mike Gibson, David Duckham, JPR Williams \u2013 all legends in the making. Carwyn was phenomenal, miles ahead of anyone we'd met in coaching. He was a highly intelligent bloke, quite quiet, but a great coach in terms of ideas and how to apply them. John Dawes was easily the best captain I played under.\n\nYou were happy whenever you saw Gerald Davies or David Duckham get the ball. Duckham was a fantastic player who could win a match for you. He scored six tries in one of the midweek games when it was pissing with rain, and he ran towards the touch in-goal line on a couple of occasions just to make my conversions more difficult.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nEvery New Zealand side has a good pack and set of backs, so whenever you go, you know you are going to be tested and to everyone's credit, we not only concentrated like mad on the Tests but also the huge provincial games, when the home players take such enormous pride in pulling on their provincial colours.\n\nDOUG SMITH\n\nAll our games were torrid affairs. After you'd won on the Saturday some clown would spout, 'Wait until you get to Wanganui \u2013 we'll kill ya!'\n\nBarry John glides through the All Blacks' defence.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY (Ireland)  \nToured: 1971 & 1974\n\nWe had some craic. Do you remember Bill McKay? Great Irish and Lions forward of the 1940s and 1950s. A hard man who emigrated to New Zealand. We were in Napier, I think. He introduced himself, then said, 'Do you fancy hunting tomorrow?' I said, 'How do you mean hunting?' 'Wild boar.' I said, 'God, that would be great.' He said, 'I'll pick you up in the morning at six.' To my surprise Ian McLauchlan said he'd come with me. We got into this jeep and drove over hills and across this river and drove halfway up a mountain and then we stopped and we had to get out. There were Maoris there. They put a rifle over my shoulder and up on a horse I got. We edged along the mountain on these horses and if you fell off you were dead. We got to the top and Rua, one of the Maori fellas, says, 'Right, now we go hunting.' McLauchlan went off silently and sat on a rock. He said, 'I'm having none of this shit.' I had my rugby boots on me. We were climbing down the mountain into this ravine. We had a pack of dogs with us and the dogs caught a boar. I stuck the ol' knife in and rammed it down and that was the end of the boar. I thought, 'Jesus, look at me, I'm king of the mountains!' Then Rua takes the knife and cuts the boar down the middle and the guts flop out in a big ball. And the smell! Then he ties the two back legs together and he says, 'You kill, you carry.' And he threw it over my neck.\n\nWe had to go back up the mountain with this dead boar on me. Eventually we got back up to the top and there's McLauchlan sitting on his little rock breaking his bollocks laughing. The day comes to an end; back on the horses, back across the mountain and we got to one of the stations, or villages, on this farm and they were having this party. The worst part was on the Friday on the front page of the New Zealand Herald there's McLauchlan dressed up in a chef's outfit with a big white hat on top of his head and a great big knife and he's standing beside the boar I killed. I said, 'McLauchlan, you shit!'\n\nGareth Edwards slips the tackle of Wayne Cottrell and races away from Alex Wyllie and Ian Kirkpatrick as John Taylor moves to back him up.\n\nPETER DIXON\n\nSocially it was great, and I was a single man. As an anthropologist I also liked seeing new places, and I'm only sad that I've never been back to New Zealand. I tried to get out to Maori parties in particular, and I remember coming back from an all-night party one morning and meeting Carwyn, who asked me if I was out for an early morning walk. I said, yes, I hadn't been able to sleep \u2013 which in a sense was true.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nIn New Zealand you can't do anything without being noticed. I remember going for a walk in Auckland on the night we arrived and at the first corner we came to was a travel agent with two huge windows and both were filled with profiles of the Lions, with photos, age, who you played for, everything. Two blocks further along the road it was the same again. That was a real culture shock to us. Everyone wanted to talk to you. We were asked not to drink midweek, and one night we were stuck in this small town with nothing to do, so John Pullin, Sean Lynch, myself and Mike Roberts went to this quiet bar and said to the guy behind the counter that we didn't want to speak to anyone, we just wanted a quiet drink. We ended up absolutely blotto. But Carwyn knew everything, so the next morning he said we were going to have a cavalry charge, and 'You four are going to lead it.' Of course, the rest of the boys knew we had been on the piss, and they were all shouting to get a move on. We had to charge around six fields about three times. I developed a real admiration for Lynchie that day. He was running and throwing up at the same time. He'd had a bucket load more than the rest of us.\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL (Scotland)  \nToured: 1971 & 1974\n\nRay McLoughlin is a very senior financier and a very sharp guy, and after our third or fourth game we were beginning to get quite irritated because they were being quite restrictive with what the New Zealand Rugby Union were giving us. So we had a players' meeting and Ray said he had worked out that with the size of the crowds, the cost of the tickets and the number of games we'd played, the tour had already been paid for. So we agreed that we should look to get a little something more from the NZRFU and decided to ask for two bottles of wine on the table at every dinner. So we sent the committee away to do that, and that's what we got. We were delighted. It's the way things were done in those days.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nWe knew we had to get off to a good start with a win against Counties\/Thames Valley in Pukekohe, and then we were up and running. Then it was Wellington, who were New Zealand's equivalent of Leicester Tigers. We played some absolutely wonderful rugby against them \u2013 we scored nine tries to beat them by around 40 points, and local pulses started racing. They realised that the Lions were not lambs.\n\nJOHN TAYLOR\n\nJohn Bevan on the wing started off magnificently, he was one of the great players before he left for rugby league. But both he and Chico Hopkins, the scrum-half, began to suffer from homesickness. Both were young and both were from the valleys, John from the Rhondda and Chico from the Llynfi.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nWhen we played Wellington I was playing against Graham Williams, a guy who played for New Zealand about six times and he was at the end of his career. I always obstructed guys at the back of the lineout, pushed them or blocked them. It just meant our fly-half could do whatever he wanted to do and you'd get away with it once or maybe twice, but then a guy might give you a smack. About 15 minutes into the game I obviously pissed this guy off and he just punched me and I punched him back and he punched me again and I started laughing. I thought, 'This is fucking ridiculous, I have no right to be punching this guy and he had every right to punch me because I was messing him around the place.'\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nThe turning point of the tour was the provincial game against Wellington, with half the Test team, and we beat them 47-9.\n\nDOUG SMITH\n\nThey were bastards, the New Zealanders at that time. That game against Canterbury, where we lost Sandy Carmichael, the front of his face smashed to bits, black eyes fit to burst. The New Zealanders made the mistake of trying to smash us to pieces and got their come-uppance by us hitting them back. That was what riled them most.\n\nGareth Edwards spins the ball out to Barry John.\n\nRAY McLOUGHLIN\n\nCanterbury certainly had a reputation of being harder, as they call it in New Zealand, than everyone else. New Zealanders are great ones for intimidating guys on the grounds that once you've done that they are a walkover. This was going to be a very difficult match and I had been urging everyone to show their teeth immediately in the face of the intimidation that was bound to happen. That was essential to avoid being psychologically beaten.\n\nJOHN DAWES\n\nAlthough we never said it, the Canterbury game was pinpointed as the big game before the First Test. However, Carwyn did not play Barry John in that game, he thought that Canterbury might go after him so Mike Gibson was the fly-half instead. That was the one and only time that Barry was protected by Carwyn.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nIn any rugby, if somebody hits you then you have to hit them back. It doesn't matter when and how you do it but you've got to make them absolutely understand that you are not a soft mark. Because if you don't they will do it again, and again, and then somebody else will do it and you'll just become a bloody punch bag. I came from a background where the punch bag was always on the other side. When we played Kings Country I had the guy propping against me in all sorts of trouble, and when he dropped his hand I said, 'Don't even think about it pal or I'll put you in hospital. I don't get punched at home and I don't get punched out here.' The New Zealanders believed that the Lions in previous times were all about fair play \u2013 but after that Colin Meads said, 'These Lions don't believe in fairy tales.'\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nIt was the big game going into the First Test and Ray and I were on the pitch, so it looked like we were going to be the props in the Test side. I don't think we realised what we were going into against Canterbury. It happened early on when I got a backhander at a lineout right across the left of my face. I went down and the medics came on the pitch to check it out before I played on. There were punch-ups all over the park, and the story about the ref saying, 'I'll referee the game and you can do what you like,' is true. He denies it, but that did happen. Not long later I drove into a ruck, hit the deck and fed the ball back, then I got kicked in the other eye. I thought, 'Fair enough, that's life,' and I just carried on. It was the backhander that had caused the real damage.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nAlister Hopkinson was propping against Sandy Carmichael and he just kept punching him in the face. Canterbury went out to kick the shit out of us. We beat them 14-3 and it was a bit of a hiding. They went out with this thuggish attitude. Gareth Edwards was running across the pitch and Alex Wyllie came up behind him and punched him in the back of the neck. Edwards and somebody else went to the referee and said, 'What are you going to do?' And the ref said, 'I'm only refereeing what I can see.' It's a bit like saying, 'Good luck lads, do whatever you want.'\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nBy the time I came off the pitch, both eyes were pretty well shut, so they sat me on the bench and put ice packs on my face. McLauchlan came towards me to see how I was just as I went to blow my nose, but it was blocked and because the sinus was cracked the air blew into my eye socket, which inflated like a balloon. That was the first time \u2013 and probably the last time \u2013 I ever saw fear in Ian's eyes.\n\nPETER DIXON\n\nThe Canterbury match stands out as brutal. It was a battle all the time, primarily among the forwards. At the lineout there'd be a fight at the start of it, then the ref sorted it out; you'd have the lineout again, and then there'd be a few sly punches as you were running across the field. There was also trouble at the scrums with their second-rows throwing punches through on our props. I respect Sandy for not retaliating, but if he'd said anything to me I would have swung one in. I was not really aware he was being hit, mainly because everyone was fighting their own corner. I was determined that if anything came my way it was going back again, and there are a few pictures of me trying to flatten Grizz Wyllie, and vice versa. It carried on between Wyllie and myself a few years later when Canterbury were on tour in the UK.\n\nGerald Davies and Bryan Williams in a foot-race for the ball.\n\nRAY McLOUGHLIN\n\nIn that game there was a degree of intimidation that, to my mind, was unacceptable. I was pack-leader and I was tempted to take the team off the pitch on the basis that it was the best way of making a protest and, properly handled, could be presented as not being afraid but as requiring more courage than not doing it. Maybe I chickened out but I felt that with the macho approach New Zealanders had it would have been seen as a weakness.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI don't think there was a ball on the field for the first half hour. We lost Carmichael and then McLoughlin hit Wyllie in the head and broke his thumb, so the two props were gone. Slattery got injured, Mick Hipwell got injured and there were others. It was bloody nonsense and the referee was a disaster. There was a premonition that there could be trouble.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nHopkinson came from the front of the lineout and punched me in the mouth, a punch I never saw, so a cowardly act. He smashed my front two teeth and concussed me, but I eventually got back on my feet. Peter Dixon tells the story about me asking him where were we. He obviously was able to reply and say 'Canterbury', but when I, like a drunk, asked him again 10 minutes later he didn't have an answer as someone had punched him in the meantime.\n\nSEAN LYNCH (Ireland)  \nToured: 1971\n\nPut it this way, I was injured for the Canterbury match and from the stands it was one of the most vicious matches I have ever seen. They were the heavy mob and you had to go for them because they were going for you. My idea on the field is to take your own man out and if everyone does likewise you'll be all right.\n\nJOHN REASON (writing in The Victorious Lions)\n\nThe sight of Sandy Carmichael's face as he lay collapsed on the masseur's table in the Lions' dressing room after the match against Canterbury will stay in the memory of all who saw it for as long as they live. His left eye was closed and a huge blue swelling of agonised flesh hung out from the cheekbone like a grotesque plum. His right eye was a slit between the puffed skin above and below it. His right eyelid was gashed and straggling with blood. Another gash snagged away from the corner of his eye. He was quivering with emotion and frustration. His hands shook as they tried to hold the ice packs on the swellings.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI remember Doug Smith coming on the bus after the game and saying to me, 'The King is dead, long live the King \u2013 we'll beat them All Blacks next week,' and half our team had gone to the hospital. I'm sitting looking around me and saying, 'I'm needing a lot of convincing here.'\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nWe went to watch carriage racing at the local track that night, and I put my sunglasses on because my face didn't look too well. Some of the New Zealanders were there sneering, 'Why are you wearing sunglasses at night?' And I said, 'So nobody else can see exactly what you have done to my face.' The next morning, big Doug Smith, the tour manager, came to my room and said, 'I'm terribly sorry Sandy, but it will take eight weeks for you to repair yourself and there's only eight weeks left \u2013 so, you're going home.' And that was it. I was sharing with David Duckham, who was one of the finest gentlemen I've ever met. He said, 'Now Sandy, it's up to you, we can sit in this room for another two or three hours and when you're ready to go and meet the boys I'll come with you. I'll stay with you.' So, that's what we did \u2013 and he stayed with me the whole time. When we eventually went down we discovered that Ray McLoughlin had been sent home as well because he had broken a scaphoid. It had been like Custer's last stand.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nI was left behind in Canterbury to get dental reconstruction or whatever.\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nI've never named names over that and I never will, and the reason is that if I tell then the story ends. I don't want them ever to forget and if I leave it this way then they can't forget. The only other person who knew is dead, and that is Dr Smith who promised not to tell anybody. I got a phone call from New Zealand the last time the Lions were there in 2005 asking me about it \u2013 and that's great because they haven't been able to draw a line under it. For years and years, British teams had gone across to New Zealand and South Africa and had the shit kicked out of them. After what happened in Canterbury the Lions were fairly angry \u2013 and the Test side decided they were not going to sit back and take it anymore.\n\nSandy Carmichael shows his battle wounds after the Canterbury match.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nIt was just sheer nonsense. All sorts of stuff. Hopkinson and Wyllie were the two guys who started it. Hopkinson is dead now. There was a guy Tane Norton who was captain of the All Blacks. He was always a good friend but he wasn't proud of that stuff. There were two or three thugs on the field. They say it's part of the game and they get away with that. We knew they would target people, like Edwards. I'd seen it all before. We won the battle and we won the match and we won it well and it gave me a feeling of what we had. We had guys who wouldn't lie down.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nIn the Canterbury game, Arthur Lewis had said to young John Bevan, 'If you get the chance, don't try to run around them, run through them.' And on the way to the clinching try he knocked three of their guys down. It was an amazing try. Two of them converged on him and he blasted his way right through the middle of the pair of them. You don't do that very often in New Zealand.\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nBevan knocked two guys out the way like a bowling ball going through the middle of two pins. He was a very fast man and there wasn't an inch of fat on him \u2013 and to this day I'm in awe of that score.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nThe First Test, to be honest with you, was over in the blink of an eye. It was probably the most intense game of rugby I ever played in. They just came and came and came at us all the time. The All Blacks are generally pretty clinical \u2013 if they have a two-on-one they tend to finish it \u2013 but that day they seemed to pass when they should have kept it. Our tackling was ferocious. I don't know how many tackles I made that day, but it was a lot, and when we came off the field we were elated but we were on our knees \u2013 really tired. I've never seen my try again. I did an interview in Wales and the guy gave me a DVD which he said was the 1971 tour in colour, so I've got that at home, but I've never really bothered about it.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nNew Zealand made a quite magnificent start to the First Test, we had to defend heroically, but their scores didn't come. When we won the match that really shook them.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nThe ma\u00eetre d' at our hotel in Dunedin was talking to four of us on the eve of the First Test \u2013 Gareth, Mike Roberts, me and somebody else \u2013 and he stated New Zealand would win, so we obviously said rubbish and he was so adamant we inquired as to the best bottle of wine he had in store. Chateau Lafite 1934. So the bottle was put up as the wager. The following evening, after the match, the four of us sat at the table and called him over and he spent a few minutes in an emotional state and then proceeded to open the wine and smell it and gaze at it and then we said, 'Pour it out into the four glasses,' and no, no he had to swirl it around in the glass first until we said, 'Pour it out in four quarters!' and he did reluctantly and then we drank the 1934 prize down the hatch. It was gone in seconds after 37 years of care. He cried.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nI have to say I didn't rate Ray McLoughlin as highly as everybody else seemed to. He never did anything outside the scrum. He was totally immobile. It pisses me off that after 40 years people are still saying that he was the first choice loose-head. He wasn't even there. When we won that First Test match he was back in Ireland, and Sandy was back in Scotland. The players who won the Test match, their names are there and anyone who wants to make a song and dance about the players who went home, well, would we have won the Test match if they hadn't gone home? I don't think so. That's what I think and you can write that any way you like.\n\nPETER DIXON\n\nWe were in with a shout of winning the Second Test but then Ian Kirkpatrick scored a wonder try running through the middle of most of the pack and then the backs. They scored two tries down the blind-side in that Test. That was John Taylor's side! Although I should also have been covering across.\n\nJOHN TAYLOR\n\nThe highlight of the games between the Second and Third Tests was a dazzling performance by Gerald Davies against Hawke's Bay. The match was rather ill tempered, but Gerald was above such things, and scored four of the best tries one could hope to see. Having side-stepped, swerved and outsprinted all opposition on the wing for the three of them, he moved into the centre and split the defence open for the fourth, with his unique ability to side-step at full pace.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nOn a Lions tour of New Zealand, probably more so even than in South Africa, the next game is always 'the big one' for the locals and in the press. 'Wait till Canterbury. Or Wellington, or Auckland, or Taranaki.' And so on. At the end of the tour, it was, 'Wait till you get to Hawke's Bay.'\n\nThere were strong-arm tactics employed against us that day. But again, we were playing the game in the way that Carwyn James wanted us to play. Run, attack, use all that you have. For all their physicality, what came through in the end was our ability to play rugby and attack from all corners of the field. I think the moves of three of the four tries started from our own half, they were all counter-attacking plays.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nIt was uncanny, because we came off after the Second Test defeat convinced that we could win the series. I was getting back from a hamstring injury in that Second Test and did not have a particularly good game, while the All Blacks played very well, with Ian Kirkpatrick and Syd Going outstanding. We prepared well ahead of the Third Test and Carwyn changed our tactical approach by sticking Derek Quinnell at blind-side flanker with a clear instruction to stop Going. Fair play to DQ, he did. We had a great start with a couple of first half tries from Gerald Davies and Barry John.\n\nJOHN TAYLOR\n\nFrom the moment we arrived in Wellington for the Third Test, our thoughts were only on rugby. We all knew that this was the most important match of our lives. After 17 minutes, it was New Zealand 0, British & Irish Lions 13. It had been a glorious 17 minutes! The All Blacks managed a solitary try in the second half but we won 13-3 and, suddenly, we had created history.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nThe key for us was containing them up front. We beat them in the First Test and that was a big shock to them. In the Second Test they fluked it. The best we played in the series was probably the Second Test, but we were a little bit over-confident. We knew we could easily hold them up front, and we thought if we did that the backs would run riot \u2013 but the All Blacks got two breaks and finished them both, while we got umpteen breaks which we didn't finish off.\n\nBut in the Third Test their forward effort collapsed and we won it really, really easily, and that killed them off. Bringing back Brian Lochore, which they did, was wrong. There must have been young guys in New Zealand who were fitter and hungrier. We viewed that selection as a sign of desperation.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nThe last Test was a toughie. I knew the referee certainly wouldn't be on our side and the crowd certainly wouldn't be on our side and it was one mammoth game, 14-14. In one way we could have and should have played better. We didn't play all that well and it was a massive relief that we'd won the series when we drew that game. Against all odds.\n\nJOHN TAYLOR\n\nWe should have won comfortably but in the end we needed an unlikely JPR Williams score \u2013 some fullbacks are renowned for their drop-kicking, others are not and JPR was the latter category. Therefore, when he let fly from the 10-yard line it was not only his London Welsh colleagues who were sceptical. But the ball sailed over. All the records were broken, the series was won and Barry John, with a massive 180 points, was the King of New Zealand.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nThe odd time I'll speak at a lunch or a dinner and I mention that backline people sit and gasp and that's 40 years ago and they still remember those names. I couldn't tell you who played on the last Lions tour. Barry John was top of his game, but it wasn't just him. The miracles of Gerald Davies and Mike Gibson, who was at his peak; wee Gareth and JPR, those guys were all at their peak. Something I'll take with me to my grave, the pleasure and privilege of playing with those guys. It was sheer brilliance.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nMy father was a great admirer of the All Blacks, and he could never imagine anyone beating them. His greatest hero was George Nepia, the legendary fullback. My father had watched him play against Llanelli at Stradey Park. One of the nicest things was that on the tour in 1971 I got to meet George Nepia at Hawke's Bay, and had a photograph taken that I was able to take back to show my father.\n\nBARRY JOHN\n\nIn New Zealand, I had been given the tag of 'The King'. My face appeared everywhere and the fact that I scored 10 of our 13 points in the decisive Third Test led to 'King John wins game for the Lions' headlines everywhere. It was never something I was comfortable with and the players used to take the mickey out of me over it. When I walked into the dressing room, they would stand up in unison and bow. It was their way of making sure I never got too big for my boots.\n\nJOHN DAWES\n\nWas that series win the highlight of my career? At the time I did not think so but on reflection, it had to be \u2013 to go to New Zealand and beat them. However, there was one match that was my absolute highlight \u2013 another game involving New Zealand, but this time for the Barbarians, two years later. In pure rugby terms, that has to be the highlight because of the quality of play produced by both sides. We never dropped the ball once and what we achieved was quite fantastic. Mervyn and Gerald both dropped out through injury and as they sat watching from the stands, one of them turned to the other and said, 'Not being out there is the biggest mistake we have made in our rugby careers.'\n\nBARRY JOHN\n\nNothing summed it up more than the August day we landed back at Heathrow airport. There were so many people to greet us that morning. It was the day the authorities realised they needed to review airport security because a bus load of Welsh fans from Maesteg turned up on the runway about 20 yards from our aeroplane.\n\nThat Lions tour raised the profile of rugby union from Division Three South to the top of the Premier League. Our feats in New Zealand have never been achieved since, but winning over a four-Test campaign down there is as close as you will get to an impossible task in rugby. It will only get harder for the Lions given the close proximity of games on tours and how difficult it is to put together the intensity needed to beat New Zealand over, what is now, three successive weekends.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nDoug Smith said at the beginning of the tour that we would win the Test series 2\u00bd to 1\u00bd, and that there were two fatal flaws in New Zealand rugby that we would exploit. So in every single interview he did he was asked what one of the flaws was, and he always said he'd tell just before he mounted the plane to go home. So at the end of the tour he was asked again what the flaws were, and he said, 'None \u2013 New Zealand rugby is in great shape. We're just in better shape.' That was it. He had played them along.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nWe had no idea how big it had become when we were out there, no real sense of history in the making. It was 1971. What were mobile phones? What was the connection between New Zealand and back at home? If you wanted a phone call you had to give 24 hours' notice. The person who drew our attention to it was Cliff Morgan, who came out to commentate for television \u2013 when the television people at home realised that something big was happening they sent over Cliff.\n\nI was talking to him one day just after he got there and he told me that I would not believe the interest at home, and that was the first time you really understood. We carried on in the Test series but it was only really when we got back to Heathrow that it hit me. I remember saying at the time, looking at the thousands of people, that this is what I imagine it was like when the Beatles arrived.\n\nJOHN DAWES\n\nWinning the series in New Zealand in 1971 and then with the 1974 team following it up in South Africa, the whole concept of Lions tours changed. Until 1971, the Lions had always been regarded as a group of players who could sing and also play a bit, and although naturally they tried to win, it wasn't everything.\n\nBARRY JOHN\n\nThe predictions from New Zealand were that we would be easy meat for Colin Meads and the men in black. As predictions go, it was right up there with Michael Fish: 'There won't be a hurricane!'\n\nJohn Dawes, Doug Smith, Colin Meads, Carwyn James and Gordon Brown following the Fourth Test.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nYou sort of get a taste for it. It was because we won in '71 I said, 'Right, I'll have another go at these buggers in South Africa,' in 1974.\n\n## CHAPTER NINETEEN\n\n# [THE INVINCIBLES  \n1974](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nA KEEN debate is always raged as to which have been the greatest Lions. Was it the 1971 party, for their brilliant efforts in proving that it could be done, in blazing the glorious trail and reversing history, therefore proving to the parties that came after them that to defeat the All Blacks was not an impossibility?\n\nOr was it the 1974 group, which overran South African rugby in such a devastating manner, which went through the entire tour unbeaten, and which also turned history on its head by taking on South African rugby up front and beating and beasting the goliaths of the game? What is the answer to the debate? Frankly, there are many involved in British and Irish rugby who are simply thrilled to be given a choice. What is certain is that both tours catapulted players into the stratosphere, numbering them as amongst the all-time greats before the tour had even ended, at a time when Britannia, along with Ireland, did indeed rule the waves.\n\nWillie-John McBride's name is indelibly linked in the archives of the 1974 Lions to South Africa. Making a then unprecedented fifth tour with the Lions, he captained an unbeaten team that set numerous new records on its way to becoming the first international side to win a four-match series in the Republic since 1896 (3-0, with a draw in the final Test). Above all, however, he did so much personally to ensure the tour's success, fueled by the scars which previous defeat had left on him.\n\nThe political climate was strongly inclined against the tour, the Westminster Government having declared that they could not support the visit. Shortly before the team were due to leave Britain, McBride gathered his party around him in a London hotel besieged by anti-apartheid demonstrators. As the clamour outside penetrated the room he told them of the huge task ahead of them. Aside from the political protests, he went on to recall his past experiences in New Zealand and South Africa. How his team would face intimidation and dirty play, differing foreign law interpretations and referees likely to favour the home side. The fight would be hard, he said, and he offered anyone who didn't feel up to the physical and mental challenge the option of dropping out from the visit there and then.\n\nNo one faltered as the party silently contemplated four hard months ahead. The silence was apparently broken by the tough Pontypool hooker, Bobby Windsor, who chimed in his broad East Wales accent that, 'I'm bloody well going to enjoy this!' McBride had set his stall out and his players were going to follow where he led.\n\nHe was, in many ways, years ahead of his time. The term 'great enforcer' was a popular press expression used years later to describe Martin Johnson's attributes as a lock and captain both of a successful Lions outfit and England Rugby World Cup team. But the phrase could so easily have applied to McBride a generation earlier.\n\nIf McBride was the 1974 tour's enforcer, its brains were his Ballymena clubmate, Syd Millar. The Ulstermen formed an impressive double-act. The uncompromising mental attitude and physical fitness they generated in their talented players should not be underestimated when assessing the reasons for the team's success.\n\nMillar, a triple Lion (1959, 1962 and 1968 vintages) had twice toured South Africa before becoming one of British and Irish rugby's outstanding coaches with an unequalled knowledge of the mechanics of forward play. He had an abundance of talent at his disposal and he set about moulding a winning side with relish.\n\nWas there ever a better quad of props in Lions rugby than Sandy Carmichael, Ian 'Mighty Mouse' McLauchlan, Fran Cotton and Mike Burton? The unlikeliest supporter for this proposition was JPR Williams, the Welsh fullback. JPR so relished the physical engagement of rugby that, on tour, he enjoyed nothing better than offering himself as a tight-head prop for practice sessions. He'd adapted quite easily to the role on tour in New Zealand in 1971 and enthusiastically presented himself for duty again in 1974.\n\nAfter a particularly rigorous work-out during which he had been popped out of the front-row during a practice in the Kruger National Park, JPR told the Daily Telegraph's John Reason, 'There seems to have been an improvement in technique [since 1971].'\n\nIn the second-row Gordon Brown of Scotland was at the peak of his formidable powers. His work in the lineout was a rich source of possession for the tourists' pacey backs and he perfectly complemented the skipper in the pack's engine room. Built like a tank he also crossed for eight tries on the tour, establishing a new record for a forward.\n\nFergus Slattery, Mervyn Davies and Roger Uttley were the ever-present back-row for the Test series but their high-octane performances were fuelled by the knowledge that they were under huge pressure for their places from their 'shadows'. Tony Neary, Andy Ripley, Stewart McKinney and Tom David pressed them hard, Ripley losing out to 'Merve the Swerve' very narrowly, apparently on account of the Welshman's superior off-loading skills in the tackle.\n\nResults and analysis show that modern Lions rugby reached its peak on this tour \u2013 no fully representative side before or since has been unbeaten. But looking back, while the stock of forward play was high, there were perhaps signs that back play was entering a recession. The counter-attacking play that had set the 1971 tour on fire was still there, and JJ Williams, JPR Williams and Andy Irvine were as exciting a trio of runners as South Africa has ever seen.\n\nBut a preoccupation with set moves and too much use of the crash-ball in midfield meant that the bright, carefree approach seen in New Zealand three years earlier was less evident. Ian McGeechan and Dick Milliken in the centre, however, defended superbly and were the ideal combination.\n\nGareth Edwards was a commanding figure behind the scrum and revelled in the gilt-edged possession his forwards provided. He himself believed that in 1974 he was at a career high. He had assumed the mantle of playmaker from Barry John and masterminded the side in the Test series. The best of Phil Bennett's dazzling running at outside-half was also seen on this tour, while the level-headed and calculating play of McGeechan and Milliken outside him added to the Lions' edge in the Tests. JPR Williams was reliability personified behind them.\n\nThe Lions also had some magnificent characters, notably Windsor, around whom a host of legends grew, Mike Burton, who would have served the Test team well, and Andy Ripley, the one and only. Ripley was a Test match player to his bootlaces though he only ever played one for the Lions. His rescue of a stray kitten on tour, the bulletins in the papers as he nursed it and the picture of a local citizen who agreed to adopt it, made the great man as popular in South Africa as he was with his own party.\n\nIt was a ferocious tour, and the ascendancy of the Lions provoked an even more ferocious backlash from the home teams, with provincial opposition trying desperately to soften up the Lions so they could be finished off in the Tests. But this Lions team was too hard, too durable and too fierce in itself. There were some gory punch-ups during the tour, the kind of thing that would have kept a whole battery of citing officers in employment had there been any in that era.\n\nThe tour also, apparently, gave rise to the '99 call'. This was meant to be a call used by either McBride or whoever was the Lions captain on any match, as a reaction to an outburst. It meant that everyone should simply throw punches at their nearest opponent, on the basis that a referee might send off a lone puncher but he could hardly send off a whole team.\n\nThe call has become legendary. Or perhaps mythical. In fact, you can barely find a Lion who ever heard the call being made, and plenty more who believe that it was simply a figment of the imagination, a legend that grew in the telling. Even McBride himself, at a push, will admit that he may have called '99' once but probably no more.\n\nIn the run-up to the First Test the Lions won seven matches, scoring 294 points including 43 tries. Records galore were established in the 97-0 win against the South-Western Districts at Mossel Bay. It was the biggest win by any international touring side in South Africa; Alan Old's 37 points remain the most points in a match by an individual player for the Lions on tour and JJ Williams' six tries matched the Lions record established by David Duckham against the West Coast\/Buller Combined at Greymouth on the 1971 tour.\n\nThe 1974 tour party.\n\nThen came the First Test, and glory began to beckon. Admittedly, the Lions were forced to battle hard for a 12-3 victory in the opening Test in Cape Town. The Newlands ground was heavy after rain but the Lions forwards gradually overcame their opponents. The tourists came from behind to strangle the Springboks, the pack's quick ball giving Phil Bennett and Gareth Edwards the scope to dictate the tactical course of the Test.\n\nThe best performance of the tour came in Pretoria where the Lions went 2-0 up, registering their highest score and biggest-ever winning margin for a Test against South Africa (28-9). Two early tries by the deadly JJ Williams got the Lions off to a flyer and a second half dropped-goal by Ian McGeechan stretched them to a two-score lead before the dominant Lions pack laid the foundations for late scores by Phil Bennett (penalty) and Dick Milliken (try). By now, South Africa, under Hannes Marais as captain, were casting about desperately, shuffling their players and often throwing out the good with the bad. For the Third Test, they were so uncertain as to who might mark the great Edwards, that they called up three players and put them through a bizarre passing test.\n\nThe Lions would not be intimidated in the Third Test in Port Elizabeth where a massive first half punch-up threatened to halt their progress. Andy Irvine replaced Billy Steele on the right-wing in the only change in the tourists' Test personnel from the first two games of the rubber. The Springboks had dropped ten players and made a total of eleven changes to their side after losing in Pretoria.\n\nBut once again the Lions' technical discipline proved too much for the hosts and a Gordon Brown try gave them a 7-3 cushion at the interval, after a half of monstrous fierceness. Scores came regularly in the second half for the tourists to win 26-9 and thus take their first series in South Africa for 78 years. Famously, the team walked to the touchline at the end, and as a group, waved to their team-mates in the stand, as a tribute to the efforts and support of the dirt-trackers.\n\nAnti-apartheid protestor, Peter Hain, outside the Lions' London hotel.\n\nThe evening and next day in Port Elizabeth is meant to have seen one of the greatest parties in Lions tour history, which is saying something. The Welsh journalist and Lions tour veteran JBG Thomas appeared to take refuge in glorious understatement in his tour book The Roaring Lions: 'Some beer was spilled on the carpets and one fire extinguisher was used.'\n\nThree more comfortable provincial wins followed \u2013 only against Orange Free State were they seriously challenged \u2013 before they reached Johannesburg for the final match of the tour. As they ran out for the Fourth Test they were nursing a played 21, won 21 record. Gordon Brown had broken a bone in his right hand in the Third Test so his place went to Chris Ralston for the fourth international, the only change to the Lions Test side. Ralston had had an unlucky tour suffering with influenza, bronchitis, dental problems and a shoulder injury. He was knocked out playing against the Leopards, ending with an enormous cut to his head. Moreover, he, along with Bobby Windsor and Stewart McKinney, had been the party's most nervous flyers and experienced his worst moment when a bird had flown into an engine of the plane carrying the team out of Port Elizabeth.\n\nRacial segregation gates.\n\nEllis Park was full to the rafters for the last Test to see if the Lions could emulate the 1891 tourists and finish with a 100% record. In the eyes of many they did, through Fergus Slattery. The Lions scored two tries (Roger Uttley and Andy Irvine) to one, but Slattery was controversially denied a winning score by the referee, Max Baise, in the last minute. The Lions left the field disgusted at the decision.\n\nJPR Williams had joined the three-quarters line near the end of the match and had looked as if he would score himself. But he was held up on the line before unloading to Slattery who drove over. His team-mates swore that he had grounded the ball between his legs and over the line. But Mr Baise didn't see it that way and so while Willie-John McBride ended his Lions career with a record 17 Tests to his name, the tour log showed the 13-13 Ellis Park draw as the only blot on the 1974 Lions' 22-match copybook.\n\nThe Lions had departed London as political outcasts. They returned to London airport on the Tuesday after Johannesburg to a heroes' welcome and were feted by the government for their outstanding success. Millar has since written that he regarded this as rather two-faced.\n\nFor South Africa, it was beginning to dawn on them that the high-level competition denied them by the sporting isolation caused by apartheid was to the detriment of their rugby at international level. It was their most convincing defeat. And for British and Irish rugby, a glorious summit.\n\nThe party was strong, rumbustious, full of character, devil, class, resistance, unity and purpose. And there is no doubt of their status as all-time greats.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nAll three of my Lions tours were tremendously demanding, a non-stop schedule of midweek games followed by Saturday matches, and it is no exaggeration to say that it took me nine months to really get over both the physical and mental demands of the 1974 tour \u2013 that is how tough it was playing a 22-match tour. And things had changed \u2013 the expectation was that if we could go to New Zealand and beat the All Blacks then we could go to South Africa and beat the Springboks. Easy!\n\nIn 1971 Carwyn James said that if we had 30 to 40 per cent of possession then we would win \u2013 and the backs did make the most of that hard-won possession \u2013 while in 1974 we had such a powerful set of forwards who dominated the games and controlled the set pieces that we had closer to 60 per cent of the possession in most games, and sometimes more. The confidence of winning in 1971 was carried through \u2013 along with the backbone of that winning team \u2013 and we had what it took to play at altitude on the high veldt, on hard grounds and with a dry ball.\n\nA lot of the boys had been to South Africa before and we knew there was no such thing as a bad Springboks side, so this would be a different mountain to scale. Willie-John was making his fifth Lions tour, and you cannot get more experienced than that, while players like Phil Bennett were coming to the fore. And we were incredibly fortunate with injuries. We only used 17 players in the four Tests and that settled side and continuity of selection certainly contributed to our success. What a tour.\n\nFRAN COTTON (England)  \nToured: 1974, 1977 & 1980. Manager: 1997\n\nThe first time I had ever really become aware of the Lions was in 1968, when they were on tour to South Africa. The tour was covered by television and I remember, as a youngster, training at Newton-le-Willows Rugby Club and then crowding into the clubhouse with the rest of the players to watch the games. I marvelled at the quality of the rugby and the huge crowds and, in my case at least, it really did fire a young man's imagination.\n\nTo be selected years later was a dream come true and having toured both South Africa and New Zealand with the Lions I felt I had measured myself against the best in the world. I believe you have no claim to being labelled as a world-class player until you have made your mark on a long tour to the southern hemisphere. And I don't care what anyone says to the contrary.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nSouth Africa can be a brutal environment, so one of the things I kept preaching was that we had to be better than all of it. Bigger and better than the crowd, the referee, the linesmen and the players. We had to be bigger and better than all of that.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nSyd Millar was a brilliant coach, but his man-management skills outweighed everything. I don't think there is any doubt that in 1971, it was Doug Smith, the manager, who was in charge. In 1974, it was clearly the coach who was in charge.\n\nBILLY STEELE (Scotland)  \nToured: 1974\n\nWillie-John was a father figure, which was quite important because you had a lot of experienced guys there, but there were a few boys like myself who had never really toured before.\n\nWille-John McBride leads his pride into battle.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nThe captain has to be a psychologist because the players are all different. Some don't like being away from home, for example, so the captain has to identify that and spend some time with them. Even though tours are now down to six weeks, that is still a long time compared to national tours today, which are just a few weeks.\n\nOthers lack confidence. It's a big deal going on a Lions tour, especially for young players, and the captain has to make sure everyone feels involved. Sometimes it can be simple things like receiving letters. There was one player like that in 1974 and we made sure we didn't hand out any letters until his had appeared.\n\nThe main difference between captaining the Lions and captaining your country is of course that the captain has to unite four different sets of players. To do that, he has to be a motivator and a leader of men. The captain has to develop that pride in the Lions. He has to have the respect of the players, so you want to be sure the captain will hold his place in the team. That's not absolutely critical but it's very, very important.\n\nI made Willie-John McBride Irish captain and I made him Lions captain too. He was my choice because I knew how he thought and he knew how I thought so it wouldn't take long to get us working together.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN (Scotland)   \nToured: 1974 & 1977. Head Coach: 1989, 1993, 1997 & 2009. Assistant Coach: 2005\n\nPeople these days would be amazed to learn that even on a tour as recent as 1974, there was still no medical back-up available on the tour, no doctor or physiotherapist accompanied the party. If you needed treatment, the injured players had to find the nearest physiotherapist or whatever in every town we visited, and if the injury was a slightly more serious one, then they would have to start from scratch with each new appointment.\n\nI was very lucky to have been part of it in 1974. It was a fantastic tour, and every player would say it was a life-changing experience, not just a rugby experience. We are all incredibly close and have a bond unique to the Lions that I have never experienced with any other team. It is the highest accolade to become a Lion, and then to become a Test Lion is still the ultimate measure of a player.\n\nMIKE BURTON (England)  \nToured: 1974\n\nWhen it came to selection for England I always seemed to be chosen for the nasty away games in Paris \u2013 for an afternoon out against Gerard Cholley and his friends \u2013 but never for the easier games at Twickenham, when the college boys would always be selected. When I was chosen for the Lions, I felt like a boxer who has had his arm hoisted as world champion.\n\nANDY IRVINE (Scotland)  \nToured: 1974, 1977 & 1980. Manager: 2013\n\nIt was my first tour so I was bound to be a wee bit starry-eyed \u2013 and when you are winning then everything becomes even more enjoyable. I was the second youngest in the team and I had never been on a tour before \u2013 so I had no idea what it was all about. It was a fantastic experience \u2013 and I'm obviously immensely proud to have been part of a team that created history in the way that we did.\n\nROGER UTTLEY (England)  \nToured: 1974. Assistant coach: 1989\n\nI was just starting off, and had only played four England Tests, and when I got picked it was massive for me. In retrospect, Africa generally was still a dark continent \u2013 we knew about apartheid, but not really what it meant. The prospect was fantastic, and as a youngster I had seen footage of Frik du Preez take a kick-off and run in a try from his own 10 yard line, so I knew something about the history. I had also watched the '71 Lions in New Zealand on the black-and-white pictures coming back from afar, and been inspired by the heroic win. So the Lions had been there for me from an early age, and the prospect of being one of them was a fantastic achievement and a massive privilege.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nI gave up my honours year at university because I felt that there was a good chance of me going on the tour. So I went and got a job and I explained to my new employer that I needed a contract where I could disappear for three months in the summer of 1974 if necessary. I was very fortunate that my boss was a pretty keen rugby fan so he understood just how momentous a Lions tour was, and I got paid leave. But I never got another day's holiday apart from that.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nWe had to suspend payments on the mortgage for several months at the time of the tour because, although Judy was working, I was not being paid in my absence from teaching.\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nI had started teaching in '71, and when I went on the Lions tour they gave me a leave of absence and paid me. The tour allowance was about 75p a day, but you didn't need to spend any money. The proceeds of my daily allowance, added to my share of the money from black-market tickets, bought me a second-hand Austin Maxi on my return to the UK.\n\nMIKE BURTON\n\nOn the flight out, Willie-John was tacking on to various groups and sharing a drink in the relaxed atmosphere of the flight... Willie eventually reached a group which included myself and Geoff Evans, the clever Coventry centre. He sat down and puffed on his pipe and opened a can of beer. 'You know, it's going to be hard,' he said. And he gave me that look \u2013 his head bent slightly forward, so that the whites of his eyes were showing... He held up two great fists, one in front of the other, Marquess of Queensbury style. 'It may come to a bit of this,' he said, looking around us. I nodded once... I was trying to tell Willie that I would follow him through the thick of it and right out the other side.\n\nGORDON BROWN (Scotland)  \nToured: 1971, 1974 & 1977\n\nIn rugby you get bankers and brickies, doctors and dockers, teachers and tearaways. Bobby Windsor was a hard-as-nails Welsh steelworker. When he came to your house you put away all the cutlery, when he shook hands you had to make sure you still had your watch and rings.\n\nI remember when we all gathered in a London hotel, Willie-John McBride made one of his famous rousing speeches: 'If there's anyone here with any doubts go home now. Not a word will be said. But if you don't leave within the next two minutes then you're here for four months. I've been in South Africa before and there's going to be a lot of physical intimidation, a lot of cheating. So if you're not up for a fight, there's the door.' There was a brief silence until Bobby, who loved fighting more than anything, jumped up and shouted, 'I'm going to bloody well love this, boyo...'\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nBobby, who only had a few caps for Wales at that time, spoke up at a meeting when we were asked if we had anything to say. 'Yeah, I do,' he said. 'When I'm down on the deck and these bastards start kicking me and stamping on my head, I don't want to look up and see the numbers on your back. I want you right there with me.' Talk about a key moment. That was the tour on the road.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nWillie-John had been on two previous tours to South Africa and had been on the receiving end of a bit of a doing. He was determined that this tour was going to be different.\n\nHe hammered home two things. Firstly, that we were never going to take a backward step when it came to confrontation \u2013 and things did get violent. Secondly, that our forwards were going to attack their scrummage. Syd Millar had also been on the receiving end in South Africa as well, and with Ian McLauchlan being an influential figure in 1974 too, there was a very, very strong emphasis on scrummaging \u2013 and it did make a difference.\n\nGareth Edwards scoops a loose ball from the scrum in the First Test.\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nThe brains trust of Syd Millar and Willie-John between them knew what had to be done. They said when the squad gathered in the UK, 'If you don't want to go toe-to-toe you can leave us now.' Syd attended to the forwards and we did lots of scrummaging, really brutally hard sessions. We had a lot of blokes who were really not very nice people on the rugby pitch. Whether it was Fran Cotton, the 'Mouse' McLauchlan, Gordon Brown or Mervyn Davies \u2013 Merve the Swerve was quietly determined \u2013 we were uncompromising. Bobby Windsor may have been amusing off the pitch, but on it he was a very tough piece of work.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nWhen Syd Millar and Willie-John sat down together side-by-side, the great warriors with battered faces and stiff movements, they looked as if they would be more at home on Mount Rushmore.\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nIt was the best three sporting months of my life. I went out as fourth choice second-row forward, and played in all four Tests at blind-side. I played in 16 of the 22 matches on that tour, and it was sensational not only to be part of the Lions, but part of a winning Lions team. There was no doubt, we wiped the floor with them. Sure, their selectors panicked \u2013 but we forced them to panic.\n\nThe dirt-trackers and Test team stuck to it \u2013 there was no split, and we worked hard and trained very hard. We were pros for those three months and it was great not having to worry about things like laundry or food. We also saw a magnificent country, and were treated very well.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nThere were three factors that we had in 1974 that are a common denominator of all successful tours. All 30 players were committed to the cause right up to the last minute. We had a legacy in terms of benefiting from the experience and confidence of players who had also been part of the 1971 team. And we had so many world-class players at their peak who were already Test Lions, such as Gareth Edwards, JPR Williams, Ian McLauchlan, Willie-John McBride and Mervyn Davies.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nThe anti-apartheid demonstrations were a big part of the build-up. But the way I saw it, it was a shambles in Northern Ireland in those years. I lived through it all and it was a disaster and I had no influence over that, so how could I have influence in South Africa? All I was interested in was people. I've always seen sport as a very powerful thing in bringing people together. I still believe that. You had to live here to know how bad it was. I was a bank manager and that wasn't an easy life. I've always been a person that, if I believe something is right, I do it and I don't run away from it.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nBasil D'Oliveira came to talk to us about South Africa and the other guy who came was the writer, Laurens van der Post \u2013 two South Africans who both said we were right to go. What Van der Post said was, 'If you don't go, it's like people sitting in closed rooms not communicating; you can go and you can communicate and you can be critical and because you are rugby players people will listen.'\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nI played for North-Eastern Counties against the Springboks, against the likes of Piet Greyling, Jan Ellis, and Dawie de Villiers, so the prospect of playing them again was sensational. But I also knew about the apartheid issues because there'd been a big demo at the Gosforth Greyhound Stadium before we played them. However, for all the niggling political doubts, I wanted to see for myself what was going on. It was a big adventure, and to go with the guys who were legends, like Gareth Edwards and Willie-John McBride \u2013 it never occurred to me not to go.\n\nOn the political front, if we had gone over there and got whacked then it would have confirmed the white South African status as top dog. But we showed they were not invincible, and the black and coloured people loved us beating the South African whites. So I think it did good, and maybe got the whites to see that they couldn't have it all their own way.\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nTo be honest, I didn't know anything about the situation. And when I got there, I was a bit gobsmacked by signs on benches saying, 'White only'. We were the first to play the coloureds, we were the first side to be on the same pitch with the blacks. Is it a bit naive to say that you have to build bridges rather than ignore it and hope that it sorts itself out?\n\nWillie-John McBride calls a lineout during the Fourth Test.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nWhen I was captain of Ireland I was under threat the whole time. I couldn't win. There were guys saying, 'What are you doing captaining a bloody Irish team?' And then I'd go down south and there'd be people saying, 'This bloody Protestant, why's he captaining the Irish team?' And there were all these threats. I lived with security. Every time I went in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin there was a guard at my bedroom door. People said, 'What do you do it for?' And I did it because I thought it was right. If I had stood back from all that there probably wouldn't be an Irish team. You know what I mean?\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nI don't suppose we really helped the blacks' and coloureds' cause by going to South Africa in 1974, but I'm not sure we damaged it either \u2013 and they certainly seemed glad to see us.\n\nBefore we left, there was all this protesting going on outside our hotel, and I remember Willie saying, 'My beloved Ulster is in turmoil and I can't do bugger all about that. So I can't be expected to do anything about South Africa.'\n\nDICK MILLIKEN (Ireland)  \nToured: 1974\n\nShould we go or should we not go and was it morally correct? Tony O'Reilly spoke at the Ireland-England dinner the previous year and he said, 'My advice to any young man on tour is to go with an open mind, take it all in and form your own opinion, don't let anybody tell you what you should or shouldn't think, judge for yourself.' It was reassuring for somebody like him to say that. There were people here in Bangor who'd stop me in the street to say I shouldn't be going. People saying, 'It's awful you're going.' Local papers had articles and there were letters. The O'Reilly thing was good.\n\nGordon Brown looks to pop the ball to Gareth Edwards during the Second Test.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nThree groups of people \u2013 those who were pro-contact, the second who were anti-contact and the third, which was the biggest group, were the people who really didn't give a shit. And that was the reality. That's the way the world generally is. The biggest group are those who really don't care.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nWith a kind of naivety, and very selfishly, I went to play rugby. After we came home I was asked on to a television programme to talk about apartheid and I said that I could not honestly give an opinion on that because I went to South Africa to play rugby and the South Africans showed me the rugby they wanted me to see. We didn't really come into contact with the areas where the blacks and coloured people lived. We went to some townships, but were never in a position to ask them what life was really like.\n\nI went back to play for Natal in 1975 and it was not a nice place to be. You saw a lot of things that you didn't see as a tourist. We got a black girl in to babysit the kids and told her to help herself to anything in the kitchen, but she sat in a corner with her own stuff and she hardly ever spoke. As soon as we arrived she was darting off. She was completely intimidated by us.\n\nOnly a couple of people turned up to protest before the tour. Peter Hain and his sister were around, and they told us that we shouldn't be going. Some of them were in the park outside the hotel singing the songs, until Willie-John went out and asked them in for a cup of tea.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nThe sports minister in the London government was an ex-soccer man and they removed British citizenship from those of us who had passports. The embassies were told to have no contact with us. By removing our right to contact our embassy and the embassy's right to contact us we regarded that as them saying that we were non-citizens. That's the way we read it. At the same time, all this stuff was going on in the North of Ireland. It may well have been that some of our relatives could have been shot or blown up or something and we would need our embassy. But they didn't think about us in that way.\n\nSo we weren't very happy when Denis Howell, the sports minister of that time, appeared at Heathrow when we came home and, after having said that we were non-people and we shouldn't have gone, he appeared because we were successful and there might have been a photo opportunity for him.\n\nMervyn Davies, Gordon Brown and Fran Cotton look to secure a loose ball.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nBy the time I went to South Africa in 1974 with the Lions, I was so much more aware of the general political situation. It could hardly have been otherwise for I encountered more and more the arrogance of the white man.\n\nHow do I view the wider picture so many years later? John Taylor was strong enough and knowledgeable enough to say that going there wouldn't be any good at all for the future. It was his view, I respected that. Others felt differently.\n\nWhen we went in 1974, given all the fuss which had preceded the tour... we made a point of seeking out black people and asking them for their views. The majority said they thought we were right to tour, a few felt we should have stayed away. But what most said was, 'You give us the will to go on.' That will had increased significantly by the time we had finished our tour unbeaten. Rugby was the game of the Afrikaner, which is why the black people took so much pleasure from our win. It was as if we had delivered a blow on their behalf.\n\nHow do I know that? Because Nelson Mandela subsequently made it clear that the tour worked against the Afrikaner in the long run. The Afrikaner believed he was secure in his ascendancy but we proved by thrashing his beloved Springboks that that wasn't the case at all.\n\nI know one thing \u2013 the coloured people at the matches used to go berserk with excitement when we were winning. Even if it was only for a short period of time, you could tell that they felt a wonderful pleasure and change from their usual misery. It would be too presumptuous of me to say that the 1974 Lions tour caused major cracks to appear in the entire system of apartheid. I don't believe any rugby tour has the power to do that. What it may have turned out to have done, perhaps in an unexpected way, was provide one more shoulder pushing against the wall of apartheid which had seemed at one time impregnable.\n\nBOBBY WINDSOR (Wales)   \nToured: 1974 & 1977\n\nWe played against two black sides out there and they were really pleased to play against \u2013 if you like \u2013 a white side, and afterwards have a meal together, which I thought was a great thing, both for them and for us.\n\nI thought by playing against two black teams we were helping. And when one of those teams (the Leopards) scored a try against us, and the Springboks hadn't scored a try in the first two Tests, well, they went crazy. It was like they had crossed the line first.\n\nPhil Bennett makes his dazzling break to score in the Second Test.\n\nJOHN TAYLOR\n\nIn '68 I was worried about the whole business of touring South Africa, but I wanted to be a Lion so much that I let myself be persuaded. I'd had misgivings but I was desperate to play. I put all the misgivings to the back of my mind.\n\nThe prevailing rugby logic was that you weren't helping sustain apartheid, you were building bridges. As soon as I got there, I realised that was complete nonsense. There was no question, apartheid was more obvious and far worse than I had ever expected it to be.\n\nThe night before we left, the high commissioner or the ambassador said something to the effect of, 'Don't get involved in our politics; you won't understand them. But our rugby and our girls are great so go and enjoy them.' And then, when we got out there and had our first night in a hotel in Stilfontein, a group of real Afrikaners came to our hotel and, without any prompting from us, launched into an aggressive defence of the apartheid system and how this was the only way to treat the blacks and so on and so forth. I thought, 'Bloody hell! What have I come into?'\n\nEverything was so much more stark and black and white than you could have ever imagined. Apartheid then was essentially being strengthened. They were pretty much finding ways to push the blacks out of the specific areas that they wanted to. So it was really when I came back from that tour that the decision on touring there in the future was made.\n\nThe rugby establishment took this attitude that rugby guys were terrific guys, no matter what, that it was bigger than anything and therefore it was wrong in any way to break ranks on that. I obviously took a different point of view and thought man's inhumanity to man was far bigger. I said, 'I will go back to South Africa when Nelson Mandela invites me back,' and eventually that happened, which was wonderful.\n\nI was absolutely convinced that the rest of the sporting world was right and that there was this sort of massive arrogance in rugby that the brotherhood of rugby, the fraternity of rugby, meant more than the brotherhood of man \u2013 that they couldn't be bad chaps because they played rugby. It was very much that sort of arrogance that I absolutely deplored in rugby. I had no doubts at all.\n\nAndy Irvine after the final whistle against the Leopards.\n\nMERVYN DAVIES\n\nIn those days I was living in London and sharing a flat with John Taylor, who had been to South Africa in 1968 and was quite vociferous about his views on apartheid. We had many arguments about it but I said, 'I'm just going out there to play rugby. You've been there, now give me a chance to go there and make my own opinions about it.'\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nThe blacks were our biggest fans. They were always penned into this little enclosure with the sun in their eyes, and as the tour went on their enclosure got smaller and smaller. After a few weeks we started noticing this and eventually we started to go round to that part of the ground when we arrived to give them a wave, and they would go bananas.\n\nLike all Lions tours, we used to do community visits to schools and local rugby clubs and so on. After training one day, a coloured girl shoved a note into Willie's hand. It asked if we could go to a coloured school. Well, of course we could. I went on a couple of visits, and boy did they look after us well.\n\nDICK MILLIKEN\n\nThe non-whites used to be put in the part of the ground that looked into the sun. We always walked to their area and waved to them. It wasn't that we were trying to be provocative or anything, it's just that they were cheering us and we were acknowledging it.\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nPeter Hain was protesting against us going, and if I ever meet him I'll shake his hand and thank him from the bottom of my heart, because he did us a huge favour. They were scared he was going to disrupt our training at Eastbourne so they flew us out to South Africa ten days earlier than scheduled \u2013 and that was vital to us being almost ready at the beginning of the tour.\n\nWe trained in Stilfontein in fairly high altitude for more than a week and Ken Kennedy, the Irish hooker (who was also an orthopaedic surgeon) was doing a thesis on rugby injuries, so he volunteered to be the tour doctor. He checked all our blood levels, made sure our red blood levels were increasing, and if they weren't then we got pills. All that stuff developed a side ready to hit the ground running in South Africa. Even with that, in the first game we played in the high veldt my lungs were on fire \u2013 but because of Ken and the work he did, we coped.\n\nBobby Windsor used to excite the non-white element in the crowd something terrible. Whenever we arrived at a ground there would always be a game being played on the pitch beforehand, and the blacks would always be herded like cattle into an enclosure with the sun glaring into their faces. Well, Bobby would walk down to that part of the ground and he'd be like an orchestra conductor, he'd lift his arms up and they'd all be up roaring, then he'd put his hands down and they'd be quiet, and then he'd raise his arms again and they'd all be up. He was lucky he wasn't arrested for inciting a riot.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nAt the beginning of the tour the British government told the diplomatic corps in Pretoria not to get involved with us at all, to stay away from the games, not to host functions. Then we landed at Heathrow on the way back and there was an invitation to go to Downing Street. Where did it all change? What happened when we were out there? Apartheid certainly hadn't changed one little bit at that time. But the attitude of the British government had changed.\n\nThe whole experience was riddled with contradiction. You had in those days the sections cut off from the terraces, reserved for the Cape coloureds and blacks, the non-whites. They turned up in their droves \u2013 and some of the areas they came from were grim \u2013 just to cheer us on. If they'd wanted to make a protest in any other way, they wouldn't have gone to the game at all. That didn't mean that they were directly trying to support the tour, of course.\n\nI went in the dead of night on the train on my own with a journalist, from Durban up to Johannesburg. When we got there, the station master \u2013 in the middle of the night, mind you \u2013 had the red carpet out. He had all his station staff lined up, as a guard of honour for us. And there wasn't a white person in sight. So, here was another extraordinary contradiction. If there was resentment from the black community towards us, I never saw it. They didn't have to do that. That was something that the black station master decided for himself: there's a Lion on this train. Even when you weren't looking for it, there was so much goodwill towards us, no question.\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nWhen we got to South Africa we spent the first ten days at the Three Fountains Hotel in Stilfontein, which was a little mining town out in the sticks near Potchefstroom. There were three or four of us in a poxy little room with single beds, and kit-bags and boots everywhere. The bathroom and bog were down the corridor, so it was nothing too flash. We didn't really see anyone until match day.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nI received what was probably my greatest ever compliment on that tour. It came from JPR Williams, who has probably long since forgotten that he ever made it... Dick Milliken and I had worked out between us that the opposition were going to be at least a stone heavier than us but that not only meant that we were going to have to be more clever to make up for it, but that we were not going to let anyone past us in midfield. As far as I can remember, we did not let anyone through us in a Test match and JPR never had to make a tackle on an opposing player who had cut through the middle.\n\nAt some point during the tour, JPR addressed us both. 'It's great playing behind you two,' he said. At that point, Dick and I reckoned that we could both die happy.\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nIt wasn't the era of professionalism, but in Willie-John and Syd Millar we had two guys who had seen it, done it, had had their arses kicked in South Africa and were determined not to have their arses kicked again. And we were very serious in how we approached each game. We trained like dogs.\n\nWe used to warm up and stretch, then Syd would always get us to run round the whole complex once or twice depending on how big it was \u2013 it could be a mile and a half. Then he had it set up so Rippers (Andy Ripley), who was an international 400 metres runner, would get the nod and take off, and we'd be after him like a herd of rampaging buffalo.\n\nThen there were the sprint sessions, and there was a lot of competition: JJ was an international sprinter, Jonny Moloney was fast, I was a PTI in the RAF and as fit as a fiddle, Slattery was quick and he'd join in with the backs, and like a true flanker he'd go like a flyer, so you'd always be watching him like a hawk \u2013 it was all good banter, but highly competitive.\n\nTommy David, another flanker, had a poncho moustache and he used to always fancy his chances \u2013 although he wasn't quite as quick as Slats. When the shit really hit the fan you would look round at the finish and he'd have spew hanked on his moustache. So you knew you had to get in front of him.\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nI don't remember '99' ever being called \u2013 if there was an incident, all that happened was everyone got stuck in. It was never really my cup of tea, and looking back on film of the Third Test I see myself step in, throw a punch, and step back pretty quickly. Against Northern Transvaal a blond Aryan type slotted me, and I went down in a heap only to see JPR piling into him.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nThe '99' has been overplayed. It didn't happen more than a couple of times, but it stopped the nonsense. I shouted 99, I think, once and I didn't have to do it a second time. The funny story about that is when we were chatting about it (standing up to South African aggression) and what we were going to do, I remember Phil Bennett saying, 'Excuse me, am I involved in this?' I was really talking to the forwards, but I said, 'Phil, we're all involved in this.' The day it happened was exactly the day I thought it would happen: Eastern Province, and afterwards we came in the dressing room and the guys were saying, 'That worked, that stopped it,' which it did. Somebody said to Phil, 'Where the hell were you?' Phil said, 'Oh, I gave the ball boy a hell of a hiding.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nIt was an appreciation that the only way you can protect your team-mates was to be all in it together. It was an embodiment of team spirit \u2013 don't mess with any of ours, otherwise you'll have to handle all of us. In fact, there were only three or four incidents in 22 matches, and most of them were in the Third Test.\n\nThat Test was do or die for the South Africans and they picked big powerful blokes who were lively, and for the first 20 minutes it was an incredibly tough game. At one point you saw someone in a red Lions jersey drop on the ball and all eight Springboks stamped all over him, so we took action. That was when JPR came storming in from fullback to clout Moaner van Heerden. The balloon only went up when Gordon Brown scored. Then, in the second half, van Heerden came in and thumped Bobby Windsor, and Broony climbed in.\n\nApart from that, there was a bit of a set-to when we played Northern Transvaal, and also a flare-up against Natal. The Natal incident started when JPR clouted Tommy Bedford, who was the local hero, and it went off to the extent that the crowd started throwing full cans of beer from the top of the stands. It resulted in the referee having to call the players from both teams into the middle of the pitch for safety. That was it in 22 games, so the rest is myth and legend.\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nTo be honest, I never heard '99' being called. It was agreed that if any nonsense started it would be one for all and all for one, but you didn't need to call '99' to make our big boys like Gordon Brown realise that it was time for them to step forward.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nThe '99', I always regarded it as a load of ol' crap. The principle behind it, and it was really only to do with the Third Test, was that if anything happens there'd be a shout of, '99', and everybody gets stuck in because there's no way the referee can send us all off. My attitude when it broke out was to grab the guy standing beside me and say, 'Stay out of it.' What's the point? I was never going to go and hit a guy who was just standing there. The idea was you'd hit the nearest guy to you. Why? It didn't make sense. I think about two or three guys started swinging punches. I wasn't going to hit a guy who wasn't looking at me. That's a cheap shot. That's cowardice.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nIt's rubbish. There has been all sorts of chat about the '99' call but why warn somebody when you are going to hit them? It didn't exist. It's like the story about a Welsh guy who backed \u00a310,000 on us winning all the provincial games. And he was going to share it with us, and if we won all the Tests he was due half a million pounds and he was going to share. We never met him, however, because he didn't exist. All these fantastic stories have grown up in the ether.\n\nAll these things like either Carwyn James in 1971 or Willie-John McBride in 1974, saying, 'Get your retaliation in first.' Duncan Paterson was saying things like that in Borders rugby long before I went on the tours. But if you tell a story enough times, then fact gets mixed up with fiction.\n\nDICK MILLIKEN\n\nI don't ever recall this '99' being called although there was a clear instruction that if we were all in fighting they couldn't send us all off. When everything flared up in the Third Test, Ian McGeechan and I, our natural reaction was to step back, then we were pushed aside by JPR who ran 15 yards to land a punch. He was the only back who got involved. He had a Geronimo sweatband and came roaring in to hit some second-row.\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nWhen we played Eastern Province at the famous Boet Erasmus Stadium in Port Elizabeth, they were a thuggish side who tried to work us over. There was fighting left, right and centre, with Stewart McKinney and Mike Burton in the middle of it \u2013 the boys were not going to be messed about.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nWhen we played Eastern Province, the information we had, rightly or wrongly, was that the South African coach, Johan Claassen, had gone into the dressing room and said, 'Let's rough them up a bit to see what's in them.' Well, we were the wrong team to rough up.\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nThe boys from the '71 tour were so affected by what happened against Canterbury on that tour, and they said if there was any indication of that sort of crap it demanded an immediate response. There were no neutral referees or touch judges, so you had to let the South Africans know. We stood up to them, probably for the first time. We went down to Port Elizabeth to play Eastern Province, and I was on the bench. It was strange because they were in the same colours as Canterbury \u2013 black and red \u2013 and that triggered something in my mind. And these guys wanted to play like Canterbury had.\n\nBut the Lions showed them that if they wanted to start it then we would finish it. There was the biggest punch-up you have ever seen in your life. There was this guy knocking hell out of Broony on the ground, and as he was getting up Stewart McKinney came off the tail of the lineout and poleaxed him with a punch. By the time the referee got to the situation McKinney was back at the tail of the lineout again looking like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. So the Lions came out on top there, in the fight and in the match, and that told South Africa that a line had been drawn in the sand.\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nIt was brutal. At one point I got the ball near the right touchline with three of their guys coming across and you could see in their eyes that they were desperate to knock me into the back row of the stand. I managed to cut back inside them and I was delighted to score \u2013 but I was just as relieved to still be in one piece.\n\nYou can't condone violence, but we didn't start anything \u2013 we just didn't take a backward step. And that gave them a hell of a shock.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nIt was a small back division when you think about it, because it was only JPR and Dick Milliken who would be regarded as reasonably physical \u2013 the rest were all quite small, but fast and elusive.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nThey called '74 a forwards thing. Rubbish. Tommy Grace scored 14 tries, JJ Williams 13 tries, Andy Irvine 11. It was classic rugby. The coach, Syd Millar, had said he didn't want any miss moves, crisscrosses in the middle of the field or anything like that: he just wanted the ball out to the wings. JJ was absolutely on fire, as was Billy Steele earlier in the tour before he got injured. Billy was one of these guys \u2013 against three men in a five-yard area he'd beat all three of them. Give him the ball on halfway with no one in front of him and tell him to run it in, he couldn't do it. He'd always get caught, he just wasn't quick enough. But Billy was the Dancer. And JJ \u2013 give him the ball anywhere and he always wanted to score. He was lightning fast, by far the fastest man I ever played against.\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nI was a jinky side-stepper so had very little interest in getting involved in punch-ups. When the trouble erupted us flair players in the backline \u2013 guys like Phil Bennett, Ian McGeechan, JJ Williams and myself \u2013 would be hanging around looking useless, and JPR would charge past us at 100 miles an hour to get to the fun.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nAnd there was one or two real geniuses there. In any list of great players, Gareth Edwards would be right at the top, he was in a complete league of his own. A couple of times we really struggled in games until he got going, and then he transformed the whole thing. Against Orange Free State in Bloemfontein we were down and out until he grabbed the game by the scruff of the neck. And I still think that pound-for-pound Phil Bennett was the best stand-off we've ever seen. On hard grounds you couldn't get to him, and he was tougher than people give him credit for. He was almost unstoppable \u2013 I learned more from Phil on that Lions tour than anyone else.\n\nHe obviously played a lot of his international rugby with JPR and had a big role in bringing him into the game, and he introduced the same ideas to me \u2013 but because I was a wee bit quicker than JPR he adapted the moves and angles to make it really effective. We operated these things that Benny had come up with for Heriot's and Scotland for the next ten years!\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nI would say Gareth Edwards was the greatest player ever. He was a gymnast and pound-for-pound he was the strongest player in the squad. I remember one training session when he said to Syd that he would have to stop because he had blisters. Now, they weren't that bad \u2013 but he didn't need to train. It was a case of, 'Take a break Gareth. Enjoy yourself and have a few gin and tonics. But do the business on Saturday.'\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nThe list of great players on the tour starts with Gareth Edwards. He just did everything right, and was such a threat. JPR Williams was a rock at fullback, and as combative as any forward.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nFor me, the key guy in South Africa was Mervyn Davies. He was the perfect No 8. He won ball in the back of the lineout, steadied everything, always took possession forward. He was a fantastic player. Fergus Slattery didn't stop running from the time he got off the plane to the time he got back on it. He was like a dog after a bone. And Phil Bennett was at the peak of his game.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nWe trained very hard, and the scrum practice was far harder than that on any of the modern tours. We would put down 60 to 70 scrums every single day, and it was live scrummaging between two packs in which every player wanted a Test place. It was fiercely competitive, and at the end of it you were absolutely goosed. I went out there 16st 12lb and came back close to 18st. My neck was 17in before and 19in after. None of my clothes fitted when I went home. That's how tough it was.\n\nI have a huge amount of respect for the determination of the South Africans, but power is too important to them. They tend to be too one-dimensional.\n\nSTEWART McKINNEY (Ireland)  \nToured: 1974\n\nThe scrumming practice. God, it was hard! There was no scrummaging machine, so it was all live stuff \u2013 eight against eight, 60 scrums a day.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nScrummaging. Every day and when it came to the game it was easy. The forwards in '74, you didn't mess with those guys. Cotton, Windsor and McLauchlan, myself and Gordon Brown, Roger Uttley, Mervyn Davies and Slattery. Hell of a pack of forwards. I knew we had the men to stand up to anything that was going to be thrown at them.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nWe had so much reserve strength. Geoff Evans and Roy Bergiers were the other centres on the tour and at the very start, I was looking at them and I could not believe that I would become a regular in the Test team... We also had Alan Old, a strong contender for fly-half.\n\nMERVYN DAVIES\n\nThe great finisher on that tour was JJ Williams on the wing. He had always been rapid, he was an international class sprinter as a young man before he devoted himself to rugby, but he was also a really good all-round footballer. His trademark was the chip ahead. JJ would be running at top pace then he would dink the ball over the defenders with his boot and chase it and almost every time it would pop up into his hands. His influence was amazing. He scored two tries in the Second Test in Pretoria, he scored another two in the Third Test in Port Elizabeth, one was so brilliant that they never laid a hand on him and he scored in total isolation. There was one great picture of JJ with both arms in the air after he scored a try with thousands of delighted black followers behind him joining in the celebrations. He was so sharp.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nIt was JJ Williams who scored some of the signature tries, especially with his party trick of chipping the ball ahead and using his great pace to get to it first. Fran Cotton was a fantastic rock at tight-head... the list of great players was endless. Fergus Slattery was at the peak of his abilities, and was an amazing figure because he played it ferociously hard on and off the field. On the field he was absolutely brilliant, he underlined the defensive principle I have stuck with ever since, and driven into all the teams I have coached. It is that the most important defender is the man just inside the ball and just inside you. When Dick and I were going up in defence, Fergus would be bawling, 'I'm on your inside! I'm on your inside! If he comes this way, I'll smash him.'\n\nIan McGeechan.\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nWe were a squad of 30 men who had gone there to win the series, and there was never any griping about selection from me or any of the other guys who missed out on the Test team. I realised that I had a job to do with the dirt-trackers, and they were now short of a loose-head prop because Franny had switched to the tight. There weren't many props who could play both sides, but he was one and I was another. So I went to Syd and said that I could play loose-head if he gave me an easy game against Rhodesia to bed in, so that's what we did.\n\nThat must have been the strongest Lions squad that ever toured, and just to be part of it was astronomical. We meet up now and then and it's as if we have never been away \u2013 the banter is still there \u2013 and it's great to be part of a family like that.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nI knew I was going out as number two to JPR, but they ended up playing me on the wing on Saturday and at fullback on Wednesdays. I ended up playing 14 games, which was brilliant.\n\nWe didn't train twice a day, so we had a run out in the morning and the afternoon was free to play golf, go surfing or do anything you wanted, really \u2013 but like any holiday it can eventually become a wee bit tedious, whereas if you are involved in nearly every game it gives you something to focus on. Players nowadays like to be rested because they are knackered, but in those days you wanted to play in as many games as you could.\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nI was in charge of allocating rooms. I had this complicated, colour-coded chart, and it was my job to make sure that you didn't have two guys from the same country rooming together, you didn't have two guys who had roomed together before in the same room and you had the guys playing in the next game all rooming together. We'd set off on a plane to a new town and they'd give me the team while I was in the air, and by the time we had landed I had to have them all roomed.\n\nOne of the big problems was the snorers, and Broony [Gordon Brown] was one of the worst. Hotels shook with the noise he made, so you had to break one of the rules if he was playing and get a player who was not involved in the next game to room with him because that person was going to have a hard time sleeping. You'd be saying, 'Look son, it's for the good of the team. You're not playing, you're not even on the bench, but you're with Broony \u2013 because the rest of the team need to sleep.'\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nBobby Windsor was one of the real characters of the tour. One of the great stories about Bobby is that his boss at the steel works where he worked in South Wales wouldn't let him go on the tour, but because there was thousands working there they never checked and he got one of his pals to clock him in and out. And when Bobby got back he found he had earned more money than usual because his pal had put him in for overtime. Whether it's true or not, who knows? Nothing would surprise me with Bobby.\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nThe management didn't want us to phone home too often. I think there had been problems on previous tours with people getting homesick, so they wanted everyone to focus on what was going on in South Africa. But unbeknown to the rest of us, Bobby had been sneaking into the manager's room to phone his wife, until one day before training Alun Thomas came onto the coach and said he'd just received a telephone bill from the South African Rugby Union for x thousand rand. He said: 'I suspect it's one of you boys so I would like the culprit to own up.'\n\nNobody moved. Everybody was looking at each other wondering what the hell he was on about. Then he said, 'Well, I'm a bit disappointed because I know they have been ringing Newport 321456.'\n\nBobby jumped up and shouted, 'Which one of you bastards has been phoning my wife?'\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nAndy Ripley was just from a different world. I remember one night when four of us were sitting having a meal, and Rippers got up and said, 'Sandy, do you fight in bars?' I said, 'No.' And he said, 'You've got a face that looks like it fights in bars.' And then he just walked off.\n\nWe had to go to this cocktail party and we were supposed to be in our number one dress code, but Rippers turned up in flip-flop sandals, trousers and his blazer with no shirt. So he got a row from the management, who told him to wear a tie next time. So at the next function, he still had no shirt but he was wearing a tie.\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nI still have this image of Rippers on our final day in Cape Town when we were going over the Chapman's Peak Road for a braii with his feet hanging out of the car window on one side, and his head out of the other.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nAndy did not even take a case. He crammed everything into the Lions duffle bag that we were given. Into the duffel bag went his blazer, his kit, whatever. When I shared a room with him, I discovered that he just tipped everything out in a pile in the corner.\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nDuring the tour there was no curfew, and there were big G&T sessions by the swimming pool at most hotels led by JPR. But when it came to training you would be there on time ready to go \u2013 and any signs of weakness due to the overindulgence were not tolerated by Syd. There were plenty of training ground punch-ups, and there was one big bust-up between the front-rows at Seapoint, when the dirt-trackers had a go at the Test team, so we had to go in and beat them up.\n\nJPR Williams puts in a booming clearance kick.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nThe strength of the '74 tour was the unity of the whole squad. I'm sure most of the lads would tell you that some of the hardest moments on that tour were training against, dare I say it, the B-side, which was a shadow side more accurately. They were as tough as any team we played.\n\nIt's hard to put in so many words what is special about the Lions. Suffice to say every player aspires to play for his country. Then you realise there is a further step to take. You read about it and, OK in later years, you're able to see these tours on TV. But we grew up reading about them, Cliff Morgan, Jeff Butterfield, Tony O'Reilly and all those guys on these long, long trips to the far side of the world. It's a gathering of the clans, isn't it? And there's the uncanny factor, too, that you battle and try to tear each other apart only weeks before and, all of a sudden, you are standing shoulder to shoulder against a common enemy a long way from home.\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nThe greatest team talk I ever experienced was before the First Test. A meeting was called in the team room before we left for the match, and when I walked in there was a few guys already sitting there with Syd and Willie at the front of the room. It took five to ten minutes for the room to fill up, and during that time nobody spoke. Then we all sat there for another five to ten minutes and still nobody spoke. The hairs on the back of your neck were standing on end. Eventually, after 20 minutes, Willie-John stood up and said, 'Right, we all know what we need to do. Let's go and do it.' I was petrified when I went into that room and I felt invincible when I came out.\n\nDICK MILLIKEN\n\nThe First Test was played at Newlands on a very heavy, muddy pitch on a rainy day reminiscent of the usual conditions back in Ireland. One of the crucial scores that victorious day was a drop-goal by Gareth Edwards. There was nothing on, no real danger to South Africa and we were running on a particularly heavy part of the pitch. The genius stopped, looked up and dropped one of the most magnificent goals I have ever witnessed. It wasn't a beautiful or typically classical drop-goal that flew high through the posts, but remarkable because I am convinced that when he dropped the ball to execute the kick he was momentarily stuck in the mud. Only his immense strength, grit and grim determination overcame the laws of gravity.\n\nMERVYN DAVIES\n\nI managed to set down my own marker early in the first half when their flanker Boland Coetzee took an inside pass from his wing. It was one of those unearthly occasions when time stood still and I unleashed the perfect hit. It was the tackle of my career and it gave me terrific pleasure. You can keep your 50 yard runs and wizard little sidesteps. The sensation of me catching Coetzee under his ribs, driving hard and sending him wheezing 10 yards backwards onto his arse was bliss. As soon as he hit the dirt the boys rucked over him and won turnover ball. All around us, we heard the South African crowd let out a collective, almost wistful groan.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nWhen we won the opening Test at Newlands it was like throwing a grenade into South African rugby \u2013 it created so much confusion the Springboks did not know which was their best side and that confusion kept going right to the end.\n\nIn all honesty we were very fortunate to win that Test, we dug in and squeezed out the result, but after a really tough game against Transvaal ahead of the Second Test we turned the screw at Loftus Versfeld and played at a different level.\n\nI was 27 years old at the time and probably playing as well as at any time in my career and playing behind that pack was a pure pleasure.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nWhen we played the First Test we played against what was a Western Province-biased side. It was played in Cape Town and when we went up to play the Second Test in the Transvaal in Pretoria they reversed it and they put more Afrikaners in there and they got taken apart. But when they went back to the coastline they decided Plan A didn't work and Plan B didn't work so now they'd go for Plan C and put all the gorillas in there to eat the Lions alive. They picked Gerrie Sonnekus at scrum-half but he was more a No 8 and they brought in two gorillas into the second-row.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI remember leading the team out in the Second Test. Of the moments in life that I remember vividly to this day, that was one of them. The sun hitting me and I was carrying that bloody old mascot thing and the ground was like a rock and 50-60,000 South Africans all around us, and I knew, I just had that feeling, that there were 14 players with me who were not going to lose. It was just a wonderful feeling. It still hits me today. They picked that guy Moaner van Heerden. He didn't last very long. Moaner was kicking guys and hitting guys. He was carried away. He came out with the idea of sorting us all out. There was no way he was gonna survive.\n\nGORDON BROWN\n\nThe referees were giving us no protection whatsoever. In the Third Test at Port Elizabeth, the 'Boks had brought in some heavies to try and sort us out, the main one being Moaner van Heerden. Willie-John had singled him out and warned that he would have a go. The nearest Lion would then wade in and give van Heerden a doing. Sure enough, after ten minutes, van Heerden belted Bobby Windsor and I was the nearest man; that's how I broke my thumb.\n\nDuring that fight I hit Johan de Bruyn, who was a fearsome forward from Northern Transvaal. A fearsome man with a glass eye. And when I punched him, the eye flew out. So there we are, 30 players plus the ref on our hands and knees scrabbling about in the mire looking for this glass eye. Eventually, someone yells 'Eureka!' whereupon de Bruyn grabs it and plonks it straight back in the gaping hole in his face. And when he stands up I can't believe what I'm looking at... there's a huge dod of grass sticking out of his eyeball.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nMax Baise, the referee who did the First Test had refereed us in 1968 and I knew him, and when we went to South West Districts and he was reffing I said, 'Oh, you've dropped a bit in the rankings, haven't you?' He said, 'I'm not too popular now.' Anyway, the South African union put him on the list of four referees for the Test and we could choose. I said to the guy, 'If we pick you we just want a fair deal and if it's a fair deal, you'll get more.' So he was straight as a die in the First Test.\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nWe didn't have neutral referees. For the Test matches, they would give us a list of four South African referees and we would get to choose one. For the First Test we chose this guy called Max Baise, because we'd had him during the provincial matches and we liked him, and I'll always remember he penalised the Springboks for not being back ten at a lineout and Phil Bennett kicked it. The Lions just didn't normally get decisions like that.\n\nAfter the game, I went out to see a friend of mine behind the stand before I got changed, and Danie Craven was there giving Baise a real dressing down.\n\nSo, before the Second Test they asked us who we wanted to referee, and we said we'd have Max Baise; but we were told we couldn't have him because he wasn't on the list.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nThis guy de Bruyn came to me. He'd refereed in a provincial game and had not refereed very well and he came to see me and apologised and said, 'I'm sorry, I haven't had a good game today, I made mistakes.' I said, 'Ah, don't worry about it.' They put de Bruyn on the referees list for the Second Test so I picked him and he was straight as a die as well. And we picked him for the Third Test as well.\n\nThey took de Bruyn off the list for the Fourth Test and they gave us another four who we didn't know much about and we said we're having none of them. We compromised and said we'll take the first guy again. Baise. He disallowed Slattery's try.\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nSouth Africa were always trying to muck up our preparation. We called it 'the fifth column'. When we arrived in Pretoria for the Second Test, we found there were two dozen cans of beer each in every room, and 200 fags each because a lot of us smoked in those days. They must have thought we would drink and smoke ourselves stupid before the match. So we quickly called a team meeting and decided that we would hire another room and we'd lock all 60 dozen cans of beer and all the fags in there \u2013 and we'd take it all to Kruger National Park with us when we had our break the following week.\n\nSo that's what we did. We won the game, and the next morning we piled it all onto this ancient Dakota plane which was built in 1948 and flew to Kruger Park, and we were worried about the weight with all that beer plus a squad of burly rugby players. We flew all over South Africa in these old Dakotas, and I remember one stewardess telling us that it took an hour to get the blasted things going before a flight.\n\nBy one o'clock in the morning of our first night in Kruger Park we'd finished all the beer. The party fell apart when the dust fire extinguisher went off. The whole place ended up white. I remember Geoff Evans asking if anyone had a corkscrew, and nobody did so he smashed the top off the bottle, and emptied the contents into his glass.\n\nWe were wandering around with wild animals all over the place. We had one training session while we were there, and while we were running up and down the pitch passing the ball I saw something moving out the corner of my eye. It was a pride of lions settling down to watch us. I said, 'Should we be here?' And one of the guys looking after us said, 'You're okay, they've eaten.' That didn't reassure me too much.\n\nSTEWART McKINNEY\n\nThey go and shoot paint at each other these days to build team spirit, and all these other organised bonding things, but we had none of that. We would sing songs. At first everyone was very shy, they didn't want to get up and sing. Bobby Windsor got up and told a load of jokes, the funniest half hour of my life, and we just went from there. Willie-John sang, Fergus Slattery sang, Billy Steele then sang, for the first time, 'Flower of Scotland', which became our tour song, way before the Scots took it up.\n\nWe had a week up in Kruger National Park, the largest game reserve in South Africa, and we had a hell of a good time. We were on the drink for a week. Imagine that on a modern-day tour! Today you'd be watching videos of the other team. We had every afternoon free to do your standard leisure things, fishing or shooting or wee cruises up the Zambezi. I'm not jealous of the players these days. Ours was a different game from a different era. I think we had a lot more enjoyment. I'm actually jealous of the guys who toured in the fifties. They went by boat for a month there and back. They were gone for six months; that would've been my idea of heaven!\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nThe Welsh are always good singers; Willie-John McBride could carry a tune, and Franny Cotton was actually pretty good with some songs from the Bible belt in America \u2013 but it was Gareth Edwards who demanded the Scots sing a song, and Billy Steele came up with 'Flower of Scotland'. I have to admit I had never heard it before. Nowadays it gets criticised for being a wee bit dour, but back then it really took off. It was easy to learn the words and it became the Lions tour song.\n\nBILLY STEELE\n\nI've always been a big fan of folk music \u2013 The Corries, The Dubliners and so on \u2013 and 'Flower of Scotland' ended up as the tour song. We changed the line about 'Proud Edward's army' to 'the Springbok army'. I remember rooming with Bobby Windsor on one occasion and he had the song stuck in his head. He kept waking me up to ask what the next line was. He woke me up about six times.\n\nBefore the Second Test at Loftus Versfeld we were singing 'Flower of Scotland' on the bus on the way to the stadium, but we had only finished the first verse when we arrived and I remember the officials coming on and trying to get us off the coach, but nobody moved until we had finished. And when we finally walked off the coach and walked through the crowd we felt ten feet tall.\n\nWillie-John said afterwards that he realised at that point that there was no way we were going to lose.\n\nDICK MILLIKEN\n\nFor the Third Test the 'Boks were two down in the series and they came out so fired up. Their eyes were glazed after being locked up in a prison camp and for about the first 25 minutes Geech and I did nothing but tackle. We had a great understanding, just met force with force and we were black and blue. Then we got up near the Springbok line and Gordon Brown caught the ball and fell over for a try and for them it was like the air going out of a balloon.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nThe Third Test was the hardest game I have ever played and the first half was even harder than that! The Springboks were on a mission from history and the pressure they put on us was incessant and for a long time there was nothing we could do to stem the tide of their attacks.\n\nThe psychology of it was difficult for me. Every time I played on that tour, I was up against guys who were comfortably a stone or two heavier than me. Sometimes I wondered how long I could keep defending against it all. But this happened so often in my career of playing for or coaching the smaller team, and we were able to lay our honey trap. South Africans are always intent on coming out and making their hits. They are very focused on pushing up in the straight-line to smash the opposition. The honey trap we laid involved trying to get them to come up and then we'd spring it and shift the ball late.\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nThere was huge physicality in the first 40 minutes of the Third Test and you just had to stand up to it and give as good as you got. We got a bit of a break when their hooker threw it straight to Gordon Brown who just fell over the line. Try! We kicked it so it was 9-0 at half-time and that was the end of the game. Thier Plan C hadn't worked. We hammered them.\n\nDICK MILLIKEN\n\nThey just collapsed. They had marmalised us and it was like being in the trenches, but we were ahead and they looked as if they believed that we were invincible. We ran amok in the second half.\n\nMIKE BURTON\n\nThe night after the Third Test when we took the series was one of the greatest ever. Willie-John's wild side surfaced again. There was damage to the hotel, fire extinguishers were set off, beer was spilt, glasses were broken, doors were knocked off hinges. There was quite a trail of destruction.\n\nROGER UTTLEY\n\nWe saw the wondrous stalactites in the Kango Caves, flew through the mountains in a Dakota down the Garden Route and spent a day in the Kruger Park chasing rhinos in little Nissan pick-ups. Alan Old was in the back of one of them with his broken leg still in plaster and, like the rest of us, bouncing everywhere. Health and safety wouldn't allow it today. After winning the Test in Port Elizabeth a fishing trip was arranged on a little boat with a few crates of beer on board. We hadn't even untied when Billy Steele said, 'I'm not feeling too good'. Then we got to the mouth of the estuary into a big swell, and I remember Swerve and Burto eating boiled eggs while Gareth and I were hanging over the side dying of seasickness.\n\nThen there was the showdown at the Marine Hotel in Port Elizabeth when we were having a bit of a ruck and the manager got excited. That's when Willie-John, in Y-fronts and socks, after being informed the police were coming said, 'Tell me, how many will there be?'\n\nMIKE BURTON\n\nNext morning arrived with the whole party in the anguished stages of re-entry and they savoured a day and a night to remember. Down in the foyer, Alun Thomas, the manager, was fretting. He was studying a list of damage handed to him by the hotel manager. 'Look what the boys have done,' Thomas said. And he went down the list: 300 rand for this, 500 rand for that, 600 rand for something else. It had been quite a night. Willie took the list and looked down it, with the inevitable pipe puffing away. He looked at the two managers. 'Are there any dead?' he asked, and walked away towards the revolving doors for some fresh air... As he passed me, he stopped. 'Last night was priceless. They will never be able to buy that again for a million, let alone what they are talking about back there.'\n\nSANDY CARMICHAEL\n\nAfter we won the Third Test I was rooming with Stewart McKinney, and it was dangerous, dangerous stuff. We started drinking at six o'clock that night and went to bed at quarter to one on the Monday morning. We were taken down to a barbeque at the beach in Port Elizabeth, and everyone was in swimming. We looked at the water, looked at each other, looked at the water and looked at each other. Eventually Stewart said, 'Sandy, we'd just drown.' So we turned round and walked back up the beach for another drink.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nIn fairness, the South Africans did improve a lot for the Fourth Test \u2013 so they deserve credit for that. But did we deserve to win that game? I would say, marginally, yes. I don't know about Slats' try, but my gut feeling was that it was a score. So, it was a wee bit disappointing \u2013 but there was an element of relief because if we had lost it that would have spoiled the record. What we have done is left a wee scope there for another team to go one better than us. The challenge is still there!\n\nFERGUS SLATTERY\n\nI put the ball down on the ground but I didn't score because the referee didn't award it. The referee didn't see it and to be fair the result was correct because Roger Uttley was awarded a try in the first half and it wasn't a try. He never got his hand on the ball. The problem with the Fourth Test was that on the Tuesday I saw that all the guys had packed their bags and had completely switched off. That's a big mistake and we made it. We went into that Test ready to tick box 22 having won 21. The guys weren't really thinking about it. You play an international match and the closer you get to it the more you commit mentally to it. You have to be 100 per cent mentally attuned when that whistle goes whereas we would have been 10, 20, 30, 40 per cent. It was a mental thing not a physical thing.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nRelations between the two teams weren't that great and Morn\u00e9 du Plessis said once that the Lions were a bit stand-offish. That's not true. I went for meals with my opposite number, and spent a whole Sunday with him and his family. I met one of their guys when I was over following the Lions in 2009 and I asked if the old wounds had healed yet. 'No. I hated you in 1974 and I still hate you now, but I will buy you a drink.' That's the sort of attitude it was.\n\nGARETH EDWARDS\n\nSouth Africa is an extremely hard place to go and win, take it from me. They will take the skin off your back and never give anything less than their all.\n\nIn 1974 they also had outstanding players like Jan Ellis and Morn\u00e9 du Plessis so I did not have exactly an armchair ride. But behind such a dominant pack and with Big Merv controlling things at No 8, we were playing on the front foot with time to size up our options.\n\nMIKE BURTON\n\nWhat we did to the Springboks represented the biggest hammering ever given in a series between two major rugby-playing nations. If the players had been racehorses when they retired, they would all have gone to stud, and they would have won the Derby. Many people said that our second string, midweek side would have been far too strong for the Springboks.\n\nDICK MILLIKEN\n\nGeech told me when he was Lions coach in 1997 they arrived and the then minister for sport said, 'Mr McGeechan, it's great to meet you,' and Geech said that he proceeded to recite the entire Test team from 1974. He said, 'It's because I was on Robben Island when you were playing and our white guards had their radios on listening to the match and we cheered when South Africa were being beaten to annoy the guards and it was a great uplift for us.' If anybody ever asked me who would I like to spend a day with, it would be Nelson Mandela. I was a 23 year old in 1974 and since then I have taken a lifelong interest in South Africa and what happened there and to think that in that cell Mandela was listening and maybe acknowledged the name Milliken; that he would have known of me, that's just incredible.\n\nAndy Ripley celebrates the series victory by going surfing.\n\nIAN McLAUCHLAN\n\nThey took myself, Willie-John, Gordon Brown, Mervyn Davies, Fergus Slattery, and JPR Williams from the 1971 team and made us the core of the 1974 team. If they had taken the nucleus of the 1974 team on the 1977 trip to New Zealand, I firmly believe we would have beaten New Zealand again.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nI never thought for a moment that we would not beat the Springboks, even though we had never beaten them before. Dick Milliken and I struck up a great partnership on and off the field on that tour, and it is a friendship which has continued all down the years. After we won, we both looked across at the two massive Irishmen, Willie-John and Syd. It wasn't anything that they said or did. It was just a look that passed between them. It was a look that was completely different, a look of elation, a look that I had never seen before.\n\nThe meaning of the Test wins and the tour to two first-time Lions playing in a great Lions team, and wide-eyed at it all, and the meaning to two old warriors who had suffered and grafted for it, was something on a different plane altogether.\n\nGareth Edwards in action against Natal.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nThe great thing about Willie-John as a captain was that he knew when to work, and knuckle down, and when to play. One of my most vivid memories is on the Sunday after we won the Third Test in Port Elizabeth. We had a big barbecue on the beach as a tour party, the sun was shining, we had steaks and cold beer, and life couldn't have been better. There was a British journalist covering the tour, Chris Lander, who had a habit of turning up everywhere on a bike, and there he was on his bike in the surf!\n\nAfterwards we continued celebrating at a hotel nearby, where the manager was a right idiot who shouted at his black and coloured staff, treating them very poorly. Micky Burton and Bobby Windsor came down the stairs each with a fire extinguisher and covered him from head to toe in foam, while all his staff applauded.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nAttitude is the first thing a team needs to have. If the attitude is right, the other things fall into place.\n\nYou will always have guys who are disappointed when they don't get in the Test side. They may be star players in their own country but they could be only number three in their position in these islands. Those guys can turn off a bit.\n\nThe second team is very important on Lions tours; it's vital they keep their side of the tour up. The captain has to make sure those guys know how important they are to the team and to the final result.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nThe sheer belief in ourselves, the loyalty of those guys to each other. I remember the last moment in the Third Test and we'd only used 17 out of the 30 players in the series and the immediate reaction was to stand on the touchline and applaud the players in the stand because they were part of us, they kept us in the Test side because they worked like hell to get in the Test side themselves and they made us all the keener to stay there. A remarkable bunch of men.\n\nGlorious Victorious. The Lions return home. \n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY\n\n# [HISTORY IN REVERSE  \n1977](006.html#a3)\n\nNEW ZEALAND & FIJI\n\nTHE GREAT satisfaction and even joy for rugby in Britain and Ireland during the 1974 tour of South Africa lay in the evidence that after years of losing the physical confrontation on so many tours, the Lions had grown up and, as Colin Meads once said in New Zealand, 'They had stopped believing in fairy tales.'\n\nThe process by which the Lions were able to stand up physically and even to dominate New Zealand and South Africa in the two tours in the first half of the 1970s continued at such a rate that during the 1977 trip to New Zealand, the Lions pack were in almost every significant phase by far the superior unit, giving New Zealand a real going over up front in what was, in many ways, the most humiliating sight ever suffered in New Zealand sport. Indeed, they inflicted so much pressure in the Test series that the All Blacks were forced to resort to a three-man scrum.\n\nYet, incredibly, things went too far. The Lions \u2013 and British and Irish rugby as a whole \u2013 had become so obsessed with scrummaging and forward dominance that they had begun to ignore their age old strengths in back play, individual genius and the ability to cash in on possession. There are some Lions teams of the past who lost in their Test series who, had they been given as much possession as the 1977 Lions, would have won at a canter.\n\nThe Lions were pushed off their rugby pedestal as a result, by three Tests to one, with the series slipping away in the dying seconds of the Fourth Test. For years the tourists had travelled in hope \u2013 the hope of winning sufficient possession; but it was now the New Zealand backs that prayed for a beggar's share of ball to outplay their visitors. The New Zealand side of 1977 were not a great outfit, but they were allowed to escape.\n\nBritish & Irish back play had become stereotyped and on this tour it struggled to put into practice the simple tenets that Carwyn James had held so dear in '71. The visiting backs were simply unable to transfer the ball at speed to their wings. Their preoccupation with set moves that were clearly telegraphed to their opponents in the Tests left the All Blacks defence with the simple task of shepherding the Lions sideways in a rudimentary form of drift defence.\n\nPerhaps the biggest irony of all was that the coach on tour was John Dawes, the wizard who had inspired such glorious attacking rugby for London Welsh, Wales and the 1971 Lions. Dawes appeared somewhat out of sorts on tour, apparently engaging in battles with the visiting press party as well as the All Blacks, and he could not conjure a return from the Lions' possession.\n\nThe outcome was that the Lions' match-winners JJ Williams and Andy Irvine, two of the few tour successes, were unable to find the overlaps and spaces that had opened up on the '71 visit. With Phil Bennett, in some ways a reluctant tour captain, forced out of his comfort zone by the New Zealand back-row, centre Ian McGeechan once observed that all too often when we was given the ball, he was running towards the touchline.\n\nWales generally ruled the Five Nations in the seasons between the 1974 South African and 1977 New Zealand tours. Champions in 1975, Grand Slam winners in 1976 and Triple Crown holders in 1977, they supplied the majority of the tourists when the original party of 30 was announced.\n\nSixteen of them \u2013 a record contribution for the Principality \u2013 were named under the captaincy of Phil Bennett. Not all of the contingent were deemed to have justified their selection.\n\nGiven that Gerald Davies and Gareth Edwards had declared themselves unavailable, and that no concession was made for JPR Williams having to stay behind until June owing to his medical commitments, the size of the Welsh contingent did raise eyebrows. Uncapped Welsh players Elgan Rees (for Gerald Davies), Brynmor Williams (for Gareth Edwards) and Alun Lewis (a replacement scrum-half when Williams was injured during the Third Test) leapfrogged established internationals from the rest of the Home Unions. John Bevan, moreover, Bennett's rival for the number 10 shirt in the Welsh squad, went as Lions understudy to the skipper.\n\nArguably Gareth Edwards' individual brilliance, his experience as a tactician and ability to take pressure off his fly-half could have turned the series in the Lions' favour. Bennett had to stand deeper to cope with the passing of inexperienced scrum-halves so that in attack the Lions were invariably starting off on the back foot. Edwards' style would undoubtedly have helped with the backs' alignment.\n\nGeorge Burrell of Scotland, a Lions contender in 1950 and later an international referee, was the manager, with Dawes, Wales' guiding genius through the three seasons of Five Nations successes, the automatic choice as Lions coach. In the aftermath of a series defeat, many critics argued that maybe Dawes had misplaced confidence in some of the fringe Welsh players who had gone on the trip.\n\nDavid Burcher pipped Scotland's experienced centre, Jim Renwick, for a place among the five centres in the party. Only three out-and-out wings were selected, though Bruce Hay, a fullback, and Gareth Evans, a centre whose sole Wales cap had been as a replacement wing for Gerald Davies during a defeat in Paris, could deputise. Burcher had replaced Ray Gravell in the Welsh side that season. Gravell had been a Lions prospect but had suffered a shoulder injury that had put him out of contention for the tour. The best crash-ball exponent in the Home Unions, his absence was a bitter blow to John Dawes' plans.\n\nBurcher was a different type of centre who had enjoyed a successful Five Nations, but Renwick, with his burst of pace, was judged unlucky to miss out. On tour his priceless acceleration in midfield would have been a valuable asset playing alongside his Scottish co-centre Ian McGeechan who, with Bennett, was probably the only certainty for the Test side.\n\nBefore the tour party flew out, a couple of changes were necessary. Welsh lock Geoff Wheel failed a medical that discovered a heart flutter and Roger Uttley suffered a back spasm after the tourists had convened. They were replaced by Moss Keane and Jeff Squire. The England lock Nigel Horton sustained a broken thumb in the seventh match of the tour, against Otago, and significantly, Bill Beaumont, his England team-mate, flew out to replace him. The burly England lock established his credentials quickly on arrival and was arguably the find of the tour, his clean lineout catching and power in the rucks and mauls making him an integral part of the pack for the last three Tests. 'Why wasn't he chosen originally?' critics asked.\n\nThere simply could not have been a greater contrast between this trip and the previous Lions odyssey to South Africa, which took place in sunny weather and fast conditions, proceeding with a certain glamour and with the respect of the South African rugby people and the nation. On the 1977 tour, the tourists were unlucky to hit one of the wettest New Zealand winters on record. Rain and mud seemed to afflict every match and the depressing conditions did nothing for the Lions' back play.\n\nFurthermore, there was a harshness and a lack of civility in the reaction to the team on the part of the home media and public, something which many put down to the thirst for revenge after 1971. 'The bad news tour', it was called, the result of what seemed to amount to a hate campaign waged by New Zealand tabloids that labelled the Lions 'lousy lovers', louts and animals.\n\nIt induced a defensive reaction from the Lions and the tradition of fun that had gone hand-in-hand on previous long tours was missing. Public relations deteriorated. The Lions became stand-offish and were often obstructive and uncommunicative with their own media, some of whom \u2013 Clem Thomas among them in his role as rugby correspondent for the Observer \u2013 fell out with the Lions management. Burrell and Dawes became very protective towards their players and ultra-sensitive to criticism, the upshot of the pressure of trying to live up to the high standards set by their immediate predecessors.\n\nEven so, there was only one defeat in the matches outside the Tests in New Zealand. The tourists' midweek side lost 21-9 to the New Zealand Universities four days before the First Test. The Lions played their walking wounded in this match and faced some bizarre decisions from a referee working through the law book for reasons to award penalties. The Universities kicked five altogether and their sole try was the result of an unseen knock-on.\n\nIt proved a poor omen to take into the Test in Wellington at the weekend. The Lions went one-down, losing 16-12 at Athletic Park where all the scoring took place in the first half. Grant Batty, then past his best and carrying an injury, scored the match-breaking try just before the pause, intercepting in his own half to run 60 metres to the posts. The Lions forwards were surprisingly unable to win possession in a scoreless second half.\n\nThe 1977 tour party.\n\nDespite losing narrowly, morale was low and the team lacked direction. It was at this point that Terry Cobner, the Pontypool and Wales flanker, brought the pack together to forge a new spirit of commitment and developed the game plan that brought reward in the Second Test. He effectively rescued the Lions from impending doom after that First Test defeat. If there was one reservation it was probably that Cobner did not demand enough quick ball after his men had won it.\n\nThe Lions made significant forward changes for the Lancaster Park Test. Derek Quinnell, Bill Beaumont and Gordon Brown were immense in the Lions engine-room, blazing the way for the pack to raise its game. The tourists regrouped admirably to level the series and win their first-ever Test in Christchurch. The highlight of the match was a corner try by JJ Williams, taking a beautifully-weighted pass from Ian McGeechan who had drawn the defence. The score gave them an early 13-0 lead, Phil Bennett having kicked three penalties. All New Zealand could muster were three Bryan Williams penalty goals as the Lions ran out 13-9 winners.\n\nSpirits were lifted and good wins against the Maori (in a cliff hanger), Waikato, NZ Juniors and Auckland were excellent preparation for the vital Third Test at Dunedin's Carisbrook ground. Here New Zealand scored a try in the first minute and never surrendered their lead. The irony was that the Lions' forwards completely dominated the All Blacks in this match, but through poor decision-making and weak kicking their backs threw away countless opportunities in attack. The Lions were never more than a score behind until the final quarter of the match when Bruce Robertson shone in the centre for the hosts. It was, like some other games, an encounter with far too much rough play.\n\nA tight series was decided agonisingly in the last minutes of the final Test in Auckland, when the Lions thought they had grafted out the win to draw the series. Yet they lost 10-9 when No 8 Lawrie Knight, with the help of a lucky bounce, stormed over from ten metres for a try in the corner four minutes from time. The Lions had only themselves to blame. They had won the majority of the possession and exercised a stranglehold over the All Blacks for 60 minutes during which they established a 9-3 lead. They were so dominant up front that one New Zealand newspaper reported that the All Black pack 'had been shoved about like cows'.\n\nBut the Lions surrendered the lead in the last quarter by opting to throw the ball around. Their backs were unable to pierce New Zealand's tight defence and the All Blacks capitalised on trifling errors to haul themselves into a position from which they won the game and with it the series.\n\nFor the first time a Lions tour abroad attracted a considerable travelling following of British and Irish fanatics. They fell into two categories: the package tourists and the shoe-stringers \u2013 students, mostly, who hitch-hiked their ways around the main match centres or, if their pockets were deep enough, hired camper vans.\n\nIt was little wonder, then, that the entire party are said to have roared with delight when their plane took off from New Zealand for a stopover in Fiji. As founder members of the International Board, the Home Unions strictly adhered to its laws and regulations. Until 1981 the IRB forbade recognition of matches outside the Five Nations and Tri-Nations as major Tests. For that reason Lions games against the likes of Fiji, Canada, Ceylon and Argentina were never accorded full, official Test status. This was also the first Lions tour to New Zealand which did not have a segment in Australia.\n\nIt was just as well that match did not have Test status as the tour ended with an international in Suva where the Lions were beaten 25-21 and, just to pile on the anguish, the party was held up by an air-traffic controllers' strike at Heathrow before arriving home 12 hours late. It was a defeat that caused severe soul-searching amongst those charged with giving a technical lead back at home. The truth was that the team winning possession lost the match. An unwanted rugby first.\n\nMOSS KEANE (Ireland)  \nToured: 1977\n\nI packed a modest bag, big enough to hold two pairs of underpants, four pairs of socks with holes in five, a jumper with no elbows, a pair of jeans, pants for good wear and three bottles of Lucozade, just in case they didn't sell it in New Zealand.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nIt was regarded as an unhappy tour because the weather was terrible. It really did rain a lot. And we also had a lot of injuries.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nAbsolutely nothing on that tour seemed to turn out quite as British & Irish rugby supporters had hoped. It was not the glorious moment; it was a grim, doomed, endless slog. It was interminable, not enjoyable in the slightest.\n\nMIKE GIBSON (Ireland)  \nToured: 1966, 1968, 1971, 1974 & 1977\n\nI injured my back in about the second training session and it affected my hamstring, and thereafter I was rarely in a position to compete for a Test place. I spent more time on the physiotherapists' couches than on training grounds. You often used to think that if you had an injury you could have a super time on tour, but you didn't. You just wanted to play rugby.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nWhen you're not winning you tend not to bond as well as a team. It's pretty obvious that it's easier to build up a rapport on the back of victories. In South Africa we had a very stable Test side, whereas in '77 it changed a lot \u2013 partly because of injury and partly because of players losing form. And if you look at successful sides, the one thing they always have is consistency in selection.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT (England)  \nToured: 1977 & 1980. Manager: 2005\n\nThe Lions had been in New Zealand for a month before I arrived as a replacement, and I was sharing a room with Fran Cotton before my first tour game in Timaru against Mid-Canterbury. Fran told me that I would always remember Timaru for the rest of my life because it was the place where I played my first game for the Lions. He was right.\n\nPHIL ORR (Ireland)  \nToured: 1977\n\nIt just rained all the time and you couldn't really get out, which wasn't much fun. It was the tour of the famous Fran Cotton mudbath photograph against the Junior All Blacks in Wellington. He was one in the lineout, I was three and in a matching condition.\n\nPETER SQUIRES (England)  \nToured: 1977\n\nBecause of the Lions' success in 1971 the pressure was on, and New Zealand were out to ensure that they won the series. You had a sense the whole way through that the country was against us. There was pressure on them to win, and also on us to do as well as the 1971 Lions. That team had outstanding world-class backs, with Gerald Davies and Barry John scoring fantastic tries, and we were expected to play like that. We were also expecting to play an expansive game, but when we found ourselves in New Zealand's wettest winter for 20 years, playing on bog-heaps, it moved more towards a forwards game. The conditions were captured in the classic photo of Fran Cotton covered in mud.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nAll 30 players looked the same, it just so happens I was the one immortalised by Colin Elsey, the photographer. It poured with rain throughout the match and for the last quarter of an hour you could only recognise people by their mannerisms or the way they ran. Obviously I had no idea of the significance of that picture until a few weeks later when I arrived at Twickenham to play for the Lions against the Barbarians to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee. When we drove into the West Stand car park, everyone, and I mean everyone, was waving the match programme on which yours truly was featured on the back cover!\n\nPhil Bennett emphasises a point during a break in play.\n\nPETER SQUIRES\n\nMoss Keane was the outstanding character. He was a big, generous monster of a man, and a great storyteller \u2013 if you could understand what he was saying! He had a very strong Irish accent, and he liked a drink or two, and sometimes would get a bit wild, although usually he would collapse when he'd had his fill. His tour number was 33, but no one laughed when he said 'Tirty Tree'. I roomed with him and Willie Duggan, who was another big character. Willie tended to keep his own hours, and the only way you knew he was back in the room was because he was a chain-smoker. By the end of the tour you knew these guys better than you knew most of your England team-mates. You had spent longer in the trenches with them and you developed lasting friendships.\n\nMOSS KEANE\n\nWillie Duggan was a very good rugby player and he was an enigma. He never believed in training and his brain was unreal.\n\nWILLIE DUGGAN (Ireland)  \nToured: 1977\n\nI always smoked before I went out because I was of a nervous disposition. I had to try to relax.\n\nPETER WHEELER (England)  \nToured: 1977 & 1980\n\nThe classic schoolboy error on tour was letting someone know your room number because your bar bill could grow to epic proportions. Hotel telephone operators were always buttered up by everyone in the tour party because calls home were so important, but there was always ducking and diving to get away with not picking up the bloody great telephone bills to the UK.\n\nIan McGeechan makes a break, supported by Peter Wheeler.\n\nPHIL ORR\n\nWe didn't see a great deal of New Zealand and there was much too much rugby. It would be nice to go and see New Zealand properly. I'm not a rugby fanatic and I like to get away from it but one of the problems of being on a Lions tour is that it is difficult to do that. It's relentless and the intensity of interest is incredible. I remember in one town waking up in the morning and switching on the radio \u2013 it was the morning of the match \u2013 to find that the station which was broadcasting was doing so live from breakfast in our hotel. When you wake up on the morning of a match the last thing you want to do is be interviewed over your cornflakes. So everyone ordered breakfast in bed, which didn't go down too well with the public, but you can understand why we did it. That sort of pressure you didn't need.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nThe press guys were part of the tour, and there was no reason not to trust each other, however in 1977 it changed a bit when the New Zealand tabloids got stuck in. One week it was 'Lions are Lousy Lovers' and then the next week it was 'Lions are Thugs'.\n\nPETER SQUIRES\n\nWe were not prepared for the 'Lions are Lousy Lovers' stuff in their tabloids. We didn't have media training in those days and it did get to everybody a bit. The siege mentality got stronger the longer the tour went on.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nThe captain almost certainly would have been Mervyn Davies, but he had to retire the previous season so Benny [Phil Bennett] became the Welsh captain and it must have been seen as logical for him to take on the Lions job. I thought we were really unlucky. We maybe got a wee bit more than our fair share of luck in '74 but that evened itself out three years later. That '77 team was definitely better than the results showed. We had a great front-five.\n\nWILLIE DUGGAN\n\nIt's my view New Zealand have never seen a pack of forwards like that before. The eight guys we had were so physical but we also all had rugby skills. We were able to match them up front for strength, aggression and will to win.\n\nBarely recognisable, the Lions forwards prepare for a lineout against the Junior All Blacks.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nJohn Dawes disappointed me as a coach. I was looking forward to learning from him. It may seem remarkable to say now that he was the first backs coach I had ever had. I was expecting a lot and, strangely, he didn't say a lot. He talked mostly in generalities, and he was never really specific about what he wanted.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nIn 1977 we did not have the same collective attitude to fitness that existed in 1974, and there were not as many world-class players. However, the one that I would have to pick as world-class on that tour is Graham Price. Pricey really came of age, and at that time was the best tight-head in the world.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nThe style of play we had in New Zealand was too forward-orientated. Forward power wasn't enough to win us the series.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nThe coach was John Dawes, who tended to concentrate more on the backs. Phil Bennett, the captain, was also a back. So the forwards were lacking in decision-making and organisation. Terry Cobner emerged as the forwards coach and he did a very good job. He was a school teacher and had done a bit of coaching so he was highly respected and regarded, but relative to the calibre of the likes of Mervyn Davies and Fergus Slattery, our back-row wasn't nearly as strong.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nI've always liked John Dawes and there was no doubting the record that he had achieved as a player and then as a coach with Wales, but he wasn't up to coaching a Lions tour. He let events overwhelm him \u2013 and he's not the first or the last person who has had that happen to them on a tour of New Zealand. As a player who had been there and done it, the assumption was that he would be able to handle the situation, but the intense pressure of coaching is very different to the pressure of playing. The media spotlight got to him and I think that by the end it had totally distracted him \u2013 I think it's fair to say that, as players, none of us learned anything from him while we were on that tour, which is very sad because he had a lot to offer. A tour like that needs a big, focussed personality in charge as coach, someone who would have kept rugby at the forefront and not allowed himself to be distracted. I think that if someone like Carwyn James had coached that tour we would have won the series.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nSome of the Welsh lads on the tour were not really up to the challenge. They did not have the mentality of a winning Lion.\n\nPETER SQUIRES\n\nAndy Irvine played outstandingly in a not very outstanding backline. Andy was very much an individual talent, and he did make mistakes, but he would also do the unpredictable. He was always looking to counter-attack, and he had the pace and skill to do something about it. Phil Bennett was a great player, but didn't play his best rugby on that tour.\n\nPHIL BENNETT (Wales)  \nToured: 1974 & 1977\n\nI should never have accepted the captaincy for that tour. I have long thought about what would have happened had it gone to someone else. The pressure of those three months on tour was just too much for me and when the matches were over, I just wanted to leave New Zealand as soon as I could \u2013 I had a young family at home that I hadn't wanted to leave and every weakness that I had as a player and a tourist was subsequently exposed. It was a very difficult period in my life.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nTerry Cobner took charge of the forwards after the First Test and they became a superb unit. But we never got the ball back from the forwards at the right time. They would take the ball on and on but then they would wait until the momentum stopped before giving the ball back. I kept chipping away at Cob. I told him that he had to let the ball go when we were on the front foot, they shouldn't wait till they couldn't do anything with it anymore, and only then give it back... It must have been humiliating for the New Zealand forwards \u2013 and old All Black forwards were probably turning in their graves \u2013 but we never cashed in on our forward superiority. Typically, as they always were, the All Blacks were incredibly smart... They didn't bother committing too many forwards, they almost gave up on it and not just when they did the famous three-man scrum. Their back-row held off and that meant that when we won the ball we were outnumbered.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nWe lost 21-9 to the New Zealand Universities and John Dawes blew his lid. We were only three or four days out from playing the First Test, but he made us do one of the most brutal training sessions I've ever experienced. It made no sense at all to be doing a fitness session that close to the First Test. The midweek side had played the day before and although they had lost they certainly didn't need to do a fitness session, and the Test team (none of whom had been involved in the loss) should have been rested or preparing for the Test. But instead we were all run into the ground. I remember that after we had been sprinting around for about an hour we had a two minute rest and then split into backs and forwards to go through our unit drills. Everyone just collapsed during the rest and lay on the ground \u2013 no one could speak; there wasn't a joke cracked, or anything. No one could even swear.\n\nWe did some unit drills and then the forwards were made to do a huge scrummaging session. When it was finally all over we headed back to our hotel. We were down in Christchurch and had to cross a bridge over the River Avon to get back to the hotel, but some of the boys were so knackered that they just waded through the water in complete silence rather than walk the extra distance to the bridge.\n\nTo make matters worse we did another sprint session the next day. It was ludicrous. By the time the Test match came around, we were all still reeling from it all. Everyone's legs were so heavy and our bodies were all stiff and sore. It was pretty much the worst preparation for a Test match you could imagine.\n\nPower players. From left to right: Price, Wheeler and Cotton.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nI never had a problem with the management on that tour \u2013 it was more the way we were treated by the Home Unions. We knew that the game was strictly amateur so we wouldn't get paid, but it was damn difficult to get anything out of them \u2013 there was never any decent kind of entertainment budget, so we often had to get the New Zealand liaison officer to pick up our drinks tab; there was a very limited telephone allowance; and we didn't even have enough shirts to allow us to exchange and keep our match jerseys. I played in seven Tests in my Lions career over two tours, but I only managed to keep two shirts.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nThe rain almost created a state of siege. The golf courses were flooded and there was almost nothing to do. Andy Irvine, Bruce Hay, and Doug Morgan, the three Scots, and myself spent our time playing snooker, usually in army or navy clubs, potting away while back at the hotel our training kit was steaming on the radiator. My snooker improved out of sight but I am not sure that our rugby did.\n\nMOSS KEANE\n\nI must have been playing well against the Universities because I got a dunt from one of their players. (Willie) Duggan came down from the stands when they brought me in. I thought I was in Vancouver with Lansdowne. This paramedic says I shouldn't play again for at least two weeks and Duggan was very strong on this. Yet there I was, playing a Test match four days later, against the All Blacks, for f***'s sake. I remember being inside in the dressing room. Terry Cobner was leading the pack, saying we're all Celts \u2013 there were five Welsh and three Irish. I just had this feeling of unreality, 'What am I doing here?' type of thing. Most of the match is a blank. That ruined the tour for me, basically.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nWe definitely deserved to lose the First Test. Ironically we played with the wind in the first half and lost a few tries, and when we turned into the wind we actually played a lot better and managed to get ourselves almost back into the game.\n\nThe First Test in Wellington.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nThe environment in New Zealand was fairly hostile wherever we went and the weather was horrendous the entire time we were there. It rained incessantly. There was huge pressure on both side to perform in the Test series \u2013 we had a huge burden of expectation on our shoulders after '71 and '74, and the Kiwis had a lot to prove: they had lost in '71, of course, and they had also lost to South Africa in '76, so they were desperate for the win. That whole feeling of desperation spread across the entire country, from the All Blacks to all the provincial players, to the media and the public \u2013 they were all hostile towards us and there was a sense of hysteria about the whole thing. They were on a mission and when they won the First Test, the pressure really began to build further. We knew that if we lost the Second Test, that was the series gone.\n\nIt's amazing when you look back and consider that before that match, no Lions side had ever won the Second Test in New Zealand \u2013 and no Lions side had ever won a Test match in Christchurch. The weather, predictably, was dreadful \u2013 absolutely torrential rain, gale-force winds, the lot. And our changing room was grim; I can still picture it so vividly \u2013 a cold concrete room with poor lighting that was completely empty except for some little wooden benches. Psychologically the whole experience either breaks you or drives you to shove it back at them, to prove that the environment doesn't affect you. The whole thing is a battle.\n\nBill Beaumont, who joined the tour as a replacement, made a huge impact in the Test series.\n\nPETER SQUIRES\n\nBruce Robertson and Bryan Williams were class acts, and Grant Batty was effective, but could be a petulant, stroppy character. He threw a punch at me in the First Test and after a few pints at the post-match dinner we had a wingers' union convention with players from both teams where he was warned of future conduct and told not to strike other wings. He took it in good part. Batty was a difficult opponent, tigerish and a good footballer, but I would rather have played against him than Bryan Williams, who was big, powerful and quick with a very good hand-off.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nI was selected to play in the midweek game against Marlborough-Nelson Bays four days before the Second Test and was amazed to see that Gordon Brown had been picked alongside me. The sectors obviously wanted to see how we played together and the general chat in the changing room was that if I played well, we would be partnered in the Second Test. For a change on that tour it wasn't raining \u2013 in fact, it was a warm afternoon \u2013 and we flattened them 40-23, but I remember being absolutely whacked after an hour or so because of the pace we were playing at. I pulled Gordon aside and said, 'I can't keep this up, I'm knackered.' He turned to look at me and fixed me with those big blue eyes of his and said softly, 'We are going into the Test team together \u2013 and if I see you drop off anything in the next twenty minutes, I'm going to belt you as hard as I can.' And that was that \u2013 I kept going and so did he and he drove me all the way through that last twenty minutes \u2013 and, as he promised, we were partnered together for the Second Test.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nThere were five changes in the pack from the First Test and Terry Cobner emerged as a binding influence as pack leader. I remember before we ran out he took us into the shower room and told us that we were not alone out there in New Zealand, that the lights would be coming on in the Welsh valleys in the small hours as people listened to the radio reports. It was very emotional stuff. You could see the raw emotion in the eyes of some of the hardest men I know \u2013 Fran Cotton, Graham Price, Willie Duggan, Derek Quinnell, Gordon Brown \u2013 tears were running down their faces. At that stage you had to hold us back from just charging out there. The intensity of the moment was just incredible.\n\nTerry Cobner pulls the forwards aside for a pep talk during the Second Test.\n\nWILLIE DUGGAN\n\nThe Second Test was the most physical game of rugby I have ever played in; a real humdinger of a game. It was a game we had to win and when I say it was physical, it came to fisticuffs and whatever had to be done was done. It is what I would call a good old-fashioned game of rugby where the referee didn't get involved. I believe there shouldn't be a referee on the field. Let the lads sort it out themselves.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nThe Second Test will not go down in the annals of history as one of the great games. It was niggly, hard, with lots of off-the-ball incidents, but the Lions had never won in Christchurch before, and we were very determined.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nThere was a general understanding that we wouldn't take any nonsense from the All Blacks \u2013 we had to defend ourselves and if there was any nonsense then you reacted. Phil Bennett had been targeted throughout the tour with late tackles \u2013 they knew how important he was to us and that in form he could win any match for us on his own. Kevin Eveleigh hit him with a shocker in the Second Test and I just laid into him. That was such a tough match. It was my first Test for the Lions and it was the hardest game I'd ever played. I learned a lot about myself with that Test \u2013 the intensity and the emotion that surrounded it left me drained afterwards and I slunk into a real low in the days that followed.\n\nGraham Price attmepts to charge-down Sid Going's clearnace kick in the Second Test.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nWe deserved to win the Second Test, and we had our chances to win the Third Test as well but we missed our kicks at goal.\n\nGrant Batty scores in Wellington, despite the last-ditch efforts of Irvine and Price.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nAfter we beat them in the Second Test the New Zealanders did the unthinkable and dropped Syd Going and brought in Lyn Davis, a passing scrum-half. They also introduced a very quick openside, Graham Mourie. Those changes won them the series because from then on they moved the ball very quickly away from the forward contest, where they were coming second.\n\nWe had an exceptional pack of forwards, and we were really dominant, especially in the Third and Fourth Tests. But the conditions were atrocious and the backs lost confidence. It was almost a bit of an event if they got the ball along the line without dropping it. The minimum we should have got was a drawn series, and we were good enough to win it.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nTechnically you won't get better than the Lions front-row of Fran Cotton, Peter Wheeler and Graham Price, and we dominated the scrums to the extent that in the Fourth Test New Zealand were forced into a three-man scrum after losing a prop injured and putting a back-rower in the front-row. It was ignominy for them to do it given the tradition of All Black forward might, but they were smart, and had worked out that it was the best way for them to win their own ball cleanly.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nIn the Fourth Test they put three in the scrums at some points because we were just so dominant. Of course, we didn't have the common sense to keep the ball in the scrum and drive them back. We dominated that Test, and they got one try from a speculative kick \u2013 three of our guys were after it but it bounced over all their heads and into the arms of Lawrie Knight, and he just touched it down. That was just sheer bad luck.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nFor an All Black pack to swallow its pride and go for a three-man scrum sounds unthinkable, but it got them quick ball, and it was not the only area where they out-thought us. The lowest point in my rugby career was the 1977 final Test. To dominate and then lose to a soft try right at the end was hard to take.\n\nJOHN DAWES\n\nWe had a pack to take on the world, in fact we had two packs that could, and did, lick the All Blacks and by the final Test New Zealand were reduced to pitiful three-man scrums. I have never seen opposition forwards so humbled in the tight. But I took my eye off the backs, didn't show them the attention to detail that I should have.\n\nBill Beaumont presents the ball to Dougie Morgan in the Fourth Test.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nTwo lapses of concentration undid all the magnificent work of the pack.\n\nWILLIE DUGGAN\n\nThe First Test they won by an interception by Grant Batty, the Second Test we won and in the Third Test we were annihilated. And in the Fourth Test I got over in the last minute but couldn't get the ball down.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nI never felt more frustrated after a match than I did after that final Test. I remember coming off the field at Eden Park and just thinking, 'How did we lose that?' Their score to win it was tough to swallow, but we should have been out of sight by then. We'd gone for a pushover try on their line earlier on and were moving forward \u2013 it was going to happen \u2013 and then Willie Duggan picked up at No 8 and was held up. It was so frustrating. I just thought, 'Why? We were about to push them over their own line!'\n\nWILLIE DUGGAN\n\nBasically the Test series hinged on an interception and a silly mistake.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nIt was hard to believe we had crushed the All Blacks up front in two successive Tests, only to lose both.\n\nGraham Price and Moss Keane.\n\nPETER SQUIRES\n\nI remember the shout of relief and pleasure when the flight home left New Zealand soil. We lost to Fiji on our way back on a three-day stopover, but by then the players had had enough and just wanted to relax. That was when Fran Cotton said, 'Why couldn't it have been 14 weeks in Fiji and three days in New Zealand?'\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE\n\n# [EXTERNAL PRESSURES APPLY  \n1980](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nTHIS WAS a tour which took place against a heavy and difficult backdrop. As a protest against apartheid in the Republic, sporting contact with South Africa and the outside world had almost ceased through a whole range of sports by 1980. As far as the Lions were concerned, early tours to South Africa had proceeded as if the divisions and tensions between the races were simply a fact of life; scattered misgivings were expressed but it wasn't until much later that rugby was drawn squarely into the firing line and consciences were pricked as contact with South Africa became a ferocious problem.\n\nIt was a particular issue for rugby in several ways. First of all, the bond and the friendships between South African rugby and rugby in Britain and Ireland, not to mention New Zealand, meant that the firmest friendships had been established over the years and some people in rugby clearly felt that to abandon contact with South African rugby would be to renege on a friendship.\n\nYet unquestionably, South African rugby, white-dominated to an almost total degree, was seen by the non-white population at large as almost as significant an instrument of apartheid as the government itself and the police. This was why the 1974 team had been so riotously supported by the tiny, uncomfortable, non-white enclaves in the big grounds.\n\nCertain changes had come about in South African rugby in 1980, notably the fact that the central administrative body absorbed the coloured rugby federation, giving limited access to a form of multi-racial rugby. But many non-whites in South Africa refused to take part, seeing it as a charade for the wider sporting world \u2013 and there is no doubt that tokenism played a large part in the selection of non-white players for several teams and tours of the era. Opinion in the world outside was unconvinced. The Olympic movement and the British government were brought into the dispute, with even Conservative administrations urging the Home Unions not to go ahead with tours and not to issue invitations for incoming tours.\n\nPerhaps ironically, one of the administrators who pleaded with the Home Unions not to make their planned tour of South Africa in 1980, was none other than Dickie Jeeps, the magnificent Lion of 1955, 1959 and 1962, who by now was chairman of the Sports Council.\n\nPerhaps the only distraction, and it was a happy one for the unions, was that America's boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow was for a time a bigger issue. In the end, the Lions continued the tradition by departing for South Africa, although it was to be the last Lions tour to the Republic for no less than 17 years, a situation which, happily, led to the return of Australia to the Lions itinerary as a touring venue in itself.\n\nAt least the rugby authorities could agree on something \u2013 that Bill Beaumont, the English lock, would be the tour captain, and remarkably, he was the first Englishman to lead the Lions for 50 years. He had led England to a rare Grand Slam in the 1980 Five Nations, was highly respected throughout the game and was to do a splendid job on tour.\n\nPerhaps even better news was the fact that, at long last, the principle of neutral referees had come into rugby. Surviving Lions and the ghosts of Lions long dead must have deemed it a move long overdue. Francis Palmade and Jean-Pierre Bonnet from France travelled to South Africa to control the Test series.\n\nIt was a time of depression in the economy, and a time when the demands on top players were becoming almost astronomical. So even though fast air travel was now available and there were almost infinitely improved internal communications in South Africa, it was obvious that the days of the long tours were well in the past. The 1980 trip was the first shorter tour of the modern era with only 18 games arranged \u2013 and, by the standards of 2013, even this was something of a monster trip.\n\nWithin this period of transition for rugby, and also for rugby in a wider landscape, what no one could do was legislate for the hand of fate. This was a tour savaged by injuries, with no fewer than eight replacements being called on. Poor Stuart Lane, the fast flanker from Gwent and Wales, tore his ligaments with the tour just one minute old, as the Lions kicked off against Eastern Province.\n\nIf anyone hoped that this was not to be a portent for the future, then they were sadly mistaken. At fly-half, just to give one more example, the Lions had to play three different men in the four-match Test series \u2013 Gareth Davies, Ollie Campbell and Tony Ward. Perhaps the only good news was that, again at long last, the Lions actually took a doctor with them in the party in the shape of Dr Jack Matthews, the Lion of 1950. They needed him.\n\nThe rest of the management team was made up by Syd Millar, the coach of the celebrated Lions of 1974, and Noel Murphy, the flanker and former Lion, whose coaching pedigree never quite matched that of Millar.\n\nOne sad echo of the previous Lions tour, to New Zealand in 1977, was that the Lions pack was powerful enough to stand up to the home teams in all the primary phases and ruck and maul and even, as it proved in the Tests, to get the better of the Springbok pack. But the Lions backs could not cash in. This was such a sad reversal of history that not even the heavy toll of injured players behind the Lions scrum could provide a complete excuse.\n\nThe shorter tour brought out another problem \u2013 with the First Test on any Lions tour being of absolutely overwhelming importance, there were now far fewer Saturday games to groom the selection and performance of the Test team.There were still some very fine Lions performances. John O'Driscoll, the blind-side flanker, played in every match of the Test series, relished the physical challenge of the Springbok pack and scored the winning try in the Fourth Test with a surging run to the posts. Peter Wheeler, the hooker from Leicester and England, was also ever-present in a Lions Test front-row that provided a solid platform.\n\nA single try in a match against a South African invitation team might appear at first an odd thing to single out as a highlight \u2013 even though it was the score which saved the Lions from an almost certain defeat, having trailed 15-6 at one stage. But this extraordinary try saw the ball transferred between around 30 pairs of hands in all, beginning with David Richards, the Swansea centre, making a break from a lineout; the ball went through ruck after ruck after ruck, often with Derek Quinnell maintaining continuity, before Mike Slemen escaped the covering defence to score under the posts. The whole move lasted not far short of two minutes and has been included in all Lions compilations ever since.\n\nThe Springboks at the time were an excellent team, with Morn\u00e9 du Plessis as captain \u2013 a worthy opponent in terms of international stature for Beaumont. They also had at fly-half Naas Botha, another in a long line of outstanding Springbok kickers, the kind who had tortured the Lions since the days of Bennie Osler. Botha was never a great all-round rugby player, but often, he did not have to be.\n\nElsewhere, Louis Moolman was a gigantic second-row, so huge that one British writer observed that when Beaumont was standing next to Moolman in the lineout, it seemed as if Big Bill was standing in a large hole. Another superb player was Gysie Pienaar, an excellent attacking fullback.\n\nTo their credit, the Lions won all their provincial games on tour, with highlights being victories over Orange Free State, Transvaal and Western Province, this latter in the shape of a thumping 37-6 victory in Cape Town. However, in the Tests they simply lacked firepower and steady organisation behind the scrum, with Davies, Ward and Campbell all alternating at fly-half. They were hindered by a lack of any real bite in the outside backs and injuries compounded their problems further, forcing the team to play in a constant state of flux.\n\nPerhaps the most worrying time on tour came in the match against the South African Federation, which was a rough battle up front. Fran Cotton, the titan of the 1974 and 1977 tours, was suddenly led from the field with chest pains, and was clearly in some distress. The obvious anxiety was that he had suffered a heart attack, although the problem was eventually diagnosed as pericarditis, an inflammation around the muscles of the heart. Cotton made a full recovery but was not to play again on tour. He was badly missed.\n\nThe 1980 tour party.\n\nThe First Test took place at Newlands in Cape Town, with the Lions at one stage 16-6 down before they came surging back to draw level at 22-22 just six minutes before the end, and apparently with momentum now very much on their side. Tony Ward scored 18 points with some splendid kicking, and Graham Price, the Pontypool prop, scored a try. Yet South Africa had scored three tries, and at the end, they seized the game when Divan Serfontein scored a dramatic winning try.\n\nIn the Second Test, Andy Irvine, another hero of 1974, had arrived as a replacement and was chosen at fullback. The Lions controlled long periods of the game, but even then the only Lions try, by the fierce O'Driscoll, could not prevent South Africa building a 16-6 lead. Yet again, the Lions came back and trailed only by one point with 15 minutes remaining. But they made too many errors, and with Gareth Davies badly damaging knee ligaments to disrupt the flow, the Springbok wing, Gerrie Germishuys, and fullback, Gysie Pienaar, scored tries, and the Lions found that they had passed up another wonderful opportunity. The powerful and popular Ray Gravell did score a consolation try for them at the end.\n\nThis tour was the first involvement with the Lions of Clive Woodward, eventually to pilot England to World Cup glory 23 years later. Woodward was replaced in the centre by Paul Dodge for the Third Test, with Woodward, in turn, replacing John Carleton on the wing. The Lions led 10-6 in the second half with a try by Bruce Hay but again, and even though some South Africans admitted that the Lions were superior, there was another late try by Germishuys and a Lions team which had won plenty of possession, had disastrously lost the match and the series.\n\nThere was consolation of sorts in the final Test, won with courage by 17-13, and so the 1980 party did not after all become the first Lions to be whitewashed in the Republic. A mini-burst of two tries in under five minutes from Irvine and O'Driscoll gave the Lions the victory, but even then the margin did not reflect in any way their forward dominance.\n\nThe Lions were left to rue their luck; they were also left to rue their own failings in their painful failure to cash in on possession. They were left to wonder when next they would travel to South Africa, the place which above all had put Lions tours on the map of the sporting world; and to wonder what they could have done on their tours, if only one of their grand forward packs of history had more frequently managed to team up with one of their illustrious back divisions. The heady optimism of the early 1970s was fading away.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nIn those days apartheid was a raging subject and we got a lot of abuse, but I had a very simple philosophy. Rightly or wrongly I felt that politicians should not interfere with sport. We asked the South Africans to play mixed teams, which they did. We asked for mixed crowds, which we got. So we thought that was a step forward and more than the politicians were achieving. I remember one press report at the time which said the UK had improved their trading position with South Africa by tens of millions and thinking, why isn't that causing as much fuss.\n\nYou could argue for hours about the rights and wrongs of going on that trip, but my point of view is that we did achieve various things and I along with others spent a lot of time speaking to blacks and coloureds and finding out how we might help them in rugby terms, so it was a positive experience and I have no regrets.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL (Ireland)  \nToured: 1980 & 1983\n\nIn my innocence, and it's no defence at this stage of my life, I was cocooned in this sort of rugby world that I was living in and all I wanted to do was play rugby. I was that innocent. I was almost oblivious to the political controversy that was raging at that time. It's a very weak defence, it's almost uncomfortable, it's almost embarrassing saying it now, to be so unaware of the repercussions but I was so immersed in the game I was virtually oblivious to the whole issue, strange and unbelievable though that may sound.\n\nMIKE SLEMEN (England)  \nToured: 1980\n\nWhen I first went to South Africa in 1978 with North West Counties, the black and coloured players I talked to after games wanted contact, and we were young guys who wanted to go and play against one of the best rugby nations. I was invited to talk on a current affairs programme on BBC2 before the 1980 tour, on which there was a black speaker talking against apartheid. I said that a Lions tour was a great sporting experience, and that there was nothing we could do about apartheid. I also argued that a sports boycott by the British government was a double standard because wherever you went in South Africa all you saw were international companies, many of them British.\n\nJIM RENWICK (Scotland)  \nToured: 1980\n\nI was only there to play rugby, but you can't help notice what's going on around you. If I really thought we could change it by not going to play rugby there then I might have had a different attitude. But I felt: if you stop dealing with them is that the solution? Does that make the situation better or worse? Maybe if you can see how bad it is then that helps the situation because it's in your face. I always think that if there's a problem you speak about it \u2013 that's what I was taught to do. When we stopped trading with South Africa it was like we were doing our bit and we didn't have to think about it anymore \u2013 out of sight out of mind.\n\nGraham Price, Peter Wheeler and Phil Orr.\n\nJOHN ROBBIE (Ireland)  \nToured: 1980\n\nI made an early decision to go and see everything that I could. I used to get up in the morning about 7.30, have breakfast and then just go for a walk I walked the streets of every town we visited. When in Durban I walked on the beach, I chatted to fishermen, guys who had been up all night, at Umhlanga; policemen in Johannesburg; coloured dustmen in Cape Town. I was fascinated by life in South Africa and I wanted to see it all.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nI went to Soweto and the chills still go down my spine as I recall it. Was that an eye-opener! It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, but there was a cloud over Soweto which stretched as far as the eye could see. And the squalor, the smell, the kids in bare feet. That was my wake-up call, that was my sobering moment. 'What is going on here? This is what it's been all about. There is something wrong here.' It was one of the defining moments in my life. From then, I started questioning.\n\nALAN TOMES (Scotland)  \nToured: 1980\n\nSome of us went on a trip to a place called Sharpeville, a township near Johannesburg. They had us in the back of a truck and one of the guys threw a pocketful of change. All the kids were crawling around the street after the coins, so we all started throwing cash. Thinking about it now I'm a bit embarrassed \u2013 big shots throwing scraps to the kids \u2013 but at least they got the money I suppose.\n\nJOHN ROBBIE\n\nOnce we arrived at our hotel in Cape Town there was a black soccer team also booking in. One of their players spoke to Billy Beaumont and said they were all very disappointed in the Lions. Billy assumed he was talking about the defeats in the first two Tests, but the guy went on to explain that he thought we should have refused the invitation to tour. He was a little bit rude and must have been overheard. Anyway, when we came back from training the soccer side had been moved to another hotel.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nI worked closely with Doc Craven of the South Africa Rugby Board, and I met with the president of the black union and the president of the coloured union. The guy from the coloured union came to the hotel and I met him and I said 'Come in.' He said, 'I can't.' I said, 'Come in.' He said, 'I'm not allowed.' I said, 'You're my guest.' And he sat down and he was very uneasy. That sort of thing did make me very uncomfortable.\n\nPHIL BLAKEWAY (England)  \nToured: 1980\n\nRight from the start, things began to go wrong. Instead of a week's preparation in Eastbourne, which had been standard practice for Lions parties of the past, we were whisked straight out to a training camp at Vanderbijlpark, not far from Johannesburg. In theory, it wasn't a bad idea \u2013 especially as there were plenty of groups back in Britain anxious to voice their opposition to anything connected with South Africa. The trouble was that we were on the high veldt, some 6,000 feet above sea level. You need time to acclimatise \u2013 and the management didn't give us that chance.\n\nNoel Murphy, one of the few non-drinking Irishmen I've known, immediately proposed a 'light work-out' although all of us were still feeling the effects of a 24-hour journey. In reality, he proceeded to run the living daylights out of us. Even the fittest boys \u2013 let alone the little fat lads like me \u2013 were poleaxed. I recall Allan Martin, 'the Panther from Aberavon', taking off in a sprint around the athletics track, which made him extremely unpopular with the rest of his struggling colleagues. But we were soon struggling because, on the second time round, we discovered him spread-eagled on the ground gasping for breath.\n\nVery soon, we were training for three hours morning and afternoon. In that heat and at that altitude, it was a suicidal policy. It knocked the stuffing out of us before the first game and I am sure it took its toll in the Tests.\n\nMIKE SLEMEN\n\nThe main reason we lost the series was the injuries. For instance, Gareth Davies was injured in the first game against Eastern Province when he threw a long pass to me, and was hit late and hard. It meant that I scored the first try of the tour, from about 15 metres out, but it put him out for three weeks, and he only played three more tour games after that. We also lost Terry Holmes, a scrum-half who had good skills and power, and was like Mike Phillips in 2009. Flanker Stuart Lane was injured from the first kick-off in the first game. We kicked long and he was so psyched up, and chased it so well, that he put pressure on the fullback who caught it. But when he side-stepped, Stuart tried to change direction so quickly that his knee went. He didn't touch a ball in a competitive match on tour. We should have known then that it wasn't going to be our tour, but it was a series we could and should have drawn.\n\nJIM RENWICK\n\nI was on the bench for the first game and when Gareth Davies got hurt Syd turned to me and said, 'You're on.' But I had been watching the game and sunbathing at the same time and I couldn't find my boots. So they had a meeting about it and decided from then on boots had to be worn at all times by the subs and you had to be ready to get on as soon as anybody goes down. I maybe didn't make a very good first impression!\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nEarly on the tour I tweaked a hamstring and missed the first couple of games. My first game was against Natal in Durban. If I hadn't played I was going home. I couldn't touch my toes in the dressing room before the match, but I played. We sneaked a win in the hottest conditions I've ever played a match in. The following day all the blood congealed in the back of my knee and I was out for the guts of four weeks \u2013 but I wasn't sent home. I was left behind in Joburg. The doctor who was looking after me gave me as a cure for my hamstring: a zube [cough sweet]!\n\nMIKE SLEMEN\n\nIn the non-Test games I got a lot of the ball, and there was the 'wonder try' in the game against the SA Invitation XV. This was a hard game, because it was almost a trial match for the opposition, who drafted in units like the Western Province pack en masse. We were losing, but this try showed what we were capable of. We kept the ball and kept moving it \u2013 I touched it three times on my wing, and Elgan Rees had it three times on his wing \u2013 before it broke down. However, from a hack into our half, Jim Renwick revived it by counter-attacking from our 22 and linking with me. About seven pairs of hands later Bruce Hay gave me an inside pass as I came infield, and I cut through from about 20 metres out to score. They always talk about the Gareth Edwards try for the Barbarians, but this went on much longer, about 90 seconds as opposed to 30 seconds. The press actually stood up and applauded.\n\nALAN TOMES\n\nI was speaking to our liaison officer when we were in Bloemfontein for the Orange Free State match and he was asking what we fancied doing. I said that I had always wanted to drive a train, so he told me to meet him in the hotel foyer at half-eight the next morning. I kept it quiet and I only told Jim Renwick. The next day this guy took us along to the depot and we got to drive a train. And this wasn't any Mickey Mouse train \u2013 this was a proper piece of machinery. It was a steam engine so we had to pull the levers and the power of it was unbelievable. It was a great experience.\n\nJIM RENWICK\n\nToomba became known as Casey Jones after that.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nI realised in 1980, when I had to leave the tour early, that it was the end of my international career. I had to leave the pitch during the match against the South African Federation team with chest pain as a result of pericarditis \u2013 an inflammation of the fluid lining the heart. It turned out not to be life-threatening, but I didn't know that at the time, and the doctor who did tests on me that day said he thought it was a heart attack. The diagnosis left me with a sense of disbelief given all the training I had done throughout my career. I was also newly married to Pat, we had just had a daughter, and I was 6,000 miles from home, so there were a few emotions running through my mind that night\n\nI was transferred the next day to the Groot Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, where the heart transplant specialist Dr Christian Barnard worked, and I was sitting in a wheelchair waiting when he came past, recognised me as part of the Lions squad, and asked what I was doing there. After I'd told him, he said if there were any further complications to come upstairs and he would give me a new heart \u2013 which was not really what I wanted to hear. After the tests came back with the pericarditis diagnosis it was a huge relief, but I still had to return to the UK, and I watched the First Test at home.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nPoor Fran, we had some great times together and South Africa 1980 was no exception. On one occasion we were hacking our way down a golf course in four-balls. I missed a green and when I went to chip back I found my ball nestling next to a snake. I retreated hurriedly before my caddie told me the snake was dead. When we had all holed out I gingerly picked up the snake and popped it in the hole for the next four-ball to discover. As it happened it was Fran who first putted successfully and went gleefully to reclaim his ball, only to find the unwelcome guest I had left for him.\n\nJim Renwick reads post from home.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nIn the First Test we murdered them up front. The cardinal sin on a rugby field is to miss touch and put it in opposition hands where they can run it back at you. We allowed them to stay in the game because of our mistakes.\n\nJIM RENWICK\n\nThere's no doubt in my mind that the management wanted to play ten-man rugby, they wanted to take the 'Boks on up-front then bring big men down the middle \u2013 and to be fair I think we did beat them up front, but we didn't win the series.\n\nSome people might say the backs let us down and I wouldn't argue with that. But they didn't put anyone in charge of the backs, we were more or less left to do it ourselves, and we had a lot of injuries to key players. None of the backs who played in the First Test had played in a Lions Test match before.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nTony Ward kicked a record 18 points, but we lost 26-22.\n\nJIM RENWICK\n\nWe should have won that game, but the Springboks scored a try in injury time. It was a bad try to give away. A guy called Dave Smith, who was playing in the centre, had a go at us. He broke a few tackles and set up a good ruck, and Divan Serfontein, the scrum-half, dived over the line.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nLike every Lions tour everything depends on the First Test. You win the First Test and your tour is alive until the final whistle of the final game. You lose the First Test and suddenly the dynamic just changes. It was a match we really should have won.\n\nMIKE SLEMEN\n\nMy wife, Eileen, was six months pregnant with our second child when I left for South Africa. The problem was that our lad became sick with croup, and because she was looking after him, she became ill. The medics were worried that she would lose the baby girl, which wasn't moving, and I found out she had gone into hospital on the morning of the First Test. She had kept it from me, and it was upsetting when she broke down on the phone, and, after speaking to her mother, I knew I had to go back. I told the management I had to go straight away, but there was nothing that I could do. I couldn't get a flight immediately, and Bill Beaumont persuaded me to play.\n\nI was in hospital seeing my wife, and we were listening to the Second Test on the radio, when I saw she was crying because she felt guilty. It was strange not to be there, but she supported me in everything I did in rugby, and this was more important \u2013 our daughter now has children of her own. The Lions had replaced me, and under the rules they could not bring me back, so my tour was only five matches long. It wasn't until quite a few years afterwards that I realised I was the top try scorer.\n\nFran Cotton is assisted from the field with worrying chest pains.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nI picked up an injury at the Hong Kong Sevens a month before and really struggled to get fit. I thought I had made it in time and got on the plane to London, but I got a fitness test there and they weren't happy with my hamstring and sent me home.\n\nI remember listening to the First Test match on the radio and they lost, with one of the boys getting injured \u2013 and I thought to myself that I might have a wee chance of getting called out. Then, within ten minutes the phone rang and I was told to pack my bags. But it wasn't because of the injury, it was because Mike Slemen's wife had taken ill and he was having to come home.\n\nI ended up playing in three Tests but I was a bit of a basket case, because I could play on the Saturday but would then be on the physio table all the next week \u2013 they were just patching me up to keep me going.\n\nSYD MILLAR\n\nThe Second Test was a wet day and at half-time Doc Craven said to me, 'Look at the pitch.' I said, 'What do you mean, Doc?' He said, 'Three-quarters is green, one quarter is mud. You have been playing on the Springbok line and they haven't been out of their half.' And he was right.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nWe should have won. When I came on with about 15 minutes to go there wasn't much between the teams. Ray Gravell, the one and only, was playing in the centre. He always looked like he was a man of such incredible confidence when in actual fact he was quite insecure. A fantastic character, life and soul of the tour. I'm running on and in my head I'm expecting Grav to say, 'Well done on your Test debut,' and offer me a bit of encouragement as to what we might do and the way the game is going, but none of that at all. What does he say to me as I run on? He says, 'How do you think I'm playing?' and, 'Do you think I'm playing well enough to get selected for the Third Test?' Knowing Grav, I said, 'Grav, you are having a stormer!' But that was another one that slipped through our fingers.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE (Scotland)  \nToured: 1980 & 1983\n\nI got really friendly with Rodney O'Donnell. He was really superstitious: he refused to come out of his room on Friday 13th; if he walked along a pavement and stepped on a line he'd have to go way back and start again; and when I roomed with him he had to jump into his bed and hit the top and bottom sheet at the same time \u2013 it would take him 20 efforts.\n\nHe broke his neck playing against the Junior Springboks. He did it tackling Danie Gerber, their number 13. He broke his sixth and seventh vertebrae which, of course, added up to 13 \u2013 which he was quick to point out to everyone. He is an amazing man.\n\nHe had an operation while we were there and a big frame bolted onto his head and neck. He's still around now, coaching St Mary's College \u2013 so he was a lucky guy after all, I suppose.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nThe Third Test and we're playing in Port Elizabeth in the torrential rain. It had rained for a week. They had put up these temporary massive stands and it was jammed. We arrived at the ground and Wardy (Tony Ward) had forgotten his boots. Can you believe it? Now that wasn't something he was going to say to Noel Murphy. So he goes around the dressing room, 'Anybody have a spare pair of boots?' The only one who had a spare pair was Colin Patterson and Colin wore size seven and a half and they were training boots with moulded soles, just for the hard grounds. They were not meant for that kind of day. Shortly before we got out, the subs are asked to leave the dressing room and they are up at the back of the highest stand so it takes them an age to get up there. By the time they sat down we've kicked-off. I have one scar on my face from my playing career and it happened within ten seconds of the start of that Test match. I kick off, ball goes loose, I go down on it and Rob Louw comes in with his boot. There's blood pumping out of my face. Meanwhile, Tony is making himself comfortable in the stand. The first thing he sees is me down on the ground.\n\nJOHN ROBBIE\n\nWardy asked me what the hell he should do now. I said, 'Pray as hard as you can.' It must have worked because Ollie somehow continued.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nThe weather was terrible, with lashing rain and a howling gale. With about ten minutes left to play, we were 10-6 up after Bruce Hay had scored a try and Ollie Campbell had kicked two penalties. Then disaster struck... Clive Woodward normally played centre but had been selected on the wing and made the kind of mistake that is typical when someone plays out of position. He chased after a loose ball and side-tapped it into touch and then turned his back and ran off to get back into position. I was about 30 yards away and hammering across the pitch and it was one of the worst moments of my career because I could see exactly what was about to happen. Clive was jogging away and his opposite number, Gerrie Germishuys, picked up the ball and took a quick throw-in to their flanker, Theuns Stofberg, who passed it back to him, and Germishuys belted up the wing to score in the corner. Naas Botha kicked the conversion and for the third time in three Tests we had been the cause of our own downfall.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nThe situation seemed unreal. We felt we were playing well enough yet there we were, three-nil down and the series gone because of lapses in concentration, no more.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nYou'd turn up at a new ground, with the smell of barbeque smoke, sun, short grass, rock hard pitches, and huge blokes with suntans against you. And it was that artificiality of people hating you, and waking you up the night before a match by blasting their horns outside your hotel, everywhere you went they were against you.\n\nThey really didn't like you, they really wanted to beat you, and that was fair enough, I suppose. But then a few days later I would be amazed at how social they could be. You would drive to a farm and this guy would have slaughtered a beast the night before for a barbeque, and he couldn't do enough for you.\n\nALAN TOMES\n\nJim Renwick and I had a bed marathon after the last provincial game. I think we'd just had enough by then. The Griqualand West game had been a really dirty match. We were knackered after two months of tough touring. We were sick of eating steak all the time. We weren't going to get in the Test side. It was wind down time for us really, so we decided to stay in bed for two days, and all we ate was beans on toast. Word got round the hotel that we were doing a bed marathon so guys kept coming up to see what the chat was. It was good fun.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nI actually went AWOL halfway through the tour. I realised it wasn't working for me and that I wasn't going to make the team so I switched off. I remember going to watch a black folk singer perform in a pub. He sang 'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika' and I thought it was a beautiful song. It was all about freedom, and now it's the national anthem. But back then going to see a black man singing in a pub was deemed weird. We had to smuggle ourselves in there. I had more fun doing those things than doing the usual tour stuff. Maybe I felt more comfortable there because I was with the South African beatniks, who were in their early twenties so much closer to my age than the vast majority of the tour party.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nI believe that we would have won the Test series if South Africa hadn't played two warm-up matches just before we arrived against the South American Jaguars, which was effectively Argentina. In the second of those matches a terrific fullback called Gysie Pienaar emerged. He was destined to play a significant part in our downfall, but if it hadn't been for the visit of the South Americans he may well not have been considered.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nThe star of that South Africa team was Gysie Pienaar, the fullback. Everything he touched turned to gold. Jack Kyle always said that the 1950 Lions would have won the series had it not been for the New Zealand fullback Bob Scott. I would say that if it hadn't been for Gysie Pienaar I think we could have drawn or won that Test series. He was that good. It was a tour of what could have been.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nIt was unthinkable, after all the hard work we had put in and the pleasure we had in each other's company \u2013 and despite the number of players who had been forced out of the tour by injury or, in the case of Fran Cotton, by illness \u2013 that we would return without one win with which to console ourselves.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nWherever we went as Lions we were there to be shot down because of 1971 and 1974 \u2013 it was always revenge \u2013 and that's why it was such a massive effort to win that last Test in 1980. There had been virtually nothing between the Springboks and us during the series, and virtually all the Tests could have gone either way. On that tour we won all our provincial matches, and that is the mark of a very good team. I was glad for Noel's sake that we delivered the goods in the final Test.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nIt was a different tour to New Zealand in '77 and though we got a lot of injuries early on, and also lost the series 3-1, it was thoroughly enjoyable. However, a number of stars made themselves unavailable and just as there was no hard-core from 1974 left in 1977, the same was true from 1977 to 1980. The South Africans were big powerful units, but I didn't consider them to be a dirty side \u2013 just difficult to combat. I remember Maurice Colclough was being marked by the giant Springbok lock Louis Moolman, and at the lineout it was difficult to get a throw through. We eventually managed it with a hard flat throw to the middle, and Maurice, who was not lifted, was a good player and very athletic. We gave as good as we got, but lost out narrowly because we were a bit disjointed around injuries.\n\nIt was very close, and we lost the series because of small things around each Test match. Naas Botha proved for South Africa that he was a better player than simply a goal-kicking machine, and my view is that on Lions tours you had to be eight points better than the opposition before a match to win a game because of home pressure and home town refereeing. They are just a fact of life on tour.\n\nJIM RENWICK\n\nWe had a plan to play ten-man rugby, and that is what we were going to do. But if you arrive with two or three different ways you can play then it makes life easier for you when plan A doesn't work. On a tour like that, plan A is not going to work all the time. You are coming up against different teams every three days and sometimes it might take something a wee bit different to get the result you need. Remember they are getting to see plenty of how you are playing so you have got to have something else tucked away to keep them on their toes. I'm not saying we didn't have another plan, but we didn't have it prepared like we should have.\n\nClive Woodward played in the centre in the Second Test and got in on the wing for the Third Test. He was probably a bit like me from the point of view that he wasn't happy with the way the back play was going, and I think he felt there should have been a backs coach. At Leicester, where he was playing, Chalkie White was the backs coach, and he was actually in South Africa at the time and there was some chat amongst the players about trying to get him involved, but it never came to anything. Most teams had two coaches. Scotland would have had Nairn McEwan and Colin Telfer doing the backs, but the Lions only had one and it was maybe time to think about changing that.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nI shared with Clive Woodward and he was a Rank Xerox trainee at that time. I remember he accepted a call, and then immediately said, 'Hang on,' and laid the phone down for 30 seconds, then went back on the line and finished the conversation. I asked him afterwards what that was all about and he said, 'We've been told to always be in control of every situation so that's me getting my time to think, and he's on the defensive.' So he was a guy who had been taught how to be a leader. He was a really nice man \u2013 but I remember thinking, 'Wow, you're different.'\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nSyd Millar, Noel Murphy and myself, all of us forwards, decided that we would take on the Springboks up front. During that period our rugby had probably become too preoccupied with forward domination at the expense of back play, and as captain in 1980, I hold my hands up. When you are on top in the forwards it is easy to say, 'Let's keep it here,' and one or two of our backs got frustrated because there is no defence against quick front-foot ball, as the Springboks showed us. In South Africa we were a bit one-dimensional \u2013 the forwards kept the good ball to ourselves, and then gave the backs the bad ball and said, 'Do something with it.' I accept responsibility.\n\nWhen you look back at the Lions coaches who have been successful, the ground-breaking tour was in 1971, and Carwyn James was a backs coach, and his captain was a back (John Dawes) \u2013 and that influence remained in 1974 through players like Gareth Edwards and JPR Williams. However, it is also true that we had eight different half-backs in eight games, whereas in the front-five of the pack, apart from Fran Cotton's heart problem, we stayed intact all through. Derek Quinnell said to me that we had to put more pace in the back-row, but after Stuart Lane was injured we had no real out-and-out No 7s, so in the last two Tests we played three blind-side wing-forwards in the back-row in Colm Tucker, Jeff Squire and John O'Driscoll.\n\nOllie Campbell clears his lines against Orange Free State.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nThe South Africans were quick to see that the Lions were short of pace in the back-row after Stuart Lane was injured, and that it would help their cause to move the ball wide, away from the main source of Lions strength, knowing that big flankers like Rob Louw and Theuns Stofberg would be pounding up in support. It is no coincidence that Louw scored tries in the first two Tests, and Stofberg scored in the Second Test and played a vital role in the decisive Springbok try in the Third Test.\n\nJIM RENWICK\n\nThey had been waiting six years for us and when we got out there they were ready. I didn't think we were as ready as they were. Having said that, the Wednesday side never lost a game and we were up against good opposition. I don't think many teams will ever do that in South Africa. I played in the First Test because many of our midfield backs, including Ollie Campbell and Gareth Davies, were injured. Tony Ward was fly-half and they had to play Dai Richards in the centre. He was more of a runner than kicker \u2013 so I was more involved with the decision-making. But once Ollie was fit again and Tony joined the squad, they could do their own kicking and I knew that I wasn't going to get in the Test side because of the type of game they were wanting to play. They were always going to be better off with Ray Gravell and Paul Dodge crashing through the middle. But I never stopped trying because we wanted to keep the Wednesday team going \u2013 we didn't want to lose a game. I ended up playing in 11 games, and only Graham Price and Clive Williams played in more matches, so I got plenty of rugby and did my bit for the squad.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nJim Renwick became a cult hero. He was this wee unassuming bloke who nobody could understand and who would sing cowboy songs \u2013 and suddenly he had John Carleton and the English guys dribbling at his feet. They could see he was his own man \u2013 and a great player who should have been in the Test team throughout the series.\n\nI thought the Scots weren't treated that well. Alan Tomes should have been in the Test team too, and I felt I should have been in the Test team. I've never said it before, but I felt badly done by on that tour. As a junior player, I didn't feel I had the ear of the coach. I was a student and perhaps a bit of a reactionary, so I didn't want to feel like I was crawling to Noel Murphy \u2013 but that was what I needed to do.\n\nRay Gravell was a wonderful guy, but he would finish a game and straight away be in the coach's ear asking what he thought of his performance. I could never be a part of that sort of stuff because I was this quiet, inexperienced student.\n\nThe tour was full of these big ebullient characters like John O'Driscoll and Maurice Colclough, who had plate fights in the hotel corridor \u2013 and I just felt so out of it.\n\nJIM RENWICK\n\nI used to get stick because of my accent \u2013 nobody could understand what I was saying. My number was 22, so I used to shout, 'Twinty-twae,' and they all used to take the mickey. Bruce Hay got it as well because he kept on saying 'ken' \u2013 everybody wanted to know who Ken was.\n\nThe first night I shared with Peter Morgan, he could speak Welsh but he didn't have a clue what I was on about. So I had to try and speak a bit properly but I soon got sick of that; I wasn't going to change and neither were they, but they soon got used to it. They used to send guys out to schools to speak to the kids. So I got sent along to this one school and they couldn't understand a word I was saying. So I didn't get to do that anymore \u2013 which was a shame because I liked that part of it. Sometimes we'd have to go and open a local shop or something, get your photo in the local press and things like that. I used to volunteer because it meant you got to go out and meet folk and have a blether with them and just see what was going on. It was a good tour, a good experience and a good set of guys \u2013 but I suppose when I look back I wish I'd been more organised. It's the chance of a lifetime, and I suppose it rankles in the back of my mind that maybe I should have taken it more seriously and maybe I should have said more. But I didn't at the time because I didn't know what was in front of me. It's like playing a game of rugby, you assume that you're going to get the ball at the lineout, but it's not always that cut and dried and if what you've got planned doesn't happen then you have to adapt and make the most of the situation.\n\nBILL BEAUMONT\n\nIt was a great honour to captain the Lions, and it was also different because the sense of responsibility meant you became much more focused on the tour as a whole. In 1977 I only had myself to worry about, and never thought I would get into the Test team, so, having achieved that, I came back with a great sense of satisfaction. But in 1980, as captain, you had to prove you were worth your place in the Test side, and lead by example. I had never been fitter than when I went to South Africa because I wanted to make sure I hit the ground running. To get myself in condition I purposely did a lot of road running to get myself prepared for the hard grounds, because if you don't your calves can get very tight. I played all ten Saturday games on the tour, and my only injury was having some blood drained from my knee after the Second Test.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nBill Beaumont was an incredible captain and an incredible player, if everyone in the pack had been like him then it would have been great.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nTwo things decided the outcome of the series. A string of key Lions players were injured, including Terry Holmes, Gareth Davies, and our only open-side, Stuart Lane. And, as happened with the All Blacks in 1977, the Springboks out-thought the Lions. Rather than being confrontational they played a counter-attacking game, using incisive runners like Gerrie Germishuys, Gysie Pienaar and flanker Rob Louw. They never kicked the ball back to us, but ran it back instead, using a classic Lions game to beat us.\n\nWe were outsmarted and outplayed, and we really missed a quick open-side of the calibre of Fergus Slattery or Tony Neary, neither of whom were able to tour. Louw was a good player, but he was not in the same class as Slattery.\n\nIn terms of conditioning I don't think the 1980 Lions trained very hard at all, and there was no comparison to 1974 in terms of intensity. I don't think they worked the boys hard enough. It was also a whole new group, and although there were a lot of very good players, there were not any who at that time were world-class.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nMy Lions tours were disappointing because we lost. I'd heard all these stories about these fantastic tours of the seventies, but I didn't enjoy my 12 weeks in South Africa in 1980 or my ten weeks in New Zealand in 1983 at all. I actually hated them \u2013 genuinely hated them. I really thought we were so far behind the times.\n\nI trained really hard with Bill Dickinson before going to South Africa, I gave up smoking, and when I turned up at this hotel near London the first thing we did was go out on the piss. I thought, 'This is madness.' I was anticipating living the life of a monk, but everybody was drunk out their brains and I ended up having to put Graham Price to bed. And that was a portent of the next 12 weeks. It was remarkably self-destructive and amateur. I couldn't believe the drinking that went on \u2013 I still can't believe it. If you weren't in the Saturday team you got pissed on the Friday night, and if you weren't in the Wednesday team you got pissed on the Tuesday night \u2013 it was crazy. We didn't have a drinking culture like that with Scotland \u2013 we couldn't afford to because our backs were always against the wall. I went on the tour thinking I would learn a lot, but all we did at training was run and run and pass the ball and run. So we were very fit but we didn't have the same kind of bulk that the Springboks had. They had been beaten in '74 and this was revenge for them. We heard stories that they had been in the gym, which was an alien concept to us.\n\nThe South Africans were just stronger than us. They were more developed people, like Danie Gerber. We were just these skinny Europeans. And there wasn't much art to the way we tried to play. It was tackle, tackle, run, run \u2013 and we had a good scrum.\n\nJIM RENWICK\n\nWe trained in the morning, had a bit of light lunch, then played a bit of golf or did different things depending where we were in the afternoon. Then it would be onto the beers depending on whether you were playing the next day or not. And when we went drinking we did it in style. Some boys didn't drink or didn't drink much, but some boys drank a lot \u2013 and I think I was in that second category. We always had big nights after the games \u2013 basically it was back to the hotel where we'd have a bar organised and we'd take it from there.\n\nSome of the boys like John O'Driscoll and Maurice Colclough were wild with drink. They'd get hell of a drunk at the after-match functions and throw food about. I remember at one dinner Syd was speaking and Colclough poured a tub of beans over the top of him. It was schoolboy stuff that you wouldn't get away with in Scotland where it was always far more disciplined. It was quite a laid back tour, I suppose.\n\nThen there was the Sunday School which was basically going out for a couple of beers and having a bit of fun after our lunch on Sunday. Beaumont was the leader, and you had to be invited in. I was in it, Toomba (Alan Tomes) was in it, so was Bruce Hay, John Carleton, Pricey, Jeff Squire, Colclough, John O'Driscoll and a few other guys. We ended up getting T-shirts made.\n\nClive Woodward spots a gap against Northern Transvaal.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nIt was the first time we saw sponsorship. We got given training tops with the name of a cigarette brand emblazoned across the front. And there were Coca-Cola stands at the side of the pitch, so they were way ahead of us in terms of the way the money worked.\n\nYou'd go to places and have lunch with a gathering of businessmen, and you'd have to tell a joke or a couple of stories, and the businessmen would chip into a pot. I went to a couple of those things. Then at the end of the tour that pot was used to buy uncut diamonds, and there would be somebody waiting at Heathrow airport to buy the diamonds at twice the price, and we'd all take our cut.\n\nIt wasn't a lot, but there was this separate business going on about trying to profit from the tour, and I had been totally naive to this. I was 22 and had thought it was all about the rugby.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nA Lions tour is like a three-year university degree crammed into three months. It is a test of character to get to know 30 blokes intimately, who become lifelong friends. For instance, after the 1980 tour I had not seen Colm Tucker for 20 years, but then I saw him in Dublin at a match and it was as if we had never been apart. When you are living so closely together, sharing such an intense experience, you cannot hide anything. Whether it's strengths, weaknesses or foibles they will be found out and examined. It is up there with my best achievements and it means an awful lot. It was also the amateur era, and no one got annoyed if you enjoyed yourself. You wouldn't swap those memories or tours for anything.\n\nBill Beaumont is carried from the field following the Lions' victory in the Fourth Test.\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO\n\n# [MONTHS OF MELANCHOLY  \n1983](006.html#a3)\n\nNEW ZEALAND\n\nIF THE melancholic 1966 tour to New Zealand is reckoned to represent the low point of Lions history in terms of results and unfortunate selections, then those who followed the 1983 tour would be forced to admit that this ill-starred, badly-planned odyssey ran 1966 very close.\n\nThe Lions were whitewashed in the Test series and since this was now the era of the shorter tours to one location, they did not have the consolation enjoyed by the 1966 team of some Test success in Australia. There was only one leg in 1983, a rather grim and often (compared to previous vivid tours) even featureless passage around New Zealand, where the confidence and excellence and resistance and brilliance of the 1971 Lions was by now something of a distant memory.\n\nThe tour, in the eyes of many, was crippled by the selection of its hierarchy. The great Willie-John McBride applied for the post of coach but in the end was made tour manager, a role which he never appeared to be happy in or enjoyed. Perhaps a ceremonial position was not the old warrior's style, and nor, demonstrably, was dealing with the mass media which now followed every tour.\n\nJim Telfer, the great Scottish Lion, was appointed as coach, a measure which received general acclaim \u2013 and Telfer was, in the next year, to coach Scotland to a Grand Slam, one in the eye for those who attributed most of the blame for the 1983 disaster to him.\n\nYet again, however, the choice of captain repeated some of the Lions' mistakes of history \u2013 not least in the fact that too much attention was paid to the game immediately before the final selection, in this case an Ireland win over England at Lansdowne Road. For this and for other reasons, Ciaran Fitzgerald was named as captain, even though he lacked the world-class attributes and physical stature to make an impact in the Lions Test series, and even though Peter Wheeler, a magnificent Lion in 1977 and 1980, was available and favoured by many. Indeed,Wheeler was omitted from the tour entirely.\n\nPerhaps Fitzgerald's supporters did themselves few favours with their assertion that the opposition to Fitzgerald was some kind of pro-English coalition. It was nothing of the sort; it was an assertion of the obvious realities of the contenders at the time. Also affected by the dispute was the steely Scotland hooker, Colin Deans, who was relegated to the role of dirt-tracker, when almost everyone on tour bar McBride regarded him as the better of the two touring hookers.\n\nFitzgerald's own performances reached an early nadir when he threw the ball in crooked six times in the Second Test match in Wellington, conceding six priceless pieces of possession. At the end of the tour, Lions supporters were re-acquainted with one of the realities which the previous 98 years of touring had stressed \u2013 that to play and to lead an individual country was by no means incontrovertible evidence that you were a Lions captain or a Lions Test player. As Telfer was later to write, he wanted Deans to be his Test hooker, and said so repeatedly, only for McBride and Fitzgerald himself to outvote him on the tiny tour hierarchy.\n\nYet again, the Lions were badly afflicted by injury, losing dynamic players such as Terry Holmes, in fine form at scrum-half, Nigel Melville, who was injured soon after arriving as a bright replacement, Ian Stephens, a world-class prop, and Jeff Squire, as good as any All Black in the back-row all succumbing. This left them dreadfully short of true class and power.\n\nHowever, it is extremely doubtful if, given their inbuilt disadvantages, the Lions would have won more than one Test match even if all the chosen team had been available until the end. New Zealand had some pedigree players, notably the splendid Dave Loveridge at scrum-half, Stu Wilson on the wing, Jock Hobbs and Andy Haden up front. There were few weaknesses in the team, and if the All Blacks of 1983 were workmanlike rather than stellar, they were also too organised, committed and strong for the tourists.\n\nAs Clem Thomas wrote of the tour, 'The Lions were to win little, for the problems which faced the coach Jim Telfer were daunting, due to poor pre-tour selection. Imagine leaving out Paul Dodge, amongst many other terrible errors of judgement! Why do the Lions selectors, time and again, pick captains who are not certain of being the best in their position on tour?'\n\nThomas also made another salient point, which sprang from the rather graceless nature of the tour and the lack of any real rapport between the hosts and the touring team:'Players of all nations were beginning to question their role as cannon fodder on the world stage, as once again on tour we saw players in a game which is supposed to be of fun and enjoyment, involved in scenes of attrition.'\n\nThere were very few vintage performances, with the tour provincial games bringing defeats at the hands of Auckland and Canterbury, this latter game being notable not for the usual rough play between the two teams which had marked history, but for the fact that the Lions missed kick after kick at goal after the management bluntly refused to choose a proper goalkicker. Dusty Hare was available and kicked beautifully during the tour, but for some strange reason, the Lions did not seem to grasp the overwhelming significance of goalkickers in the game at that time, or indeed at any time.\n\nOne of the other features of the itinerary was a realisation on both sides that in the new 18-match tours, playing four Test matches was simply unviable. So for the next Lions tour, to Australia in 1989, only three Test matches were arranged and the tour became slightly less brutal as a result.\n\nDespite everything, there were some outstanding successes in the Lions ranks. John Rutherford, one of the greatest Scotland fly-halves of all time, had to move to centre to make the Test team, chiefly because no one in authority appeared to realise that the iconic Ollie Campbell was nowhere remotely near his best at fly-half, and that Rutherford deserved a chance. Rutherford added considerable class to the midfield, notably in the Third Test in Dunedin, and his craft was in sharp contrast to the blundering of some of the other Lions backs.\n\nUp front, Peter Winterbottom, then a tyro England flanker, was absolutely magnificent in the resistance, with a courage that was scarcely believable. His high tackle rate and aggression in broken play impressed New Zealanders so much that Winterbottom was inundated with invitations to return for stints in New Zealand's domestic rugby. Gwyn Evans, from Maesteg, eventually forced his way into the Test team at fullback and up front, Graham Price managed to hold on in the scrums to give the Lions some kind of fingertip hold on proceedings.\n\nTo their credit, the Lions at least avoided any crushing defeats in the first three Tests of the series, only for them to go down humiliatingly by 38-6 in the final Test in Auckland, the biggest Test defeat in Lions history.\n\nThe First Test, as usual, had given the Lions their best chance. And they blew it. Even when the tour of Terry Holmes ended with a serious knee injury in the 21st minute, the Lions still could and should have won, as a good place kicking effort by Ollie Campbell gave them a 9-6 lead at half-time.\n\nHowever, they were completely unable to cash in on periods of authority due to some poor back play and, eventually, the Lions payed a heavy price when a try by flanker Mark Shaw gave New Zealand the match, 16-12. There was to be no way back.\n\nThe Second Test was played in typically horrendous conditions at Athletic Park, Wellington, and the Lions performed wonders in the first half to restrict New Zealand to a 9-0 lead when the home team were playing down a hurricane-force wind. But some absolutely masterly play in the second half by New Zealand, when their accuracy and discipline were quite wonderful, meant that the Lions were denied possession and could not score a single point. It was a crushing 9-0 win.\n\nThe series was lost in Dunedin in the Third Test. Again, the match was played in dreadful conditions, but Roger Baird and John Rutherford both scored tries to give the Lions some hope. However, in the end, a try by Stu Wilson cooked their goose, and yet another Test series had slipped by as New Zealand closed it out.\n\nIn the opening stages of the Fourth Test, one of the New Zealand fans up in the stand produced a trumpet and blew a loud exhortation to his heroes to go on the charge. They obliged. New Zealand were outstanding that day, with Loveridge operating at his world-class best, with Wilson scoring a hat-trick and with further tries from Hobbs, Haden and Alan Hewson. It was a relentless performance by the men in black, and brutal evidence, if any were needed, of the sad regression of British & Irish rugby.\n\nThere had been a lack of wisdom in the preparations and selection, and a lack of class on the field. Sad but true, and the domination of the southern hemisphere had been re-imposed.\n\nThe 1983 tour party.\n\nCIARAN FITZGERALD (Ireland)  \nToured: 1983\n\nThere was a lot of media hassle on the tour which probably distracted from the rugby side of it. All of that came from who the captain was going to be, Peter Wheeler or myself. A lot of the English media prior to the tour had him anointed and appointed. That was a big sideshow all the way through.\n\nCOLIN DEANS (Scotland)  \nToured: 1983\n\nWhat really annoyed me was that they picked the wrong hooker. I thought Peter Wheeler would have been picked because of his experience with the Lions, and he would have been a great captain. But they left him at home. They took Ciaran Fitzgerald as captain and I was the other hooker. Ciaran clearly did a good job for Ireland \u2013 but he just wasn't a Lions captain. He wasn't the dominant figure in his position and everyone knew it.\n\nCoach Jim Telfer.\n\nPETER WHEELER\n\nIn the Five Nations before the 1983 tour, the Irish beat us so that put me on the back foot, and I knew I'd not had the best season. I stayed in Dublin after the match and had a drink at O'Donoghue's with Fergus Slattery at 11 a.m. on Sunday morning, but when it closed at 2 p.m. the landlord decided he would do a lock-in, and he brought sandwiches round and we just sang songs. It was a fantastic time and went on into the evening. We caught the early ferry back on the Monday morning, the day the Lions squad was announced, but before we left I was called by the journalist, Ian Robertson, who told me, 'You're not the captain, and you're not in the tour party.' I was extremely disappointed, but I'd had so much go right with my career that I couldn't let one setback get on top of me. We crossed the Irish Sea in the pouring rain, and then my wife Margaret and I drove back home from Anglesey. She tells me that all I said was, 'Oh well,' a few times \u2013 but by the time we got back I'd sorted it out in my own mind.\n\nI had no axe to grind with Ciaran. I just didn't think he was good enough as a player, although he clearly had something as a captain. The questions over his Test credentials showed on the tour in the friction with Colin Deans, who many people thought was a better hooker. I got an invite to go back to Dublin while the tour was on to do some coaching, and Ciaran's brother was on the same course. Word had already come back that things were not so good and I remember him saying that Ciaran had been singled out, using the term, 'Yes, they've put a saddle on him, haven't they?' At that time it wasn't so much the coach and captain selecting the team as it was the Four Home Unions divvying it up.\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nThe Fitzy decision didn't go down well in England and they [the media] started up. We had enough guys in New Zealand to contend with without our own starting up. When the New Zealand press saw one or two of the English journalists going for Fitzy they rubbed their hands with glee and jumped in as well. Fitzy played well amid all that controversy.\n\nCOLIN DEANS\n\nDespite Ciaran being captain, I was still confident that I was going to get picked for the Tests. I had discussed it with Jim Telfer before we left and as far as I was concerned the team sheet was a blank piece of paper with no names pencilled in \u2013 so I had every opportunity to play all four Tests.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nIt is no secret: I was out voted. I never told anyone that until it was printed somewhere else, so I can say it now. I wanted Colin Deans in the team.\n\nCiaran was supposed to be a natural leader, an army officer; he had led Ireland to the Triple Crown, and he was a big pal of Willie-John's. I'm not saying he wasn't good enough to be on the tour, but he shouldn't have been in the Test team.\n\nI used to sit and say that I didn't think he was good enough. And he would say he wanted to play, and Willie-John would go with him \u2013 so I had to accept that. His throwing-in was all over the place. Certain players develop as Lions, and he didn't do it.\n\nI've met him since and he's a nice enough fellow. He was a hard little bastard. But he wasn't good enough \u2013 and that coloured the whole tour.\n\nROGER BAIRD (Scotland)  \nToured: 1983\n\nI did feel sorry for Ciaran Fitzgerald, but not as much as I felt for Colin Deans. Fitzgerald wasn't playing well, his throwing-in was struggling, and he became more of a recluse the longer the tour went on. So much so that I met him at Ravenhill a few years back when we were both involved with the under-21s and chatted for an hour \u2013 and that would be more than I spoke to him for three months.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM (England)  \nToured: 1983 & 1993\n\nI don't remember having a one-to-one conversation with Ciaran throughout the tour \u2013 we were only there for 11 weeks!\n\nDONAL LENIHAN (Ireland)  \nToured: 1983 and 1989. Manager: 2001\n\nFitzy was an insular fella anyway. There were nine Irish fellas on the tour by the end of it but he wouldn't be spilling his guts to us either. He was aloof in some ways. An outstanding captain \u2013 but he wouldn't be a fella to pour his heart out. I had huge respect for Ciaran and the way he dealt with situations. He never dropped the guard. We had 30 players and only two hookers, so he was togged out for every single game and had no reprieve: Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday \u2013 every single week either playing or on the bench.\n\nHUGO MacNEILL (Ireland)  \nToured: 1983\n\nCiaran is the best captain I have ever played with. Not just for his words but his thoughtfulness in dealing with players as individuals was fantastic. I think inadvertently Willie-John, in protecting him from the media, ended up protecting him from his team. Had Ciaran been given the opportunity to stamp his mark on the tour early on it would have made it easier for him. Willie-John spoke a lot at the early meetings. He didn't need to. Even if he sat in the corner and said nothing he was still Willie-John the legend.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nWe were supportive of Ciaran but we needed to do it in a more proactive, more verbal way. I don't think we did enough at the time in standing behind him and supporting him. In our own way we all did support him, no question. But it should have been done at some stage by some of the senior players, of which I was one. With the wisdom of years and looking back it was one change I would make. We should have made it clear, as a group at a meeting with everyone there, that he understood that he was our man. I regret that.\n\nTour captain Ciaran Fitzgerald and Graham Price tackle Dave Loveridge.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nI'm not sure about the Ciaran Fitzgerald thing because he was quite a good player and a good lad. I always thought he got a terrible press from us Scots because he kept Colin Deans out, but he wasn't that bad. When you start losing you like to pin excuses on someone and he was convenient because he was a decent bloke, an army captain and Irish. He maybe didn't look the part but he was a battler. Colin was possibly better but Ciaran was a good captain and a good bloke.\n\nJIM CALDER (Scotland)  \nToured: 1983\n\nI just remember how hard Colin trained to get... well... nowhere, really. It was pretty tough for him. I shared that angst because I wasn't originally in the Test team. We used to do extra training together, and I remember one night in Canterbury when Johnnie Beattie, Deano and myself agreed to meet at 5 a.m. the next morning to go for a run, because we were all hacked off about not being picked and really wanted to push our case.\n\nWell, at 5 a.m. the next morning I really couldn't be bothered, but at 5.05 a.m. the phone rang and it was Deano at reception saying, 'Come on, let's go.' So I got up and went downstairs and there was Beattie as well, who I suspect had received a similar call from Deano. And I don't think I had ever run so hard and so fast before. Deano was like a man possessed. After half an hour, Beattie gave up, but Deano and myself just kept going and kept going \u2013 we were just so pissed off.\n\nFortunately for myself, I got in for the Third Test. I broke my thumb so I didn't make the Fourth Test, but at least I got some satisfaction from having got my full Lions cap.\n\nJohn Rutherford.\n\nCOLIN DEANS\n\nLooking back now, I should have helped the guy, for the good of the team. Nowadays they'd have analysts and specialist coaches giving him all sorts of advice, and he would have been helped \u2013 but back then he was on his own, really.\n\nThere was a hell of a lot of pressure on him \u2013 especially given the way results were going \u2013 and there was none on me.\n\nThe only pressure on me was that my second son, Ross, was born two weeks into the 12-week tour so I had that to contend with. But that just threw me more into the limelight and I got a heck of a lot positive publicity, not to mention generous gifts and well-wishes from the locals. It really was very special that there were these people in New Zealand who didn't know me, and they would come along with these little gifts for me.\n\nJIM CALDER\n\nIn 1966, Mike Campbell-Lamerton had captained the Lions but really struggled to justify his place in the team. He had said to Creamy [Jim Telfer], 'What do the boys think?' And Creamy had said that they thought he should drop himself. So he did. And I think Telfer was trying to get that sort of discussion with Fitzgerald.\n\nI remember he took me aside at one point and bounced this idea off me that Fitzgerald might be persuaded to do the same thing, but at that stage I was a midweek player, and not really in a position to be making my voice heard on something like that.\n\nCIARAN FITZGERALD\n\nYou had to make the decision very early that that's the way it was. You accepted it and got on with it or else you let it get to you. Not for one minute was I going to lose the opportunity I had. One of the strangest things is that normally you'd take a lot of flak from the home media but a lot of the New Zealand media were flummoxed by all of this and so they were coming out with articles in support of me. I was in the eye of the storm all the time. English journalists would take me aside saying, more or less, did I not realise that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nI never really felt the split in the squad over Ciaran Fitzgerald, but no one was talking to me about it because I was only a kid. However, Colin Deans was playing very well, and Iain Milne was also good at tight-head. There was a selection dilemma, too, at fly-half, where John Rutherford was the better running No 10, but Ollie Campbell had been part of the Irish Triple Crown side, kicking goals and putting balls in the air.\n\nRutherford was a great player, and if he had been given more of a run, and Jeff Squire, Ian Stephens, Bob Norster and Terry Holmes had stayed fit, it would have made a big difference. Holmes was a main threat to New Zealand, and without him we were fighting a losing battle from the start.\n\nCOLIN DEANS\n\nIain Milne also suffered with the selection on that tour. Over the years he was a joy to play with. He just gave you that sure-fire feeling that the right-hand side of the scrum was going nowhere. You can look at people in the street and know what role in life people are made for. You know the Bear is a prop. New Zealand were laughing their socks off in '83 when they knew the Bear wasn't being picked for the Tests because we were just ripping teams apart in midweek.\n\nDavid Leslie was left behind as well, which was sad. I think if he had gone he would have pushed Peter Winterbottom; I think he would have been in the Tests. You need someone with that mental toughness.\n\nJIM CALDER\n\nThe All Blacks said that they couldn't believe that Deano and the Bear were not being picked. As Clive Woodward said: 'If you don't pick your best team then how do you expect to win?'\n\nWILLIE-JOHN McBRIDE\n\nI went over to London first of all to be interviewed as the coach and ended up as the manager because they made Jim Telfer the coach. It was a great challenge, but it was a sad time to do it. England got the wooden spoon that year, they had a dreadful season, Wales weren't a good side and Scotland weren't a great side either. Plus we had all sorts of injuries. When we put the team together I remember saying, 'God, will we get away with this?' There were one or two players we had to pick hoping they would get fit on the tour. We had to because there really weren't any other choices.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nIt was wrong to take people like Maurice Colclough. He had been a big star in 1980, but he was coming off a bad injury. He came up to Scotland for a fitness test and he had lost a lot of definition in his leg. We were desperate to get him to go because he was a huge man and he had been a big part of Bill Beaumont's team in 1980, but he could hardly run, and when you passed him the ball he was handless. Nice enough fellow, but I have never been so disappointed by the quality of a player he was, especially given the position he held in the English camp.\n\nAndy Dalton throws the ball in during the Second Test at Athletic Park in Wellington.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nWe were closer than the results of the series indicate. We trained bloody hard, and there was virtually no let-up from Jim Telfer. As a 22-year-old that was fine, and I just got fitter and fitter \u2013 but some of the older boys really suffered. Going to New Zealand you need to give yourself every chance, and I don't think we did. Jim flogged people too hard. We had a week's holiday in Waitangi, and the guys thought it would be great to have a break, do some fishing, and give the body a rest \u2013 but we trained every bloody day in a park. Jim developed as a coach, and probably now realises he was flogging us.\n\nROB NORSTER (Wales)  \nToured: 1983 & 1989\n\nBeing picked for the 1983 Lions helped me realise a goal I had set myself as a kid. It was a real pinnacle playing for Wales, but the next target was always to play for the Lions. Going to New Zealand in 1983 was a huge highlight in my career.\n\nI was in the mix in 1980, and got a letter asking about availability, but it was a bit early for me. I fell short that time, probably quite rightly because I was a young buck, and Alan Tomes went instead.\n\nRoy Laidlaw tries to clear the ball in dreadful conditions during the Third Test.\n\nGoing to New Zealand was a daunting prospect, but we had a strong party. Not quite as strong as it might have been because of selection, but good enough to be in with a shout.\n\nWe were criticised for possibly being a little bit too forward orientated, but what do you need to win in New Zealand? There was a view at the time that our manager Willie-John McBride fancied more of a tracksuit role as a coach and perhaps there was some tension created through that.\n\nBut Jim Telfer was someone I was really relishing working with. He had a fabulous record as a coach and was a tough guy on the park. He was obsessive about his rugby and a real disciplinarian. He carried some mental and physical scars from the Lions' appalling tour to New Zealand in 1966, but he had stood up then and had a good name and reputation in New Zealand.\n\nBut while I was happy to train flat-out, twice a day in sleet and snow, not all the senior pros appreciated the drilling he gave us. A few of them objected to his methodology.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nWe were hard-hit on the injury front as a result. Ian Stephens, Bob Norster, Jeff Squire and Terry Holmes were nailed on for the First Test, but none of them were fit for it. Then Nigel Melville was shipped in for Holmes, and looked very sharp, including scoring a couple of tries \u2013 and he would have played in the First Test but for a cheap shot by the North Auckland flanker, 'Wuzz' Phillips, which put him out of the tour with fractured neck vertebrae.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nI thought at the time I was good enough to be the coach. I thought I had enough experience to take on the All Blacks. But I learned that I just wasn't good enough at that stage to get the best out of the players.\n\nI don't know who would have been good enough because New Zealand were streets ahead of us in terms of how they developed players and played the game. We deserved to be beaten. And it was a pretty sad tour by the time we finished.\n\nI was the only coach, which meant I had to take charge of the backs. I had never coached backs in my life so I had to delegate a lot to guys like John Rutherford, Roy Laidlaw, Clive Woodward and Ollie Campbell.\n\nCIARAN FITZGERALD\n\nThere was a clash of styles between Jim Telfer and myself. In the Irish set-up the captain ran a lot of the show and it's always my belief that to run the show on the pitch you have to run it off the pitch in terms of trying to get guys to listen to what you say. The guys had to be able to respond to your voice when you say something. It had to mean something and I don't think Telfer was used to a captain like that. Telfer's captain would have tossed the coin and that was it. I think he was a bit taken aback when I used to ask him what the plan was before the training sessions, how much he was going to make us do. I would voice fairly strong opinions and there was always an edge there. He wasn't used to it and it was an issue all the way through. I wasn't going to give and Willie-John had to step in a few times. Telfer was a good guy, though. He knew everything about rugby.\n\nJIM CALDER\n\nTelfer was a professional stuck amongst amateurs. There was nobody better at preparing a pack of forwards to go out there and give the opposition hell. You could see he'd get frustrated by it, because the depth of his thinking was so much greater than anyone else's.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nPoor old Jim Telfer \u2013 he was badly treated. I'll swear to my dying day that he would suggest stuff in training and then some players, who I can't name, would wait until he was out of earshot and then say that we weren't going to do that in the game. We'd practise a certain way of playing, like rucking, for hours and then these guys would say, 'Nah, we'll just maul.'\n\nIt was because he was Scottish. If you were Scottish you were a minion, I felt.\n\nJim is a fantastic man and was the best thing on the tour, but he couldn't get everyone to buy into what he was trying to do. He was way ahead of everybody there, but they all believed they knew better than he did. They were wrong.\n\nROB NORSTER\n\nThere was definitely a tension between the senior players and Jim and once we had lost the First Test you just felt we were on a slippery slope and there was no way we were going to recover. Players started getting injuries and I'm not sure whether they were always genuine.\n\nWe did rucking drills the length of the field, running under a white stick to get our body positions right. We had some torture sessions and also did a lot of heavy scrummaging work. This was often done on sand and we'd rip the skin off our knees \u2013 it was hard and tough. If I'd been in my thirties, at the tail end of my career, on an 18-match tour of the toughest rugby-playing country in the world and having just come out of a long, hard season at home, I might have had a different view of things. The tour certainly became a huge test of character.\n\nBut to be fair to Jim, he was the sole coach in charge of 30 players \u2013 it was bonkers. I used to liken him to Howard Hughes of an evening in the hotels because he would leave his door open and paw over the videos of our matches. If he saw you he would call you in and get you to work the pause and rewind buttons and get you to go over the tapes with him. That's why we all used to tip-toe past his room.\n\nROGER BAIRD\n\nI think it was unfair on Jim Telfer that he didn't have an assistant. He is an out-and-out forwards coach. There is no one better at getting forwards rucking and kicking shit out of folk, and he was so hell-bent on that that he started getting resistance, especially from the English guys. He needed a foil.\n\nBy 1983 everybody had two coaches so it was terribly short-sighted. We ended up sorting the back division out amongst ourselves, and consequently I felt we had the balance wrong in the side. John Rudd (Rutherford) should have got a run at ten, and Woodward should have had a chance to play in the Tests \u2013 but you needed a back in there to push both those selections.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nWe had six games before the First Test and the backline that was selected for the First Test had never played together before. Not only could we have won that match but we should have won it. Had we won that First Test the whole tour would have taken on a different dimension and character. We knew then that suddenly we had a mountain to climb.\n\nCIARAN FITZGERALD\n\nThe First Test was critical and we had a chance of winning it. New Zealand would have had to change their side had they lost. There was a lot of talk over there that the All Blacks were ageing so it was an opportunity.\n\nROGER BAIRD\n\nWe had a two-on-one and Rob Ackerman dummied when he should have given to Trevor Ringland; we also had a failed drop-goal attempt near the end, and the list goes on. History shows that when you go on tour the First Test is your big opportunity \u2013 and if you lose the First Test you are in a bit of trouble. The tragedy for us \u2013 and for New Zealand too \u2013 was that if we had won that game the series would have been live up until the Fourth Test, but after it went 3-0 after the Third Test a number of guys were just looking to get out of there.\n\nHUGO MacNEILL\n\nThe night before the First Test, Ollie Campbell and I practised drop-goals from everywhere on the pitch in Canterbury and they were all going over. Near the end of the game, 13-12 down, there was a ruck near their 22 and I called the ball from Roy Laidlaw. It had rained overnight and just as I went to kick it my left leg went from under me and it still only missed by a couple of feet.\n\nROGER BAIRD\n\nDr David Irwin was completely bonkers, and he was picked against Steve Pokere, who was this very nice, religious guy who would not play on a Sunday. At the first lineout the Doc was pointing, and shouting: 'Pokere, you're f**king dead.' He was known from then on as 'the Dirty Doc'.\n\nCOLIN DEANS\n\nIn the Second Test Ciaran Fitzgerald had six squint lineout throws. Against the All Blacks every piece of possession is vitally important and that was us giving them the ball for nothing six times. To me, that's what lost the Second Test.\n\nCIARAN FITZGERALD\n\nI lost a tooth. A certain All Black at a ruck. I could see this fella coming and I got an elbow straight into the mouth.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nWe're playing against a gale force wind in the first half and its 3-0 coming up to half-time and Dave Loveridge scores a try. But it's only 9-0 and it's a 15-point wind! The All Blacks played against the wind in the second half as only the All Blacks can. We didn't see the ball. It was a template on how to play against the wind. Final score: 9-0.\n\nHUGO MacNEILL\n\nWe never got a coherent pattern in our backline. It was like a car that was firing but not firing on all cylinders. We didn't have a backs coach. The Lions at our best might have beaten them but we didn't have proper organisation in the backs. New Zealand were just so good at the little things and when you added them all up it amounted to a big thing.\n\nJIM CALDER\n\nHalfway through the tour we started to lift weights. They booked a room on the top floor of the hotel, and we all went up and started bench-pressing \u2013 as if that was going to make a difference against the All Blacks on Saturday. It was that amateur.\n\nROGER BAIRD\n\nAfter the Second Test we went up to the Bay of Islands and had a party, and the cake was hijacked and put over somebody's head. I couldn't name names \u2013 but I know that Roy Laidlaw and Clive Woodward were in the vicinity.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nJohn O'Driscoll was a top bloke, but we had to add his 'brother' to the roll-call because he'd go a bit mad after a few beers. In Whangarei after a match he was throwing beds and TVs out of windows, and Willie-John said in the next team meeting, 'We can't be having this, who did it?' We said to John, 'It was you,' but he denied it outright \u2013 and that was when we added his brother to the team roster.\n\nSteve Boyle was another character. He played the first two games of the tour and then said to Jim Telfer, jokingly, 'I think I'm being overplayed.' He did not play again for another three weeks.\n\nBoyle's nickname was 'Foggy' (as in Fog-horn), and he was the unofficial leader of the midweek side. On the eve of the Dunedin Test he took them out for a night on the town, forgetting that Jim had arranged a training session for the Saturday morning. No one turned up until Nick Jeavons strode into the hotel lobby at 8 a.m. still in his blazer after a night out.\n\nWe had a great time socially, and there was always a Saturday night party after 'Foggy's Tours' had handed the invites out on Friday night. The Kiwis were very hospitable everywhere other than on the pitch.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nI arrived out as a replacement on the Tuesday they were playing Canterbury just before the Third Test. I'd been at home for the First and Second Tests and we'd been reading all the papers. I was very close to Ciaran. He was on the bench for the Canterbury match and I was in the stand but I remember having a bit of a run on the pitch after the game was over. I was on the pitch five minutes and Fitzy called me aside in the in-goal area and started throwing balls to me and I thought to myself, 'Jesus, this is a sign that he needs some reassurance.'\n\nCOLIN DEANS\n\nIt really became apparent to me that I wasn't going to get my chance when they picked the team for the Third Test in Dunedin. We had played Canterbury midweek and beaten them with me being voted man of the match. Virtually everybody \u2013 apart from some of the Irish boys \u2013 said that they had to pick me now. We were 2-0 down in the series and we had to win the game, so it was now or never in terms of making the big decision. At the team announcement, when it came to the hooker everybody was looking at me, and my name didn't come up. It was devastating. I got Jim on his own afterwards, and he just said he couldn't say anything. I respect him for that, I suppose.\n\nCIARAN FITZGERALD\n\nGraham Price, Ciaran Fitzgerald and Staff Jones.\n\nI remember training before the Third Test and one of the scrums collapsed and I swear to God you'd take a deep breath when you'd go down because it had been raining so hard in Dunedin that the water was up over our boots. We had a shot at that Third Test as well and it didn't happen. It was the first time I ever saw guys wearing thermal underwear. The All Blacks had their thermals on. It was really cold and really wet. People were blue. It was okay for forwards but for backs it was horrendous. Poor Ollie Campbell might have had hypothermia after the match.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nMight! What does he mean might?! Oh my God, without a second's hesitation, those were the worst conditions I ever played a match in. I think I thawed out at Christmas just about. The New Zealanders had these special wetsuits that they wore underneath their jerseys, some of the players wore mittens, some of them cleverly wore a plastic bag between their socks and their boots for insulation. We ran out in the same gear that we would have run out in three years earlier when we were in South Africa on the high veldt. I'll never forget it. We ran out and as soon as my foot landed on the grass the water immediately came over my boot. It was like putting your foot in a bucket of ice. It felt like minus 50. Maybe it was only minus 10. It couldn't have been colder had it been played on the South Pole.\n\nFive minutes in, everything had gone numb \u2013 hands, feet... brain. Everything. I'm telling you, Scott of the Antarctic wasn't even close. Ten minutes of the match and your brain was almost going. None of us had ever played in conditions like it so to lose by just 15-8 was heroic.\n\nBut it was the lowest point of the tour. No contest. As I lay in my hotel bed the following morning, my teeth were still chattering. And this pit in your stomach. You've lost the match, the series. There's no way back.\n\nJIM CALDER\n\nDespite the weather, we probably played our best rugby, with Roger Baird and John Rutherford \u2013 who was picked at centre \u2013 scoring. But even then we didn't really get close to winning. It finished 15-8.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nThere was no socialising with the All Blacks because we had no time to. However, there was a post-Test dinner in Dunedin which turned into a big bun-fight, and I remember Haden just lobbing food at our table. The officials didn't bat an eyelid... Willie-John couldn't exactly say, 'Don't do that!'\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nSaturday, 16 July, 1983 \u2013 the date of the Fourth Test \u2013 remains one of the saddest days in my life. A 38-6 defeat, a 4-0 series loss, there was no coming back from that. The dreams I had held three or four months earlier were in tatters. I was very disillusioned with coaching and with rugby and I was also totally against the whole Lions concept by this stage: it was so difficult to get the team together and prepare properly before going into the biggest Test matches these players would ever experience.\n\nI couldn't fault the players, because they'd given everything, but they'd come through a system that wasn't good enough to prepare them for the levels of excellence of that All Blacks team, who were just better \u2013 both technically and tactically. But for all that I still felt that the fault lay with me because I'd failed to work around those deficiencies and differences, I'd failed to find a way for us to win \u2013 and there is always a way to win.\n\nROGER BAIRD\n\nThere had been a couple of boys trying to sell their blazers before the last Test, and one of them was playing in the Test team. I was thinking, 'If that's the attitude then where are we going here?'\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nI think the only thing I can say about the Fourth Test is that we came second. That's not a good memory. When the New Zealanders smell blood they go for it.\n\nROGER BAIRD\n\nI made a cock-up with the first try when I stayed out and should have come in and somebody came through the middle. Then, not long after that, Stu Wilson came in on a short ball to score and before we had a chance to draw breath, they kicked off and Andy Haden caught it and romped right up into our 22 and I thought, 'This is going to be a long afternoon.' They were walking away with it.\n\nThen Stu Wilson came in on another short ball and I came in and stopped him dead in his tracks but I got his knee right in my forehead, so much so that he thought he had killed me. I was completely poleaxed.\n\nThey eventually brought me round and I got carted off and Peter Winterbottom walked up to Roy Laidlaw and said, 'The lucky bastard.'\n\nDavid Loveridge breaks free during the Fourth Test.\n\nCIARAN FITZGERALD\n\nWe had nothing left. During the second half, I'm not saying we had one leg on the plane but it was over before the match was over. I could sense it. Everything the All Blacks did worked like a dream. Every kick bounced into their hands. They got cock-a-hoop and let fly.\n\nMichael Kiernan.\n\nOLLIE CAMPBELL\n\nI couldn't agree more. Our bags were packed mentally and we were gone. In fairness, it was literally last man standing at that stage. I scored my only try of the tour against Waikato in the midweek match beforehand and in scoring it I pulled a hamstring. In any other circumstance there is absolutely no way I should have played in the final Test. No way. There are injuries you can play with, but you can't play with a hamstring pull. But it was last man standing.\n\nI couldn't train the week of the Test and I think I only lasted around 30-odd minutes.\n\nIt was a bitter-sweet experience, certainly one of my most fulfilling but tinged with disappointment. To be one of only two teams who were whitewashed in New Zealand was difficult to swallow. You regret that we didn't play any memorable rugby. Unlike the 1971 tourists, we left no legacy.\n\nAt the same time, it was such an invigorating experience to play against New Zealand. You go through club, province, country, you win a Triple Crown, then the Lions \u2013 you think you're at the pinnacle. Then you go to New Zealand. You come up against this wave after wave of attack. You're thinking, 'There is another level.'\n\nYou could say I've become a student of New Zealand rugby. I'd get second-hand books in Greene's bookshop on Clare Street. I'd have read over a hundred by now. So you can imagine how magical it was to go there with the Lions, 20 years after you'd first seen them play.\n\nThe night of our first game, in Wanganui, Colin Meads was there at the post-match function. Colin Meads. It was like: Welcome to New Zealand. I had to ask him if it was true he used to train by running up and down the hill on his farm with a sheep under each arm. He said it was a myth, which was almost a shame. You didn't want to shatter the illusion.\n\nROGER BAIRD\n\nThey were a better team than us, but I think 4-0 was a bit harsh. If we had gone with a better balance of coaches, and got our selection right, then I think we might have grabbed one win in the series. I've spoken to a few other guys over the years \u2013 particularly the Irish boys when I met up with Ollie Campbell, Trevor Ringland and Dave Irwin one night \u2013 and one of our greatest regrets was that we didn't win that First Test because it was there to be had. If it had been 3-1 that would have been so much better \u2013 but it ended up 4-0 and we've never had a reunion or anything like that.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nThe All Blacks by then were on a different planet: John Ashworth, Andy Dalton, Gary Knight, Gary Whetton, Andy Haden, Mark Shaw, Jock Hobbs and Murray Mexted \u2013 probably the best All Black pack of all time. Their backs weren't bad either with guys like Dave Loveridge, Stu Wilson and Bernie Fraser. That was a great team \u2013 really abrasive.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nAfter that tour I vowed not to coach again. It was the lowest moment of my career. I was devastated and no matter what anyone said, I felt like a failure.\n\nWillie-John McBride spoke to the press at the end of the tour and said he hoped the Lions would pick me to coach the next tour, as this experience had been invaluable. But I remember my own response to the media. In reply to one question about my future involvement, I asked them, 'Is there life after death?' It summed up how I was feeling.\n\nI remember being asked what I thought the Scottish press would say about me \u2013 but I was more concerned about what the people in the street would say.\n\nI'd really looked forward to being the coach, I'd prepared well and the feedback I got was that the training sessions went well \u2013 but it just didn't go how I'd expected it to. I had to be persuaded \u2013 mainly by Roy Laidlaw and John Rutherford \u2013 to come back to coaching.\n\nWillie-John is a great guy and we toured twice together, but he never really discussed rugby with me. He had been put forward by Ireland as either coach or manager, and when he got the manager's job he maybe didn't want to step on my toes, so he distanced himself from that side of it.\n\nMy closest mucker on tour was Donald McLeod. We used to sit in the bar and talk about rugby and have a good drink \u2013 but he wasn't there as a rugby expert.\n\nI got myself into a hole and all I could do was keep digging.\n\nI came home and I was totally disillusioned about the Lions. I wanted nothing to do with them. That lasted until Ian McGeechan asked me to help him in 1997.\n\nJOHN BEATTIE\n\nThere is nothing worse than being on a losing Lions tour. It really is the worst feeling in the world. You'll hear wonderful stories about the hospitality \u2013 but that's bollocks. You are there to be in the Test team and to win the series, and unfortunately I didn't achieve that. To me, it was an unmitigated disaster. I hated it. I don't look back on either of my Lions tours with any sense of affection.\n\nDon't get me wrong, I believe in the Lions hype. I think it is the most magical concept in world rugby: Britain and Ireland decamp to another country and the team you pin your hopes on are wearing a combination of colours from all four competing nations. But for the people in it... well... it's an all-male, bullshit-dominated cabal of blokes \u2013 so if you win it must be great, but if you lose everyone hates it.\n\nI could name you the whole '71 team, the whole '74 team, the whole '89 team and the whole '97 team \u2013 but I couldn't name you any of the losing teams, including the ones I was involved in.\n\nRoy Laidlaw and Dave Loveridge in the aftermath of the Fourth Test.\n\nCOLIN DEANS\n\nIn '83 they picked the players who were supposed to be good. Players were picked on past reputations. Colclough was big and bulky, but soft underneath when the crunch came. I firmly believe that if the nine Scots on that tour had played in the last Test we wouldn't have been hammered by 30-odd points. We knew Jim Telfer, we were fit and we were prepared to push ourselves to the limit. Some of the other players were not. To train as hard as we did, it was a shock to them. There were occasions when I trained three times a day.\n\nOn the last day all the Scots got together and were talking and we decided that we were as good as any of them. And it was quite enjoyable sticking two fingers up at those who had not rated us out in New Zealand when we won the Grand Slam the following year.\n\nJIM CALDER\n\nI remember sitting in an airport on the way back and we all agreed that we were going to go home and really push on as an international team. We had seen inside the other nations and realised that they weren't any better than ourselves. So we came back and we drew 25-all with the All Blacks and won the Grand Slam in 1984.\n\nThere was a bunch of us who were seriously pissed off that we hadn't achieved on that trip what we thought we should have, and that was a big factor in what happened the following year.\n\nROB NORSTER\n\nNew Zealand is a wonderful place to tour, but I'd love to go there in their summer. The fact we headed Down Under after a full season of thrashing about in our own winter conditions and got another three months of the same made it a real physical and mental challenge \u2013 and one that we failed to meet.\n\nThe captains: Ciaran Fitzgerald and Andy Dalton after the Fourth Test. \n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE\n\n# [THE COMEBACK KINGS  \n1989](006.html#a3)\n\nAUSTRALIA\n\nIT MAY have been accompanied by a certain grinding of the gears, but even before this tour began there was a sense, at last, that those presiding over Lions tours were catching up with the modern game, and therefore there was a chance that the Lions would catch up with their southern opponents. At least occasionally.\n\nThe first priority was to fill the yawning gap in the Lions itinerary caused by the absence of the South Africans from international sport due to apartheid. After a great deal of discussion, the Lions committee decided to take the plunge and instigated a tour of Australia and Australia alone for the first time since 1899.\n\nIt must be remembered that this was before the great surge in Australian rugby which saw the Wallabies win the World Cup in 1991 and 1999. It must also be remembered that the tour came two years after the inaugural World Cup, part of which was held in Australia, when for the semi-final between Australia and France in Sydney, Australia could not even fill the capacity of 18,000 at the Concord Oval stadium. At the time, international rugby in the country was by no means profitable or thrusting.\n\nThere were considerable doubts, indeed, that Australia could really stage a successful Lions tour. Clearly, three Tests against the Wallabies would provide a sound centrepiece. Clearly, so would matches against New South Wales and Queensland and, possibly, the Australian Capital Territory. It was years before the days when Australia had five major provincial teams.\n\nWestern Australia were not strong, but at least they would provide some opposition and a staging post as the Lions made their way to Perth en route to Sydney and Brisbane in the east. In the end, to fill out a fixture list of 12 games, the Lions had to arrange matches against Queensland B and New South Wales B, against New South Wales Country and against an ANZAC team at the end. To some, as the Lions prepared, it looked a rather thin list.\n\nSuch anxieties were in the future as the Lions opted for their coach. Boldly, they chose Ian McGeechan, a great Lion of 1974 and 1977, who, while he had been appointed Scotland coach at the time of his Lions appointment, had never yet actually coached his country. He had one season with Scotland in 1989, and then took up the Lions challenge.\n\nHis pedigree had grown since his playing days, notably in a successful tenure with Headingley and with some of the other Scotland international teams. But if it was a bold gamble back in 1989, it was to look slightly less of a gamble in 2009, 20 years on, when McGeechan coached on his fifth Lions tour, and his fourth as head coach, a staggering record and a staggering tribute.\n\nThey even gave him an assistant, another first. Roger Uttley, who toured with McGeechan with the Lions in 1974, was appointed as forwards coach, a wise move bearing in mind that the core of the forward pack would be Uttley's England charges \u2013 at the time, England were developing the most formidable pack in their history. The choice of captain was Finlay Calder, the tough Scottish flanker who had the respect of the playing community in Britain and Ireland. The tour manager was Clive Rowlands, a robust and voluble Welshman who had coached Wales between 1968 and 1974 before becoming their manager at the 1987 World Cup. Rowlands had the priceless gift of dealing with matters under his own remit while also clearing the way for McGeechan to operate. 'The Lion is growing,' Rowlands would say after every victory. At the end, the Lion was very big indeed.\n\nAnd the other upshot was the triumph of a Test series victory. If that was rare enough, then it was even more rare that the series was won after the loss of the First Test, and this in only a three-match series.\n\nBut while Australia lost on the field, it was far from all bad news. Just two years after they had so miserably failed to sell out a World Cup semi-final involving their own team, the Lions tour helped galvanise the international game in the host country. The First and Third Tests had been switched to the Sydney Football Stadium, with a capacity of 44,000, and they were both sold out.\n\nPerhaps even more significantly, there was a strong view that the defeat of the Wallabies in the 1989 tour focused attention on the deficiencies in the team, weeded out some weak links and therefore forged the team which, in 1991 under the driving coaching of Bob Dwyer, won the Rugby World Cup.\n\nIn one sense, this thoroughly modern tour had overtones of the past. It was a highly controversial tour with some of the incidents of rough play causing a sensation in Australia, with the only difference being that this time it was the touring team, and not the home sides, who were accused of starting the trouble.\n\nAt the end of the tour, as eminent a rugby figure as Bob Templeton, Australia's much-loved and admired assistant coach, commented that Australia should not have complained, and that by doing so they were admitting that they were beaten by the harder side in the series. Not that that should excuse some of the excesses on both sides. Dwyer himself, angry at his team's defeat, later declared that his team had been 'beaten up by the English coppers.' This was a reference to the fact that three of the core Lions forwards, Wade Dooley, Paul Ackford and Dean Richards, were all policemen back at home. At one stage, the Australian Rugby Union sent a protest letter to the Four Home Unions committee; it took an informal meeting between Templeton and McGeechan to calm the situation.\n\nThe severely truncated tour, with a small number of build-up games before the First Test, made it essential for the Lions to develop rapidly. The fact is that while they developed their forward play, with a pack built around their policemen, the Lions never had time to develop their back play and as Ian McGeechan was to admit with a certain sadness, the Lions never had the opportunity to become an all-round attacking force.\n\nWhat they did do was develop a powerful pack, with a small but busy front-row, and a back-five forward unit that ranked with any in the history of the Lions. Calder often struggled with injury niggles but with Dean Richards alongside him and Mike Teague in the form of his life on the blind-side flank, they made up a magnificent back-row, and after Dooley had forced his way into the Test team for the Second Test above the estimable Robert Norster, linking up with Ackford, the pack became outstanding.\n\nTeague, the hero of Gloucester, had a magnificent tour, breaking tackles continually with his power and becoming the Lions' focal point. He was voted the official player of the tour, on an aggregate vote from the three Test matches. The extent of his brilliance is that he only played in two, missing the First Test because of injury. He was christened 'Iron Mike'.\n\nThere was a problem at fly-half on tour, with Paul Dean, the Irishman, joining the sad list of Lions to be injured in the very first game of the tour. But eventually Rob Andrew, the Englishman who had not enjoyed a great home season, arrived as a replacement and formed an excellent half-back partnership with the fiery Robert Jones of Wales, whose battles at scrum-half against Nick Farr-Jones of Australia were to become notorious.\n\nGavin Hastings at fullback had a superb tour, but in the centre, there was a significant new figure. Will Carling withdrew from the Lions party due to injury, and in his place, McGeechan drafted in young Jeremy Guscott, who had played for Bath since the age of seven and who had only just won his first England cap, momentously scoring three tries in an away match in Bucharest against Romania. His raw talent was beyond doubt, but it was still an extravagant gamble by McGeechan.\n\nOr so we thought. Guscott was quick to earn the respect, and then the admiration, of the Lions and the world game, becoming one of that breed always coveted by McGeechan throughout his Lions career: 'The Test match animal.' Guscott was never to let McGeechan down in three momentous tours.\n\nThe Lions showed excellent form in the early games, disposing easily of Western Australia, and then defeating a strong Australian B team 23-8 in bad weather in Melbourne. They eased their way past Queensland and New South Wales, the latter win gained by a late drop-goal by Craig Chalmers, and they entered the First Test full of hope.\n\nSignificantly, even the game against Queensland B at Cairns, in far North Queensland, had the ring of authenticity, with a decent crowd and a competitive game, and a new venue to put on the map of Lions rugby.\n\nThe 1989 tour party.\n\nAustralia fielded the great David Campese on the wing, and they had Farr-Jones and Michael Lynagh at half-back, arguably one of the greatest combinations the world game has ever seen. The pair were superb in the First Test in Sydney, against a Lions team which lacked focus, accuracy and tempo. Greg Martin at fullback was one of four try scorers, with Lynagh adding 14 points. The Lions did not score a try in a salutary 30-12 defeat, and such was the shock to the system that McGeechan was forced back to the drawing board.\n\nIn some ways, the tactical course which McGeechan and Uttley decided upon was bound to lead to conflict. They suspected that there was a soft heart to the Australian team and that they should wind up their forwards and try to overpower the Australian team at source. The temperature of the tour was already hot, especially after an incident in the match against Queensland when Mike Hall, the Lions back, was kicked many times on the ground at the back of a ruck. There were further incidents in the match against New South Wales.\n\nTour captain, Finlay Calder leads his team out.\n\nWhen it came to the Second Test in Brisbane, with the whole tour clearly at stake, Dooley was brought in to add strong arms to the pack alongside the athletic and steely Ackford; Andrew replaced Chalmers as the controller at stand-off, Teague returned and Guscott came to the fore for the first time. McGeechan, the master, plotted, and there was the scent of cordite in the air, even as the teams took the field.\n\nPart of the game approached carnage, with Robert Jones and Nick Farr-Jones clashing and, as Clem Thomas observed, 'rolling on the ground like two ferrets in a sack.' There was another incident when Lions prop David Young seemed to stand on Steve Cutler's head, with another huge punch-up breaking out.\n\nHowever, the Lions were the superior team; Australia could not handle their rumbling power and even though they still led inside the last eight minutes, the authority of the Lions forwards was obvious and Gavin Hastings put the Lions ahead when a sweeping movement made space for him to score down the right.\n\nThen came Guscott. The Lions launched another sustained attack and when the young man was given the ball in midfield in a move going from right to left, it would have been easy for him not to take responsibility and to pass the ball. But instead he grubbered the ball through, sprinted with electric pace, gathered the ball as it bounced up and scored the try which decided the Test and rescued the series.\n\nGuscott was an apprentice bricklayer at the time and it is said that one onlooker taking in the scene as Guscott became a Lions legend in one run, said, 'That boy will never lay another brick again.' Back in Bath, another scene was being enacted. Henry Guscott, father of Jeremy, was watching in the early morning on the television. Such was his sense of excitement and elation that he picked up a sledgehammer, walked the deserted streets to Jeremy's home, let himself in and demolished a wall of the house. Happily, the wall had been due for demolition as part of improvements.\n\nThe furore about the dirty play raged like a forest fire through the week preceding the Third Test, with a barrage of former Australian gunslingers and street fighters produced to condemn the Lions \u2013 with some justification. But with McGeechan largely keeping his own counsel, it was also clear that the Australian camp was alarmed at the new momentum.\n\nDespite all the protestations that it would be a clean game, Jones and Farr-Jones clashed in the very early stages, although matters did quieten down a little later, despite the incredible tension of the play. The result was famously decided by the match-winner, Campese, but not this time in favour of Australia. Andrew dropped for goal but missed badly and the ball bounced up to Campese, deep in his own goal area. Campese shaped to kick then started to run the ball out. He changed his mind and then threw a dreadful inside pass to Martin, his fullback. The ball eluded Martin and Lions winger Ieuan Evans made it to the loose ball to touch down for the decisive score. Although Australia threw everything into attack in the final quarter, with hair-raising scenes, the Lions held on at 19-18, the first time they had ever won a Test series after losing the First Test.\n\nThe Lions beat New South Wales Country and the ANZAC team and then happily savoured the feeling of joining the touring parties in 1971 and 1974 as the only post-war victors in the deep south. Despite the lurid incidents, it had in many ways been a richly-successful tour. With respect to New Zealand, the sun and climate and wide open spaces of Australia were attractive to the touring party after the New Zealand winter tours, and also good news for the television producers back at home, beaming pictures to the United Kingdom and Ireland.\n\nThe tour felt like a real Lions tour, and ensured that Australia would now take their rightful place on the Lions rota, and would stay there, even after 1997, when South Africa returned to the Lions fold. The tour may have helped Australia for the future, in terms of their crowds and their team. But in that moment, it had ended in a Lions triumph.\n\nFINLAY CALDER (Scotland)  \nToured: 1989\n\nThat was the highlight of my rugby life \u2013 without a doubt. We were the best team in the world. We would have beaten anybody. We had quite a mobile pack with Brian Moore, David Sole and myself there, but we also had a fantastically physical English presence with guys like Wade Dooley, Paul Ackford, Dean Richards and Mike Teague, not to mention Dai Young, the Welsh prop who was 21 years old and as strong as a horse. So we were able to develop this hybrid between a 100 mile an hour Scottish rucking game, and an English mauling game. With that pack we would have taken anyone to the cleaners.\n\nIEUAN EVANS (Wales)  \nToured: 1989, 1993 & 1997\n\nIt was a sensational tour \u2013 I loved it from start to finish. We had an outstanding captain in Finlay Calder. He was quietly spoken, but there was an iron fist in his velvet glove. He was intelligent, inspiring and a great man to play with and under. I had huge regard for him.\n\nThere were those who decried the fact we were playing a full series against the Wallabies before we went, but the Australians certainly deserved their shot at a full tour. The 1984 Aussie side was an outstanding team and 18 months after our tour they became world champions. So any preconceptions from past Lions about this not being a worthy trip were proved to be totally disingenuous.\n\nGAVIN HASTINGS (Scotland)  \nToured: 1989 & 1993\n\nWe did not know how good Australia were going to be. It turned out that it was one of the hardest tours I have ever been on. We knew that Australia had achieved the Grand Slam in 1984 and that, in 1988 when they again came over again, although England had beaten them convincingly by 28-19 they had easily beaten Scotland 32-13. In the summer of 1988, England lost both Tests in Australia fairly substantially, so we had a shrewd feeling that life with the Lions in Australia was not going to be easy.\n\nLooking back, it was a lovely country to visit on a tour and it was hugely enjoyable, largely because the man in the street in Australia knows little about rugby union. You can walk around town without being recognised, nobody knows who you are, so it was a great deal more relaxed, off the field, than touring somewhere like New Zealand.\n\nROBERT JONES (Wales)  \nToured: 1989 & 1993\n\nTo play for the Lions had always been one of my ambitions. It is the next thing you hope for after playing for your country, proving yourself to be one of the best in your position in Britain and Ireland.\n\nTo be recognised in that way was a wonderful feeling. It made me a member of the best team I ever played in, and led to the single incident which is most remembered from my 16-and-a-half years in senior rugby.\n\nJOHN JEFFREY (Scotland)  \nToured: 1989\n\nBefore we left we had a training camp at Pennyhill, where Finlay and Roger Uttley had a stand-up row in front of the players about what kind of rugby we were going to play. Roger wanted an English style mauling game, while Finlay was convinced that we needed to play a Scottish style rucking game. I'm not sure it really resolved itself, but we certainly rucked more than we would have done otherwise, and there was an uneasy truce from there on in between Roger and Finlay.\n\nWade Dooley couldn't make that session because he was at his grandfather's funeral, and the English boys joked \u2013 perhaps unfairly \u2013 that he always had a funeral to go to when there was a tough training session on the cards.\n\nWhen Wade finally pitched up we were in this lovely pub in Staines, and they made him down two pints of beer and do the bleep test on the lawns outside the bar in front of everybody. Fair play to him, he pulled it off \u2013 and managed a phenomenal score.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE (England)  \nToured: 1989 & 1993\n\nFinlay wanted to play a certain combination of rugby: it was a big English pack \u2013 and he could see a big English presence \u2013 but he wanted to play a rucking game. Looking back, I think we adapted well to top of the ground conditions, and the results reflected that.\n\nROBERT JONES\n\nIan McGeechan did not dictate to us. Everyone had his say. I had as much input as someone like Bob Norster; Steve Smith, the reserve hooker, had as much say as I did. Ian wanted everybody to be involved, to be able to work closely together. It worked. At no time on that tour did I feel I was playing away from my strengths or doing things because I had been told to do them. Geech and Finlay Calder knew they had the best players in the British Isles in their squad and allowed them to be themselves rather than try to fit them into a preconceived pattern.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS (Scotland)  \nToured: 1989 & 1993\n\nFinlay was fantastic right from the start: demanding that there would be no cliques, demanding that the players' fitness levels increased from the first time we got together, and demanding that we all enjoy the experience.\n\nAnd Geech was able to impart his knowledge on the Welsh, the Irish and the English guys \u2013 which Lions coaches hadn't always managed to do in the past, so that was a huge plus.\n\nBRIAN MOORE (England)  \nToured: 1989 & 1993\n\nWe were not quite then into the bitterest years of the England-Scotland feud but enough roots of that feud were showing to make all the English contingent at least a little sceptical of the Scottish captain. Yet in the months of the tour I developed a tremendous respect for Finlay Calder. He is one of the most direct men I have ever met, direct to the point of non-diplomacy. On the field, and off the field, he had an iron-hard competitive edge and attitude. When you play against someone like that, it is easy to hate them. You use it to build up an active dislike to take you into a mindset to return the aggression. When you play with a man like that, it is very reassuring. You could rely on him in the most difficult moments. That is a massive factor in the minds of fellow players.\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nI'm so glad that people now see in Brian Moore the man which I have known all this time. He's an extraordinary human being. I've never seen a man as driven about anything and everything in my life. He's just a compulsive winner. Scotland is a funny nation because if he was one of us we would have been so proud of him, but because he wore an English jersey he became this figure of hate.\n\nHe had a lot of Scottish traits \u2013 not particularly big, thrawn, bad tempered and with this phenomenal desire to win.\n\nWith the Lions I quickly recognised that this guy knew a lot more about rugby than me, so I put him in charge of the forwards, and he revelled in the role because it was recognition for him and it showed he had the respect of his peers.\n\nThe contact in international rugby is unbelievable. It is like a cartoon, you see stars, and to think clearly through all that muddle takes some doing \u2013 but a few guys have the ability to do that and Brian is one of them. Somebody with an incredibly astute rugby brain like Brian, and who is able to get to the nub of any decision in the heat of battle, is worth their weight in gold.\n\nROBERT JONES\n\nEverything felt right from the moment we arrived at our hotel that May. That sense of four national groups, men who were usually opponents on the field of play, coming together with a single purpose adding to the feeling of excitement.\n\nI have never felt so relaxed. For nine weeks we were away from the pressures of playing in Wales and from the need to earn a living. We were, in effect, full-time professionals.\n\nI realised the quality of the players we had in the squad and I remember thinking, 'I can't wait to play with this team. They are going to be so good to play with.'\n\nBrian Moore.\n\nBRIAN MOORE\n\nThe first two games of the tour had been quiet \u2013 too quiet and, probably, too easy. Queensland at Ballymore, in Brisbane, was our first big game and suddenly the tour seemed to take off from there. It was a tough and, at times, brutal game. Julian Gardner and the rest of the Queensland forwards trampled all over Mike Hall at a ruck, when he was clearly nowhere near the ball. And it wasn't rucking, it was kicking. While Mike was lying on the ground being treated, Finlay called us all in. 'That is the last time something like that's going to happen on this tour,' he said. 'Nothing like that's going to happen to one of us again.' And with that, the whole feeling of the tour changed. There was a palpable shift in the attitude among the whole party. We wouldn't start anything; but if it started, we would finish it.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nI remember Bob Norster dishing it out in retaliation to Queensland after Mike Hall had been trampled on about 20 times. When Ren\u00e9 Hourquet blew his whistle it seemed as if Bob had been caught red-handed and was going to be sent off. All he said was, 'Penalty Lions.'\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nWere the Lions dirty? It depends on which side you were on. We were pretty rough, but I don't think we were dirty, and there is a huge difference. Dirty is kicking somebody's head when they are on the ground, and we didn't do that \u2013 certainly not intentionally.\n\nBut did we go out to set our stall down? Of course we did, from one to fifteen. And ultimately I think we earned their respect.\n\nJOHN JEFFREY\n\nThere were two training sessions that stick in my head as being crucial to the success of that tour.\n\nThe first was in New South Wales in absolutely awful wet conditions, and it went on and on and on. Every time we made a mistake the coaches told us to start again, and I never hit as many rucking pads in one session as I did that day. But the guys kept going, and it became this thing about proving the coaches wrong and getting it right for ourselves \u2013 and afterwards there was this great feeling of achievement. It really strengthened the squad.\n\nThe second session was during a mini break up in Cairns on the Queensland Coast. We had a huge night out and even the coaches were drinking cocktails out of test tubes. Every time certain songs came on the jukebox barmaids would jump on the bar and dance. It was that kind of place and that kind of night.\n\nThe next morning we were all really suffering and Robert Jones didn't even make training \u2013 but a taxi was sent back for him. His father-in-law was the tour manager, of course, so he wasn't going to get away with anything. We did this really long session in the 90 degree heat. It was torture, but we all made it through \u2013 even Robert, who had to do extra. It was a test of commitment \u2013 and it was another one of those moments which strengthened the squad.\n\nDavid Sole.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nIt was the first time the Lions had toured Australia \u2013 in its own right \u2013 in nearly 100 years. On previous trips it had been a stop over on the way to New Zealand. Having played against New South Wales and Queensland we went up to Cairns to play a Queensland B team, which was certainly a stark contrast to going to the Northern Transvaal or Waikato, which is what we would have been doing at that stage if the tour had been to South Africa or New Zealand \u2013 but that was the tour schedule we had, and you could argue that it made it tougher for us when we made the jump into the Test matches. We certainly seemed to get caught on the hop in the First Test.\n\nIEUAN EVANS\n\nIt is the only Lions tour in which we lost the First Test and then went on to win the series. After a very good opening few weeks, in which we played some good rugby, we went into the First Test full of confidence and got bullied off the park. We were comprehensively out-muscled and lost heavily to an outstanding Australian side that two years later would win the World Cup. They had some brilliant players, but still we weren't expected to lose 30-12 \u2013 and certainly not in that manner.\n\nROBERT JONES\n\nI have watched the match on film several times since and they were sharper, quicker in thought and scored some excellent tries. Perhaps we were over confident.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nClive Rowlands came in the dressing room and kicked the door hard after returning from the First Test press conference. He said, 'I'm not going in there as a loser again.'\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nIt didn't take long for the press to start calling for heads to roll, my own included. I called a management meeting and offered to stand down for the Second Test. 'If you go, I must go also,' was all Clive Rowlands said. The matter was closed.\n\nFinlay Calder walks his team out before the First Test at the Sydney Football Stadium.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nI withdrew from the First Test with a hamstring injury. In 1987 I had gone to New Zealand for the World Cup and played with a tweaked hamstring and made a real mess of it \u2013 so I didn't want to repeat that mistake. But I was told that I would have to play the following game or I would be on the plane home, so the pressure was on.\n\nWe went down to Canberra to play ACT the following Wednesday and we found ourselves 21-11 down and seriously under the cosh at half-time. With the Test team having been thrashed in the First Test it was a real thunderbolt to the confidence of the whole squad, and we knew we were all staring down the barrel. But we produced a fantastic second half performance to run away with it, and when we came off the pitch after the final whistle the Test team were standing there to applaud us into the changing room. The unity which the dirt-trackers found that day was brought into the whole squad, and I have no doubt it was inspired by Donal Lenihan's captaincy.\n\nClive Rowlands always spoke about the badge getting bigger, and it was moments like that which made the badge grow.\n\nJOHN JEFFREY\n\nAt half-time it had looked like the tour was coming off the rails. They had this infuriating Kookaburra song and we really wanted to shut them up \u2013 which we did in the second half. The forwards really stuck it to them, and we ended up comfortable winners. That was the turning point in the tour.\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nDonal Lenihan was a great talisman in the midweek team. He made them believe that they had every chance of playing in the Test team. You need these guys to keep the tour going. He was like a father figure for everybody, and instinctively knew how to manage each individual. It's hard to put a finger on it, it's hard to replicate \u2013 but he just got it right.\n\nHe was judge of the court and presided with this Irish benevolence and charm that made it all just click together.\n\nJo Maso used to talk about it being fine to have a salad but you need someone to bring the dressing. Well, Donal brought the dressing.\n\nI think it was Roger Uttley who christened the midweek team 'Donal's Donuts' after the ACT game, and from there they made up T-shirts and it became a badge of honour to be one of the 'Donuts'. It sounds a bit childish but you need things like that on tour to keep everyone feeling a part of it.\n\nJOHN JEFFREY\n\nEvery town or city we stopped in, Donal would somehow find the Guinness rep and get a tap installed in the bar we were going to be drinking in.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nThe Donal's Donuts thing is a complete and utter pain in the arse to be honest with you.\n\nThe bottom line is that by 1989 the 6ft 8in second-rows were becoming the norm so I was struggling to make the Test team and I knew that from an early stage. I had no issues from that point of view and to be fair I got on well with Ian McGeechan and Clive Rowlands and I recognised early on that I had a role to play but it wasn't going to be in the Test team.\n\nHaving gone out as a replacement myself on the 1983 tour I went out of my way to make the replacements feel part of the group. The Donuts thing, it was exaggerated. Now, they were a great group, don't get me wrong. We played ACT on the Tuesday before the Second Test and we were losing at half-time, but we got it back and won well and that was a key game for the spirit of the tour. The Donuts thing grew legs but it came out of that game.\n\nThat midweek spirit had happened naturally but it's been forced on other tours and I'm not sure it's worked. The 1993 midweek team was a complete and utter disaster. They were so bad I think it exaggerated what happened in 1989.\n\nPlayer of the series, Mike Teague.\n\nJOHN JEFFREY\n\nThe selectors stuck with Finlay, but they had to make some pretty tough decisions before the Second Test, which was only a week later.\n\nThey replaced several players, including Brendan Mullin, Mike Hall and Bob Norster. These guys had never been dropped before in their lives, and they were obviously bitterly disappointed. I was pretty gutted too. Before the tour everyone thought that Phil Matthews, the Irish captain, would be the first choice number six, and I fancied myself as the second choice, with Mike Teague an outside chance. So when they selected the squad, and Matthews wasn't in it, I have to admit that I thought I would walk into the Test team.\n\nThen I scored two tries in my first game against Australia A and felt pretty pleased with my performance \u2013 but for some reason they selected Mike Teague for the two big games against Queensland and New South Wales leading up to the First Test and he played well. All of a sudden he was the main man, Iron Mike and all that stuff, and I was chasing him for a place in the Test team.\n\nAnd it got even worse for me when Mike was injured for the First Test and they went for Derek White at blind-side flanker instead of me. I was left thinking: 'Jesus Christ \u2013 what have I done wrong?'\n\nFinlay still takes great delight in telling me that he had the casting vote in that selection. With friends like that...\n\nSo, on the evening after the team had been named for the Second Test, we had to go to a governor's reception in Brisbane, where a lot of drink was taken \u2013 especially by the boys who had been dropped.\n\nOn the way back to the hotel, the bus dropped the dirt-trackers off at a night club, which was the norm in those days, and as we disappeared into the night I remember Clive Rowlands, the tour manager, saying, 'JJ, look after those boys.' And I thought to myself, 'Thanks a bunch \u2013 leave me out the team and then leave me with this lot to look after!' Talk about adding insult to injury.\n\nIEUAN EVANS\n\nIn the build-up to the Second Test Finlay spoke softly and calmly to us all and gave us a very firm understanding of what was necessary. His message came across loud and clear about how we had to confront Australia in Brisbane.\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nThere was such desperation in the changing room before the Second Test that it was palpable. It was indescribable \u2013 very, very tense.\n\nIt was a Scottish-type environment, with David Sole, myself, Scott and Gavin Hastings getting everybody up and building adrenalin, which is what the Jocks were used to doing to survive \u2013 because we didn't have the power to match the likes of England.\n\nAnd then there was this slightly surreal moment when Dean Richards came up to me \u2013 he might have been the hammer of the Scots but he's just a lovely, gentle person \u2013 and he said, 'You know Finlay, I don't really like all this noise, would it be alright if I went and stood outside?' I said, 'Of course, of course.' There was no point in him standing there feeling awkward. And if he wasn't man of the match that day then he was dash close to it.\n\nThat Second Test in Ballymore has been given a lot of hype over the years, but I have to say we were pretty hyped up ourselves at the time \u2013 and you could see in the Australians' eyes that they maybe weren't frightened of us... but they were pretty intimidated.\n\nIf you are going into a difficult situation then you want to know exactly where people stand, and that was one of only two occasions in my international career when I just knew we were going to win because of the personalities we had in the changing room.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nWhat the Australians expected from northern hemisphere sides was for them to turn the other cheek \u2013 'soft Pommies' was the phrase, I recall. However, we had some pretty handy guys on the tour like Dean Richards, Wade Dooley, David Sole and Finlay Calder. We were in our late twenties, the right age, and coming to the height of our powers. We were battle-hardened 'circuit men' who had been around. Finlay was a fantastic captain \u2013 a hard boy, uncompromising, and wasn't going to be brow-beaten.\n\nIEUAN EVANS\n\nThere were lots of red shirts in the crowd and plenty of support for us at Ballymore and, right from the start, there was an attitude and a readiness on the pitch to go to war.\n\nAnd it was little Rob Jones who kick-started it all. It set a tone. It wasn't so much that we set out to start a fight, more we wanted to set a tone and let the Aussies know that this time we weren't going to sit back and let them dominate us as they had done in the opening game of the series. The scrum-halves provided the spark and the fuse was lit.\n\nGavin Hastings.\n\nROBERT JONES\n\nAll through the week before the match, Ian McGeechan was playing mind games with me. He kept reminding me how important Nick Farr-Jones, their scrum-half and captain, was to them. He was the key influence in their team, the man who called the shots and made things happen. He was also extremely good at influencing referees, chatting to them, saying things like, 'Sir, sir, wasn't he offside?' We had the feeling that if we could knock him off his game, it would knock Australia off as well.\n\nOn the morning of the match, 8th July, I got up, dressed in number ones \u2013 the blazer, shirt and tie in which we went to matches \u2013 and watched the First Test again on video. I don't think I have ever been so wound up before a match, and that was before Finlay Calder's special line in pre-match oratory which was likely to have you bursting with adrenalin for the first few minutes. I was aching to get to grips physically with Farr-Jones.\n\nAn opportunity came at the first scrum. There was nothing premeditated in the sense that I had decided exactly what to do beforehand, but I had gone out with the intention of doing something to unsettle him. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to stand on his foot and push down.\n\nHe came back at me, and within seconds there was a pretty lively punch-up going on. Before the match, Finlay had emphasised that we were not to take a backward step: that we would tackle hard, put on physical pressure up front, ruck hard and drive the lineout. I knew that if there was any trouble, four men would come instantly to my assistance: Mike Teague, the Gloucester builder, and the three policeman, Paul Ackford, Wade Dooley and Dean Richards. And that is exactly what happened.\n\nIEUAN EVANS\n\nRob threw about 14 punches, almost none of which landed on Nick Farr-Jones. But he did it safe in the knowledge that he had some pretty mighty beasts backing him up. That pack in the Second Test, based around England's forwards, was very tasty and needed no second invitation to jump in and sort things out. We had Brian Moore, Mike Teague, Dean Richards, Paul Ackford and Wade Dooley from the English pack alongside Dai Young, David Sole and Finlay. They weren't going to take a backward step \u2013 and didn't!\n\nROBERT JONES\n\nThat punch-up set the tone for the match. Nick was very upset by the incident and kept chatting to the referee. The Australians in general were upset about our physical approach and it has to be said that things got quite brutal at times.\n\nPAUL ACKFORD (England)  \nToured: 1989\n\nWhen Australians start whingeing about intimidatory tactics, then you know you've got them on the run.\n\nROBERT JONES\n\nToday, I would probably have been dismissed and suspended for six to twelve weeks for what I did, but not in 1989. I can't say that I regret it, though. It was probably the turning point of the match and the series. Nick Farr-Jones was distracted from his normal game and was not nearly as effective as he had been the week before. We won that game 19-12 and established something of a physical and psychological edge over the Aussies.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nIt was a simple fact that the Lions felt they had been bullied in the First Test and they wanted to get even. We didn't go to fight, but when Robert Jones decided to stand on Nick Farr-Jones at the first scrum there was only really going to be one outcome \u2013 and the fists certainly did fly.\n\nI didn't know what had happened to spark that incident until afterwards when I watched a video of the game with Robert Jones and he turned to me and said, 'Look at what I do with my right foot!' Basically, he lifted his boot and with the long studs on he stepped down on Nick Farr-Jones's foot.\n\nFarr-Jones shoved him and Robert responded by throwing a half punch, meanwhile Mike Teague came off the side of the scrum and absolutely melted Farr-Jones with this monster punch. And the whole thing erupts into this massive fight. All the while I'm giggling away in the backline because us glamour boys don't get involved in that sort of rough stuff \u2013 unless you are JPR Williams!\n\nIEUAN EVANS\n\nI moved very slowly towards the encounter from my wing, but never got to the heart of it. That was where the big elephants hang out and I know my limitations. It was a very tasty fight, but it was over relatively quickly.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT (England)  \nToured: 1989, 1993 & 1997\n\nThere was another massive punch-up when Dai Young kicked Steve Cutler in the head. There was a huge fuss made about that incident in the press afterwards \u2013 and quite right, to be honest \u2013 but the furore was also fuelled by the fact that the Wallabies had lost and the series was going to go down to the wire. Everyone was at us \u2013 from the press all the way to Bob Dwyer, the Aussie coach \u2013 but I think it was because we had them worried. They wanted to undermine us, to try and put us off, because our forwards had grown stronger and stronger as the tour had progressed, and they had been sensational in the Second Test. The Wallaby forwards had been bullied and the whole country was starting to panic. They said that we were deliberately harking back to the '74 tour and the '99' call, but that wasn't true. Nothing was premeditated. Sure, we had identified Nick Farr-Jones as the key to disrupting their backline and Robert Jones had instructions to niggle him to try and get under his skin and put him off, but that was all. The actual fighting wasn't planned and Dai Young's kick certainly wasn't. It was a ridiculous thing for him to do, but he was only 21 and was playing in the biggest match of his life; there had already been a fight and his blood was up. I'm not condoning what he did \u2013 far from it \u2013 but it certainly hadn't been premeditated before the game.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nI would describe it as the most violent game of rugby that has ever been played. We can't be seen to condone what went on, but needs must. There were some hard players on that tour; hard men and they all came together and sorted the job out.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nWe got a rocket after the First Test. Looking back we had a few players out of position and inexperience at fly-half with Craig Chalmers. We also thought we would win and when we didn't Ian McGeechan made changes \u2013 and with that came a different mental attitude. We knew it was the last chance. McGeechan and Roger Uttley gave the squad the belief that we would win if we stuck to the plan. Put simply, we knew we could win if we beat the Aussies up. The Lions forwards didn't need a rugby ball in that Second Test, because it was a question of let's have a scrap and see what they are made of. Robert Jones did his business with Nick Farr-Jones, and away it went. Australia were always unsettled after that \u2013 and they weren't as close as a team as we were.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nGeech was the finest coach I'd ever had \u2013 the best. His tactics and analysis were fresh, and refreshing. He was also hard edged, and that idea of going after the Wallabies in the Second Test was his.\n\nIn the end we reacted to the way the Aussies made us play. They had dished it out early in the tour, and when we returned fire with fire they didn't like it. They may all have thought, 'You soft Pommie bastards' \u2013 but we were a side that fronted-up, and they had probably changed their view by the end of the tour.\n\nThe aim was to face them down, but also to play rugby. Geech wanted a balanced game, and he wanted it played at pace. We were very fit, and David Sole, a prop, was as quick as any of the backs, and the likes of Paul Ackford and Brian Moore were also very mobile. The only one of the pack who wasn't fast was Deano, but he could play rugby.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nWhen the Aussies bleated about the roughhouse tactics we were too busy celebrating to listen. If it's not refereed, you do it all day long. There were no assistant refs and no citing, and both sides were able to muscle it. They were big men \u2013 just look at the size of Tom Lawton \u2013 but they couldn't handle it.\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nFor me, the selection of the pack for the Second and Third Tests, with Mike Teague and Wade Dooley brought into the side, was the key. That set the platform, and everything else fell into place.\n\nThe Australians didn't like Wade Dooley, he was a big bully of a man in the second-row and they had nothing to compete with him.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nTeague was immense on that tour \u2013 it was the best I'd ever seen him play. He had come in as a bit of a wild card and I think guys like Finlay Calder and John Jeffrey saw him as a one-dimensional English forward who just wanted to arm-wrestle his way through the game by being stuffy and tight and mauling everything. But he worked like a maniac out in Australia to change that perception; he got himself fitter than he had ever been, stronger and more dynamic. He would train until he dropped. He was just sensational to watch in action. He would leave nothing out on the pitch. Blood, sweat and tears was Teaguey; you couldn't ask any more.\n\nRobert Jones and Nick Farr-Jones come to blows.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nI had hit a bit of form, and so when they thought I'd done the A\/C joint in my shoulder against New South Wales it was a bit upsetting. In fact, I'd torn the tendon off the bone. Having been carted off against Wales in the Five Nations I'd come back to play well for the Lions in the provincial games, and was established as part of the Saturday side. Anyway, Clive Rowlands said they would give me two weeks to get fit, and that they'd give me a cortisone injection, and if that didn't work then I'd be sent home.\n\nBecause I was playing well, the management wanted to keep me, but they also brought in a replacement. So, because of the tour regulations on the number of players, I had to sit on my own at matches like a punter, away from the team. However, I was still wearing the Lions blazer and as a result I spent a fortnight getting heaps of abuse from these obnoxious Aussie bastards in the crowd. It was the best team talk I've ever had. I was seething. All these crap comments about soft Poms, which I thought were a bit rich coming from a bunch of convicts. They were much worse than The Shed [the infamous stand at Gloucester's ground]. After that, I was a man possessed.\n\nWhen I was selected for the Second Test I still needed that injection, but we came through to win, and the rest is history.\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nRob Andrew was just outstanding, as well. He wasn't selected originally, which I think was a political thing because Ireland only had four in the original selection, but then Paul Dean got injured in the first match so Rob came in and immediately made clear who the top dog was. He was a great guy to have in your team.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nIn the Second Test, Gavin scored the first of our two late tries to win it from my pass, which I must confess was a bit of a Barnes Wallis bouncing bomb. He was concussed at the time so he had the choice of grabbing at one of three balls, and fortunately he went for the real one. As he ran back into position he said to me, 'Thanks for the pass \u2013 what's the score?' Because he didn't have a clue what was going on.\n\nGAVIN HASTINGS\n\nI don't remember it because Farr-Jones had just smacked me really hard.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nGavin and I became the first pair of brothers to have play together in a Lions Test match since the Joneses in 1908. And it was a very special moment because our elder brother Graham was living in Melbourne at the time, and he came along to support us with our Mum and Dad, who had travelled out from the UK. As Ian McGeechan always says: family is the most important thing.\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nJerry Guscott scored the match-winning try from quick ball which put the Australians on the back foot and allowed him to send through this wee grubber kick, which he collected himself and touched down. What a class act!\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nIt was a great passage of play \u2013 Ieuan Evans chased a kick ahead, the ball ended up in Finlay Calder's hands and he went on a great run that took him about five yards from the Aussie line. The forwards piled in and the ball came out relatively quickly, with Brian Moore keeping things going by coming in at scrum-half and passing the ball out to Rob Andrew. We had a lot of space out to the left, but because of the chaos of the build-up play neither the defence nor the attack were properly aligned. I took the ball from Rob and saw that the Aussie centres, Walker and Maguire, pushed up to take me. I'd been watching a lot of rugby league while we were out on tour and I loved the way they slid grubber kicks through the defensive line on the sixth tackle. Because their defence was scrambling, I saw there was space behind them so I dropped the ball onto my foot and pushed it between them and went through after it. The bounce was perfect and I didn't even have to bend down to gather it \u2013 and I was in under the posts. It was the most amazing feeling to know that we had clinched the match and were still alive in the series \u2013 and I had scored the try that had secured the win.\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nThat was the moment when the destiny of the series changed. Nobody can match the Australians when it comes to hanging on in there \u2013 but at that point you could sense that the whole thing had shifted in our favour.\n\nJerry Guscott is the only man to win two Lions series' himself. He turned that series round for us with his late try in the Second Test, and then eight years later he sticks that drop-goal between the posts to beat South Africa. What a sublime rugby player!\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nJerry and I were always rivals but we became good friends through that Lions tour and I always felt he played more rugby for the Lions than he ever did in an England jersey. He was absolute class, and that moment summed it up.\n\nJeremy Guscott chips through the Wallaby defence to score an exquisite try in the Second Test.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nThe Lions means many things to me. As a kid, a ball-boy at Bath, the Lions were the great Welsh players \u2013 Gareth Edwards, Phil Bennett, Barry John \u2013 and a smattering of Mike Gibson and 'Broon from Troon' [Gordon Brown]. It was almost unattainable, but then, as I progressed through club, county and divisional rugby it became a possibility, especially after getting into international contention. It went on to hold a very special place in my heart.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nIt was a massive relief to win a really tight Test match \u2013 but I don't think anyone believed we had turned the series. What we had done was save the tour because many a Lions trip has gone completely off the rails on the basis that they weren't winning.\n\nWe knew we still had a hell of a long way to go, however; because one thing you can be sure of with the Aussies is that you can catch them out once, but you won't do it twice. They were going to come back at us with everything they had \u2013 there was nothing surer.\n\nRORY UNDERWOOD (England)  \nToured: 1989 & 1993\n\nThat has to be one of the most memorable moments of my career. The sheer relief and joy at having turned round the fortunes of the tour in a week.\n\nThe Grand Slam is a longer drawn-out affair, whereas in Australia we went from agony to ecstasy in a few short days. It was brilliant.\n\nEven better, we had the time to enjoy it because the tour schedule provided for a break of a week, part of it on Queensland's Gold Coast, before the Third and deciding Test back in Sydney. Everyone enjoyed the moment, even those in the stand, and we realised that we were back on course to take the series.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nWatch that interview with Finlay at the end of the Second Test, it's great. He's had a smack in the eye, one in the mouth, and he says to Australia, 'You'll get a physical game again next weekend.'\n\nBRIAN MOORE\n\nBy the Third Test our confidence was high. I remember going off to warm up on my own; it used to take me a while to loosen up, but I stopped after five minutes because I felt completely loose. It was a feeling I had never had before and never had again, but I was absolutely ready to play. It was not just a physical thing; it was an inner feeling too. I knew that we were all ready and we were not going to lose that Test match.\n\nScott Hastings.\n\nIEUAN EVANS\n\nThe Third Test turned into a game of chess \u2013 it was very nervy and tense. Nobody wanted to blink. It was physical and intense, but having responded to the beating we had taken in the First Test we were back on a level playing field.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nAt one point during the Third Test, the Australians were attacking and purely out of instinct I changed my body position to tackle David Campese and stopped him scoring under the posts. Bob Dwyer, the Australian coach, has spoken about that being the turning point in the game, but it didn't seem like anything special to me at the time. That shows the intensity of rugby we were playing by that point on the tour, we were doing these impressive things by instinct and thinking nothing of it. It was just incredible.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nWhat sticks in my mind most about the Third Test is that leading into half-time, while we were still playing, they played 'Waltzing Matilda' and 'Advance Australia Fair' on the tannoy to try and swing momentum their way. We got the series win by the skin of our teeth, but we kept the pressure on them, and did it.\n\nIEUAN EVANS\n\nGames like that turn on tiny margins. Moments of genius or errors dictate who comes out on top and, in this case, it was an error by David Campese that proved the difference between the two sides. I can't take any credit for the try because I was just doing my job \u2013 chasing a kick ahead, hoping to pick up the pieces if any presented themselves.\n\nWe had a scrum in front of the posts on the edge of the 22 and Rob Jones fired the ball back to Rob Andrew for a drop-goal attempt to try to put us back in the lead.\n\nIt was one of the worse drop-goals ever. It came off the side of his boot and was heading to the corner flag. David Campese caught it behind his line and, like any dutiful wing, I chased what seemed to be another lost cause.\n\nYou can be chasing all day and get nothing, but sometimes the bounce will go your way. Early on in the game he had thrown me a dummy and I had taken it. I had 40 metres to think about what was going to happen this time and I just knew he wasn't going to do the same thing again.\n\nI'm not sure why he tried to run out from behind his own line. But he didn't try the dummy and his pass to Greg Martin went to ground and I dived on top of it. I have to admit, I gave him a bit of verbal after the try, which wasn't like me, but it all stemmed from me taking his dummy earlier on.\n\nWe played against each other five times on that tour and, to me, he was a rugby genius. The best player I had ever played against \u2013 a truly wonderful, wonderful player.\n\nIn terms of significance and importance, that try helping the Lions to win a Test series after losing the first game, it was the most important try of my career. What a shame given all I had to do was dive on the ball over the line!\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nDavid Campese probably had the worst series of his life. He had that slip-up in the Third Test and it was down to frustration. We had choked him of possession and for somebody like that, who thrives on loose ball and having opportunities to express himself, that must have been torture.\n\nHe got a lot of stick in the Australian press afterwards, but his mistake wasn't the reason we won the series. We would have beaten any team at that time.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nCampo's schoolboy error was unreal. But there are all different levels of rugby, and there are some players, like him, who had something extra, and then there are others who look to players like him to make things happen. On that occasion, it simply didn't happen the way Campo wanted it to \u2013 but we also put him under pressure. Ieuan Evans was probably a bit quicker than Campo, and in the last two Tests Ieuan gave him no space at all.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nIt was pretty shocking to see the amount of abuse that the Aussie media and fans rained down on Campo after the match. He turned up late to the post-match dinner and left early \u2013 and I can understand why: he was taking the blame for the loss \u2013 from himself, from his teammates, from his coach, the fans, the media, everyone. But in many ways, how could they blame him? The man was a bloody genius and he tried things. It just didn't come off for him on that occasion \u2013 but his pass might have gone to Greg Martin, who might either have cleared up field, or they could have started a counter-attack that might have taken them anywhere. We had bugger all defence at that stage \u2013 Ieuan had pushed up and if he had been beaten by the pass then Campo and Martin would have been in the clear; the rest of us were still covering across and there would only have been Gav at the back to try and stop them. To lose a match like that is devastating, but it could have been very different. I've always tried to be philosophical about these things. Campo certainly won more matches than he lost because he tried things.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nIf Campese had one of his good days and the sun was shining, you were stuffed. It didn't work out for him on that tour, but he was the best player I've ever seen.\n\nThe decisive moment in the Test series: Ieuan Evans and Greg Martin dive for the ball as it crosses the try-line during the Third Test.\n\nIEUAN EVANS\n\nIt isn't just the try that sticks in my mind from that game. I actually caught a rabbit in the middle of the game. I looked up at the big screen and saw I was in shot. There was a brown thing cowering at my feet and I looked down to find it was a rabbit. I picked it up and carried it to someone on the side while the game was going on and then went back to the match.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nI got the match ball after the game, but I threw it to John Jeffrey. Getting that man of the series was the highlight of my career, and I remember Roger Uttley saying to me, 'You won't realise what you've achieved until years from now.' We went around the field and thanked the fans, and it was also good to see in the press box that the UK press was delighted with the result, showing that they were human after all.\n\nFor years we had been hearing about how the southern hemisphere were fitter, stronger and faster, but for once we had beaten them, and on their own territory. There was tremendous satisfaction in that.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nA sight I will never forget was that of Clive Rowlands. He had tears flooding down his cheeks as he greeted every player and he told us, 'The lion is getting bigger!'\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nBizarrely there was a fourth Test match back at Ballymore against an ANZAC XV \u2013 which was a combined New Zealand and Australian team. Only two New Zealanders \u2013 the great Frano Botica and the prop Steve McDowell \u2013 turned up, so they played alongside 13 Australians. We won that match as well.\n\nIeuan Evans screams in delight as he scores the clinching try.\n\nFINLAY CALDER\n\nNick Farr-Jones is on record saying that the Lions coming over and beating them up in 1989 was the best thing that ever happened to Australian rugby. His point was that if it hadn't been for the experience they wouldn't have won the World Cup two years later.\n\nProfessionalisation was the best thing that ever happened to rugby at the top level, by a mile; because the strain on players, on their families, and on their employers, was becoming more and more and more. It had started at the World Cup in 1987 when people began to realise that the commercial aspects were changing, and reached its inevitable conclusion when they made the announcement in 1995 that the game would go open. I suppose the 1989 Lions were an important step in that process. We were playing in front of full stadiums and it was great fun \u2013 I wouldn't change those seven weeks of my life for anything \u2013 but money was pouring into the game and the players weren't seeing a penny of it, so it was obvious that it wasn't going to be long before there had to be a change.\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR\n\n# [THE TWILIGHT OF THE AMATEUR  \n1993](006.html#a3)\n\nNEW ZEALAND\n\nTHE LAST Lions of the amateur era took off in the aftermath of a mediocre Five Nations Championship which had ended with a thumping win by Ireland over England in Dublin, a win against the odds. The uneven nature of the tournament gave rise to a degree of uncertainty as to whether this team really could become the second Lions to win a series in New Zealand.\n\nThe good news was that Ian McGeechan, the master of 1989, became the first man ever to coach two Lions tours, a welcome recognition that the post as Lions coach should always go to the best man, and not simply be informally rotated around. Gavin Hastings, the regal Scotland fullback, also seemed to be a wise choice as captain, although the party seemed to be less strong in key areas. Significantly, the committee system of selection meant that McGeechan was not always allowed his preferred choices.\n\nPredictably, the 13-match tour of New Zealand was to be mired in controversy \u2013 over refereeing, as ever, with the First Test being decided by one of the most controversial calls of all time \u2013 and also because the pressure of the tour exposed shortcomings in the original selection and, as the tour developed, a clear division sprung up between the Test team and the midweek team. The split reached a nadir when the Lions lost embarrassingly against Hawke's Bay and Waikato, robbing the tour of momentum at a crucial stage.\n\nTo this day, some of the '93 party still have a bitter taste in their mouth and are adamant they should have won the series. The fact that they came so close after a mediocre Five Nations suggests the coaching party could not be improved upon and McGeechan's diary of the tour was titled So Close to Glory. As journalist Clem Thomas noted, it 'could just as easily have been called Same Old Story.' By the time the Lions arrived back home they were being viewed by New Zealanders as potentially one of the best Test sides to have toured the Land of the Long White Cloud, but they still came up short by 2-1 in the Test series, despite a tremendous win in Wellington in the Second Test.\n\nThe barricades surrounding the 'play for the love of the game' ethos were crumbling during the early 1990s, and it would be two years later that they would be fully dismantled. An old-style controversy arose when Wade Dooley's father died during the tour; the England second-row immediately flew home for the funeral and an appropriate period of mourning. Dooley wanted to re-join the tourists but under the agreements for the trip, he was not allowed to, as he had already been replaced.\n\nThis did not help the mood of the Lions camp, although the silver lining was that it did give a fresh-faced lock called Martin Johnson, who had honed his game during an 18-month stint of club rugby in New Zealand, his first taste of action in the red jersey. It would not be his last.\n\nThat this was an amateur tour played by policemen, builders, bankers, lawyers and pilots was underlined by the fact that the players received \u00a322 a day communication allowance which at the time would buy them 25 minutes on the phone to their family back in Britain. Some were also forced to claim a \u00a340 a day hardship allowance to make up for lost earnings.\n\nMcGeechan was part of a management team that also including tour manager Geoff Cooke, the man whose organisational skills helped transform England's rugby fortunes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and assistant coach Dick Best, another man of pedigree.\n\nThere had been three outstanding candidates for the captaincy \u2013 Will Carling, who had led England to two Grand Slams by then and a World Cup final, the Scottish fullback Gavin Hastings and the Welsh winger Ieuan Evans. Hastings was given the nod on the grounds that he had toured New Zealand three times, the Kiwi supporters knew who he was, and he was a racing certainty to start at fullback. Carling was a massive public figure, but not necessarily a popular one amongst officialdom or with the Celts, and as things turned out would not last the Test series as a first choice centre and would withdraw from possible selection for future tours \u2013 the only major player ever to do so in the modern era.\n\nHastings ended the adventure with his reputation enhanced both as a player and as a leader. His boot rewrote the record books as he scored the most points by a Lions player in a series, the most penalty goals in a match and became the tourists' leading scorer in Test matches. This was also the first Lions tour where a try was worth five points and many observers thought it would end up in a free-running touchdown festival, but Hastings' boot and that of Grant Fox, the home fly-half, turned out to be the main protagonists.\n\nIt is to Carling's credit that he took his demotion on his very famous chin and knuckled down in the midweek games, which is more than can be said for some of the dirt-trackers. Of these games, there were losses recorded to Otago, Auckland, Hawke's Bay and Waikato.\n\nHalf of the 34-man party were English, their largest representation for years, but there were just two Irishmen \u2013 prop Nick Popplewell and lock Mick Galwey \u2013 in the initial selection. To say that that put Irish noses out of joint would be an understatement, particularly as the Irish had beaten Carling's England in the final match of the Five Nations.\n\nThe Irish press had a field day but Best was quoted as saying after the tour that selection had been a dog fight with every home faction trying to get their own men into the party. For example, Best fought for Jeff Probyn, the English prop, to be taken but was outvoted and still thinks the defeat to Ireland was a factor in this, and that Probyn would have made significant dents in the All Black front-row. Peter Wright and Paul Burnell, the chosen tight-heads, lacked authority and the Lions were forced to switch Jason Leonard over to the tight-head during the series.\n\nThe final selection headed off to New Zealand from London and started with wins over North Auckland, North Harbour, the New Zealand Maoris and Canterbury, playing with a rare verve and style, with the comeback win over the Maoris particularly impressive. Ben Clarke in the back-row and Jeremy Guscott in the centre were supercharged.\n\nThen the team hit their first road block. James Robson, the medic from Dundee, was on his first Lions trip and after seeing the state of some players after the game against Otago, which ended in a 37-24 defeat, it is a wonder that he ever toured again. Scott Hastings ended up under the surgeon's knife with an horrendous fractured cheek and there were also worries about Carling and the giant English lock Martin Bayfield, who was taken out in mid-air and crashed to the ground from a great height \u2013 opinion varied as to whether this key Lion was deliberately targeted. He recovered but remained shaken.\n\nBut centre Hastings, a hero of 1989 and a superb tourist, was off the trip. The ship was steadied with a 34-16 win over Southland in Invercargill before McGeechan had to pick his side for the First Test at Lancaster Park. Surprisingly he opted for Carling in the centre although up to then the England captain had been short of form, and gave Kenny Milne the nod at hooker over Brian Moore.\n\nWhat followed in Christchurch would have knocked the stuffing out of many touring sides as Australian referee Brian Kinsey made at least three decisions that Lions supporters and their Kiwi counterparts still argue about to this day. Kinsey gave the All Blacks a try when Frank Bunce and Evans tussled for the ball over the line, with television pictures showing that Evans had a grip on the ball as they crossed the line and the ball wasn't grounded. Then he called the Lions back for a penalty when Carling was odds-on to score, despite being held by flanker Michael Jones after being released by Jeremy Guscott, turning seven points for the tourists into three.\n\nBut still McGeechan's men were leading 18-17 with seconds on the clock. Then Kinsey controversially penalised No 8 Dean Richards when it appeared that Bunce had held on to the ball after a tackle \u2013 this presented Fox with the chance to win the game. There was no danger of him missing and the Lions had a hard job containing their disappointment or disgust.\n\nThe 1993 tour party.\n\nTo win the Second Test after such a setback is a testament to the fighting spirit of the squad, or the Saturday part of it at least. Captain Hastings was suffering from a hamstring injury and volunteered to miss the game reckoning all 15 players had to be fully fit to face such a fierce examination. McGeechan had other ideas and Hastings played, as did the newly-landed Johnson \u2013 one of seven Englishmen in the pack and 11 in the starting line-up. Carling was omitted. McGeechan spent the week carefully going through the game plan and, as he later admitted, sent out a team with far less licence than usual.\n\nThe All Blacks scored early when, horrendously, Hastings dropped a high kick and centre Eroni Clarke scored, but the Lions led 9-7 at the break before winger Rory Underwood scored a stunning try: New Zealand captain Sean Fitzpatrick knocked on, scrum-half Dewi Morris counter-attacked and Guscott drew John Kirwan to send Underwood flying down the left-hand touch line at the gaunt old Athletic Park, to score.\n\nUnderwood's try sealed only the sixth Test win ever by the Lions on New Zealand soil and although the midweekers suffered a dispiriting loss to Waikato, by 38-10, hopes were high that Hastings could emulate John Dawes, 23 years previously, by captaining a winning Test side against the All Blacks.\n\nSurprisingly, the hosts left out No 8 Zinzan Brooke and re-constituted their lineout by calling in the veteran Andy Haden to do some coaching sessions. The Lions, encouragingly, took a 10-0 lead after a Scott Gibbs try and five points from the boot of Hastings.\n\nBut the All Blacks were to prove convincingly superior, and led by Sean Fitzpatrick, they launched a ferocious assault on the tourists. With the lineout misfiring and a lack of composure across the park, the Lions conceded tries to Bunce, Fitzpatrick and Jon Preston, leaving them on the ropes and eventually on the wrong end of a 30-13 defeat. It was a bitter end to another bitter series.\n\nIt was a shame that allegations of excessive drinking by party members not in the Test squad damaged morale, and the fact that in the olden days, such behaviour would not have been quite so out of order, is no excuse. Yet this was also a tour conducted in an oppressive environment, in which affection and even respect for the Lions appeared to be in short supply from the New Zealand public and media.\n\nIt might have been an amateur tour but McGeechan conducted a thoroughly professional inquest into the events in New Zealand. In his report, he made 13 recommendations, stating that the coach should have the final say on selection of the squad and that the tourists needed more time together before they left the United Kingdom. He also had some salient points to make about the difference between referees in the southern and northern hemispheres.\n\nTour captain, Gavin Hastings.\n\nGAVIN HASTINGS\n\nWithout doubt, the pinnacle of my rugby career was to be selected as captain of the British & Irish Lions on their 1993 tour of New Zealand.\n\nIt was something that gave me a marvellous sense of personal fulfilment, but at the same time I was also aware of the enormous honour that the selectors had conferred on me, by recognising that I was the best man to lead the Lions. It was, therefore, an extremely unnerving responsibility and a severe challenge.\n\nIt was a fabulous honour to captain the Lions in New Zealand, for I like the country and I respected New Zealand rugby players. At the same time, I would like to think that they respect me as a rugby player because I performed to a level in New Zealand that I am proud of, and I am similarly proud of the way that the Lions performed in the Test series. We held our heads high, we conducted ourselves well, both on and off the field, and you cannot hope for, or expect, anything more than that.\n\nI had the benefit of having been on the previous Lions tour in 1989 and I think I had the even greater benefit of being known to New Zealand and its rugby people.\n\nI had been out there in 1987 for the World Cup with Scotland and stayed to play club rugby for Auckland University. I went back with Scotland in 1990 and returned in 1992, this time with a World XV to celebrate the centenary of the NZRFU.\n\nI think all those factors were extremely important in advancing my claims for the captaincy and I think it was a decision seen as a good one out in New Zealand. I also believe that I had huge support in the British Isles.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nThe success of Lions tours is that you meet these men in a very special cause, and you become lifelong friends. Ask any player and they all want to say, 'We were Lions.' However, in 1993 there were too many players living on reputations, past their sell-by-date, who had gone on one tour too many. Also there were too many political selections, and I do not believe it was the best side that could have represented the Lions.\n\nJASON LEONARD (England)  \nToured: 1993, 1997 & 2001\n\nMy first Lions trip was a fascinating experience, although it would have been much better if we'd won, of course. What I found particularly enjoyable was the tour mentality \u2013 everyone sticking together, the cross-nation banter and the breaking down of national stereotypes.\n\nEven as a player, you end up believing what is written about other players a lot of the time, so when you meet them and tour with them for eight weeks, it can be a real shock to discover they're actually OK.\n\nIt's also good to get to know some of the non-England players in a friendly environment because, routinely, we tend to see people only when we're about to play them or have just played them. You're all on the same side on tour, which produces much tighter bonds and allows you to get closer to other players.\n\nBEN CLARKE (England)  \nToured: 1993\n\nIt was the pinnacle. Everyone remembers Lions teams, and it was just a wonderful experience that I will always cherish. It all began well before the tour because of the selection build-up, and the Five Nations season before it was massive because you were playing against your Lions rivals. So, the first thing was to get selected, and then you wanted to get in the Test team. I was driving my car through Bath, and my mum called \u2013 it was about 10.30 in the morning, and she'd heard it on the radio. I knew I had half a chance, but you don't expect it, because that would be the wrong thing to do with a Lions selection. It was a fantastic feeling.\n\nPETER WRIGHT (Scotland)  \nToured: 1993\n\nI knew before I went that I was a controversial selection. Most people expected Jeff Probyn to get the call, but he missed out and I have no doubt that politics had a lot to do with that. He was a seasoned international prop at that stage and I was at the end of my first season, but there were already 16 Englishmen in the squad so that maybe counted against him.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nProbyn should have gone \u2013 there is not a doubt in my mind about that. He was hugely respected by every front-row player in the Five Nations and all the England guys knew how good he was \u2013 and how important he had been to the success that we were enjoying during those years in the late eighties and nineties. I remember thinking at the time that he hadn't been selected because they were looking for quicker, more mobile props. But the ones that were selected were hammered up front and it soon became apparent how much we could have done with having him there to shore the whole thing up. The selectors had gone for a balanced squad which encompassed all four countries rather than just selecting the best players available to them; there were too many other English guys, so Probyn missed out. But as a result, ultimately so did we.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nOne of the problems was that although Gavin Hastings was captain and was Geech the coach, the majority of players were from England, and dominated Test selection. However, the English didn't think it was an England tour, even though we were the most successful team at the time, and it showed in the way that Nick Popplewell, Ieuan Evans and Scott Gibbs all broke through into the Test side. It was clearly a problem for some of the Scottish players, who were demotivated and didn't participate in the midweek games as they should have.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nI have the utmost respect and time for Gavin Hastings \u2013 the best fullback of my era \u2013 but whether he was the best captain, I don't know. Gavin would be one of those guys I would go to battle with, but political considerations shouldn't have got in the way. He was probably not the right man to lead the tour. Will Carling was a natural leader of men, and should have been picked as captain. He was underrated as a player and as a captain \u2013 but he was also the first rugby superstar, he was getting married, and he had too much off-field stuff going on. There were a lot of English on the tour, and so Carling was probably the right choice, but he didn't get the nod due to the English contingent being so big and the danger of them dominating everything.\n\nWILL CARLING (England)  \nToured: 1993\n\nI didn't need to captain the Lions from an ego point of view. I'm not belittling the Lions. The 1993 tour was a unique experience. But, at that stage in my career, it was nice not to be given that responsibility. Maybe I was being selfish... The Lions were looking for an emphasis away from the English bias. Two of the three-man management team were from England. And English players were obviously going to provide the majority of the squad. To be Lions captain is a great honour. No one would ever turn it down. But, after five years of leading England, I was looking forward to the responsibility being with someone else. So I spoke to Geoff Cooke and said I was tired. Gavin Hastings knew how I felt. We had discussed it when we worked together for ITV... I didn't head out to New Zealand thinking, 'It should have been me.'\n\nPETER WRIGHT\n\nWhen we ran out for our first game against North Auckland, Stuart Barnes \u2013 who was captaining the side \u2013 did the usual thing of laying the Lion mascot next to the flag on the halfway line. They had this guy dressed up in a stupid costume dancing around, and he came over and stood on our mascot, which I thought was highly disrespectful \u2013 so I shouldered him to the ground as he ran past.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nI was in prime position to get a Test spot, and thought that if people didn't want to train and put it in, then that was one less competitor for a Test place. I was wrong \u2013 I should have said, 'Get going and put the work in.' I went to New Zealand as a bit of a namby-pamby runner, but was determined to show that I could defend. I think I did that, and came back with a lot of confidence. I was pleased with how I played.\n\nThe New Zealand Maori throw down their challenge to the Lions with their Haka.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nI told Will Carling at one stage that he was a fucking disgrace, because he was a good player, and was letting himself down \u2013 although Scott Gibbs was playing better. It's hard to take the disappointment when you're an international and you don't get selected, but it's quite sad they let themselves down. How people handle that is not just the key to how they perform, but how everybody performs.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nOne of the great things about touring with the Lions is that you get to meet some of the game's great legends, and when we went to Wellington to play against the Maoris our liaison officer was Bernie Fraser. Richard Webster revealed that he had been a ball-boy at Swansea when the All Blacks had toured Wales in 1980, and he told Bernie that the thing he had admired most about him was his amazing mouser. I don't think Bernie was very impressed by that.\n\nBEN CLARKE\n\nA lot of the players felt for Wade Dooley, and the whole thing must have been heart-breaking when he had to return home for his father's funeral. New Zealand offered to pay his way back, and where they did the right thing, I don't think the Four Home Unions did in refusing the offer. Jeff Probyn must have been a very close call at tight-head, and he must have felt hard done by. He had very good technique, and we would have benefited from him being there without a doubt. As a tourist Richard Webster is the guy I remember because he was great fun and always saw the lighter side of things. He always had a smile and lots of positive energy.\n\nGavin Hastings beats New Zealand Maori's Sam Doyle to score the winning try.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nWe went clay pigeon shooting and Richard Webster, who was completely hyperactive, was given a pump-action shotgun \u2013 the least responsible person in the whole tour squad to be given charge of something like that. When it was his turn he did quite well and hit some of the clays, then started to celebrate, holding the gun casually in one hand \u2013 and it went off, hitting the ground about two inches from Peter Winterbottom's foot. Wints went completely pale but he handled it OK, until the reality of the situation hit him later and he realised that he had almost lost his foot, or some toes \u2013 which would have been bad enough, but he would have also lost his Test spot... to Richard Webster.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nAs soon as Martin Johnson came out it was clear that he would be in the Test side \u2013 and it was clear he should have been on the tour from the start.\n\nWILL CARLING\n\nWe had all known Wade Dooley's dad. It was a chance for this great amateur game to show the world what a great amateur game it is. If rugby had been a professional game, I might have understood \u2013 it would have cost a lot of money to have paid an extra man. But this was a player who had won 50 caps for his country, whose father loved rugby and would have wanted him to come out, who had announced that he was quitting rugby after the tour, who had been invited out by the host union. Even now I can't believe the Home Unions behaved like that.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nThe first half against the Maoris was a disaster. I remember looking up at the scoreboard at half-time and thinking we were in real trouble. We were 20-0 down, but we had the sun and the slope in our favour after the break and things eventually started to go our way and we managed to come back to 24-20. It was a big relief, because if we had carried on like we did in the first half we would have been humiliated.\n\nPETER WRIGHT\n\nThe Maoris had a guy called Alan Prince who scored a great try \u2013 but as he dived over he gave Rory Underwood the bird, which was completely out of order. To show that sort of lack of respect is bad, but to do it to someone who was a world-class player and a great ambassador of the game was shocking. The Maori management handled it really impressively. They came out and apologised and said how disappointed they were with their player. They turned what could have been a really negative situation into something which reflected really well on them.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nRob Andrew played well in the Test matches, but in the build-up to the series, I really hoped that Stuart Barnes would make it in ahead of him. We were playing together at Bath and I felt that we were a better fit. But it wasn't to be. Barnsie is a big red wine drinker and he started off the tour taking it fairly easy on the booze front, but after a few weeks the split between the midweek side and the Test team began to show and it was evident that the selectors were going to go with Rob at ten \u2013 so Barnsie began to indulge in some of the produce from the local vineyards. He would turn up on the bus for training looking pretty grey and with his sunglasses firmly in place. He coined a new phrase, having stuck to just 'two quiet ones' early on, it eventually became 'two quiet ones \u2013 followed by twenty loud ones'.\n\nThere's been a lot made about the midweek side going AWOL on the rugby front and ended up just partying \u2013 and there's no doubt that some of them did \u2013 but there were those of us who played in the Test side who also had some pretty big nights out. I remember going on a fairly big bender after the Maori game where a whole load of us went out until the early hours and were crashing all over the hotel when we got back. There was a team meeting the next day and Geoff Cooke stood up and had a real go about there being so much noise \u2013 and he told us that those responsible were to own up and go and see him after the meeting. I wish I could say that I was big enough to go and see him, but I didn't. In fact, none of us did.\n\nSCOTT HASTINGS\n\nI remember thinking after the Maori game that Jerry Guscott was almost certain to be in the Test side, which left me, Will Carling and Scott Gibbs battling it out for the other centre spot \u2013 so I knew I needed a big performance before the Test team was announced. I was on the bench against Canterbury the following Wednesday and against Otago on the Saturday after that \u2013 and for some reason I knew I was going to get on in that game. While we were walking around the pitch before kick-off a seagull landed on my head and shat all over me, I was absolutely covered, and somebody said it was supposed to be good luck. And sure enough, ten minutes into the game Will Carling had to come off with a leg injury and I thought, 'Great, this is my chance.' We were playing pretty well, but Otago scored a try just before half-time so it was really tight. Then, at the start of the second half, I went to smash Josh Kronfeld and his knee must have hit my face. The next thing I remember is trying to close my mouth but it wouldn't shut properly. I knew there was something serious wrong so I just stood up and walked off the pitch. And that was it \u2013 my tour was over in an instant.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nAgainst teams like Waikato and Otago you want to be at your best, and although guys like Richard Webster were outstanding for the dirt-trackers, not everyone was as motivated. The other problem was that New Zealand is a very hard place to go and win in. You can catch them napping once, but you will not catch them again. Sean Fitzpatrick, the All Black captain was also very good at psyching out the opposition, and finding their weaknesses, and New Zealand were in the process of building a really good team.\n\nPETER WRIGHT\n\nAs the tour progressed the squad became more and more divided. The Saturday team was clearly the priority, which was absolutely understandable. Meanwhile the midweek team was left to its own devices.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nIt was very unfortunate that the tour party split in two. You felt for some of the boys in the midweek side, because quite a few of their team-mates didn't do the shirt justice. Some of them had given up. The key to a successful Lions tour is you have to have quality players, but you also have to have team spirit running right through it. Whether you are in the Test side or not, everyone has to pull in the same direction. In 1997 Geech and Fran Cotton had clearly identified that non-Test players had to pull their weight, and before the tour they got the guys to say before they left how they would contribute if they didn't make the Test side. In 1983 and 1993 we didn't do that, and the Waikato and Hawke's Bay matches in 1993 were embarrassing.\n\nPower players: Dean Richards grapples with Michael Jones.\n\nPETER WRIGHT\n\nI've heard all the chat about the Scottish front five, and myself in particular \u2013 worst Lion ever and all that crap \u2013 and that does grate. People are entitled to their opinion \u2013 but I know that I did the best I could. I played on both sides of the scrum for the team, and we had a couple of pushovers when I was on the park. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and I came back from that tour, re-evaluated my game, and became a better player as a result.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nIn the First Test we got so close, and then the penalty given against Dean Richards ended it. It was harsh, the referee didn't have to give it, and it was the last play of the game. It was rough justice to lose like that, especially as Frank Bunce had also been awarded a dodgy try. But what's the point of moaning and being characterised as a sore loser? It was the First Test and we still thought we could beat them.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nTo this day I still don't know what that penalty was for at the end of the First Test \u2013 but it was a decision that turned the game. We were robbed. We had gone well up to that point, but that decision killed us, and we did well to come back and win the Second Test in Wellington.\n\nBEN CLARKE\n\nWe had quality throughout the squad, but Scott Gibbs was very powerful and really took the game to the New Zealand midfield. For the All Blacks, the talisman was Sean Fitzpatrick, who was a great leader and player, and we also had to contend with Michael Jones, who not only had great ball-playing ability and real physical presence but was also incredibly athletic.\n\nANDY NICOL (Scotland)  \nToured: 1993 & 2001\n\nIn 1993 I didn't make selection. Gary Armstrong was originally in the squad but he got injured and I felt I was in with a good shout for being his replacement, but they went with Rob Jones instead \u2013 which was fair enough. So I went to the South Sea Islands with Scotland instead, and we had just been beaten in Apia in Samoa, and I was lying on the deck absolutely drained because it was really hot, as you can imagine. Then, Allan Hosie, the tour manager appeared next to me and said, 'Chin up \u2013 you're going over to New Zealand tomorrow to join the Lions.' Robert had taken ill and been taken to hospital for blood tests, and they had sent for me as a temporary replacement. So, whereas the rest of the Scotland squad were going home via a three-day stopover in Fiji, I was going to New Zealand to join up with the Lions, which seemed to me like a great deal.\n\nWhen I got to New Plymouth, Peter Winterbottom said to me, 'You had the chance to go to Fiji and you came here instead \u2013 what is wrong with you?' I think he was joking. I was there for six days, by which point Rob had recovered, but they gave me a special dispensation because we had quite a few injuries, and I sat on the bench against Taranaki. These were the days before tactical substitutions, so with six minutes to go Rob clutched his shoulder and came off \u2013 and I got on. Willie-John McBride played 68 games for the Lions, and I doubt he can name every opposition side he faced. Well, I can tell you exactly what I did in my Lions career: ten passes, two kicks and stood on one New Zealander. And we won! Geech wanted to keep me as a training member of the squad, and New Zealand agreed to it, but the Home Unions blocked it.\n\nWILL CARLING\n\nAuckland was a shock. It was the first time in my life that I had been dropped. I had no inkling about it. Nobody had spoken to me or warned me... I had this terrible sick feeling in my stomach. It wasn't that I thought it was unfair; Scott Gibbs had been playing really well and deserved his chance. But I wondered what I was doing on the tour. I had drifted along for four weeks, and had just paid the penalty.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nI was in the stand for the Hawke's Bay game and it was pretty tough viewing. There were guys out there who were trying their best \u2013 guys like Barnes and Carling, who were pushing to get into the Test side \u2013 but there were others who were just awful and had clearly given up trying. I can still remember how angry I felt about that; the honour of wearing a Lions jersey should never be taken for granted like that \u2013 the tradition is too important and you just think about all the work done by the guys who never get to wear it, but would give their left arm to be out there. We all went out and had fun and had some pretty big benders, but the tour failed right there \u2013 when players stopped caring about the jersey and what it meant.\n\nDewi Morris dive-passes to clear the ball from a ruck.\n\nBEN CLARKE\n\nIt was galling watching the midweek team because we, as Lions, should have dealt with those New Zealand provincial sides. Too many people were looking around for excuses, and although I can understand a huge amount of disappointment if you don't get in the Test side, some players did not deal with it very well. The best way is to prove to the selectors that they've got it wrong by playing out of your skin.\n\nPETER WRIGHT\n\nThe Saturday team always sat at the back of the bus, but on one occasion towards the end of the tour we finished training before them and got changed quickly so that we could take their place at the back. When the Saturday team eventually turned up they gave us a suspicious look then must have thought better of making a scene and decided to sit down at the front. Little did they know that somebody had got hold of a box of over-ripe mandarins, and half a mile down the road we all jumped up and bombarded them with this rotten fruit. The driver was obviously in a hurry so wasn't for stopping, and it was like the scene in 'Bugsy Malone' when all the kid gangsters get covered in cream pies. Martin Bayfield was too tall to duck his head down behind the seats, so he got the worst of it. It was all done as a bit of fun \u2013 but there was a message there as well. Guys like Will Carling and Mike Teague were in the midweek team, and I don't suppose they were entirely comfortable as marginalised figures, which is what we all basically were by that point.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nIn the Second Test we had the edge up front and played well tactically, and a combination of Rory Underwood's try and Rob Andrew kicking his penalties won it.\n\nFrank Bunce is awarded a controversial try despite being held up in the tackle by Ieuan Evans.\n\nJASON LEONARD\n\nPlaying New Zealand is always difficult. Playing New Zealand as a forward is more difficult still. Playing New Zealand in New Zealand as a forward is about as hard as it gets.\n\nAs I prepared to do just that, with the Lions shirt on my back and in a Test match for the first time, it felt like one of the most important moments in my career. I knew how much it meant to win. If we lost, the series would be over, and if we drew, we'd have no hope of winning the three-match series. We had to win.\n\nI had a good game in what proved to be quite a comfortable win for us, 20-7, which the Lions' biggest Test win in New Zealand to date. The local fans were getting quite upset at the fact that the Lions were winning \u2013 they really don't like losing at home \u2013 and someone threw a beer can at Brian Moore.\n\nI didn't see it at the time but when we went into the next scrum I could smell this awful stench of beer and Brian kept burping. He told me afterwards that when he'd picked the beer can up to throw it to the side of the pitch, he realised it was full, so he opened it, toasted the baying crowd and took a slurp before throwing it aside.\n\nBrian Moore spills blood for the cause against Auckland.\n\nBRIAN MOORE\n\nAt that point in the game if we had been pushed over there we would have lost the Test. We scrummaged more for the ball and that was obviously a dent to their psyche because they had gone for it expecting to do us. No one who's not a forward understands the huge significance of these small events and that one was almost imperceptible to most people. But it was a big turning point because shortly after that there was a turnover and Rory Underwood scored.\n\nI remember going back to the halfway line and waving to the crowd nicely and cans rained down. One that landed on me was actually full. Now I don't know why I did this but I opened it and drank it and threw it away. That upset everyone more.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nI got the ball after the turnover and we swept up the left flank. There was a two-on-one with me and Rory against John Kirwan, with John Timu covering across behind him. I knew that I had to fix Kirwan, otherwise he would just push Rory into touch or at least be on hand to slow him down until Timu made it over to make the tackle. I didn't do anything special to fix him, but sometimes you just need a look and you put doubt in the defenders mind. I looked up and our eyes met and then I glanced back inside him and that was it \u2013 I knew I had him. I straightened, he turned inwards slightly and I gave the pass. Rory had hardly any space, but it was all he needed \u2013 he didn't have to break stride, all he had to do was catch the ball and put on the afterburners. He literally had a yard or two of space but he left Timu absolutely for dead \u2013 and then pulled off one of the most ungraceful dives ever seen on a rugby field as he went into score.\n\nRORY UNDERWOOD\n\nThe All Blacks kept coming but we smashed them back, we held them at a critical five-metre scrum where Jason Leonard proved his worth at tight-head, the two Martins [Bayfield and Johnson] dominated the lineout and, when a bit of loose ball appeared, I was able to help the tabloid headline writers into 'Rory Glory' mode.\n\nWhen Sean Fitzpatrick dropped the ball, Dewi Morris saw the space on the blindside immediately. We had depth to our attack, Jerry Guscott drew the cover and gave me the space to get round John Kirwan and beat John Timu for pace.\n\nAll I could think of in those 40 yards was the need to get the ball down because I knew how important a try was at that stage, so when I could see the line I took off into the worst dive for the corner ever. Whether I could have got nearer the posts to help the conversion I don't know and to be honest, it didn't seem that important.\n\nAs I was running back I raised an arm in salutation to the boys in the stand. I knew how tough it had been for them. They had been putting in the work, they had been beaten, the press was starting to give them a lot of stick and they, as much as us, needed the tonic of a Test win.\n\nWe retreated to a brilliant atmosphere in the changing room; there was relief, delight, the knowledge that we had achieved the win we felt had deserved in the First Test and how well everyone had recovered after the traumas of the previous fortnight.\n\nMIKE TEAGUE\n\nI played in the Second Test, but I was carrying injuries. Frank Bunce was pretty impressive, and when he tackled it was like being hit by a train. For the Lions, Ben Clarke was absolutely on a roll. He has not had the credit for how well he played, probably because we did not win the series \u2013 but what you need is young players like him hitting a purple patch. On Lions tours you want young hungry players combined with a handful of senior pros, but not too many.\n\nThere were a lot of players on that tour who should not have been there, simply because they were not good enough to be Lions. I remember Peter Winterbottom coming into the changing room after the Waikato game, and he was disgusted with the performance of some of the front-five forwards. I had been the pack leader that afternoon, and it had been a very long one, with John Mitchell orchestrating the demolition of the Lions. Right in front of the players in question, Wints said to me, 'I refuse to play with them again.' And that was very much the state of the tour at that stage \u2013 a bit of mumping had come into it when some players had missed out on Test selection, and the tour party had split down the middle.\n\nNick Popplewell, Martin Johnson and Martin Bayfield in action against Auckland.\n\nWILL CARLING\n\nI don't understand how we could be so focused for the Tests, and so poor in midweek... I know that the Tests are the thing... But I was shocked to find out that guys who were internationals were not mentally strong enough. I don't think I've been in a side that hasn't competed before. It was about character more than ability: Waikato were a good side, but Hawke's Bay were not. Once my Test chance had gone, it was down to personal pride. The tour was going down the tubes, but I was still keen to play. The results might have been disastrous, but I got a lot from the last two midweek games. I was under pressure \u2013 I had to show a bit of character. Certainly, the Carling silver spoon image took a battering. It did me no harm to see life from the downside.\n\nPETER WRIGHT\n\nPeople talk about us losing the Waikato game, but what they forget is that Waikato had won the First Division Championship the previous season and were about to win the Ranfurly Shield from Auckland a few months later \u2013 so we knew it was going to be one of our toughest provincial games and it was being played by the midweekers right at the end of the tour. It was crazy scheduling! People also forget that we played that game with a few guys injured. Will Carling wasn't fit but we needed to keep Scott Gibbs fresh for the last Test, and Richard Webster had a bad arm as well. So there was a lot of mitigating circumstances. But it was the only game the whole Scottish front-five played together, so I suppose it was easy to pin the blame on us.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nMike Teague told me about an incident when he walked into a stadium urinal after the Waikato game and overheard an exchange between an elderly Kiwi fan and one of the Scottish Lions who had played in the defeat. The pensioner said, 'Mate, you were a bloody disgrace,' to which he got the reply, 'Shut up old man, or I'll give you a good hiding.' Teague responded, 'My money's on the old man.'\n\nWILL CARLING\n\nI had a varied series: I played the First Test, commentated on the Second, and sat on the bench for the Third. The bench was easily the hardest. In the commentary box, I accepted that I would not be involved.\n\nRory Underwood finishes off a brilliant individual run to score in the Second Test.\n\nGAVIN HASTINGS\n\nIt was a fascinating experience and I am sure that everyone who went on tour was richer for it. To me, that is what playing top-level rugby is about. It is not playing in front of your home crowd or 50,000 people at Murrayfield; if you really want to test yourself, the place to do it is New Zealand because, as far as I am concerned, it is the hardest place I know to play rugby. There are no easy games in New Zealand, the pressure is intense, there is no hiding place and you just have to get on with it.\n\nIt was a great credit to the Lions that we came to the third and deciding Test match with the series squared at one-each. The highlight of the tour was the Second Test victory in Wellington, but it was extremely difficult to raise our game to that level two weeks in a row.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nIn the Third Test New Zealand made changes, bringing in Aaron Pene at No 8. He and Jamie Joseph at blind-side and they got New Zealand going forward. Michael Jones also played a lot looser, and we knew that New Zealand would come back firing. However, I don't think we quite understood how far we had to step up to win it.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nThe All Blacks had worked us out by the Third Test, and when they got into Martin Bayfield our game was gone. I didn't have a huge sense of disappointment, but the whole scenario would have been different but for that First Test result. I thought we were struggling in a few areas, but we still went out and beat them in Wellington, and we went into the last Test believing we could win the series. However, having done judo as a kid, I know that there are certain floor moves and holds that are almost impossible to get out of, and the Third Test was a bit like that. It took them 30 minutes to work us out, and when they did there was no coming back. They were a better team, but we gave them a good run for their money.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nBen Clarke was a revelation, and the outstanding Lion. Ben was right on form, and played as well as he ever played. He was really fit, quick, and a very good ball-carrier because he was a big, physical man who did not go down easily in contact. For the All Blacks it was Michael Jones. He was a great player, who had everything: quick, great hands, fantastically fit, and very athletic. He was difficult to play against.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nBen Clarke was unbelievable. He said, 'I'm having them,' and when he got the bit between his teeth against the All Blacks he was unstoppable. All he had to do at blind-side was get hold of the ball, smash into people, and not worry about his hands. He was immense on that tour, almost head and shoulders above everyone else, which is pretty difficult to do. He was on a different plane to the rest of us.\n\nBEN CLARKE\n\nIt's flattering being told they would have adopted you as an All Black, and kind words from a very well respected rugby nation \u2013 and one that doesn't give too many compliments either.\n\nPETER WINTERBOTTOM\n\nWe played 18 games with an average of 23,000 spectators a game in 1983, and we got a communications allowance \u2013 but it was a nightmare trying to phone home anyway. Roy Laidlaw didn't get anything from his employers. He said the local butcher would give his family free meat, but when you consider something like that, and gates of 23,000, it's a disgrace.\n\nEverything was far more professional by 1993, and the whole organisation of the tour was at a different level. It seemed in 1983 that we were just a bunch of blokes going out and giving it our best shot. Before we went to New Zealand there was one training session at the Honourable Artillery Company, and medicals at the St Ermin's Hotel, and we were given a tracksuit and a waterproof and off we went. In 1983 I was still farming up in Yorkshire, so financially there was no benefit, whereas in 1993 I was working in the City for Tullet & Tokyo and I was given paid time off. Most companies had started paid leave by that time because the game had become bigger from a commercial aspect.\n\nThe Lions is the biggest thing you can be involved with as a rugby player \u2013 although if England had won the 1991 World Cup, I would probably have put that as my biggest achievement. But we didn't. It is very difficult to be successful with the Lions, because, as the records show, it is nigh on impossible to win a series with such short preparation time. A Lions tour is very unforgiving because you have no time in which to remedy mistakes in selection or tactics. It is especially difficult on tours to New Zealand and South Africa, where the game is a religion, whereas it isn't in the UK and Ireland \u2013 although it is probably more achievable in the professional era than it was then.\n\nI had my 33rd birthday on the 1993 tour, and I retired from club and international rugby after the Third Test at Eden Park. I'd had a fantastic career, but it doesn't always end as a fairytale.\n\nScott Gibbs powers through the New Zealand defence.\n\nGAVIN HASTINGS\n\nThe reality of a Lions tour is probably far less glamorous than the expectancy before it all happens. It is, however, a tremendous experience for young men. There is an immense amount of hard work and application, and even, at times, moments of boredom. You have to live with new people and if the relationships are going to be happy and successful, there has to be a lot of give and take.\n\nThe coming together of the best players from all the Home Nations is something very special, and I think that people treat it as such and regard it as a great honour. I certainly did. I would not have missed the experience for anything.\n\nSCOTT GIBBS (Wales)  \nToured: 1993, 1997 & 2001\n\nI've got massively fond memories of 1993 even though we didn't win the Test series.\n\nIt was initially strange to be away for nine weeks in New Zealand. Looking back now, it was probably even stranger as there was no real telecommunications through mobile phones and so on so it was old-school touring.\n\nI went on that tour as an underdog and ended up playing the Second and Third Tests. That was a great highlight for me because I remember Ian McGeechan was delighted to give me the jersey because I'd earned it. I played hard, trained hard and I deserved to get there.\n\nBEN CLARKE\n\nWhat makes Lions tours so unique is trying to pull together a team, and my feeling is that it's important to concentrate and develop teamwork in terms of knowing how each other play. Geech achieved that in 1997 and 2009, and I think we achieved similar cohesion in the Test side in 1993.\n\nThe First Test was bloody close, but we made too many errors when we had the beating of New Zealand. It was hard-fought and rugby then was a massive territorial battle with the lineout a crucial area and in the last ten minutes we got momentum. There were two controversial incidents on which the result hinged, with Frank Bunce given an early try despite Ieuan Evans also having his hands on the ball, and then the Dean Richards penalty. To this day I don't think it was a penalty \u2013 no player would give away a penalty in that situation. New Zealand is an intimidating place to play rugby, and to referee, but I thought Kinsey's decision was outrageous. It left you very much with a sense of having been robbed.\n\nNew Zealand played the same game both weeks, and we should have beaten them both weeks. Our lineout was very powerful, as they found out in the Second Test, but there were signs they knew that already when Martin Bayfield was definitely taken out by Otago the weekend before the First Test. For the Second Test we brought people in, and tightened up as a squad because we realised we really had a wonderful opportunity to win the Test series. We knew we could command territory, and just had to be careful of them on the break. Jason Leonard coming in at tight-head paid dividends when the scrum had to hold up on our line, as did Brian Moore being selected at hooker.\n\nWe dominated the lineout in the first half to the extent that they 'replaced' one of their locks, Mark Cooksley, at half-time. He just about remembered he had a hamstring injury as we walked off, and he obviously strained it further eating an orange at half-time.\n\nIn the last Test they changed their team, bringing in Lee Stensness at inside-centre, and also concentrated on putting right their lineout and attacking ours. They were under pressure from their own media, and it was a great finish to the series with it reaching a climax at 1-1 going into the final Test.\n\nI watched it again for the first time 14 years later \u2013 I couldn't bear to watch it before that \u2013 and you could see that by the last Test we had run out of steam, and they raised their game. They deserved to win that one, but the other two are another matter.\n\nJohn Preston skips past Gavin Hastings to score.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nPlaying in New Zealand in 1993 was a completely different experience to Australia in 1989. In '89 we played on hard, fast tracks and we won the series, but in many ways 1993 was a better tour because in Australia we were pretty anonymous during the build-up to the Tests and the country only really seemed to wake up to us for the Test series, while in New Zealand every game you play is a challenge and everyone you meet has an incredible understanding about rugby and respected us players \u2013 especially after coming so close to winning the First Test and then thumping them in the Second.\n\nBen Clarke.\n\nBEN CLARKE\n\nThe thing about the Lions is that you have a group of guys who live together so closely for nine weeks, and then are never together in the same room again. At the time I'd just started working for NPower, and was on paid leave plus the tour allowance of about \u00a320 a day \u2013 which was not enough when you have to play three card brag for eight weeks with Dean Richards, who was king of the cards. We were well looked after, and I loved New Zealand. It is a great country, and the ultimate testing ground for a rugby player. There was no let-up on or off the field, and I made sure I enjoyed the tour and the country. It was a tough tour, but that's what made it good.\n\nGavin Hastings tries to put on a brave face after losing the series to Sean Fitzpatrick's All Blacks.\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE\n\n# [GLORY DAYS  \n1997](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nTHIS ERA in rugby was both heady and dangerous. The Lions departed for South Africa less than two years after the game had been declared open, and therefore professional, at the famous International Rugby Board meeting in Paris in September 1995.\n\nRugby authorities had spent decades battling against the spectre of professionalism and so when it became a reality, very little had been put in place to deal with the profound changes in culture that would clearly now eventuate. Indeed, sometimes rugby appeared to be thrashing around desperately trying to catch up.\n\nTo a considerable number of people, the whole concept of Lions tours was now at stake, so wedded were they to the old years of amateurism. To some, the very concept of a professional Lions team seemed to be anathema, a contradiction in terms, however curious was their reasoning.\n\nThat is why this magnificent, ferocious and compelling tour was as important as any in Lions history. Not only did the Lions fight aggression with aggression, not only did they win where so few visiting teams had won, but they triumphantly re-emerged as a gleaming professional outfit and as the team which secured the future of the Lions concept long into the future. For that, the masterly Ian McGeechan, making his third tour as head coach, his steely assistant, Jim Telfer, Fran Cotton the manager, and the great English lock and tour captain, Martin Johnson, must all take vast credit.\n\nAny cynics were put firmly back in their places when the tourists completed a memorable 2-1 series win over the reigning world champions in front of tens of thousands of travelling fans \u2013 yet another remarkable aspect of the more recent Lions tours has been the incredible numbers following; in red hordes in their replica jerseys they added an unforgettable backdrop to many of the games and especially to the Tests, which were mega-occasions played in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg.\n\nEven the tour song suggested an updating, a break with a sometimes hoary past \u2013 it was not one of the grand old traditional hymns not, thank goodness, one of the raucous 'rugby songs' but 'Wonderwall', by Oasis. Another new development was that the team was followed by a fly-on-the-wall documentary team, and while not every traditionalist and not every player was entirely happy with this, one of the fruits was a vivid off-field DVD of the tour, including a speech by Ian McGeechan before the Second Test, which was so inspiring that it even moved great Lions such as Johnson.\n\nBookmakers in Britain had the Lions odds-on to lose all three matches against a Springbok side that contained several of the 1995 World Cup winners, including the likes of James Small, Joost van der Westhuizen, Mark Andrews and Andre Joubert. But shrewdly managed by big Fran Cotton, who as a player knew what it was like to beat the 'Boks in their own backyard, and brilliantly coached by what could be called the good cop\/bad cop double act of Ian McGeechan and Jim Telfer (whose scrum sessions became legendary and who saw the tour as the high point of a distinguished coaching career), they pulled it off.\n\nOn his retirement, Lawrence Dallaglio, who announced himself on the world stage during the trip and later won a World Cup with England as well as two Heineken Cups with Wasps, said the tour was the best experience of his career. There were stars all over the place but probably the signature player was Welsh centre Scott Gibbs who sent a shiver down spines all over South Africa when he smashed into the giant South African prop Os du Randt in the Second Test and sent the massive man tumbling to the ground. It was the defining image of the tour.\n\nElsewhere Irish hooker Keith Wood, Scotland's Tom Smith and Ireland's Paul Wallace formed a Test front-row that was expected to be hammered by the home opposition; but they burrowed underneath their huge opponents and McGeechan's innovative work across the park bewildered the inexperienced Springbok coach, Carel du Plessis. Du Plessis wasn't long for the job and was soon replaced by Nick Mallett.\n\nThe influence of a group of rugby league converts should not be underestimated. Players such as Gibbs, John Bentley, Alan Tait, Dai Young, Scott Quinnell and Allan Bateman had all spent time in league and brought their professionalism with them to the squad, to the aid of those still in the transition period who had begun their careers in the amateur years.\n\nIt seems strange to relate now, but at the time there was a lively debate about who should captain the squad with Ieuan Evans from Wales, Ireland's Wood and Rob Wainwright, the Scotland flanker, all being considered. England's captain at the time, Phil de Glanville, was not deemed worthy of a spot in the extended 62-man provisional squad but it was Johnson who was to justify totally his selection. Johnson, who admitted he was no big fan of the formal stuff that went with captaincy off the pitch, was picked as much for his physical presence as for his leadership abilities.\n\nA 35-man squad \u2013which would swell to 40 after the inevitable injuries \u2013 left Britain after some team-building exercises designed to get players from different nations to bond with each other. Cotton also organised some more traditional team bonding when, two days before the squad flew to South Africa, he laid on a free bar for the squad at a pub in Weybridge, Surrey. Nothing bonds rugby players like a few beers and by the time last orders had been called all national barriers had apparently been broken down and the squad were united.\n\nThe players laid down their own rules \u2013 and there were none about drinking, so if a Lion fancied a pint at lunchtime the day before a Test, he could have one. But as centre Jerry Guscott wrote: 'If someone was playing on Saturday, the chances of him having a drink after Wednesday were virtually nil.' The team also resolved to go out as a group at least once a week, for a meal, to watch a film or even, as they once did, a Harlem Globetrotters basketball exhibition match. Great care was taken by McGeechan to keep the party together, even after the Test team had been named. It worked triumphantly.\n\nSo, with what was estimated to be two and a half tonnes of luggage, the first paid Lions were 30,000 feet up in business class. The reason the excess baggage bill was so astronomical was the result of yet another McGeechan masterstroke. A year before the tour the Scotsman sought out the advice of John Hart, then the coach of the All Blacks who became the first New Zealand side to win a series in South Africa.\n\nHart's advice was that the Lions would get no favours from the 'Boks so they had to be self-sufficient. That meant the Lions should carry over their own training equipment, including scrum machines, tackle bags and even their own drinks bottles. Hart also advised that McGeechan should pick players who were similarly self-sufficient in that they should be able to make their own decisions on the pitch and not be fazed by the odd knock back. Talk about a meeting of rugby minds.\n\nAs usual with McGeechan-led tours the coaching staff had no preconceptions about the make-up of the Test side when they left Britain. Many thought Englishmen would dominate the pack but by the time of the First Test Johnson was the only red rose man in the front-five.\n\nThe first four games were all won \u2013 against Eastern Province, Border, Western Province and Mpumalanga \u2013 but the victories were not without incident. In the 38-21 victory over Western Province, Bentley was accused of gouging by winger Small, albeit to media men after the game, and the rivalry would simmer throughout the tour.\n\nInfamously, second-row Doddie Weir was stamped on by Mpumalanga's Marius Bosman and his tour was over. Cotton was incandescent, saying the South African should have been banned for six months. As it was all the Lions received was a three-point penalty; but the disgraceful incident only served to knit the Lions together more tightly.\n\nThere was a hiccup with a 35-30 defeat to Northern Transvaal, but a week away from the First Test against the Springboks in Cape Town there was still no clear delineation between the midweek team and the Test side until McGeechan revealed his hand. With Paul Grayson injured, Scotland's Gregor Townsend was picked at fly-half with instructions to play flat in the South Africans' faces and with the aim of moving the big South African forwards around the pitch. The back-row was to comprise Lawrence Dallaglio and Richard Hill flanking the giant Tim Rodber, an inconsistent performer for England but who was monumental in that series.\n\nAs the home propaganda machine cranked up, McGeechan countered by compiling a video of tour highlights that was played on the eve of the Test and Cotton read out letters of goodwill that had been sent by rugby fans back in the United Kingdom.\n\nThe 1997 tour party.\n\nThe match was not the easiest on the eye but an outrageous try by scrum-half Matt Dawson, in because Rob Howley had been injured out of the tour with a broken collarbone, where he dummied the entire South African cover defence, and a late try by Alan Tait got the job done in a famous 25-16 win. Tait celebrated his score with a gunslinger salute and the entire South African press went into firing squad mode as they criticised du Plessis.\n\nCritically, the so-called dirt-trackers kept the momentum going, something they had failed to do in 1993. They had set the tour back on the road after the Northern Transvaal reverse with a great win over Gauteng, the leading province, in a match in which Bentley scored an amazing try, weaving his way over from long range.\n\nThen after the Test, they thrashed Orange Free State by 52-30 \u2013 although the win brought a worrying incident when centre Will Greenwood swallowed his tongue after a collision and very nearly lost his life. The quick thinking of team doctor James Robson saved him.\n\nThe whole host nation was dreaming of the most ferocious backlash in Durban for the Second Test. It came. In an oppressive atmosphere the Springboks threw everything at the Lions, pounding them up front and scoring three tries, but missing out on extra points through poor kicking \u2013 with Henry Honiball, Percy Montgomery and Andre Joubert all trying their luck and failing miserably.\n\nBy contrast, the consistent Neil Jenkins, out of position at fullback, kept banging them over \u2013 scoring five soaring penalties in all, and gradually, incredibly, the Lions clawed it back until it was level going into the closing stages.\n\nThe brains trust: Fran Cotton, Jim Telfer and Ian McGeechan.\n\nCue Jeremy Guscott. Who else? There was always an element of great drama and even Hollywood about Guscott the player and he duly delivered the killer line. Keith Wood initiated an attack down the left, the Lions drove on and the ball reached Guscott to the left of the posts. His drop-goal boomed over. Unlike most of Guscott's career it was not a thing of beauty, but it did not have to be. The hair-raising closing stages were played out under the Springbok hammer but the Lions held on to secure the series.\n\nFor the record, a Lions team savaged by injury lost the last Test match at Ellis Park 35-16. As the players eased themselves into their luxurious seats on the flight back from South Africa they may not have realised that they were already Lions legends.\n\nAs Telfer had said to his forwards before the First Test, 'To be picked for the Lions is the easy bit. To win for the Lions is the ultimate.'\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nI had given up coaching at Melrose when I became director of rugby at the SRU, so when Ian asked me to take up the Lions job in 1997, I hadn't coached for four years and I was actually quite frightened when I thought of all these guys like Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio and boys like that. They were professionals and I was an administrator \u2013 and I think they were a wee bit worried about my reputation as well. But I quickly got them together in the forwards and explained to them that we were in this together. They were the players, so, if they made a decision, we would agree on it, and go for it. There were a lot of experienced guys so I was honest with them. 'I haven't coached all that much for a while, so we have to decide on a way we were going to work, and once its decided I'm in charge.' And that's the way it was. They did everything I asked of them. I thought the Lions in 1997 were absolutely great blokes.\n\nTour captain, Martin Johnson, secures the ball against Northern Transvaal.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nIt was a unique tour because of its timing at the end of the first season of pro rugby in the northern hemisphere. It will never happen again in the same way. It was the first time a Lions squad was paid to go on tour, there were rugby league returnees to union selected, and all the players had been amateurs before and now they were professionals, so they were guys with a broader life experience. There was also a massive change because the tour was only played in the main centres in South Africa, so they saw less of the country.\n\nNEIL BACK (England)  \nToured: 1997, 2001 & 2005\n\nI was in bed eating my breakfast when my wife, Ali, brought in the envelope. It was a letter from Fran Cotton congratulating me on my selection to tour South Africa with the Lions. For a moment I just sat there, staring at it. Then I let it fall to the covers and burst into tears, sobbing my heart out. A huge reservoir of tension and passion and desperation had built up inside me in my wilderness years in international rugby and those few words from Fran burst the dam.\n\nRICHARD HILL (England)  \nToured: 1997, 2001 & 2005\n\nAt the turn of '97, I was playing for England A and I felt that I was pushing for potential England selection, but you never knew. The thought of a Lions tour or a Lions Test series was certainly not something that was playing on my mind.\n\nIt's only after you've got one or two England games under your belt that you suddenly start thinking, 'Well, actually, I've played against two of the four teams that make up the Lions and I think I've fared okay, therefore I must stand a chance of getting involved in the squad at least.'\n\nI found out by letter. It was in a hotel in Birmingham that we had to meet for the very first time. We gathered as a squad of about 60-something and all of a sudden you're looking around the room and thinking, 'This isn't a bad room to be in!'\n\nJEREMY DAVIDSON (Ireland)  \nToured: 1997 & 2001\n\nI never thought I would be able to play with my childhood heroes. I would watch people like Will Carling and Jerry Guscott playing on television, and then there you are meeting up with Jerry Guscott in the Lions hotel. It was a bit of a shock to the system but I always just looked at the next game every time and I think that might have helped me. Some people maybe looked too far ahead.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nI was really pleased to be selected because, although I had been playing well for Bath, I wasn't in the England team. I had seen Geech a few times before the squad was announced and he had hinted that not playing for England wouldn't damage my chances, but I didn't know for sure if the Lions would pick me. Once the squad was announced I just wanted to get out there and start playing because the competition for a Test place was huge.\n\nJOHN BENTLEY (England)  \nToured: 1997\n\nTo play rugby union was a huge step and I never expected to be called up to play for the Lions \u2013 it was a different world. To play for the Lions was never even a dream. It was a place where legends existed, not the likes of me.\n\nI'd signed for Newcastle in September. My year was going to be spent playing eight months for Newcastle and four months continuing to play for Halifax in the Super League. Fran rang me in the January \u2013 I'd been under his guidance at Sale in 1988 prior to going professional \u2013 and he said, 'Are you available to tour with the Lions in the summer?' Technically, I wasn't but I said, 'Yes.'\n\nFran said they needed to look at me playing against slightly better opposition and that he'd contact England and see if they could get me a game for the second string. He rang me back and said, 'The news won't come as a surprise but they won't touch you.' So when I got selected for the tour, I think the majority of people had never heard of me.\n\nBut when people ask me if it was a surprise in the end, it wasn't because Fran had told me they were watching me. It was a great honour, though, and I had never expected to be involved at the start of the season.\n\nJohn Bentley makes a break against Border, with Tony Underwood (left) and Mark Regan (right) following in support.\n\nI sat down with my wife, Sandy, and we puzzled over how we would cover the direct debits while I was away. If I had played rugby league that summer I would have earned more than twice what I did with the Lions. There are some things in life that money cannot buy, but the payment for such a high profile event was very poor.\n\nNEIL JENKINS (Wales)  \nToured: 1997 & 2001. Kicking coach: 2009\n\nJust getting on tour was the biggest challenge for me. I broke my left forearm in the Five Nations against England and from that moment to passing a fitness test to make the trip to South Africa, it was the longest eight weeks of my career. I even resorted to putting my injured arm into a special magnetic coil three times a day to try to speed up the healing process. When we met up at Weybridge for a week of preparation I tweaked a calf muscle to heighten the tension and then had to go through a 40-minute full contact session the day before we got on the plane to prove there were no problems with the arm. To say I was nervous would be an understatement. I was within touching distance of achieving my dream of going on a Lions tour, but had to put my arm to the test with tackles, falling on the ball and getting knocked over.\n\nRICHARD HILL\n\nThere's no doubting that we had a mutual bonding around one fact: not only did the South African players, media, and public not think that we had the ability to win the Test series, many people in Britain and Ireland didn't think we could win it either.\n\nThere was a point to prove \u2013 an acknowledgement of the ability we had in our squad and of the fact that we could win. It would take a lot of hard work but the most encouraging part was that everyone was committed to that.\n\nI think we did a good job in the first week. We had the set-a-side team-bonding activities as well as a couple of training sessions and the impromptu social. It was nothing staged. It wasn't like speed dating or anything like that!\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nWe were written off from the moment our plane landed. They were world champions and the Super 12 was perceived as a vastly superior and more professional competition to anything in the north. That new generation of Bok players had possibly forgotten, or just didn't know, how big a deal an incoming Lions tour was.\n\nComing after their memorable World Cup triumph in 1995 and the excitement of those early Tri-Nations tournaments, it didn't resonate as loud as it should have. South Africa installed a new coach who had never worked at the highest level before \u2013 we just couldn't believe that \u2013 kept their Test players out of the provincial teams which gave us an easier run-in and then didn't select a first choice goal kicker. We even persuaded them to give us the first two Tests at sea level.\n\nPerhaps the '97 Lions didn't boast so many huge names as '74 but my God they made every last ounce of their ability count. Like '74 they were totally together as a unit and I have never seen a group train so hard. But they got the balance absolutely right: we relaxed when the opportunity presented itself and we enjoyed each other's company.\n\nSometimes in sport, as in life, you get your just rewards for all the hard work you put in. South Africa 1997 was one of those occasions.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nHow much more momentous could that tour be? The Lions toured the Rainbow Nation of South Africa just a few years after the African National Congress came to power... And two years after South Africa had won the 1995 World Cup. The tour also took place less than two years after the sport had declared itself open... taking steps into the unknown. The 1997 Lions were the first professional Lions, the first tour when the players signed contracts. The old days of the tour allowances, the few pennies a day to be used for making telephone calls home, and the rest of the paraphernalia of amateurism had all disappeared.\n\nRob Howley breaks away from Western Province's Percy Montgomery.\n\nKEITH WOOD (Ireland)  \nToured: 1997 & 2001\n\nWas I thinking about my father all the time? I was, when people asked me a question about him and the 1959 tour. But was I the rest of the time? No, I wasn't. From his Lions time, Dad gave virtually everything away and before the South Africa tour I said that I had little or nothing of his. I'm not a great one for memorabilia anyway. But when I said it, a whole load of stuff came back to me. I got Dad's Lions cap, a guy had minded it for years, wrapped it in tissue paper and looked after it reverentially. A guy sent a towel from the '59 tour which doesn't sound anything spectacular but this thing is a work of art, hand-stitched with the Lions and the silver fern, absolutely phenomenal. These were all things that Dad would have given to people. Jeff Butterfield gave stuff into the RFU museum and part of the collection was footage and the RFU cut it down to 13 minutes and gave it to me. It's colour footage of Dad from 1959. Incredible stuff.\n\nYou're trying to get rid of the Irish colour when you're on a tour like that. The Irish press kept bringing up, 'How many do you think we'll have on the Test side?' And I said, 'Who cares? That's not what we're supposed to be now. We're trying to get away from how many English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh are on the team. We're Lions.' There is an element of trying to condition yourself into that as a thought process. It's the most important element of a Lions tour.\n\nGREGOR TOWNSEND (Scotland)  \nToured: 1997\n\nI believe the Lions is a four-legged stool and if you cut one leg off it will affect the whole balance. We had five Scots and four Irish, and eight of that nine were involved in the Test matches \u2013 with the other one, Doddie Weir, being sent home injured.\n\nLooking back, the core of England's World Cup-winning team was there. Richard Hill had only played a few games for England, Matt Dawson was third choice for them, and that was the first international rugby team Martin Johnson had captained \u2013 so I would imagine that was an important moment in the development of that English team.\n\nNEIL BACK\n\nThey chose my kind of captain. Martin Johnson was a surprise to some people, but not to me. I had followed him into battle with Leicester many times and never found him wanting. Selecting a 6ft 7in, 18 stone bruiser as a skipper sent the Springboks an early message of our intent. I also knew Johnno's personality \u2013 very straight, very fair, hard-working on the pitch and relaxed off it \u2013 would unite the side drawn from different nations. It was also important that the fans and the media would take to the captain. Selecting Will Carling, for instance, would have been a disaster because, rightly or wrongly, he was associated in too many people's minds with English arrogance. Everyone respected Martin.\n\nALAN TAIT (Scotland)  \nToured: 1997\n\nIt was the first time I had met Martin Johnson but I was immediately impressed with him as a rugby player and as a man. He didn't say much \u2013 he did all his talking on the pitch, and I'm a big admirer of that way of operating.\n\nJOHN BENTLEY\n\nCautious and non-committal, Johnno showed no leadership qualities whatsoever on tour until he got into the dressing room or onto the pitch. Then what he said went. He commanded the respect that a captain needs.\n\nGREGOR TOWNSEND\n\nMaking Martin Johnson captain was a masterstroke. He was a man with no ego and a huge determination to win. Him and Jim Telfer together \u2013 it was what you wanted leading a hard-working pack.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nThe tour will always be remembered for its prodigals who were returning to their original code now the game had gone professional. We chose six, all of whom had been cruelly missed by their country. John Bentley, the Yorkshireman had a huge personality and ability which appealed to me \u2013 Bentos was to become a signature player on the tour.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nJohn Bentley was one of the tour characters. 'Bentos' had the hearts and minds role for the Lions as social secretary \u2013 and he was a good one \u2013 but, make no mistake, he wanted that Test profile for himself more than anyone.\n\nJOHN BENTLEY\n\nThe last thing I wanted as social secretary was to be suggesting options for the lads and having Guscott sat at the back taking the piss out of them. So I approached him to come onto the entertainments team. He burst out laughing and gleefully accepted, knowing full well why I had done it. In meetings we would spend 20 minutes mulling over a certain plan and then he would wade in and write off the whole thing, refusing to do it. To make matters worse he would instantly come up with a better scheme. That's Jerry for you.\n\nI thought about co-opting Rob Wainwright but decided against it because his idea of fun wouldn't have gone down well with the rest of the team. One day he took a lot of them out for a two-hour ramble! Falconry was his scene and myself and Dai Young used to make budgie noises when he walked past. I don't think he sussed it.\n\nThe job was quite easy. All we had to do was to keep a constant flow of activities available. Golf, go-karting, cinema... Very little was compulsory \u2013 only a team trip to a restaurant every Thursday night. The traditional tour court session also sat, though in a less alcoholic fashion than in the amateur days, with Judge Keith Wood delivering summary justice in an appalling wig. Only the coaches suffered with alcohol \u2013 poor old Geech had to down the largest whisky you've ever seen in one gulp. Fran, who was accused of giving the same speech too often, was tried and found guilty for being boring on tour after some poor work from his defence counsel, Mark Regan. Austin Healey was tied up with tape and had an apple stuffed into his mouth \u2013 for being Austin.\n\nOn previous Lions tours they seemed to have proper singers but as we didn't, we had a tour tune \u2013 'Wonderwall' by Oasis \u2013 which we could all wail. It was an okay song and it helped to bring us together, but we could have chosen a better band. I hate Oasis. They seem to think everybody owes them something. Who do they think they are? They don't give a damn. In my opinion they could do with a right good hiding. Rather like James Small.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nWhen we got to Johannesburg airport we were greeted by Louis Luyt, the South African RFU president, and he gave an awful speech. It was a very disrespectful, 'Thanks for coming, but we'll win 3-0 and wave you goodbye' speech. It was also fantastic for us. We knew we were better than that, and didn't pay much attention to the media talk. If you get the right blend of harmony with sheer willpower and determination it is a very powerful concoction, and the 1997 Lions had that blend.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nWhen we arrived in South Africa we had a function, and at the top table was Fran Cotton, 1974 undefeated Lion; sitting next to him, Ian McGeechan, 1974 undefeated Lion. You could see how much that meant to the Springboks. They couldn't seem to get away from the fact that they had been beaten by the Lions in 1974, and the victors were there in front of them. They really respected that pair \u2013 so they were great choices as manager and coach. It was important psychology.\n\nWe played some superb rugby on that tour. Rugby I've never seen from a Lions team before. The way we cut defences apart... We could get beaten in the forwards, but the quality of our back play was just superb.\n\nScott Gibbs used to intimidate his opposite number. They'd be lined up for a scrum or lineout and he'd be lined up shouting at their inside centre, 'I'm going to get you. I'm going to rip you apart.' And the rest of the team lifted, because he was on their side. The rugby league guys \u2013 Quinnell, Bentley, Young, Gibbs, Bateman and Tait \u2013 brought a professionalism to it. Not through telling everyone what to do, but just by the way they conducted themselves. It was a magical ten weeks. There were never any rifts.\n\nALAN TAIT\n\nAll the rugby league guys had a head start. I'm sure we were picked on form first and foremost but Geech would also be aware that he was going to get a lot of professionalism from us. They had just turned professional whereas the likes of myself, Scott Gibbs, Allan Bateman and John Bentley had been professional for eight or nine years, so we definitely added an edge. But we mixed in really well. There was no divide because the rugby league guys appreciated that they were rubbing shoulders with class players like Jerry Guscott, Lawrence Dallaglio and Martin Johnson. The determination of the group was the key to our success. People talk about defence winning you matches, and guys like myself and Gibbsy knew about defensive structures, about how to hold the line, and how to put pressure on the attacking team. There were just a lot of good players there showing a huge amount of desire.\n\nLAWRENCE DALLAGLIO (England)  \nToured: 1997, 2001 & 2005\n\nThere were times when our coaches would stand aside and let Gibbs, Tait and Bateman tell us how they defended when playing top-level rugby league... it was clever of our coaches to tap into these lads' expertise.\n\nGREGOR TOWNSEND\n\nGeech led all the team meetings and he was very inspirational in how he painted a picture of what we needed to do. It was quiet motivation. Telfer dealt solely with the forwards and he really had a grip of what made them tick. That was Jim at his best \u2013 they would have done anything for him by the end of the tour. Before the tour they were not as open to Jim as they needed to be. I remember the guys at Northampton had heard stories about Jim and how he coached \u2013 they would have been exaggerated or even apocryphal stories \u2013 but the likes of Tim Rodber would say that there was no way anyone could do things like that with us. But as soon as he started coaching them they realised that he was so knowledgeable and passionate, and that he was there to improve them and win \u2013 and they got right behind him.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nThey knew that if we were going to survive then we all had to be on the same wavelength, and they had to make their contribution. It was early in the professional era \u2013 but they were professional. And I was lucky that the core of Englishmen in that team were rugby nuts, like Dallaglio, Johnson and Rodber. Eventually I was dictatorial, but not initially \u2013 by the time I started shouting the odds I knew that they were with me.\n\nJASON LEONARD\n\nThe first game of the 1997 tour was against Eastern Province in Port Elizabeth and I was chosen to captain it because of my previous Lions experience. It was an important game as you have to get tours off to a good start and I knew that I had been selected because they needed someone who understood what they were doing, to get out there and ensure us a win. Even though it was the first game of a long tour, I knew that for the sake of the rest of the tour it was vital that we came away with a victory.\n\nI was pleased with the way I had captained the side. We stuck to our guns and had played the sort of rugby that we believed would beat the South Africa side in the Test matches.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nWe got badly beaten in the scrums during our third game against Western Province, and we were due to play Mpumalanga on the Wednesday, so we decided that the guys who played in that match wouldn't be asked to come back and do a scrummage session. But the guys on the bench would, alongside the Saturday team.\n\nSo, after the game we all went back on a minibus to Pretoria, where we were based, and did this absolutely brutal scrummaging session. Tom Smith must have been about 5ft 10inches when we started that session and 5ft 8inches when we finished, because the machine didn't move \u2013 but they didn't want to give in, and they didn't want me to beat them. We got beat in the next game, but that didn't matter, we had set the scene.\n\nI mellowed a lot before the 1997 tour. I was a real bastard beforehand, but I learned that I had to delegate \u2013 so I did and I got my reward from the players.\n\nRICHARD HILL\n\nI think we also bonded on the training pitch. Sometimes it was done through extremely hard work. Having someone like Jim Telfer as your forwards coach, a man who doesn't take any stick and doesn't accept standards below the best, meant that when we had a couple of scrummaging performances that were below par in the first three games, we received a severe scrummaging beasting.\n\nIt went beyond scrummaging technique. It turned into scrummaging technique, scrummaging fitness and a severe beasting, but that's a way of bringing people together. You live people's experiences. You live their pain and you live their joy when it's over.\n\nYou knew that they had the capacity levels for hard work. You knew that everybody that was there was prepared to go to the last breath, because you'd seen it. You knew how far they could go and you also knew that if you weren't putting it in, you were letting them down.\n\nSCOTT GIBBS\n\nWhen that squad was announced in '97, I think there was an element that this squad was different, this management was different, and all those elements came together to create one playing entity.\n\nThere was never anyone who felt alienated in any way. That's a true strength of a squad, that inward support from everybody. That was there in abundance in '97 and that was why it was so successful on the field and off the field. We made a lot of friendships and there was never one clique.\n\nI've got my lists of Lions laws, and togetherness was on it. There was never any question of us against them. It was all 35 preparing to beat the Springboks. Everybody played their part in that and that's why everyone can share in the delight that we won the series because it wasn't done by just the team on the day.\n\nI think the Lions has meant more to the rugby fraternity than any other team because it brings people together and there's a common goal. It galvanises and brings all the Home Unions together. It's the best of the best.\n\nNEIL JENKINS\n\nI was playing at fullback for Wales at the time and got picked in that position for the tour, although also as back-up at fly-half or centre. I knew Gregor Townsend was Geech's first-choice No 10 and I had a battle on my hands to get a look-in at fullback with England's Tim Stimpson and Nick Beal in the party.\n\nIt wasn't until I got the chance to play at outside half, though, that I really got back into the swing of things. That was in the fourth match, a midweek game against Mpumalanga, when I scored one of our ten tries and converted seven.\n\nThat game gave me the confidence to move forward and showed the management I could deliver on the goalkicking front. Then I landed six penalties and three conversions in the big win over Natal. That was the big breakthrough for me.\n\nJEREMY DAVIDSON\n\nThe midweek team went to Transvaal [Gauteng] and we were told it was the real heartland of South African rugby \u2013 and we played well. The tour took a turn and the coaches' eyes were opening a bit and they were thinking possibly, 'We've got more contenders for positions than we thought.'\n\nThe pack prepares to put all the hours of training that Jim Telfer had put them through into practice against Natal in Durban.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nThat game against Gauteng was so important, because we had just lost to Northern Transvaal. I had learnt hard lessons from previous tours that the midweek team is essential to morale and momentum. Nigel Redman had only just arrived on tour, joining us from the England tour of Argentina as a replacement for Doddie Weir. He soon proved to be the real thing and we pitched him in against Gauteng. He was marking the massive Kobus Wiese, who had said in the press that he was going to give us all the trouble in the world... We scored one of my all-time favourite Lions tries in the game through John Bentley and then a brilliant team try touched down by Austin Healey. And Nigel did a spectacular number on Kobus, playing wonderfully well. We won 20-14 and South Africa was starting to open its eyes.\n\nNIGEL REDMAN (England)  \nToured: 1997\n\nJack Rowell, the England manager, took me aside in Argentina. He told me that I was going to South Africa. I said, 'Jack, I don't believe it!' Jack replied, 'Neither do I!'\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nWe were beaten 35-30 by Northern Transvaal on the Saturday, and we were due to play Gauteng in midweek and Natal the Saturday after, which was typical \u2013 in seven days we were due to play three of their top teams. So, we picked a second team to play Gauteng, hoping like hell that they would do well, and they were getting a wee bit of a stretching in the first half, but they weren't losing by much, when a kick went right into our corner. Well, Tony Underwood caught it and drove and kept possession, the next man came in and rucked it, and we cleared our lines. If they'd scored at that point they would go on to dominate the game, and we'd have been in trouble.\n\nAfter that, there was a great John Bentley try and Austin Healey scored as well, so we won quite comfortably in the end. Afterwards I remember walking up from the pitch, and the first team, which had been beaten on the Saturday, clapped in the team which, in my opinion, saved the tour. It's moments like that which you never forget.\n\nI went out with an open mind about the Test team, but Tom Smith had only played three Test matches for Scotland and was seen as a surprise choice. We still had Jason Leonard, Graham Rowntree and Dai Young, who were scrummaging forwards, but as time went on it became apparent that they couldn't play the fast moving type of game we wanted to play. So, I suppose we were quite brave in going with Tom Smith and Paul Wallace in the front-row, and for Jeremy Davidson ahead of Simon Shaw, who was several inches and a couple of stone heavier, in the second-row.\n\nJEREMY DAVIDSON\n\nI got a lot of games at the start of the tour because they were trying to see what level of player I was. Because I was a young international player I didn't really have a big brand name like a Rodber, a Dallaglio or a Guscott. Two or three games and you know Guscott is ready for the big match against the Springboks, you know you can throw him in there. So they played some of the younger players a bit more so they could have a look at them and see whether they were up to it or not. Before the First Test I played a midweek against the Emerging Springboks and I think that was another big test for me and I came through it reasonably well.\n\nMy room-mate Graham Rowntree woke me up. Handed me the letter. He told me he hadn't been picked and he asked me to open my letter to see if I'd been picked, which was quite strange considering I didn't know him that well. He was shaking me in bed saying, 'Out \u2013 open your letter.'\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nWe knew that they would try to bully us in the scrum, so we wanted as low a scrum as possible. We never dominated in the scrum, but they didn't pulverise us either. Tom Smith is not a bad scrummager, and Paul Wallace is an awkward bugger \u2013 he got under Os du Randt. If we'd played Graham Rowntree and Jason Leonard, we would have had the same result scrum-wise, but these guys had a little bit extra around the park.\n\nPAUL WALLACE (Ireland)  \nToured: 1997\n\nSome guys \u2013 John Bentley and a lot of guys \u2013 were waiting up all night for the letter coming in under the door before the First Test. I slept very soundly.\n\nJOHN BENTLEY\n\nThe nearest anyone came to going 'off tour' was probably me after the disappointment of missing out on the First Test. I was in charge of a mini video camera for the Living with the Lions fly-on-the-wall documentary when the time arrived... I decided to film my reaction to receiving the fateful envelope that would tell me whether I was in the team for the First Test or not. I had scored four tries in five games and thought I must be in with a chance. I could not sleep with excitement the night before so I rose early and waited outside the lift for Samantha Peters, our administrative secretary, who was the bearer of tidings. I filmed the build-up, but, when I found out I hadn't made it, I was crushed. To make matters worse the letter started 'Congratulations', so I thought I was in until I read the rest of it \u2013 which told me I was a substitute. The video does not show how I reacted because I did not turn the camera on again for two days.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nJason Leonard is a superb guy. He came with 60 odd caps, and on his second Lions tour, he could play tight-head or loose-head, and captained the team in the first game when Martin Johnson was being rested. I think a lot of people would have expected him to play in the Tests, but by the time we played Natal we were playing superb off-your-shoulder rugby, carving the opposition into ribbons with our angles, and we beat them 42-12. After that we decided on our Test team, and Jason Leonard took it like a man. He came in and helped both Tom and Paul. He must have been disappointed, but he never let it show \u2013 and that culture we had developed there of everyone working for the cause shone through. He went a long way up in my estimation that week.\n\nJASON LEONARD\n\nLions tours are not about Test caps, despite what it may seem like from the outside. It's about a big group of players going away together and between them doing what is necessary to win.\n\nPlayers have bad days and I didn't have a great tour, so it was right that Paul Wallace and Tom Smith were the Test props, which didn't mean that I didn't support them every inch of the way, and do all I could to help them in training.\n\nI am as competitive as the next person but Lions tours are different. I knew I wasn't going to make the Test side so I decided to try and help the other front-row players as much as possible. I did everything I could, whether it be scrummaging sessions, lineouts or rucking and mauling sessions.\n\nGREGOR TOWNSEND\n\nWe fought so hard for each other and that went right back to the very start of the tour. We realised that in 1993 there had been a split between the midweek team and the Saturday team, and that was why the tour went off the rails in the last few weeks \u2013 so it was a reaction to that. There was a real togetherness, and it was genuine. I remember training sessions when you felt somebody had turned up not that interested, maybe they'd just had a hard game, then somebody would say to him, 'You need to sort yourself out. This is a team session \u2013 not just your session.' That to me epitomised all the good things about that tour. The team would be put under the door first thing in the morning or the night before in preparation for the team announcement so you could gather your thoughts and if you were not picked it was your job to go up and shake the hand of the guy who had got in ahead of you. If you played on the Saturday you would be out training on the Sunday holding a pad. Not that the players thought about it much, but the payments were for the whole tour, so you shared the exact same bonus money regardless of how many games and Tests you played in. All these little things were vital to making the tour \u2013 and not just the three Test matches \u2013 a success.\n\nMartin Johnson carries the ball into contact.\n\nLAWRENCE DALLAGLIO\n\nIt was made very clear right from the moment that we gathered at our base in England that nothing had been predetermined in terms of selection \u2013 every position was up for grabs. It was a great philosophy and it rang true \u2013 you had guys like Tom Smith, Paul Wallace and Jeremy Davidson who came in from left-field to start and star in the Test series, and you had a guy like Matt Dawson, who was fourth choice for England at the time, who came to the fore after Rob Howley was injured and became key to our success.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nWally [Paul Wallace] wasn't even picked on the original squad. Peter Clohessy was picked ahead of him. When did I realise he was in the frame for the Test side? I won't say very quickly, but it was just a perfect confluence of events for Wally. He was so unbelievably powerful and the manner of our training suited him. Playing against Os du Randt, nobody expected anything of him, but because he scrummaged low he ate du Randt alive. Not from the start, but by the end of the game Wally had him inside out, a guy four or five stone heavier. He was showing that form in the last week or 10 days before the First Test, but it was still a surprise he was picked. You see, you don't make presumptions about yourself or about anybody else on a Lions tour.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nWe lost to Northern Transvaal, but the Test team was coming to the boil, and having played pretty well in the provincial games \u2013 scoring against Northern Transvaal \u2013 I got a sense that I had clinched a place for the First Test. I didn't feel we were ever in danger of losing that opening Test. The Bath side I played in was so full of talent and hard mental edge that we hardly lost, and that's how I felt with the '97 Lions. We were the best of the best, and it gave me great belief in South Africa. I thought afterwards, 'Thank you boys for thinking we'll be a pushover, can't thank you enough.'\n\nLAWRENCE DALLAGLIO\n\nI've never discovered whether it was a case smart pre-tour negotiations by Fran and the Lions committee or whether it was just a balls up by South Africa, but the order in which we played the Tests suited us perfectly, with the first two at sea level and the third at altitude. If I had been the organising it as a Springbok administrator, I would have had us bouncing around from altitude to sea level and then back to altitude again.\n\nNEIL JENKINS\n\nI got the nod for the First Test and can still remember the envelope coming under the door in my room telling me I'd been selected. I was sharing with Tony Underwood and he didn't get in \u2013 they picked Alan Tait, a centre, on the wing instead. What a contrast there was between my elation and his dejection. I went for a walk to give him a bit of time and space to get over his disappointment.\n\nTom Smith, Lawrence Dallaglio and Martin Johnson prepare for kick-off.\n\nLAWRENCE DALLAGLIO\n\nI'm never going to forget Jim Telfer's speech to the forwards before the First Test. It's seared on my memory forever. You could have heard a pin drop. 'The easy bit has passed,' he said. 'Selection for the Test team is the easy bit... This is your fucking Everest boys... to win for the Lions in a Test match is the ultimate... They don't rate you. They don't respect you. The only way to be rated is to stick one up them... They don't think fuck-all of us. We're here just to make up the fucking numbers.'\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nJim Telfer speech's before the First Test, it was a slightly out-of-body experience. He was a bit mad. He was. But he got it. Jesus, did he get it. He drove us to the absolute edge of our ability, and it was about weeding out any possible flaws in the squad so you were left with this team that had the mental toughness to go through it. I've said it before, if we were there another day we'd have killed him. We were all falling apart by the very end of it. We hit a level of effort and training that to be honest we weren't fit enough for. We pushed ourselves beyond the limit. It was both technical and mental \u2013 and we loved it.\n\nPAUL WALLACE\n\nOs du Randt was down on the programme as 20 stone but he was at least 22 stone. I've propped against a lot of guys who are 20 stone and he wasn't 20 stone. He's a huge man. And also he had a massive back-five behind him. Andr\u00e9 Venter on the flank was probably the biggest man on the pitch.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nThere was a fear that they might do damage to the front-row. The first scrum we hit they knocked us back five yards and I had fear myself. We were just a little bit too high. My fault entirely. Six inches too high. We could use their weight against them by being lower, and we did that. It was frightening and daunting to have all your fears come home immediately and then have to realise quickly that you have to be lower and you'll be fine. They thought they were going to destroy us in the pack. I would call it a certainty that they had. We got the height right in the second scrum but still got knocked back a couple of metres. They were just huge men. We had to fight for every single second of every single scrum. But we ground them down. They were bigger, but we were fitter and willing to work \u2013 and we knew that every time we went down for a scrum if we didn't get it exactly right we'd be belittled, and that's a great driving force. Was Wally's scrummaging illegal? The referee didn't penalise it, so it was entirely legal. Of course it was illegal! But that's what scrummaging is about. The amount of carping that went on afterwards was absolutely fantastic. Look, it was a confrontational battle, and he was magnificent.\n\nGREGOR TOWNSEND\n\nMatt Dawson was a controversial selection because he hadn't played much for England at that stage, but he turned out to be an inspired choice. Geech knew his players.\n\nNEIL JENKINS\n\nThe First Test against the Springboks at Newlands was supposed to be the first step towards them underlining their status as world champions. Everyone in South Africa expected them to win the series 3-0. I saw my Mum and Dad the day before the First Test and my Mum said she thought I looked ill. In the dressing room before the game I was literally sick with nerves. Maybe that's why I put the kick-off out on the full. Not the most auspicious start to my Lions Test career.\n\nJEREMY DAVIDSON\n\nIf you go out there for the Lions against the Springboks you've got to have a bit of confidence in yourself, you've got to be able to back yourself in the lineouts and I knew I was capable of winning whatever ball was called to me, and luckily enough, the captain called me a lot. It's not often a captain does that, but it shows you what a good captain Martin Johnson was. Getting so much ball helped me play a bit better.\n\nJeremy Davidson rises to take a lineout during the First Test.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nAs I looked around the other faces I felt a deep confidence in them \u2013 there was no one who made me think, 'He's not up to it.' There's no doubt in my mind that despite the drama of the last seven minutes when we scored tries through Matt Dawson and Alan Tait to clinch the game, it wasn't a great spectacle to watch. But it was a great occasion, and a great result. In addition, the try by Dawson was a peach. To beat Ruben Kruger for pace off the back of an attacking scrum and then sucker Gary Teichmann, Andr\u00e9 Venter and Joost van der Westhuizen with a dummy is no mean feat.\n\nAlthough the South Africans scored tries through Os du Randt and Russell Bennett, the big hits coming from the likes of Scott Gibbs, Tim Rodber and Lawrence Dallaglio were shaking them up despite their bulk. In fact, the defence was so punishing I remember wondering how some of them got back up.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nAfter we won the First Test, Johnson said to Ian, 'We're still on tour \u2013 everyone will come out and work on Sunday morning.' And even though they didn't do very much, the team which won the Test match helped the other players in the squad prepare for their next game.\n\nNEIL JENKINS\n\nWe had another game three days later against Orange Free State and the next day the Test team were out on the training field helping the dirt-trackers get ready for that game. That is what characterised the 1997 Lions \u2013 one for all and all for one.\n\nIt was the most harmonious group I'd ever had the pleasure of being a part of and we all worked incredibly hard for each other. Before we'd even left, Geech had instilled in us that we weren't English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh, but one team representing one of the greatest rugby brands in the world. We were all Lions together.\n\nScott Gibbs displays the defensive power that epitomised the '97 Lions.\n\nMatt Dawson throws an audacious dummy and slips down the wing to score in the First Test.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nI knew what qualities Will Greenwood had at centre, and he started to show them on the tour until he was injured badly against the Free State. That was a scary moment, and it could have been fatal but for the urgency of our team doctor, James Robson, and the medical staff. They saved his life.\n\nNEIL BACK\n\nA hard training session on the Sunday was followed by a split in the camp. The Test side headed off to Durban, where the Second Test was... the rest of us relocated to Bloemfontein, where we were due to meet the Orange Free State. It was the first time on tour that we had been divided like that and it added to a sense of gloom in my mind that I was not going to get a Test berth. Other guys felt the same way. Our answer, on the rock-hard turf, was probably the best game of the tour. Fran Cotton later described it as the best ever performance by a midweek Lions side between two Tests. It was certainly the best game of rugby I have ever played in. We won 52-30 and I felt that our performance, and more importantly our attitude, meant that they might look again at one or two of us for the next encounter with the Springboks. Ieuan Evans was out of the tour with a groin injury. That meant Bentos was named in his place on the wing. The selectors also added new names to the Test bench \u2013 among them, that of NA Back. The feeling of being named in the 21 was fantastic... I still wanted to start, but this was a step in the right direction, and I felt as though I was walking on air for hours after getting my envelope.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nAnother player who impressed me hugely was Allan Bateman, and it would have been an interesting selection decision if he hadn't pulled his hamstring before the Second Test. Bateman was the surprise package, and it was a straight call between him and Jerry Guscott. What a task.\n\nNEIL JENKINS\n\nThe pressure on the 'Boks was massive coming into the Second Test in Durban. Their coach was under enormous pressure and their biggest failing was their goalkicking. They failed to convert either of their two tries in the First Test and then missed three more in the Second Test. The atmosphere was electric at King's Park and after we had taken the field I turned to see the Springboks sprint out of the tunnel onto the field. Here we go, I thought, they're up for it! It was a game we should never have won, really, but the defensive work of Scott Gibbs, Lawrence Dallaglio, Richard Hill and Tim Rodber in particular was out of this world. The Springboks scored the tries but I managed to kick all five of my penalties.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nThe night before the Second Test, Gibbsy did a TV interview where he said that we would be approaching the game like World War Three and that we were all relishing the prospect of the physical confrontation. He said that if all we did was tackle for 80 minutes, then we would love it. I'm not sure if he was speaking for me when he said that! But it was great to hear him say it \u2013 and it was exactly what needed to be said the South Africa and it gave you great confidence knowing that he was on our side\n\nThe atmosphere at King's Park was incredible. We came out of the tunnel and were hit with this wall of noise. It was electric \u2013 there were huge blocks of fans in red all around the stadium shouting, 'Lions! Lions! Lions!'\n\nJohnno pulled us into a huddle on the half-way line while we waited for the Springboks to come out and Gibbsy started jabbing the air shouting, 'We have to raise our intensity. They're going to come at us with everything they have but we have to smash them back. We have to be better than last week, we have to play harder than we've ever played before.' Then he stared us all in the eye. 'This is ours.'\n\nLAWRENCE DALLAGLIO\n\nThe Second Test was the most physically intense game I played during my entire career \u2013 and the first five minutes was complete mayhem. The Springboks came out of the traps and just wanted to blow us apart. They smashed into every contact and looked to dominate us completely. It was a psychological as well as physical confrontation and if we had crumbled then, the whole game was gone. We just had to do our best to repel them \u2013 and they just kept coming in wave after wave of attack; then, when we had the ball, it was all we could do to try and hold onto it as they smashed us with tackles. It was brutal. But if you can hold out against that kind of physicality and in that kind of environment, then you have a chance. Rugby is a game of confrontation, not a game of containment, and it's virtually impossible to win if all you do is contain. Virtually impossible \u2013 not impossible.\n\nAlan Tait scores the clinching try in the First Test.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nGibbsy wanted to take on the Springboks all by himself. He was so pumped up that he just wanted to smash anything in a green jersey; he wanted to smash through them, he wanted to smash them to the ground. He's not the biggest bloke in the world, but he would have taken on anyone that day. He was some player to have alongside you.\n\nWhen he made that break and thundered into Os du Randt, leaving du Randt on the floor and spinning off to carry the ball on again, it was one of the most inspiring moments I've ever experienced on a rugby field. We won a penalty from the ruck when he was eventually brought to ground and as Gibbsy jogged back I heard him say to du Randt, 'Get up, you fat ox.'\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nPeople say they didn't go in with recognised kickers. They did. They had really good kickers but they crumbled under the pressure of the series. Whatever it is about the Lions there is a crazy intensity. Crazy. And things happen in that sort of pressure.\n\nGREGOR TOWNSEND\n\nIn the second half we played a lot better rugby and that got us the penalties we needed \u2013 but it took real nerve for Neil Jenkins to stand up and put those kicks over.\n\nNEIL JENKINS\n\nThe pressure mounted with each kick, but every time I took my mind away from Durban and imagined myself back on my training field in Church Village. Same routine and, thankfully, same result. People always ask about pressure kicks, but that is what goalkickers live for. You don't hope the chance never comes, you pray it does. The fifth and final penalty was probably the most important of my career, but I approached it as any other and managed to keep the pressure at bay.\n\nJEREMY DAVIDSON\n\nAt the end of the Second Test we knew we needed to get up there, we needed possession, we needed to get the ball back in our hands and we needed to score because time was running out. The throw was called to me and I just wanted to get it for the team. I've got a picture of the drop-goal and you can just see one of my feet sticking up out of the ruck before it. There was nothing on for Jerry. I've watched it on video many times since and it still gives me shivers down the spine.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nAt one stage in the Second Test you thought, 'When are these guys going to stop coming?' They were just relentless and it was all defence on our side.\n\nIf you'd seen me spraying drop-kicks all over the pitch in training during the previous week \u2013 off the outside of my foot, off the inside of my foot, off the end of my toes \u2013 you would have bet as much money on me putting it over as you would on a one-legged man in a backside-kicking competition. But I'd played fly-half from the ages of 7 to 19, and the natural decision was made when Matt Dawson passed me the ball. I saw it unfolding and made the decision without anyone saying anything to me.\n\nThe moment is frozen in time in my memory. Probably because freezing was what was most on my mind. As the ball drifted towards me through the arc of the floodlights everything seemed to happen in slow motion. I prayed it wouldn't miss. I prayed it wouldn't be charged down. The sense of elation I felt when I eventually looked up and saw the ball soar between the posts will stay with me forever.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nOf all my rugby moments, the sound of that final whistle in Durban in 1997 was probably the sweetest, perhaps even shading the Scotland Grand Slam in 1990. When we were dissecting the game afterwards we found that in truth, we had not played at all well, we had not set up our own game and on occasions, we had been bullied. But we had stayed the course quite magnificently, and we won the series in the face of a relentless South African onslaught. The hostility of the crowd seemed to be willing us to lose by a large margin, but we didn't. I went on to the field at the end as the players and the followers were united in scenes of incredible joyfulness.\n\nRichard Hill hacks a loose ball.\n\nNEIL JENKINS\n\nAfter the game I remember running around the field with Scott Gibbs, both of us draped in Welsh flags. We'd played for Wales Youth, Wales and now the Lions together and it was a very special moment for the pair of us.\n\nNothing could take the shine off winning the series. The 1997 Lions team was the greatest I ever played in and I made life long friends with so many great players.\n\nJOHN BENTLEY\n\nWe all have individual moments that we recall but, having been written off as a bunch of no hopers, for us to win the Second Test, and for me to be a part of it, was my biggest highlight. I don't think I realised how big an achievement it was until I got home.\n\nFRAN COTTON\n\nI was tremendously impressed by the players' dedication, but there was also still an element of mischief with guys like Bentley, who gave it what every rugby tour has to have, which is some humour and a sense of when to play, and when not to play. They all had a common purpose that they stuck to, and they worked for each other. It was a privilege to manage them.\n\nThey showed their character in the Second Test when after being under the cosh and defending for their lives they had the energy and the will to snatch it. I don't think we were lucky to win, but it could have gone either way.\n\nIn 1974 we already had existing world-class players, whereas in 1997 we had a group who were developing into world-class players, and who over the next three years became world-class.\n\nThe series-winning moment.\n\nGREGOR TOWNSEND\n\nThe more I look back on that tour the more it grows in my mind as the most special thing to have happened in my rugby career. It was special at the time \u2013 it is the ultimate honour for a British or Irish rugby player, and I made friends for life. But I think I assumed there would be more of this to come, but I didn't make the 2001 tour. And if you look at the last three tours, they have had nothing like the success of that 1997 trip \u2013 so I was incredibly lucky to be a part of it.\n\nALAN TAIT\n\nI had played a lot of big games \u2013 especially in rugby league, which is really hard-nosed about going out there and doing a job \u2013 so I think that helped me take it all in my stride. But now I look back at it I can see that I didn't appreciate at the time just how special that experience was. Now, when I see the Lions go off every four years to try and achieve what we managed to achieve and always coming up short, it really hits home how much it means to a lot of people. It was just another day at the office, but I should have been looking at it as a massive, massive achievement. And every four years the size of that achievement gets bigger and bigger.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nThe thing that still frightens me is that we could and should have lost all of them. South Africa is just so difficult. It's a tough place but that's what makes it so fantastic to play there and win there.\n\nThe final whistle of the Second Test: a moment that will live in the hearts of the players \u2013 and the fans \u2013 forever.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nI think that we surprised South African rugby in every way. The 1997 Five Nations tournament had been poor, and accounts of some of the games were really scathing. They felt that British and Irish rugby was not constructive, not dangerous in the attacking sense. They felt that we were not particularly heavy and powerful defenders and the northern hemisphere rugby in general was... limited. That was all to our advantage.\n\nJIM TELFER\n\nThere's an aura about the Lions. I lost a bit of confidence in the concept for a while after I coached the 1983 tour, but it's a special team. No other team comes together for a very short period of time, goes on the gruelling tour and then never plays together again as a group.\n\nJEREMY GUSCOTT\n\nGeech has a phrase \u2013 'Test match animals' \u2013 it means having the ability to turn on your best performances at the highest level, keeping a cool head while playing at your highest intensity and making the right decisions under pressure nine times out of ten. I think that the whole of the '97 squad had that about them. You had some of the hardest men ever to play for the Lions \u2013 Johnno, Gibbsy, Dallaglio, Hill, Rodber, Davidson, Wallace, Smith, Wood \u2013 and some real skill out wide. But the real key was that we played for each other \u2013 we went to war for each other; and we formed a bond that will never be broken. It's amazing what can happen in the space of just a few weeks.\n\nThe squad gather around the Lion Challenge Cup. \n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX\n\n# [THE NEARLY MEN  \n2001](006.html#a3)\n\nAUSTRALIA\n\nANOTHER LIONS tradition that was once assumed to be eternal ended before this tour when Graham Henry, the New Zealander who was then coaching Wales and who was later to guide New Zealand to the 2011 Rugby World Cup, was appointed as coach and became the first Lions head man to come from overseas. The reaction was interesting. Some old Lions objected, other people realised that in the new professional era, the Lions should be coached by the best available man.\n\nOn paper, the team looked very powerful, many critics regarding them as one of the finest touring sides to leave the British Isles. But the tour, which raised soaring hopes when the Lions played brilliant rugby to win the mesmeric First Test in Brisbane, ultimately sunk to a desperately disappointing low with defeat in the series. For those familiar with Lions history, it was also a classic tour that echoed so many common traits of the past \u2013 pockmarked as it was with great rugby, injury and controversy.\n\nBut of all the glorious and not-so glorious failures in the Lions' history this really was, categorically, the one that got away. Even against the Wallabies, the reigning world champions, the Lions had for a long time looked palpably the better side. It was only late in the tour that a rash of injuries, and more particularly an exhaustion factor after a ferocious and almost endless home season, took a heavy toll. In some ways, the tour stopped dead, out on its feet.\n\nEngland's Martin Johnson was the obvious choice to lead the party, having spearheaded the victorious side in South Africa four years earlier, as he was firmly entrenched as his country's skipper and was a certainty for the Tests in the second-row. The Leicester man duly became the first man to captain the Lions on two tours.\n\nMore controversial was the choice of coach. He was supported by manager Donal Lenihan, the Irishman who had captained the midweek side in Australia 12 years previously, and Andy Robinson, another '89 Lion, who was seconded from England duty as assistant coach.\n\nGradually, the support group was growing after decades when the manager and a secretary were practically the only back-up. Other backroom staff in 2001 included England's defence coach Phil Larder, kicking guru Dave Alred, Jonny Wilkinson's mentor and fitness expert Steve Black, and the almost permanent Lions doctor James Robson from Scotland. Of these, Robson probably had the heaviest workload as the tour unfolded.\n\nHenry's preparations were not helped by the foot-and-mouth epidemic which swept the British Isles in 2001 and which caused the cancellation of the Cheltenham Festival and left the Six Nations unfinished until the autumn.\n\nHis initial selections, in a 37-man party which was the largest ever at the time, initially raised some eyebrows with centre Scott Gibbs, the Welsh talisman of the 1997 tour, left out and England's Martin Corry also surplus to requirements. Both would eventually join the party, Corry with spectacular effect, as injuries took their toll as they usually do on Lions tours.\n\nHenry, however, did include the former rugby league winger Jason Robinson, who had not played a full Test up to then, and the Irish centre Brian O'Driscoll who had announced himself on the international scene so spectacularly a year earlier with a hat-trick against France in Paris, in his initial squad. Both would play significant roles in the Test series.\n\nBut in all, eight players were invalided out of the trip including the influential Englishmen Richard Hill and Lawrence Dallaglio (he hardly played any part), the Welsh scrum-half Rob Howley and the young Scottish No 8 Simon Taylor, injured in game one. Seven players were called up as replacements including bizarrely, on the morning of the Third Test, the Scottish scrum-half Andy Nicol.\n\nNicol had been with a supporters' tour enjoying the sights of Australia and, as he has since admitted, had not kept himself in the best of shape but he was whisked up to the Lions bench after Austin Healey went lame with a bulging disc. Nicol, who can hardly have been expecting to get a game, has made his promotion the subject of his after-dinner speech routine ever since.\n\nAs a New Zealander, Henry was always likely to be the target of criticism. Some called his man-management into question, with Welsh players complaining they were alienated by their national boss, and some who thought the Test team had been set in stone before the Lions had even left Heathrow. Henry caused further disarray amongst the party when he publicly prioritised the Test team after a loss to Australia A in Gosford, meaning that when the inevitable injuries hit, players promoted to the Test side were allegedly unfamiliar with its workings. With a World Cup win under his belt he has since admitted that he made errors on the tour \u2013 and at the end of it found himself on the wrong end of a stinging attack from the England coach Clive Woodward.\n\nHenry was further undermined by newspaper columns written by Matt Dawson and Austin Healey during the course of the trip, which disrupted the spirit of the party and angered the hosts.\n\nDawson's tirade, published in The Daily Telegraph under the headline 'Harsh regime tears us apart', took the gloss off a famous First Test win hitting the streets as it did just hours before the kick-off at the Gabba. Dawson accused Henry of being 'uninspiring', said that training was 'mindless' and added that Lenihan had treated the squad like children. He also revealed that some players had threatened to go 'off tour'.\n\nDawson was fined \u00a35,000 for his rant and in his autobiography published three years later still refused to accept that he had betrayed the Lions. He did, however, admit that he regretted the timing of his outburst which was followed up by a complaint about the schedule of the short ten-match tour once the series was lost. The scrum-half also claimed that Johnson had threatened to quit the tour if Dawson had been sent home.\n\nHealey's contribution came on the eve of the deciding Third Test in Sydney and landed in Australia just as he had been ruled out of the match. Printed in The Guardian, Healey's ghosted column took swipes at Australian second-row Justin Harrison, labelling him a 'plank' and a 'plod' and told the hosts to 'spin this, you Aussies, up yours.'\n\nHealey and Harrison had clashed in a midweek match with the Brumbies and when Harrison was picked for his Test debut, the winger's alleged views on the lock were given a full airing in his column.\n\nHowever, despite all the criticism it is often forgotten that in the early tour games, and indeed, in every game up to half-time in the Second Test, the Lions played some of the finest rugby on any tour, any time \u2013 thrilling a staggering number of travelling fans who made the Gabba in Brisbane, especially, seem entirely like a home game.\n\nThe trip was also affected by tragedy when the Lions' popular Australian Rugby Union liaison man and baggage master, Anton Toia, died after suffering a suspected heart attack whilst swimming off Coffs Harbour in the lead-up to the First Test. Toia, who had previously fulfilled a similar role on Scotland tours, was a popular figure with the players and the New Zealander's death, at the age of 54, cast a shadow over the squad. The Lions cancelled their team meeting and all public engagements in Toia's memory and the Anton Toia Memorial Secondary Schools Tens Carnival was founded shortly afterwards.\n\nThe early games were walkovers with the Lions amassing 199 points in outings against Western Australia in Perth and a Queensland President's XV in Townsville. Jason Robinson scored five tries in the second game, but after impressing for a half in the first match Simon Taylor was out of the tour with a knee injury.\n\nThe Lions then had three matches against much tougher opposition \u2013 the Queensland Reds, Australia A and the New South Wales Waratahs. The Reds were impressively seen off 42-8 but Australian second-string, coached by the streetwise Eddie Jones, a future Wallaby coach, beat the tourists 28-25, with the Lions only getting to within three points thanks to two late tries. England centre Mike Catt was another casualty in that match.\n\nThe 2001 tour party.\n\nThe match with the Waratahs was a brutal affair that ended with the Lions winning 41-24. It was not the scoreline that made the headlines but the five yellow cards and one red that were brandished on the night by referee Scott Young. The yellows to Lions Danny Grewcock and Phil Vickery and to Waratahs Tom Bowman, Brendan Cannon and Cameron Blades were overshadowed by fullback Duncan McRae's red for an assault on Ronan O'Gara. The Lions fly-half was pinned to the ground by the Australian who rained blows on the Irishman, leaving O'Gara needing eight stitches in a bloody left eye and McCrae contemplating his violence during a seven-week ban.\n\nAs the Lions fans arrived in Brisbane for the First Test Henry played his hand by picking Robinson on the left wing, the Bath fullback Matt Perry \u2013 out of favour with England \u2013 ahead of Iain Balshaw, the Irish centre pairing of O'Driscoll and Rob Henderson and the newly-arrived Corry on the flank.\n\nDespite the distractions of Dawson's column the Lions turned in one of their best ever displays with Robinson sensationally leaving Chris Latham for dead in the opening minutes and fellow winger Dafydd James touching down before the break. O'Driscoll trumped the lot with a spectacular second half solo try and Scott Quinnell barged over to help the Lions to a 29-13 win. Chants of 'Waltzing O'Driscoll' filled the Brisbane air that night.\n\nThe midweek team kept their side of the bargain with a 30-28 win over the Brumbies in Canberra with Dawson making some amends for his provocative column by kicking the winning conversion before the party headed to Melbourne's Colonial Stadium for the Second Test and the turning point of the series.\n\nThe Australian Rugby Union had been shocked by the sea of red shirts at the Gabba as 20,000 Lions took over the ground and were determined not to cede the same advantage to their opponents in the cultural capital of their country. Their answer was to hand out gold hats, scarves and placards to local fans to redress the balance.\n\nKeith Wood charges ahead against Western Australia.\n\nThe Lions led 11-6 at half-time with a try by Neil Back, but had been easily the better side. During the break, one of the best-known Australian rugby writers turned to colleagues and said, 'This game is all over, the Lions are just too good.'\n\nHowever, there was to be a dramatic reversal of momentum. Joe Roff's interception of a wafted Jonny Wilkinson pass prompted a 29-point blitz that left Henry's men shell shocked and out of the game, which they lost 35-14. The bad news continued when Richard Hill, who had been completely outplaying the Australian back-row, was poleaxed by a stiff arm challenge from centre Nathan Grey just before half-time and played no further part in the series. Lenihan expressed fury that Grey was not cited.\n\nOnto Stadium Australia in Sydney, which a year earlier had hosted the Olympics and two year's hence would hold a World Cup final that would end in better fashion for the English Lions than the final Test of the 2001 tour. By this time the Lions were on their last legs, exhausted and injured. Henry later confided that they were not able to stage a single worthwhile training session in the week before the big game and that five of the team that started would not have been available if the game had been just two days earlier.\n\nWilkinson, who had been doubtful during the week with an injury, scored a try amongst his 18 points and Robinson added to his collection of touchdowns, but with seconds left the Lions trailed 29-23. However they had a lineout close to the Wallaby line and the hosts were preparing themselves not to contest it so they could defend any driving maul attack Johnson's pack would mount.\n\nBut showing nerve in his first Test match, Justin Harrison decided to jump for the ball and won crucial possession from Johnson. Harrison's skill won the series for the hosts; he later admitted that, knowing the type of player the Lions' captain was, he had guessed that Johnson would assume the responsibility of such an important lineout and call it to himself.\n\nIt was a bitter end to the trip for the Lions and the inquest into how much rugby British & Irish players should play before these demanding tours was immediately opened. The whole home season schedule was being called into question and so was the true commitment of British and Irish domestic rugby to the Lions cause.\n\nThe players from the Home Nations were battered by the end, but even now no one has come up with an answer to overcome this issue. 2001 had been a tour of glamour, colour and, eventually, defeat.\n\nHistory was to provide another slant. The Australia team were never really vintage, they had weaknesses. Did this win postpone the surgery needed on the team, therefore leaving them at the mercy of the England team in the 2003 World Cup final? Would a Lions win have changed history had they won, and made Australia rebuild as they had done in 1989? Who knows.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON (England)   \nToured: 1993, 1997 & 2001\n\nIn all honesty, before I was asked to captain the tour, I had had mixed feelings about the prospect. I was England captain, so I knew that I stood a good chance of being asked, but I also knew the expectations and the pressure and the amount of hard work that was involved with a position like that. I also knew what I would have to put my body through. But at the same time it was a huge honour and when I got the call from Donal Lenihan, I accepted it there and then. The enormity of what it meant to be the first man to captain the Lions twice didn't enter my head \u2013 I didn't allow it to. All I was concerned about \u2013 as I had been when I was asked in 1997 \u2013 was doing the job well.\n\nJASON ROBINSON (England)  \nToured: 2001 & 2005\n\nI was a complete wild-card selection. When the initial 67 players were picked for the provisional squad, I wasn't in it, which was no surprise. I had only been playing for Sale for a few months since my switch from playing rugby league and although I'd been fast-tracked into the England set-up, I had yet to start a game. So when the final squad was picked at the end of April and I was named, it came as a bit of a shock. And to be honest, I had no appreciation at the time of what an honour it was to be selected for a side like the Lions. I look back and I realise now just how big it was and how privileged I was to have represented the Lions. The memories are one of the greatest things I have. The shirt just brings so many people together, it is unbelievable. To see a mass of red shirts wherever you go all supporting the same team is just fantastic and something that makes a Lions tour so special.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nIt's a great release to get the first game of the tour under your belt. We'd been kicking lard out of each other for a few weeks, training really hard and we all wanted to get out there.\n\nYou're only a Lion once you've put on the jersey, so there were 22 guys who were suddenly far more relaxed after the Western Australia game \u2013 and it was a huge honour for me to captain the side. We scored a lot of tries and did a lot of things well, but we were annoyed about letting in two tries. It was also a real shame about the injuries \u2013 Simon Taylor, Phil Greening... they were the first of a long line of guys who were injured out of the tour.\n\nMIKE CATT (England)  \nToured: 1997 & 2001\n\nLooking at the squad that was selected, I had no doubt in my mind that the 2001 tour party was even stronger than the one we had in 1997. I was desperate to go, the idea of playing in a backline with Jonny Wilkinson on one side and Brian O'Driscoll on the other was just so exciting. But I knackered my back before we left; I thought it would be OK and made the decision to go. I did all I could to get my back sorted out but I couldn't play in the first three games, and it got to the stage where I began to feel embarrassed about being there because I spent all my time on the sidelines. Eventually I was picked to play Australia A, but I didn't even make it to half-time. The irony is that it wasn't my back that was the problem \u2013 I tore a calf muscle \u2013 and that was that, tour over. It was such a shame because I had been playing really well for England that year \u2013 but it was just such a brutally long season and my body was in desperate need of rest. There were so many injuries on that tour, and I think a lot of them were down to the wear and tear of a long, long season.\n\nJASON ROBINSON\n\nI remember waking up on the morning after our first game and thinking that we would be doing some rehab work, but instead we went into a full two-hour training session. For the guys who had played the night before, it was the last thing that any of us wanted to do. We were stiff and sore and the focus had been on a light rehab session, so it was hard to switch mentally and get motivated for the full-on session. It was then that it dawned on us that this was how it was going to be throughout the tour. After training we had half an hour to eat, have a pool session and do some media interviews before heading to the airport to fly to Brisbane. There never seemed enough time to do anything.\n\nDR JAMES ROBSON (Tour doctor)  \nToured: 1993, 1997, 2001, 2005 & 2009\n\nAs a medical team you tend to see everybody. The coaches are dealing with the players as a group, whereas the doctor tends to see them as individuals.\n\nSo it's incumbent on the doctors as well as the more senior figures to help gel the party together \u2013 there are very few tours where someone will have had no contact with the doctor.\n\nThere is also more to the job than simply dealing with injuries as they happen. Local conditions can be just as big a factor in the medical team's planning as the ruggedness of the opposition.\n\nOne of the main challenges of the 2001 tour were the distances we covered, because for every hour you change through the time zones you need a day to recover.\n\nWe also had some pretty reasonable heats to start with, particularly in Townsville, and Australia has some of the most venomous animals in the world to watch out for.\n\nI remember at a training session one of the players sitting down by the side of the pitch and leaping up with a yell, saying they had been bitten.\n\nWe found several ants there but you immediately thought of redback spiders! Just because you're training for a rugby match doesn't mean a spider won't bite you.\n\nRob Henderson dives in to score against Queensland.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH (Scotland)  \nToured: 2001 & 2005\n\nI was disappointed not to get in the initial squad because I had played pretty well in the Six Nations and believed I had got the better of most of my rivals. But I wasn't the only Scot who would have felt hard done by \u2013 for instance, the Leslie brothers missed out. Graham Henry took a lot of Welshmen even though they hadn't had a good season \u2013 I think it was a case of better the devil he knew.\n\nSo I went out to Vail in Colorado to get away from everything and do a bit of training, and after a few weeks there I got a call to tell me to get on a plane to Australia. So I went from Vail down to Denver airport, to LA, to Christchurch, to Sydney, and then on to Townsville. And when I eventually got to Townsville nobody there had even heard of the Lions.\n\nIt is rugby league territory so this was a kind of missionary expedition, and the rest of the squad hadn't flown in from Perth yet \u2013 so nobody knew who I was or where I was supposed to be staying. To top it all off, my luggage had been lost as well. It was the last thing I needed after 26 hours of travelling. I was stuck at the airport for ages before I eventually found someone who knew what was going on.\n\nI got driven to our hotel and the rest of the squad arrived overnight \u2013 and I was straight into the squad to play the Queensland President's XV.\n\nThe first half of that game was a bit frustrating. Obviously, we hadn't played together so we were a bit rusty and a few things we tried didn't quite come off. They put us under a bit of pressure and were very enthusiastic early on. But when we got control of the game I think you could see the class come through. It was great to get 80 points in the second tour game.\n\nIt went well for me in the second half, I got a few passes away and set up a few things so I was pleased with how it went. Things were a bit dodgy in the first half, I missed a few throws, but once you settle down it was such a great bunch of guys to play with.\n\nI had read the papers on the way over and they said the fans would probably be out in Australia for the First Test or the week before, but there was a sudden invasion at the last minute and there were thousands of them, all with different jerseys and different flags. It was like a home game for all the guys. It was great to be part of it.\n\nMARTIN CORRY (England)  \nToured: 2001 & 2005\n\nThere was always a mythical status about the Lions. It wasn't a case of 'you can achieve this'. There was a real aura about it and an aura about the players. My goal was always to play for England. Once you've played for England, then you say 'I'd love to play for the Lions', but it's very hard to have the Lions as a goal. I'll always put it up there so, so high.\n\nIt did make it easier being called up late. There wasn't any time to dwell on it. It was more a case of, 'How am I going to get to Australia, what am I going to do, is there going to be someone there to meet me, will someone be waiting for me?'\n\nWhen I got there, it was literally a case of 'Here's your playbook. You need to learn this because you're playing tomorrow.' It was all a massive rush. With jet lag and everything, I didn't really know where I was. I then played the Saturday as well so it was all about trying to focus on the games rather than thinking, 'I'm on a Lions tour.'\n\nPHIL VICKERY (England)  \nToured: 2001 & 2009\n\nIt was a massive event. In 2001, I was 24 so still reasonably young and it was something I always dreamed of. I watched Lions tours growing up and I never really thought I would be involved in one.\n\nIt was fantastic playing with Keith Wood and Tommy Smith. Obviously Dai Young was around and Scott Gibbs came out in the end, Brian O'Driscoll etc. There were a lot of big names and I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it and learnt a lot from mixing with all those guys. We all made friendships that have lasted ever since.\n\nMARTIN CORRY\n\nI think the great thing with the Lions is that everyone realises that you need to get to know each other. You've been knocking lumps out of each other throughout the year and there's got to be a new bond. Everyone works hard to create that and all the players realise that it's something special when you're out there.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nLooking back, I can see why some of the players on the tour struggled with Graham Henry and his attitudes. I've lived in New Zealand, my wife is a Kiwi and in many ways Graham reminded me of my father-in-law, so I got that very dry Kiwi sense of humour that he had and I understood many of his attitudes and ways of thinking \u2013 but I think a lot of that was missed by the other players and they reacted in the wrong way to some of the things he said and some of the ways he approached things.\n\nA lot of the guys had complaints about how hard we were worked in training. We had all been through a long, hard season and when we met up together at Tylney Hall before leaving for Australia, we did a lot of team-building exercises, but we also went to Aldershot to the army's physical education centre and were worked very hard. But I agreed with the management that all that kind of thing was important because we had to pull the whole tour squad together and get a sense of understanding across the group about systems, a style of play, defensive patterns, and so on. Modern rugby demands that you work hard \u2013 especially when you are a team and squad that has been thrown together with only a limited about of time available to you to prepare and get to know one another. But no matter how hard you are worked, it helps to feel supported and understood by those that are driving you, and I think that the problems stemmed from the misunderstandings between Graham and some of the players.\n\nHe said, for example, that people in the southern hemisphere didn't rate our skills or how we played and he knew because he was one of them. He meant that he was from down there and knew how they thought, not that he didn't rate us \u2013 but there was a general feeling that was spreading across the group that he did feel that way.\n\nHe was very intent on making sure we played in an incredibly structured way, with predetermined moves set for phase after phase after phase. Normally teams will have predetermined plays for two or three phases after a set piece and will then play it as they see it with the scrum-half, stand-off and inside-centre controlling the attack, but he wanted us to have set plays for seven or more phases at a time. Not only did this make us slightly robotic in our play, but it also increased the pressure on all the players as they tried to remember exactly where they were meant to be, rather than just playing their natural games and reacting to what was in front of them. In the end, we realised that this style just wasn't working for us and, as players, we decided to abandon it. And when we made that decision, we started to play our best rugby of the tour.\n\nJonny Wilkinson launches a counter-attack.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nWe made big mistakes on that trip. We over-trained heavily and I remember having conversations with Graham Henry and Martin Johnson about it and we challenged Graham. We said, 'Listen, we're over-training, we're knackered, every one of us, we're wrecked.' And he said, 'We're going to stop in a week's time and that'll be all the really hard work done.' But by the time we stopped it had taken too much out of the players.\n\nI made a mistake and Johnno made a mistake because we went along with it. It's more important to be ready to play on Saturday than to pile up the work. There's a balancing act that has to be done. The difficulty is going through technical areas of the game so that you do it together. Six weeks before, you're enemies and now you have to trust each other and be the best of friends. You have to have a technical defensive system, technical lineouts, technical rucking, technical scrummaging and that requires a lot of training and that is the biggest problem. There is so much work that has to be done but we did far too much work. We had to tick all of those boxes but we were wrecked because of the effort it took. We probably over-ticked them. I should have pushed it an awful lot more with Graham. Absolutely. I should have pushed it with Johnno, too.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nLooking back, I would accept 100 per cent that we worked the players too hard early on but there were reasons for it. England as a professional entity were two years ahead of the other three countries at the time. England had a defence coach. Ireland, Scotland and Wales didn't have one. So you had Phil Larder who demanded more time because defensively he would say the other fellas didn't have a clue. This was a whole new set-up for three-quarters of the players. So Larder demanded more time and, in fairness to Graham, because it was largely an English management team that were used to working with each other, he was trying to find common ground and so he was keen to give them the time they needed for their specific aspects of responsibility. As a result of that, I'd put my hand up and say we trained too long.\n\nLAWRENCE DALLAGLIO\n\nContrary to many reports which emanated from the tour, I believe that the fact that the Lions stayed in contention right to the final whistle of the final Test was in no small part attributable to the huge workload we put in as a squad in the first three weeks of the trip. I don't accept the criticism that the training was far too hard and there's been a lot of rubbish spouted on the subject. This is the modern professional era and the players are paid to do a professional job. I firmly believe that the two main coaches, Graham Henry and Andy Robinson, did a first-class job.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nTouring can be difficult for players, even when you're representing a team as special as the Lions \u2013 and small irritations can really begin to get to you. We were training incredibly hard, playing some tough games and building up to a massive Test series, so we were all aware of trying to keep ourselves in the best nick we could. So it was frustrating when we flew to Brisbane after playing the Queensland President's XV, that we flew on a commercial flight in economy class \u2013 with a lot of the players too big for the seats. Scott Quinnell, in particular, struggled with a knee knock and was in a lot of discomfort throughout the flight, but we all stiffened up pretty badly. This is not to sound like a bunch of prima donnas, but when you're playing at the elite end of sport, the smallest margins make a huge difference and it was disappointing that with all the work we were doing, small things like this hadn't been thought out properly by the management.\n\nJASON ROBINSON\n\nI roomed with Rob Henderson in Manly before the Australia A game. He was a great lad, but he was known as 'the Snorer'. It was like sleeping in a room with a real lion. He was hilarious, he would pretty much sleep all day and then come alive at night, trying to speak to you at 1.00 a.m. smoking fags out of the window and ordering pizza and chips from room service.\n\nLAWRENCE DALLAGLIO\n\nLosing to Australia A was a real set back. All credit to them, they played very well, but we made life difficult for ourselves with a lack of any decent first-phase possession, and then handing the ball back to them on several occasions, which put us under enormous pressure. You can't play without the ball. But we were also concerned at the penalty count against us; the interpretation of the laws was definitely different to what we were used to and we suffered \u2013 especially me as I was sin-binned.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nWe were outplayed and out-passioned by Australia A, but very nearly snatched an undeserved draw late on. The one thing that we were really pleased with was our fitness and we had rallied well in the second half. It just hadn't been enough. In the aftermath of that game, though, Graham Henry spoke to the press and said that, following that result, we would have to start concentrating on the Test side and not so much on the other guys. That caused outrage in the press at home and caused further friction within the group. There was a sense that the Test team had been identified before we had even left the UK, meaning that those not involved in that selection felt that they had little or no chance of breaking into the Test side. That statement from Graham seemed to confirm this suspicion and it had a big effect on the morale in the camp.\n\nThings got worse after we beat the New South Wales Waratahs in Sydney. It was a brutal match, best remembered for Duncan McRae's savage attack on Ronan O'Gara which ended in him getting sent off, and we lost a lot of players to injury over the course of that week \u2013 Dan Luger and Robin McBryde were ruled out of the rest of the tour and there were serious injuries to Will Greenwood, Neil Back and Lawrence Dallaglio.\n\nLAWRENCE DALLAGLIO\n\nI survived in the midweek game against Australia A in Gosford and everything seemed to be going well and then I played on Saturday against the New South Wales Waratahs. It was shattering for me when my knee gave way in the second half and I realised my tour was over.\n\nRONAN O'GARA (Ireland)  \nToured: 2001, 2005 & 2009\n\nThe Waratahs game was unbelievable \u2013 and a pretty dark memory for me. We were attacking inside their 22, I passed to Woody and he took it up close to their 5-metre line. Two of their guys brought Woody down. One of them was Duncan McRae. As the ruck was forming I followed up and shoved him. Next thing I knew I was on the ground and McRae was pucking the head off me. After the first dig I thought it was going to stop any second but they kept coming. Nine. Ten. Eleven. A frenzy of digs. One after another after another. I just lay there and took it. It was the weirdest feeling. Lying there I felt totally lost. Like I was in a daze. Even though he was on top of me I wasn't pinned down. I tried to protect my face with my right arm and after a couple of seconds I grabbed the back of his jersey with my left. Useless. Pointless. Why? Why didn't I try to push him off? Hit him. Something. Why did I just take it?\n\nTwo lacerations under my left eye needed eight stitches but the pain of that was nothing compared to the humiliation. Why didn't I try to defend myself? In the dressing room I was fucking raging. Raging with myself. Raging with McRae. When the game was over I wanted to go into their dressing room and have a cut of him. Rage was useless to me then. Too late. Why didn't I hit him when he was pucking the head off me? I don't know. I still don't know.\n\nRonan O'Gara is assisted from the pitch after his brutal attack from Duncan McRae.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nIt was a joke. I have no doubt that the Waratahs went out to take scalps that day. Tom Bowman took out Danny Grewcock from the kick-off and got a yellow card, so there was an underlying tension throughout. We lost Lawrence Dallaglio in the game, we lost Will Greenwood, we lost Neil Back for the First Test. Phil Waugh was the Waratahs captain and there was the post-match reception and he stood up and he said the Lions will 'wake up in the morning feeling sore, they took a few hits today'. You know the type of crap. There were visions of Canterbury versus the Lions in 1971.\n\nBob Dwyer was coach of the Waratahs. I knew Bob. We're in the hearing the day after the Duncan McRae thing and McRae never looked at Ronan once, he never apologised and never made any effort to shake his hand. This is 18 hours after the game. They tried to say that Ronan caught McRae by the balls and it was a reaction to that, but it was a complete and utter lie. That really incensed me. I had a lot of time for Bob Dwyer but I lost time for him after that hearing.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nI was about five yards from it when it happened; I was in a ruck and I never knew it was going on behind me. I ran off in the other direction. I thought McRae should have got banned for two years, three years. I thought it was horrible.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nI'll always remember going into the medical room after the game and that's where my admiration for Martin Johnson went even further through the roof. We'd won a difficult game and he was being stitched. He said, 'What's the story with Greenwood?' I said, 'He's out.' 'Dallaglio?' I said, 'He's out.' 'Back?' 'Out for the First Test.' He kind of shook himself and said, 'Right we'll just have to get on with it.' He's lying there and three Englishmen he would have soldiered with for a long time and who would have been well in the running for Test places were out and he just said okay. It was like if I said to him 'We've run out of second-rows, you're going to have to play in there on your own.' He'd have said, 'Fine, I'll do my best.'\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nSo we had lost a lot of players by this stage and although we had only lost one match, morale was pretty low all through the squad. But things were really compounded before the midweek team played the New South Wales County Cockatoos. Normally we would split the training sessions, with the Saturday side in one group and the midweek guys in another doing a team-run, but this all changed and we ended up watching videos of Australia before the midweek team were asked to play as the Wallabies against the Test 22 so that we could work on our defence strategies. Essentially the guys in the midweek team felt like cannon fodder for the Test side, that their midweek game didn't matter and that the Test squad had been finalised even with a game to go. It was absolutely the wrong way to run a squad like the Lions, even though I understood that the management just presumed that a team like the Cockatoos didn't pose any threat and so the midweek team didn't require the same level of attention as those that would be involved in the First Test. 1997 worked so well because every player genuinely felt that they had a chance to put their hand up for selection, right up to the very last minute. In 2001 a lot of the boys never felt they really had a chance to make the Test side, no matter what they did, and this treatment just made the chasm that was dividing the group wider still.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH\n\nLions tours are all about Test results. It doesn't matter what the midweek results are or what is happening off the field \u2013 if you are winning the series everything is good. So Graham Henry and his assistants put all their eggs in that basket. We all knew what the Test team was going to be from very early on and there was very little give and take on that.\n\nSo there was a real split feeling in the camp. The day before the dirt-trackers played New South Wales County we did a whole session with the Test team \u2013 bag holding and then acting as lineout opposition \u2013 before we did our own preparation. I can understand the thinking, but it wasn't a great message to send the midweek guys.\n\nThe Lions are held up on a pedestal and there is a belief that it will be a great experience \u2013 but I think a lot of guys are left with a sour feeling afterwards.\n\nPHIL VICKERY\n\nIn the build-up to the First Test, you couldn't go anywhere without being stopped. I think I've got a pretty good relationship with all supporters, whether they are English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh but being embraced and being part of that with the Lions was truly a privilege.\n\nDANNY GREWCOCK (England)  \nToured: 2001\n\nGetting selected for that tour was a fantastic opportunity. I got lucky in some respects because towards the end of that season I'd broken my jaw. That meant I could do all the training bar the contact work so I got myself in good shape.\n\nThe way I looked at it, I was the last-placed second-row on that trip with Scott Murray, Jeremy Davidson, Malcolm O'Kelly and obviously Johnno. There was me and the three other guys all battling for one other place.\n\nThey'd all had far more experience than me. But I think the fact that I was a bit fresher legged than the other guys, that I hadn't played as many games during the latter part of the season, gave me a little bit of an advantage.\n\nYou need a bit of luck on these kind of tours. I managed to stay injury free on the tour itself and got involved in some of the good games before the Test series and that gave me the chance to play against Australia.\n\nI didn't feel under any pressure because I looked at all the other guys and they were all vastly more experienced than me in terms of the number of caps they had for Ireland or Scotland. It was just a case of going out and giving it my best shot.\n\nI think everyone felt they had a good chance of a Test spot. We all knew Johnno was captain and we would probably all have admitted that he was streets ahead of most second-rows in rugby at the time.\n\nSo we all knew we were battling for one place but I think we felt it was relatively open. We all gave it a go but luck came my way and I managed to hold down my place. Thankfully, it all went in my favour.\n\nMARTIN CORRY\n\nIt was a real surprise to get selected for the First Test. I found out in bizarre circumstances. I went down to the team meeting and Richard Hill came up and tapped me on the bum and said, 'Congratulations mate.' I said 'What do you mean?' and he replied, 'Oh, don't you know?' I said 'OK, tell me what you know,' and he told me I was in. They tried to do this big presentation of the team but I'd already found out!\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nWe had a team meeting the night before the First Test and I'd never felt so much nervous energy in a room \u2013 but it was an anxiousness rather than an excitement. With the mood in the camp, the fact that we were about to face the world champions, the build-up in the media and the knowledge that tens of thousands of fans had paid a fortune to travel across the world to see us, all led to a sense of the enormity of the occasion. But we channelled it well the next evening and had a great warm-up right in the bowels of the Gabba and there was a real sense of togetherness among the 22.\n\nJASON ROBINSON\n\nWe warmed up in a large room under the stand and while the intensity was building in there we had no idea how much it was building outside \u2013 when we went out all you could see was a sea of red in the stands and the noise was deafening.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nWe were down in the bowels of the stadium and we could all hear this noise. And we climbed the steps and the whole stadium was just full of red. And it was magic.\n\nNEIL BACK\n\nThe atmosphere and the fans were fantastic. They were unbelievable. When we walked into that stadium before the First Test in 2001 you knew, if you didn't know already, what the Lions was all about. That was one of the highlights. It was a sea of red. The hairs on the back of your neck and all over your body were standing on end and you knew it was something special. I think that's why that performance on that day was as it was.\n\nFans are quite rightly passionate about their own team, whichever country they follow, but when they come together and put the red of the Lions on it's something really special. The great thing about rugby union is that there's no segregation, the banter is fantastic and, on a Lions tour, everyone comes together and they become Lions.\n\nPHIL VICKERY\n\nThe First Test in Brisbane at the Gabba is probably one of my greatest rugby memories and experiences. It was just phenomenal and I'd never experienced anything like it. The support, the euphoria, the expectations, the pressure, the history and everything that surrounds the Lions makes it just a phenomenal thing to be involved in.\n\nMARTIN CORRY\n\nThat First Test was one of the highlights of my career. When I look back at it, I probably still can't appreciate the enormity of the occasion. Everything about it, the build-up, the crowd, everything was amazing. We were running out there thousands of miles from home and 75 per cent of the crowd were wearing red shirts. Then, with the way we played, everything was just a dream.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nThe game could hardly have started better. With two minutes and 45 seconds on the clock we were five points up. It was a dream start, giving us the belief we could penetrate what was then the world's best defence.\n\nJason Robinson skips around Chris Latham for the perfect start to the First Test.\n\nMATT DAWSON (England)  \nToured: 1997, 2001 & 2005\n\nI was on the touchline right next to Jason Robinson when he ran round Chris Latham and it was quite unbelievable. The guy only had three yards to work in but just ran round Latham as if the Aussie was made of stone.\n\nJASON ROBINSON\n\nI received a pass from Matt Perry and found myself in a one-on-one with Chris Latham, the Aussie fullback. There was only a metre or so of space on the outside, but I decided to take it. He must have thought that I was going to try and cut inside him, so before he could react I was round him. I just managed to keep my feet in touch and to get round towards the posts. It was a great start.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nThe first day that Brian O'Driscoll turned up at an Ireland training session he was just pure class. He stepped on to the field and he was phenomenal. Before the tour I thought he was a certainty for the Test team. I didn't even have a hint of a doubt. The man had it in spades, always. People talk about his try in the First Test, but I prefer to remember what he did for the first try that Jason Robinson scored. All the space that Brian opened up. His first pressurised thing and he does the right thing, that's what I like about it. His try, I'm not dismissing it out of hand, it's phenomenal. But it's what you expect of him.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nWhen you put it into the context of the situation, O'Driscoll's try was even better than it looked. We had been under a lot of pressure going into the First Test and were in a reasonably strong position at half-time, but for him to score that try at that stage of the game quite simply closed out the First Test. The try was a totally individual one and to see three or four Australians flailing vainly after him gave the team and the crowd a huge lift.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL (Ireland)  \nToured: 2001, 2005 & 2009\n\nAustralia's defensive record was so good in the World Cup and had been so hyped during the tour, but when we broke it comfortably early on with Jason Robinson's try our self-belief grew massively. We became unafraid to try things. My try was donated by Jonny Wilkinson. There were a couple of forwards hanging round in the Australian backline and I shouldered them off and had the gas to beat the last tackler.\n\nMartin Johnson secures a lineout throw.\n\nSCOTT QUINNELL (Wales)  \nToured: 1997 & 2001\n\nA lot of people have asked about the little nod I gave in celebration to my try, the fourth we scored in that First Test \u2013 it was an acknowledgment to myself, and to all those that had helped me get to that point, that this was the pinnacle of my career \u2013 a Lions Test cap at last and an absolute thumping of the world champions in their own backyard. Australia 2001 will always be the stuff of dreams to me.\n\nBrian O'Driscoll dives over the line to score the try of the series.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nThe best moment of the tour was the feeling after we had won the First Test. Hearing that final whistle and knowing that we had just beaten the world champions was just sensational.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nThat was one of the greatest Test performances I have ever been involved in. It was an 11-month season, we were in Australia a long time and endured some tough times. But a convincing result like that made all the effort and sacrifice worthwhile.\n\nThe previous week had probably been my toughest as a player \u2013 with all the media sniping, the problems of morale in the camp and then the tragic death of Anton Toia; so to win the First Test was a great feeling. I wanted to make sure that the whole squad felt a part of the win, so I said in the changing room afterwards, 'This is what this tour is all about: winning these games. We're all a part of this.' And it was true \u2013 if I learned anything from '97 it was the importance of the whole squad, not just the guys who pulled on the Test jerseys. I wanted to try and bring the squad back together. I'm not sure whether it worked or not, but everyone was in good spirits.\n\nIt didn't last all that long though, because I had to go to a press conference afterwards and all they wanted to talk about was the column that Matt Dawson had written for a newspaper at home, where he criticised the management and the training. I was amazed that a player as experienced and senior as Matt would allow something like that to be published under his name right before the First Test \u2013 or while we were on tour at all.\n\nI spoke to him later about it and he was embarrassed and pretty upset by the whole thing and was worried about the repercussions. But I said, 'If they send you home, we're all going,' and I meant it. When you play for a team, for any team, people are always hammering home the importance of history, of what it means to people at home, to your family and so on. But I always focused on the guys I was playing with \u2013 the 14 other guys on the pitch with me were the most important. It was an attitude that kept my thoughts focused, that shut out the enormity of the situation, and it meant that my loyalty to my team-mates was absolute. I wasn't going to allow him to be sent home. Fortunately, Donal and Graham, who copped a fair bit in the article, were big enough men to let the situation go and Matt was kept on tour.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nClive Woodward was sniping all the time. He was at the English players. When we played the Brumbies on the Tuesday after the First Test Woodward was around that week telling the English players they shouldn't be there they should be in Melbourne preparing for the Second Test. He was goading the English fellas.\n\nWe had a problem with Matt Dawson and Austin Healey and newspaper columns. I actually liked Austin. I admired him in a lot of ways because what you saw in Austin was what you got. The Dawson thing and the way it came out in the paper was disappointing. If he had an issue he should have come to me and he didn't do that. There was an element where maybe he thought he was a shoo-in for the Test team but Rob Howley was the number one. In fairness to him, on the following Tuesday night he kicked the winning score against the Brumbies and we just smiled at each other and life goes on.\n\nI remember this man tapping me on the shoulder after the Brumbies game and it was Matt Dawson's father and he said he wanted to apologise, that it was not his son's form to do something like that and that he knew it created hassle \u2013 and I thought it was a nice gesture from a quiet man. I never said that to Dawson and I don't know if his father said it to him. These things happen. You move on. To send him home would have been completely counterproductive, would have detracted from what we were doing and to be fair he had a fine game against the Brumbies. You move on.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nThere were a lot of guys who went on that tour who went on the previous tour and they presumed they'd be playing and you can't make that presumption. One Lions tour doesn't lead to another Lions tour. I went to Australia in the box-seat but I never make a presumption on any day.\n\nThe Test pack readies for engagement.\n\nMATT DAWSON\n\nThe win against the Brumbies was a big moment for everyone. I personally got very emotional, but I think there were many others who felt likewise.\n\nThe conversion was like a pressure valve being released. It blew out all the emotions of the previous few days. I did break down in the dressing room reflecting on all the negatives of the preceding 72 hours. Dai Young and Scott Gibbs had given a very important and passionate team talk at half-time, reminding us all what it meant to wear the Lions jersey. There were 40 minutes left for me to make amends.\n\nI realised that this was a great opportunity to put some things to rights. I cleared my head and went through all the routines I'd spent hours and hours doing on the training field. I blocked it all out and let rip. It was a good contact and a good feeling.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nDaws had not been kicking well and there had been an earlier instruction from the bench for Ronan O'Gara to take over the kicking duties, but Rog said to Daws, 'No you keep going, keep your head up,' which was a great thing of him to do. When Daws lined up the match-winning conversion, I had complete faith that he was going to redeem himself. In the changing room afterwards he was pretty emotional about the whole thing, and it was great to see all the other guys in the squad slapping him on the back. It felt like things had come back on track and we were all set up for the Second Test.\n\nMatt Dawson celebrates his late match-winning conversion against the Brumbies.\n\nMATT DAWSON\n\nIf ever there was a game of two halves, it was the Second Test. We were dominant in the first half and defended well but we were blitzed by a very good Aussie side in the second half when they made amends. We had two or three good opportunities which we didn't put away in the first half and they may have changed the complexion of the game. We played well before the interval but it is the result that counts. They beat us by 21 points so that really hurt. We were so disappointed. We were disappointed in ourselves, especially because of the stark contrast of our performance in the two halves.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nHalf-time in the Second Test we're ahead and again we'd played unbelievable rugby in the opening half and Australia had done everything on and off the pitch to try and mess us up that whole week. They took all the banners and things off the Lions supporters going into the ground and they handed out scarves and T-shirts to the Aussies. This is where I admire the Aussies: they're winners. There was a walk of about 50-60 metres from the dressing room down a narrow tunnel and you come up to go into the stadium. When we were coming out they put up ads on the big screen so that that Lions team was on the pitch before our supporters even saw them, whereas when Australia came out they had the cameras focused on them 50 metres down the tunnel so the noise and atmosphere was building up. They were so shocked by the colour and support the Lions had in that opening Test. They spread the Lions fans all over the place for the Second Test.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nWe had played incredibly well in the First Test and incredibly well in the first half of the Second Test. Just after half-time we made a series of errors and Richard Hill got knocked out of the game and if you ever want to see the importance of one player and how his removal from the scene could change something, that was it. We were in control at every ruck until he went off, because he was on fire. And then they got the upper hand from there on in and we just seemed to struggle.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nJonny Wilkinson, and bear in mind he's a 23 year old fly-half at this stage, made a shocking error. The emphasis at half-time was to play territory for the first ten minutes. Keep them at bay and we were there. Right from the kick-off we win the ball, he goes blind and he gives the pass to Joe Roff who scores in the corner. He needed to rifle that ball into the corner.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nSome people have said Australia's intercept try at the start of the second half was the crucial score. But I don't agree. That only made it 11-11 and the game could still have gone either way. The score after that was the killer. That's when the match started to slip away from us. It was irritating to have played so poorly in the second half. We knew we should have put away more opportunities in the first half. Australia punished us by scoring from their opportunities in the second.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nThen there was the Richard Hill incident. Nathan Grey took out Richard Hill with an elbow and he was an unbelievable loss. We lost Rob Howley, then Jonny was carried off. The games were late so at 1 a.m. I was told that the independent citing commissioner, whose name was Grey, which I thought was ironic, had cited nobody and I said, 'You must be joking, surely Nathan Grey has been cited?' So, I got his number, a New Zealand guy. I rang him at 1 a.m. and I said, 'Can you let me know on what grounds did you deem it appropriate not to cite Nathan Grey?' All he said was, 'You shouldn't be ringing me, you're not allowed to talk to me and I don't have to answer that question.' And he was gone the following morning. About six weeks later, Australia were in South Africa and David Giffin was cited for elbowing a Springbok but it was nowhere near as bad as the Nathan Grey one. The citing commissioner was our same friend from New Zealand and Giffin got, I think, six weeks.\n\nRICHARD HILL\n\nI bobbled a pass from Martin Johnson and took a hit to the face. At the time you're thinking, 'Well, has that affected me or not?' You almost need a few seconds to gather yourself.\n\nI don't think I was actually convinced who I was playing for because I'm not used to playing in red! It took me a little while to work out who I was playing for and where we were.\n\nI went off just to try and re-gather my thoughts, went back on and played out the rest of that half. I remember walking off the pitch and it was almost like I then woke up in a medical room at half-time.\n\nYou go through some of the precautionary tests and, unfortunately, that night I was told I wouldn't be able to feature the next week. That was a horrible thing to take.\n\nI thought from my personal performances that the tour had been going well. I desperately wanted to get out there again and play in the series decider. Unfortunately, that was taken out of my hands.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nAustralia started to shift our scrum around, which was a surprise, got us on the back foot and kept us off balance. We were totally outplayed in that second half. We self-destructed and let ourselves down badly. From a forwards point of view, we didn't function as a unified eight and that cost us massively. We had dominated them in the First Test and in the first half of the Second Test, but we switched off at a crucial moment: they shunted us back, turned us over and Joe Roff ended up scoring his second try. It was a hammer blow. The momentum was all with them after that and Matt Burke later crossed for their third try. From winning 11-6 at half-time, we ended up on the end of a 35-14 thrashing.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nSo it's 1-1 and we get to the Third Test and I remember the stats well, I was one of six players who trained on the Monday who played on the Saturday. We were falling apart. We really needed to get the series won in the first two weeks. We were hanging.\n\nGRAHAM HENRY (Head coach)  \nToured: 2001\n\nYou cannot ever visualise these things happening. We had a lot of class players in the original tour party who were obviously Test candidates, but who never featured in the Test series or featured early and didn't finish the series.\n\nThe build-up for the Third Test was far more frustrating than the match itself. We had so many injured players that we probably had only about two-thirds of the side on the training pitch at any one time and not even the same ten players. When you consider it was impossible and impractical to undertake any full sessions in preparation, what they did in that Test was really quite remarkable. We just had to sign up, got them on the field and they gave 100 per cent \u2013 more than 100 per cent probably. It was a frustrating week full stop. If the Test had been on the Wednesday, half of the eventual team wouldn't have been unavailable.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nHow we got as close as we did in the Third Test I'll never know because we barely trained for the week.\n\nANDY NICOL\n\nI had started the Six Nations as Scotland captain so presumably had a fair chance of going, but we didn't have a great championship and it didn't happen. I went on a supporters' tour instead and drank my way around Australia for two and a half weeks. Then I got a call the night before the last Test from Donal Lenihan saying that they had an injury in the squad and might need me the next day.\n\nI was about to go and climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge and I decided I wasn't going to say no to that because it was something I had always wanted to do. So, at half eleven on the Friday night I was standing on top of Sydney Harbour Bridge listening to all the Lions fans singing on the Rocks down below, and thinking they might be singing about me tomorrow. I got a call at nine o'clock the next morning to say that I was needed to sit on the bench that night.\n\nI spent all Saturday with the injured Rob Howley, trying to digest this huge playbook and getting more and more nervous as the day went on. We went to this local park for a walk through before the evening kick-off, where I think I made two passes to Johnny \u2013 one bounced first and the other was spot on \u2013 and that was it, I was apparently ready to go.\n\nIt was an invidious position to be in because I couldn't say no. But if I had got on after five minutes I probably would have been subbed off after 20 minutes and that would have been hellishly embarrassing. But, as it got near the end I started to think I could get through it on adrenalin, and I had said to Matt Dawson that if we are big up or big down then get me on \u2013 but there was six points in it so I didn't get my chance.\n\nWhen I went into the changing room after the game my number was pulled out the hat for the drug test, and I hate to think what the analysis man would have made of that substance!\n\nMARTIN CORRY\n\nWhile the First Test was one of my career highlights, two weeks later was one of the real low points. We should have won the Second Test and then we allowed too many mistakes to creep into our game in the Third Test. It was a series defeat that hurts because we should have won it. It was very disappointing but, having said that, it was the first time I got to play on that kind of stage so I really enjoyed it.\n\nKEITH WOOD\n\nWe felt the Aussies knew a lot of our lineouts and we were trying to change a lot of them but we had an awful lot of changes in personnel and that made it hard. We had three or four lineouts on the trot that had been difficult before the one towards the end. The call for that lineout was to the back and I wanted to throw it to the back and Johnno over ruled and called it to the front. I threw a pretty good throw but they read it and snatched a hand in front of it. Did the game come down to that throw? After the fact it does and the reason it does is because of Justin Harrison and all the chat, but it didn't come down to that at all. We still had an opportunity to go and score. And it wasn't as if it was five yards from the line, it was 20 yards out. It fits the bill in terms of the story, though.\n\nWas it important? Yeah. Should we have won it? Yes. Could we have scored off it? Yes. But none of those things follow on from one another. I wouldn't be caught up on it. We lost the series because we lost our key player, Richard Hill. And we were like walking wounded at the end of it. I was so unbelievably shattered at the end of it.\n\nDANNY GREWCOCK\n\nI still rank that First Test in Brisbane as one of the best-ever atmospheres for a game. That's what the Lions bring. It just adds that something special.\n\nWe got a good start. They were the world champions, they were the Tri-Nations champions and they were a team that had been there and done it all. We'd had a relatively tough tour travelling around Australia and perhaps the expectation on us wasn't too high for that First Test, but the boys pulled out a performance.\n\nBut, ultimately, you're there to win a series. You're far more critical when your team loses. Success can smooth over a lot of things.\n\nOne try could have made the difference between a series loss and a series win for us. The boys gave it their all and sometimes you can give it your all but, whether it's a bit of luck, an interception or because you're playing as good an opposition as they were, you don't get what you perhaps feel you deserve. That's tough, but that's the way sport goes.\n\nThere's no doubt that was a brilliant Australian team at the time. I don't think it was any disgrace for us to have lost the series but would I have wanted to win, do I think we were good enough to win it? Yeah. The series was close and little decisions meant they won it and we didn't.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nI was close to tears after the final whistle. We were right in the series up until those last seconds and the realisation that it was all over and we had lost was so deflating. All that effort, everything we had worked for, all our dreams were suddenly shattered \u2013 and it was my last time in a Lions jersey. It was a dreadful feeling that will live with me forever.\n\nJASON ROBINSON\n\nThe tour was a great experience, but it was also the hardest two months of rugby that I'd had in my life. There was so much travelling and a lot of training with hardly any time off, so I felt like a zombie most of the time. Time is always against you on tours like that \u2013 especially in Australia where you have to cover vast distances between each game \u2013 but it never made any sense to me that we had full contact sessions the day after games. There were a lot of injuries sustained throughout the tour and a lot of guys were forced to go home, but the sad thing was that a large number of these injuries happened in training. I know that I wasn't alone in feeling so tired all the time and I honestly believe that if we had been kept a little fresher we would have won the series.\n\nMARTIN JOHNSON\n\nThere were all sorts of things that conspired against us. The morale in the group was up and down and there were some big divisions that developed. The management and the playing personnel didn't all gel and there was a lot of carping over what the best tactics were for the games, or the way that we approached training and preparation. But at the core was the selection of the squad from the outset. I didn't feel that the best players that were available were all there, or that the best players in the squad were picked for the Test 22s. We suffered with injury and some guys' form deserting them, but even then I think we could have overcome those difficulties if we had had the strongest squad available to us.\n\nI also think that I could have led the party better than I did. In 1997 I was aware that I was a young and inexperienced captain, but I had a lot of senior guys to help me through things \u2013 also, there was a real excitement throughout that tour party about what we were doing and the way we were playing. Four years later, I had captained good England and Leicester sides and perhaps demanded more from those around me. My man-management skills weren't as good as they should have been. I expected people to just work hard and get on with things, no matter how hard they found the whole touring experience, but if I had my time again I would have had more one-to-one chats, I would have tried to appear more open so that the players could come to me and air their issues. I concentrated too much on the job in hand and just presumed that others would follow suit. At the same time, the tour was a brutal culmination of an 11-month season, and I was just trying to get through the training and the games without breaking down \u2013 as I'm sure we all were \u2013 so my mind wasn't as focused on the needs of the other tour members as it should have been.\n\nWe didn't socialise much, either, which is a key part of touring and was a crucial element to the team-bonding that we had had in 1997. Because of the time difference, almost all our games were at night, so by the time we eventually headed back to our hotel, it was midnight. With recovery or training always scheduled for the next morning, we very seldom did anything other than go straight to bed. As a result, there were guys that I never really got to know \u2013 and that will have been true for every player across the squad. Without meals out with a few beers, or some nights out in bars and clubs together, it's very hard to get past the initial veneer and get to know another player really well. I don't outright blame the management for this \u2013 they weren't scheduling the matches \u2013 but they were aware that there were problems and should have done something to address them. Again, as captain, I should have done more to drive that as well and I didn't.\n\nThere are many regrets I have about that tour. There are some great moments to remember too \u2013 such as the First Test win and some of the attacking rugby that we played; but the regrets are freshest and most vivid in my memory.\n\nDONAL LENIHAN\n\nWe made mistakes with the training and I hold my hand up to it, but I'm proud to this day of the quality of rugby we played and I think it will stand the test of time. I think people look back now and think maybe we were a little harsh in our judgement of the tour because the quality of the rugby was outstanding.\n\nMartin Johnson after the final whistle of the Third Test.\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN\n\n# [BLACKOUT  \n2005](006.html#a3)\n\nNEW ZEALAND\n\nSIR  Clive Woodward has never been one to shrink from massive challenges. When he was appointed head coach for this tour \u2013 which was to end in almost unrelieved sporting disaster \u2013 it must be remembered that there were very few dissenting voices against a man who had dominated the southern hemisphere and also the Six Nations during his time as England coach, and had also won the World Cup.\n\nWoodward realised that New Zealand were developing a special team, with Dan Carter and Richie McCaw nearing career peaks and also that, as usual, the players he chose would be exhausted even before they left Heathrow by yet another overbearingly testing home season. He knew he would find few friends. Certainly, everyone in the southern hemisphere would wish him ill, and there were unquestionably people in British and Irish rugby who were not exactly averse to see him fall flat on his face. And that is almost exactly what happened.\n\nHe made another bold decision \u2013 that they would maintain the tradition of Lions tours and play games in midweek all around the country. Many were calling for Lions tours to be drastically truncated, so that apart from maybe a couple of warm-up games, they consisted only of the three Test matches. Woodward, and many other traditionalists, believed that this would remove all the colour and history from a Lions tour, and also removed the whole point of the activity.\n\nYet he then decided that the only way the midweek games could be played was if you took enough players to run two teams, and enough back-up staff to service those two teams. Accordingly, when the party gathered at Heathrow, they were one of the most populous sporting squads ever to assemble, and even a man with his organisational capabilities was never able to dispel the notion that it was all impossibly unwieldy, and almost bound to end in disaster.\n\nIt was perhaps natural that Woodward would call upon some of those Englishmen who had done him so many favours over the years and had ultimately won him the World Cup, but some critics felt the 44-man original party was top-heavy with Englishmen who had been injured or out of form. Welshman John Dawes, who captained the Lions to their only Test series success in New Zealand back in 1971, was the first to voice his concerns proclaiming that some of Woodward's picks were 'baffling'. Even the talismanic Jonny Wilkinson was to struggle on tour.\n\nIn truth, even Dawes' brilliant side of 34 years before would have had their work cut out to cope with the brilliance of the 2005 All Blacks, marshalled by Crusaders' fly-half Dan Carter, who tore them to shreds as New Zealand coasted to a 3-0 series win. Woodward's original selection featured twenty English, eleven Irish, ten Welsh and three Scottish representatives, but three other injured World Cup winners \u2013 Jonny Wilkinson, Mike Tindall and Phil Vickery \u2013 were also pencilled in. As it was, only Wilkinson made it to New Zealand and a third of the squad were over 30.\n\nWales had just won the Grand Slam under Mike Ruddock and as European champions were expected to supply the biggest proportion of the party, but Woodward put most of his initial faith in those he knew and trusted including flanker Richard Hill, just back from injury, and the rest of the 'Holy Trinity' of England's World Cup-winning back-row of Leicester's Neil Back and the Wasps icon Lawrence Dallaglio, although both had retired from international rugby. Dallaglio was to be injured in the first game and invalided home, a grievous blow.\n\nThe Welsh contingent included centre Gavin Henson who would prove to be a focal point of off-the-field news during the trip, but did not include his countryman and back-rower Ryan Jones, who eventually, as a replacement, would prove to be one of the few on-field successes of the trip.\n\nThere were no arguments, however, when Woodward unveiled Irish centre Brian O'Driscoll as his captain at a squad-naming press conference at Heathrow. Then aged 26, O'Driscoll had the respect of the rugby world, and was recognised as one of the leading midfielders on the planet, but his tour was destined to be short and not so sweet after he was injured during an incident in the First Test which would sour relations between the Lions and their hosts for the rest of their stay.\n\nIn keeping with the reputation he had earned with England, Woodward lavished money on his support staff. One masterstroke was to employ Ian McGeechan, the ultimate Lions coach, to head up the midweek side who were one of the triumphs of the time in New Zealand as they remained unbeaten. There were also jobs for Ireland's Eddie O'Sullivan and Wales' Gareth Jenkins as well as Woodward's former lieutenant with England, Andy Robinson.\n\nAs manager, the highly-respected Bill Beaumont, the former lock who toured New Zealand as a Lion in 1977 and captained the squad in South Africa three years later shortly after winning a Grand Slam as England's captain, was already in place. Beaumont was seen as a perfect buffer to the inevitable flak that would be flying in the New Zealand winter.\n\nNo one argued with the majority of Woodward's massive support team but there was one exception who would also prove to be one of the tour's central characters. Alastair Campbell, formerly Tony Blair's right-hand man when Blair was prime minister and an ex-political writer for The Mirror, was put in charge of press relations and polarised opinion amongst the public and media at home and abroad just as he had done during his time at Downing Street.\n\nIn another twist, Woodward's opposite number as coach of the All Blacks was Graham Henry, a former coach of the Welsh and the man who Woodward had openly criticised for his handling of the Lions in Australia four years previously.\n\nThus battle lines were drawn as the Lions headed to Cardiff for an unprecedented warm-up game against Argentina which has since been given Test status by the International Rugby Board. That match at the Millennium Stadium ended in a 25-25 draw but also ended in sighs of relief all round from the Lions' management as Wilkinson proved his fitness in his first international appearance since the 2003 World Cup final. And then it was off to New Zealand for the tourists with the words of Woodward \u2013 who claimed his party 'respect the All Blacks, but do not fear them' \u2013 ringing in their ears.\n\nThe first game, against the Bay of Plenty in Rotorua, was a triumph on the scoreboard as the Lions ran out 34-20 winners with the ever-combative Josh Lewsey scoring twice, but was a disaster for Woodward as Dallaglio, who was having a massive impact on the match, was carried off after 25 minutes. Dallaglio, a great friend of the coach and seen as a potential lynchpin of the Test side, had had his tour wrecked by an ankle injury.\n\nIt all started to unravel from there on in. McGeechan's midweek side proudly battled their way to wins over Taranaki, Wellington, Southland, Manawatu and Auckland, all meaningful games, but the Test side were found wanting by their New Zealand counterparts.\n\nThe prohibitive costs of hotels and transport in New Zealand meant that many of the Lions' version of cricket's Barmy Army had to make do and mend by traversing the country in camper vans but that did nothing to dim the enthusiasm of the estimated 30,000 touring fans, some with tickets and some without, when the travelling circus arrived in Christchurch for the First Test match.\n\nHenson was omitted from the team to play at Lancaster Park and was then pictured in conversation with Woodward in a photograph circulated to all the newspapers on Fleet Street. Henson claimed in a book published later that he was bemused by the whole episode, which to some observers had Campbell's fingerprints all over it, but worse was to come when the opening Test finally kicked off.\n\nWoodward had gone to great pains to consult Maori elders and experts about how the tourists should respectfully face the Haka and came up with the conclusion that the youngest member of the Test side, Welsh scrum-half Dwayne Peel, should stand with O'Driscoll at the tip of an arrow-head formation. Although intended as a sign of respect, it appeared to rile the home team. One minute in, O'Driscoll was out of the tour after being on the wrong end of an alleged double spear tackle by New Zealand captain Tana Umaga and hooker Keven Mealamu and suffered a dislocated shoulder. The O'Driscoll incident overshadowed the All Blacks' 21-3 win which gave Henry first blood over his old adversary, but it went from bad to worse when Lions second-row Danny Grewcock was subsequently banned for biting and Richard Hill had his tour ended with a knee injury.\n\nThe 2005 tour party.\n\nThe fall-out went on long into the night in Christchurch with Richard Smith, the travelling QC with the Lions, putting their side of the story to Willie Venter the citing commissioner, but the cold facts were that the Lions were without a captain and 1-0 down in the series with two games to go.\n\nGareth Thomas, the Welshman, was given the task of righting the ship in the wake of O'Driscoll's departure and he scored early in the Second Test in Wellington. It was a false dawn though as Carter produced a master class of fly-half play to take the series. The All Black No 10 ran through the full repertoire of his tricks as he scored two tries, four conversions and five penalties for a personal haul of 33 points in a 48-18 rout that left the tourists out on their feet. To rub salt into the wound for the Lions, Umaga also touched down, as did Richie McCaw and Sitiveni Sivivatu. The All Blacks were efficient, fast and deadly.\n\nWith only pride to play for as they limped to Eden Park for the final Test, the Lions drew hope from the fact that the magician Carter was injured. However, the New Zealand juggernaut was not about to let up against opponents who had been smashed from pillar to post in the Test series and they found an able deputy in Luke McAlister, who scored 13 points in a 38-19 win.\n\nThat was that. New Zealand were palpably the better team in almost every department; there was not one area of the game in which the Lions could seek refuge. The suspicion that the Lions lacked organisation grew with stories that they changed their lineout calls just before the First Test, and that no one really had any clear idea of the game plan. The tour was saved from disaster by the results of the midweek team, culminating in a win over Auckland just before the final Test.\n\nYet the players were not given the best opportunity to fulfil themselves; since they could no longer claim that they had enjoyed the festivities and the socialising and the sightseeing \u2013 all these were items from the past \u2013 then you had to feel sorry for the class of 2005 for all their aspirations had come to nothing.\n\nEddie O'Sullivan, Sir Clive Woodward and Andy Robinson.\n\nJASON ROBINSON\n\nI knew this tour would be extremely intense from the outset. Clive Woodward wanted to imprint the no-expense-spared model that had worked so well for England on the 2005 Lions. We had our own private jet to fly us around New Zealand; we had a huge back-up staff to help support the players; and we even had Alastair Campbell, the former Labour spin doctor, as our head of media operations. We also had a huge playing squad to make sure that everyone was fresh and that there was back-up in every position on the field. The risk with this, of course, was that a good number of players would not be involved in the Tests and some would struggle for game-time on the tour at all.\n\nMARTYN WILLIAMS (Wales)  \nToured: 2001, 2005 & 2009\n\nClive Woodward's organisation was just incredible, there's no taking that away from him. We met up at the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel, which was our pre-tour base, and everything was just run like clockwork. We were all given these big red folders that were filled with tactical plays and so on, and they had our names embroidered on them; the team room, which was normally just a few tables and chairs when the Wales team were there, had plasma screen TVs, music all wired up and a podium with a microphone. All the chairs had been laid out with our names on them. And it was the same all week \u2013 every detail had been thought out and it was all run really efficiently.\n\nI have to admit that I wasn't really into some of the team bonding stuff that was organised for us \u2013 we had to paint a big mural thing, which wasn't really my thing. The best thing we did actually, was totally impromptu. Before we played Argentina at the Millennium Stadium, me and a few of the other non-playing squad members \u2013 Dwayne Peel, Matt Dawson, Paul O'Connell, Brian O'Driscoll and Tom Shanklin \u2013 went for a night out in Cardiff and it was brilliant. Those are the kind of things that really bonds players together \u2013 blowing off some steam over a few beers, rather than painting a bit of a mural.\n\nPeople have said that there were too many players selected for that tour, but I'm not sure about that. What I'm sure of is that there were too many back-room guys. It was just massive and the tour was run like a military campaign. There was no time off to bond all together \u2013 we were basically two teams on different tours \u2013 and that division was a real problem.\n\nMICHAEL OWEN (Wales)  \nToured: 2005\n\nI was named captain for the Argentina match, with Jonny Wilkinson as my vice-captain, which was a huge honour \u2013 especially as we were playing in Cardiff. It was Jonny's first international since he'd kicked England to World Cup victory in 2003, so it was a massive moment for him as well. But as a team we didn't play at all well in that game \u2013 we just couldn't get going \u2013 there was no cohesion, our handling was poor and we got turned-over a lot in open play.\n\nBut Jonny kept us in it with six penalties and he set up Ollie Smith for our only try. It was a disappointing \u2013 and flat \u2013 start to the tour. And I was left feeling angry afterwards because at one point we had a penalty and I told Jonny to kick for goal; we were three points down, so I wanted to tie the scores, get the ball at the kick-off and look to work our way up field to try and win the game. I turned around and walked away and then when I looked back, Jonny was kicking for the corner \u2013 having been instructed to by the coaches. I felt totally undermined, and it was an indication of how Clive wanted to micromanage everything.\n\nJONNY WILKINSON (England)  \nToured: 2001 & 2005\n\nThe opening Test match against Argentina was a strange one. We had had hardly any time together, so it was almost like we were a Barbarians side, but with greater pressure to perform. It was a tough game and it eventually came down to me having to land a 40 metre kick out on the left to draw the game. Thankfully it went over, but it had been a shaky start.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH\n\nSimple things can make a huge difference on a tour \u2013 for example, the whole single rooms thing. The blueprint for the tour was England in 2003, and it's fine if that is what you have got used to \u2013 but a lot of guys from the other countries were maybe looking for a bit of support or a bit of banter, and being in a room by yourself is not really conducive to creating that atmosphere.\n\nBEN KAY (England)  \nToured: 2005\n\nA Lions tour of eight weeks is a totally different coaching challenge to the four-year build-up to a World Cup. You have to draw a line and say you are not there to improve the player, but to see them more as a finished product, and be more pragmatic. I heard Johnno say at a dinner recently that the role of a coach on a Lions tour is more motivational than anything else, because you have less time to get the player prepared and attend to all the fine detail.\n\nHowever, Clive was picked to coach the Lions because of the structure he had with England, so he should not take all the blame. The coaches can't take all the blame, because it's us who were out on the pitch. Too many players, myself included, were too quiet in team meetings, and we didn't tell them it was overcomplicated.\n\nLAWRENCE DALLAGLIO\n\nI dislocated my ankle playing against Bay of Plenty in Rotorua. It was the opening game of the tour and we had only played about 20 minutes when I went to help Brian O'Driscoll make a tackle \u2013 I slipped, my weight went one way, my foot the other and I tore my ankle out of the socket. I've never known pain like it.\n\nWhen I was lying in the hospital waiting for some morphine, the doctor in charge asked me if he could have my Lions kit. Unbelievable.\n\nI had a plate and five screws inserted into my ankle, but it meant that I wasn't able to fly home for a while. I stayed in the Hilton Hotel in Auckland, where the squad had been based when we first arrived. Simon Taylor was there too \u2013 he had been forced to quit the tour with a hamstring injury. Even though we didn't know each other very well, I called him to see if he wanted to go out for dinner. He agreed and I booked us a table at a local restaurant and ordered us a taxi. I called Simon to let him know and he told me that he'd changed his mind and didn't want to go out. So I went out on my own anyway \u2013 and apart from Bruce Twaddle, a brilliant Kiwi surgeon, I didn't see another soul for ten days.\n\nLawrence Dallaglio is stretchered from the field after dislocating his ankle during the first midweek game, against Bay of Plenty \u2013 ruling him out of the tour.\n\nSIMON TAYLOR (Scotland)  \nToured: 2001 & 2005\n\nLooking back, it is always easy to pick out, or invent, a concatenation of factors leading up to an injury but, ultimately, it boils down to misfortune and possibly having offended the gods at some point.\n\nUnfortunately, being injured prevented me from really getting stuck into the tour and from feeling a proper part of the squad. In fact, I'm sure everyone will have formed the impression that I am generally a depressive, insular oddball.\n\nThey may have a point, but being injured makes you go a bit strange. You feel guilty that you aren't involved in the really painful stuff and you begin to question your purpose in life.\n\nIt's a real shame, because they were a genuinely nice group of people and it would have been great to have played a game or two, had the chance to prove myself, which is the only time you can really become integrated. I would have preferred to have played and failed miserably, had a terrible game, than not fire a shot. As it is, I'll die wondering.\n\nMARTYN WILLIAMS\n\nIt was pretty evident early on that Woodward and the other coaches wanted to go with the tried and tested in the Test series \u2013 they wanted to try and replicate the 2003 England team with one or two other guys, like Drico and Paul O'Connell tagged in along with the English old guard. You can understand the thinking, the English team in 2003 and in the build-up years were absolutely brilliant \u2013 but this was two years later, the guys were two years older and the game had moved on.\n\nGeordan Murphy dives in to score against Taranaki.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH\n\nI think the basic structure was there in 2005, and if the Test side had performed to any extent it would have been regarded as a success. But it was almost the case that people didn't want to be in the Test side because they were getting crushed!\n\nOf course everyone would take their chance if it came along and would believe that they could improve things \u2013 but the difference between the atmosphere in the midweek side in 2001 and in 2005 was like night and day. In 2005 we won all our games, and we got a Saturday night outing in Dunedin as well when the Test team were rested.\n\nGeech and Gareth Jenkins were the midweek coaches and this really great atmosphere developed \u2013 whereas the Test side got too serious, and couldn't really step away from it and enjoy the tour. It kind of got to them, I think.\n\nThe midweek team \u2013 who were dubbed 'the Midweek Massive' \u2013 almost had our own tour. We didn't really mix enough as a party.\n\nMatt Stevens was one of the guys who had a good tour, really enjoyed himself and was the life and soul of the party. But we lost a couple of influential guys early on (like O'Driscoll and Dallaglio) and we were gubbed in all three Tests \u2013 so it wasn't really much of an environment for a laugh and a joke.\n\nIn truth, it was so organised that there wasn't much scope for spontaneity and for characters to come to the fore. The Test side were just so focused on results.\n\nBEN KAY\n\nThere was a more positive atmosphere in the midweek side than in the Saturday side. The midweek coaches made a big effort to be positive, there was less fear of the opposition, and more focus on how we would play, rather than how they would. But, remember, the midweek team is under less pressure.\n\nSHANE BYRNE (Ireland)  \nToured: 2005\n\nI couldn't say being selected for the Lions was all my dreams come true because I never dreamed that big. The Lions never crossed my radar. I never said, 'Wouldn't it be great to be a Lion,' because it was something I never thought would happen. It was a very strange tour. I went a couple of weeks without seeing Mal O'Kelly who was on the same tour I was; we were like ships passing in the night. He was away with one team and I was away with another. It was mad. There was a paranoia around the place. The splitting of the squad was an experiment but it was an experiment that failed. There was a Them and Us split. The first time the First Test side stood together was on that day of the First Test. We had no experience together.\n\nBEN KAY\n\nThe team could have done with playing together more before the First Test \u2013 and Clive has come out and said so since. With the benefit of hindsight, if we had known each other better, we would have known how to put it right when it went wrong. We certainly weren't the best prepared touring side there's been. We should have spent more time on actually winning the ball, rather than on what we would do with it in phase play. We did not get enough time on the set piece, which was often bolted on to training sessions at the end. I know some of the props felt not enough time was spent on the scrum, and I would have liked more time on the lineout.\n\nSIMON SHAW (England)  \nToured: 1997, 2005 & 2009\n\nNew Zealand was a bit of a nightmare all-round. For me, it was frustrating because the midweek side went unbeaten. However, we didn't feature in the Test matches, and it never felt as if we were going to. It was like two separate tours which didn't marry together as Lions tours should.\n\nIf anything, we were over-planned. It was all pre-ordained who would play in every game, and that's a big mistake. Lions tours are about personalities who come out during a tour, and find great form. Pre-selecting is the worst way to go about things, and it gives the opposition a real advantage too. The Kiwis knew exactly what they would come up against, and by the time the Test series started they had the armoury in place to deal with it.\n\nI arrived about a week into the tour as a replacement for Malcolm O'Kelly and my head was completely scrambled by the line-out calls for the match against the Maoris. Paul O'Connell was our line-out leader, and he didn't really understand them, and nor did any of the other forwards. I couldn't really get anyone to explain them to me.\n\nIf you are going to spend nine weeks touring and playing you've got to enjoy it, and if you get too technical or scientific the enjoyment tends to go. The most important thing on a Lions tour is that you have to get unity in a very short time, and over-analysis can sometimes get in the way. With international players, who are meant to be the cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me, there has to be an expectation that they know what they're doing, and coaches have to trust that.\n\nThat means you get line-out leaders and callers to relay systems that they are comfortable with, rather than something imposed from the outside. In 2005 our line-out systems had probably been devised months before the tour by someone who'd never played. Our coaches were so concerned that New Zealand knew our calls that you needed a code-breaker to work them out. Even if New Zealand knew our calls, if you execute them well, it doesn't really matter. We got too bogged down in detail.\n\nDONNCHA O'CALLAGHAN (Ireland)  \nToured: 2005 & 2009\n\nIn the build-up to the First Test, members of the midweek team were refused entry to the video analysis room because we weren't in the match-day 22. What did they think we were going to do? Sell our secrets to the All Blacks? There was an element of paranoia around the place that was uncomfortable and that incident caused some bitterness among the midweek players. We probably felt like second-class citizens at times, even though they didn't treat us like that.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH\n\nA lot of the time the midweek squad and the Test team didn't train together.\n\nThe Midweek Massive had a really good core of guys and Geech kept it low key and calm. When you go on these trips, guys are full of information from their national team \u2013 tackle techniques, stats, lineout codes and all that kind of stuff \u2013 so you have got to keep it as simple as possible, and I think Geech managed to do that.\n\nMeetings were kept to a minimum and time was made for a bit of fun like playing football as a warm-up to training \u2013 whereas the Test side was just so focused on results that they perhaps lost a wee bit of who they were as people, and as a player you've got to be enjoying yourself to play well.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nClive was trying to get exactly the same things out of the group of people that every Lions coach has tried to do: a squad coming together, well supported, well prepared and with a clear direction to try and win a Test series. He had his own principles. I wouldn't have gone to New Zealand if I thought, 'This is wrong.'' I had a specific role: looking after the midweek team. And I was very comfortable about accepting that role. But I've always felt that the more time you can spend together, the better, because then you can have honest conversations with each other and players can also know that they have an honest chance of a Test place. Some of them will only get two games to take it in because that's all that's available before the First Test, but they should all be given that opportunity.\n\nGavin Henson stretches to score against Southland.\n\nSHANE BYRNE\n\nWhen they announced the squad for the First Test it was a dream come true only then to be told a few days beforehand that they were going to change the lineout calls. That was an absolute nightmare. Once that decision had been made we then had to go and come up with a set of lineout calls that were going to work. To get a set of lineout calls out of the blue and functioning in such a short space of time was hard. The Irish lads came up with a set and the English boys couldn't get their heads round them. It was a ludicrous situation but we had to embrace it wholeheartedly and go for it. Right into the day of the Test I know lads didn't know the lineouts. What I would describe as knowing them is being able to do it without thinking. It drove uncertainty. It was Andy Robinson who told us. He reckoned that the All Blacks had our lineout calls. I didn't give a damn whether they did or whether they didn't. A good functioning lineout can act before they can react. You can call it before you get there. There are ways around it. Once we gathered our jaws off the floor and argued a little bit, saying we'd be mad to do this, I as the person who was running the lineout had to very quickly embrace it and push it.\n\nPutting hoarding up around our training sessions, changing our lineout calls days before the First Test. They didn't do anything to stop New Zealand, they just undermined us. The set-up was paranoid. You had two full squads travelling independent of one another and it made it harder to get the spirit in the camp. As we know in rugby, when your back is against the wall it's things like spirit \u2013 things you can't coach \u2013 that help you get through a game. That's why Ian McGeechan started what was called the Midweek Massive, trying to get that team bonded. It was fantastically done but it didn't help the Test squad when the rails started to come off it. Within the coaching staff there was a Them and Us thing. I was very aware that there was conflict within the coaching structure because you had such large personalities, O'Sullivan and McGeechan and Robinson and Woodward. These guys, some of them, are polar opposites. You'd meet up with Eddie and his eyes would go to heaven.\n\nThe Lions adopt a unique line-up in response to the All Blacks' Haka.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH\n\nThey were so paranoid about anybody finding out our plans that we had SAS guys patrolling the training grounds, and the back-up players didn't even know the lineout codes. When I was called into the squad for the Third Test I had to learn the codes on the morning of the match.\n\nSTEPHEN JONES (Wales)  \nToured: 2005 & 2009\n\nTo finally get the nod and be told I was wearing the number 10 shirt for the Lions in the First Test was very humbling and daunting... But the Test was a major disappointment. We started badly and left ourselves a mountain to climb for the rest of the series.\n\nJust minutes into the First Test, Brian O'Driscoll is injured out of the series.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nI have a scar on my shoulder that reminds me of the First Test every time I put a shirt on. You can't get away from the fact that it happened, but I don't live it every day. Bad things happen throughout your career and your personal life and you have to be able to shelve things and move on to the next level.\n\nNo, it wasn't deliberate. I think it was very, very reckless and careless, but not deliberate. I spoke to Tana (Umaga), but not to Keven (Mealamu), but that's not because I'm holding a grudge against him, it's just because I haven't had an opportunity for chit-chat. I've spoken to Tana and I'm sure he stands by his view that it wasn't deliberate and I take him at his word. The law of spear tackles has changed as a result of that. If that happened in this day and age you wouldn't be on the end of a week or two ban, you might be looking at something a bit more substantial, but unfortunately I had to be the guinea pig for that. At least some good has come out of that situation. Red cards became more prevalent in that situation and rightly so because it's about protecting players on the field. It was the first time I felt vulnerable on a rugby pitch. I wasn't in control of myself.\n\nAs I was thrown down, the only thing in my mind was to somehow break my fall. Much better to break my hand or my arm than my neck. I stretched out with my right arm just in time and hit the ground with a thud. The pain was instantaneous. Something had to give and it was my right shoulder, which had sheared away and, as I now know, dislocated. I tried to shout out to Andrew Cole (touch judge), who I could still sense standing by the ruck, but I had no voice at all \u2013 either I had been winded or the shock had numbed me for a minute, I felt like a drowning man, I wanted to shout for help but no one could hear me.\n\nSHANE BYRNE\n\nIf Brian was on the pitch you would have hoped he'd have had a galvanising effect because all it would have taken was something for us to get behind, something to happen, a big hit or a good run, anything. You'd have thought Brian could have done that, could have been that person. We're not talking about winning the game but we could have changed the manner of the defeat, rather than it being such a low. We had already lost Lawrence Dallaglio and Richard Hill and Hill to me is one of the greatest players who ever played the game. He had more effect on a team than any other single player I've ever seen. It was a disgrace the way the Drico thing was dealt with by the authorities and it just added to the paranoia and suspicion. It started to snowball from there.\n\nThe heavens open during the First Test \u2013 conditions that the hosts adapted to with greater effect than the Lions.\n\nRICHARD HILL\n\nI was tracking across field as the All Blacks attacked wide, and then they cut back infield and I checked to align with them. My studs caught on the turf and my leg, from my knee to my ankle, was at a 45 degree angle below me. Ali Williams, their second-row, had the ball and was running at me, so I made the tackle and threw everything into it. I was happy with the tackle, it was just a meeting of forces. Unfortunately, my left leg wasn't in a perfect position and got caught underneath the two of us and I had to take all of his weight. I can still remember the crunching noise as my knee went. The pain was terrible. And my world just collapsed.\n\nI'd fought extremely hard to make the tour and make myself available. I was feeling confident that it was all sorted but nothing could have prepared me for the position I got myself in.\n\nI knew on that tour that I was never going to play in 2009 so it was just all about trying to rehabilitate the knee to get myself back on to a rugby pitch. I'm not saying I rehabilitated properly or fully but I certainly got back on to the pitch, which was my desire, and I was able to retire somewhat on my own terms, rather than the end coming out there on the pitch in Christchurch. But it was a sad end to my Lions career, nevertheless.\n\nDan Carter, who was imperious during the first two Tests, launches an attack.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH\n\nAt that level you need someone who can create something from nothing because defences are so well-organised and tight. We lost Brian O'Driscoll at the start of the First Test, and he was the one guy we had who could unlock a defence and could bring others with him.\n\nThe selectors picked a lot of guys who had performed for England in the World Cup but hadn't really reached that level since then. Dallaglio was injured early on, Hill was never fit and Back was a shadow of his former self \u2013 and when Ryan Jones was flown out, he just turned up in Otago and played and you could see the freshness he brought. Apart from that, nobody really shone and I think that was the problem \u2013 we had nobody who was really at the top of their game, whereas you could take your pick with the All Blacks \u2013 Dan Carter, Richie McCaw, Tana Umaga, the list goes on \u2013 you can't pick one of those guys ahead of the others. They had been waiting for the Lions for 12 years and they were ready. We just didn't have the players.\n\nMARTYN WILLIAMS\n\nThe Kiwis were just too good for us. I felt that even in the provincial games, and in the Test series they just hammered that home. They were miles ahead of us in the way they played the game, their tactics, their running angles, everything.\n\nSHANE BYRNE\n\nI'll be remembered for the First Test and the lineout being a complete disaster which was an integral part of what went wrong. All facets of the lineout disintegrated.\n\nDoubts gnaw away at you. Things you thought were the most basic imaginable you'd call them and it didn't work and you'd say, 'Jesus, that was my banker ball.' It was a horrible scenario. An impossible situation to be in. Rugby has such unbelievable highs but then on the final whistle such unbelievable lows. I mean, catastrophic lows that you cannot possibly share with anybody else. Adding to the burden wasn't just the fact that I played in the game but the fact that I was part of the reason why it fell apart.\n\nBEN KAY\n\nWhen we changed our lineout calls in the week of the First Test, rather than working smoothly, it put an element of doubt into our minds. At the lineout all you need is a split second of hesitation, and you lose your fluidity. It is lethal, because if someone hesitates, the whole chain breaks down. It's made worse if the opposition pick off a couple of throws early on, and get into the hooker's head. To change the calls completely in a week is very difficult, and by the time of the Test series, with four inputs from four different countries, we had a massive number of them. We switched to Shane Byrne calling them because I felt that my calling was affecting his throwing-in, because it was going through his mind whether it was the right call. But, I would have preferred to have called them, definitely.\n\nJONNY WILKINSON\n\nThe gulf between the teams was so great that even though we lost 21-3, we should have lost by even more. It was a huge loss when Brian went off. I played inside-centre, with Stephen Jones at stand-off; he's a great player, but we'd only tried the combination out for part of the game against Wellington and in training \u2013 not that it really mattered. We basically spent the whole game defending.\n\nBEN KAY\n\nIt was definitely a mistake to have taken Alastair Campbell with us. I'm not critical about him personally, but the New Zealand, and British, perception of why we needed a spin doctor had a negative effect. I think he got the whole thing wrong \u2013 from the way they dealt with Gavin Henson, to the ridiculous speech he made to us in the changing room after the First Test \u2013 and a number of my team-mates agreed with me. I thought the content was wrong; he made comparisons with the Bosnian War, and SAS involvement in it, which had no place in sport. He was going on about people laying their bodies on the line, and suggesting we had not. We may not have played well, but no one could question our commitment. And we were the guys out there doing it; I may have felt differently if someone like Johnno, who had been there and done it all, had said something like that, but not a guy who had never come close to playing rugby to any high standard.\n\nDan Carter spins out of Jonny Wilkinson's despairing tackle.\n\nDONNCHA O'CALLAGHAN\n\nAlastair Campbell decided to erect a 'war-wall' in the team room, where he pinned every bit of anti-Lions coverage from the local press that he could find \u2013 and he filled it up in about two days. That was tough for younger fellas coming into it. I'll be honest, it was hard for me. You're going down the road and they're abusing you \u2013 'You're no Lions, you're more like pussycats'. And the lady in the shop thinks she's doing her bit by abusing you, as much as Richie McCaw does by poaching the ball.\n\nSTEPHEN JONES\n\nClive didn't do much wrong at the time. He was criticised for taking too many staff, players and of course, Alastair Campbell, but I always thought we just weren't good enough to win that series. I actually got on very well with Alastair, he was a fascinating bloke to talk to and a good man.\n\nI don't think that Jonny Wilkinson and I got the best out of each other when we played together at 10 and 12. We had different approaches to the game. I had just won a Grand Slam with Wales and wanted to attack and play from anywhere, while Jonny had won a World Cup with England by playing mistake-free rugby and to the strengths of a great pack. There is no right or wrong way, it was just a disappointment that we didn't click on the pitch. Mind you, I don't think it really mattered because we were playing one of the great All Black sides.\n\nJONNY WILKINSON\n\nGoing into the Second Test, I didn't feel confident about winning \u2013 for the first time in my career. The whole team was so disjointed, we didn't have any structure \u2013 or at least, not one that we stuck to \u2013 and we didn't have any chemistry either. When things go badly on the rugby field, that's what you fall back on to try and get yourself back in the game \u2013 the structure of your plays, trying to get an element of control from which to build, or fighting for your lives with your mates and reacting instinctively with one another to create chances. But with neither in place, we were on a hiding to nothing \u2013 and the All Blacks were just on fire.\n\nI had to leave the pitch with concussion and a stinger that went all down my left arm. It was so bad that I couldn't move my arm during the week without it hurting, and I had to watch the Third Test from the stands.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH\n\nThe final midweek game came between the Second and Third Test and we headed off on our own up to Auckland for it. For the midweek team to finish with a victory against Auckland, which made us unbeaten on the tour, was some achievement.\n\nThe Auckland game was by far our toughest on the trip, as they had a side packed with Super 12 players, and it says a lot for our spirit that we managed another win.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nIt was a real team performance against Auckland \u2013 everybody gave everything. It would have been easy to come off tour or think it didn't matter, but that performance shows how much it meant to the players to be Lions.\n\nMATT DAWSON\n\nIt was fantastic for the Midweek Massive to finish the tour unbeaten. Sitting in the changing room afterwards, the boys were acknowledging it was a big win.\n\nWe had focused really hard on this game since selection at the weekend. This was our Test match.\n\nA great team spirit had built up within the whole Lions squad and, as we saw with the celebrations in the changing room after the game, the whole tour party was chuffed to bits that we went undefeated.\n\nThe focus of a Lions tour has got to be success in the Tests. But to have won every midweek game and to have done that in New Zealand, where rugby is a religion and every game is so intense, is an immense achievement that the coaching staff and all the players should be proud of.\n\nLeon MacDonald carves through the Lions' defence with Richie McCaw in close support.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH\n\nStraight after we played Auckland on the Tuesday before the Third Test, they sent the midweek side down to Queenstown for a night out. Our tour was over and we all had a few beers and enjoyed ourselves.\n\nThen we came back up to Auckland and Jason White suggested we go for a few beers on the Friday night before the Test, but for some reason I decided to have a quiet night in \u2013 and that proved to be a great call because the next morning I got a knock at my hotel room door and James Robson, the tour doctor, was standing there. He told me to go down and see Clive in the team room because Steve Thompson had some sort of fever.\n\nWhen I walked into the room Clive looked me up and down, and said, 'Are you alright?' Meaning, 'Have you had too much to drink these last few days?' He'd be thinking that he should maybe have asked Andy Titterrell, who is a teetotaller.\n\nI said, 'Yup, I'm fine,' and tried not to breathe on him. And that was me into the Test squad. If I had been out until 4 a.m. I would have had to tell him to go for the teetotaller, and that would have been devastating.\n\nBEN KAY\n\nThe 'Power of Four' hype wasn't hugely to our benefit. There's a danger of becoming too media obsessed \u2013 but you can't lock yourself away, or you get turned on by the media. Clive has admitted that if he had his time again, he wouldn't be as nice to the New Zealanders as he was. He said in a team meeting between the Second and Third Tests, 'Sod being nice,' \u2013 but by then the series was over.\n\nJonny Wilkinson, playing in the centre, lines up a kick.\n\nDONNCHA O'CALLAGHAN\n\nGareth Thomas took over as captain for the Second Test. The Welsh lads really respected him but I found nothing inspirational in what he had to say. His speech before the Third Test was poor. It struck the wrong tone. New Zealand had crushed us in two Tests and we should have been bursting ourselves to burst them. Instead he went on about 'doing our best'. Then he said something that really stuck in my throat: 'I know we all want to get out of here...' We were preparing for a Test match. That thought shouldn't have been entertained for a second. Anybody who thought that should have kept it to themselves. Thomas was captain of a Lions team against the All Blacks. It should have been one of the greatest days of his career. The only thing on our minds should have been winning and salvaging some pride for the jersey. Instead some fellas were feeling sorry for themselves and only thinking of the plane home.\n\nSHANE BYRNE\n\nI came on during the Second Test, having lost the starting shirt to Steve Thompson, and the lineout went excellently for me, and then I was selected to start the Third Test and, lineout-wise, what they did to us in the First we did to them in the Third, but that was never written about.\n\nI still struggle with the realisation that 2005 will always be 'that' tour, you'll always have been involved in 'that' Test. That is a pretty hard thing to live with. Then again, you step back and look at it with a sensible head and you realise you are a Lion. Tens of thousands of players would like to have been where you were and maybe as the years go by that will be the dominant emotion. Looking back now, it was like death by a thousand cuts. It was an experiment, but one that failed. A Lions tour is not a time to be experimenting. It's too important.\n\nJASON ROBINSON\n\nNew Zealand is the toughest place in the world to win a Test series \u2013 but no one was more disappointed than the players that the series was lost in the way it was.\n\nGORDON BULLOCH\n\nPlaying for the Lions is incredibly special. I only played ten minutes of the First Test in Australia in 2001, but I was still a part of it \u2013 and there are not many Scotsmen of my generation able to say they have won a Test match as a Lion.\n\nCaptaining the Lions three times on the 2005 tour and going undefeated is another great honour. Things like that I will look back on with a lot of pride in the years to come. For many players, it was hard being selected for the midweek side time and time again. Many of these guys are used to being first picks for their clubs and their countries, and I think it says a lot for them that we didn't have any cases of guys 'going off tour'.\n\nIt proved what great coaches we had in Ian McGeechan, Gareth Jenkins, Mike Ford and Craig White. They created a side from nothing and brought a real attitude to it. They drilled into us the attitude that, once you take the field in that famous jersey, you need to show it the respect it deserves and perform to your very best, whether you're playing a Test match or a midweek game.\n\nMARTIN CORRY\n\nWhen you look back at 2001, that was a massive high for me, but 2005 was a big disappointment. To go over there and be uncompetitive was frustrating. When you get on the biggest stage you want to play your best rugby and the Lions fell well short. That was disappointing but, as an organisation, I think they've learned a hell of a lot from that.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL (Ireland)  \nToured: 2005 & 2009\n\nClive tried something different by taking a lot of players and coaching staff. On paper it was probably a good idea because it's such an attritional game now. But the trade-off is you don't get to gel as a team because there are so many players. We didn't gel as well as we would have liked. Gelling is the most important thing to the success of the team. When you look back at some of the players who have worn the British & Irish Lions jerseys down through the years they are great players. In 2005 we didn't live up to that. A lot of things went against us on the tour, but at the same time I don't think that we did the tradition proud.\n\nSir Clive Woodward congratulates Graham Henry on his series victory.\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT\n\n# [OLD SCHOOL VALUES  \n2009](006.html#a3)\n\nSOUTH AFRICA\n\nIT IS in many ways a strange thing that the popularity of the Lions amongst players and followers of rugby is as high as ever, despite the overwhelming number of desperate disappointments that have been suffered. Perhaps this says good things about the resilience in the spirits of British and Irish rugby people.\n\nThe scale of disappointment may be a personal matter which can only be judged in the individual heart and mind. But it is still somewhat doubtful if any Lions team has been as devastated, or as shockingly treated by fate, as the 2009 party during the Second Test on a warm day in Pretoria \u2013 an occasion which must arguably also rank as one of the most massive and awe-inspiring, not only in Lions history but in sport anywhere, for some time.\n\nThe Lions, needing a win to rescue the series, had turned in one of their greatest performances, and shut South Africa, the world champions, completely out of the game. The Springboks had escaped censure after a disgraceful gouging incident by their flanker Schalk Burger led only to a yellow card; then the Lions were hit by what amounted to a double-double whammy, losing both their dominant props and both their illustrious centres within a few devastating minutes.\n\nThey held the lead into the last seconds until a moment of madness by Ronan O'Gara gave away the winning penalty to the Springboks. To say that the Lions were thunderstruck afterwards is a gross understatement, and there are players who to this day struggle to cope with the defeat. There are also Lions supporters having the same problem \u2013 on that day in Pretoria, there was the astonishing sight of a whole side of the grand old stadium at Loftus Versfeld packed and boiling in a sea of red.\n\nIf the final result of the series, 2-1 to the world champions, did not entirely suggest that British & Irish rugby was in the best of health, then the existence, and the concept of the Lions, was clearly still of quite stunning importance. And not least to South Africa itself, where the economy was boosted in remarkable numbers by the spending power of tens of thousands of British and Irish of all social classes and persuasions who poured into the country to follow their heroes.\n\nIn the aftermath, history will recognise the pride that was restored in the Lions jersey despite the 2-1 series loss. The people of South Africa embraced the tourists and many highly experienced players \u2013 such as Phil Vickery and Lee Mears \u2013 still rate the trip as the best of their careers. The Lions abandoned the fruitless kick-chase game that was prevalent in the domestic leagues of Europe, played some classic attacking rugby and were agonisingly close to success.\n\nWhen Ian McGeechan, the head coach for the fourth time, arrived at the Landmark Hotel in London's Marylebone in May 2008 the assembled gathering knew the future of the Lions was in safe hands. After the heart-breaking disappointment of 2001 in Australia under Graham Henry and the more drastic reversal in 2005 in New Zealand under Sir Clive Woodward it was only natural the Lions would turn to him.\n\nOff the field things changed as well as the Lions went away from the claustrophobic model of the modern tour. McGeechan asked the players to become part of South Africa and to understand the country rather than be holed up in their hotel rooms playing video games \u2013 and they responded, even donating the fines from the players' tour court to local charities.\n\nThere were coaching clinics for local children in impoverished townships where the players were greeted as heroes and, wonder of wonders, the Lions actually got out and about and saw a few of the local sights. In the build-up to the First Test match the Scotsman ensured the players ate where the fans ate so they could see the magnitude of the occasion coming up.\n\nHe also ensured there were no cliques \u2013 something which had dogged previous tours \u2013 by making the team room the hub of all activities and making separate players responsible for things such as discipline, music, golf days and outings. It was back to an old-school-type of tour and it was all the better for it.\n\nThe choice of manager was as sound as the coach he chose \u2013 with Gerald Davies, the urbane former Wales winger and a two-time Lion put in place. Davies loves the whole concept of the Lions and although he admitted winning was important on trips like this, he said it was not the only thing. He promised the players the experience of a lifetime. And they got it.\n\nMcGeechan's backroom staff contained the guts of the Welsh coaching team with Warren Gatland, Shaun Edwards, Neil Jenkins and Rob Howley all travelling along with English scrum coach Graham Rowntree.\n\nMcGeechan's captain was Paul O'Connell, the great Munster warrior, one of the few players who came out of the 2005 tour with his reputation intact and who had turned into one of the best locks in the world. It was a choice based on the same principles as that of Martin Johnson in 1997: a big man to loom large at the coin toss and to cast a dominant figure on the field.\n\nThe initial party for the ten-match tour comprised 37 players, a significant reduction from four years previously, and the balance between the Celtic nations and the English, which had been lopsided in New Zealand was redressed. Leinster, who had won the Heineken Cup that year, were represented by the likes of Brian O'Driscoll, Luke Fitzgerald, Rob Kearney and Jamie Heaslip, who along with Munster men such as O'Connell, Ronan O'Gara, David Wallace, Keith Earls and Donncha O'Callaghan gave the Irish a powerful presence in the squad.\n\nThe Welsh contingent included the massive trainee doctor and centre Jamie Roberts, who was to be the Lions' man of the series, as well as, amongst others, Gethin Jenkins, Matthew Rees and Adam Jones, who would form an all-Welsh front-row in the Second Test. England flanker Tom Croft was considered unlucky to miss out on selection but by the time of the first match against South Africa in Durban he would be embedded in the Test side thanks to Alan Quinlan's pre-tour suspension for foul play and his outstanding form in the early matches.\n\nCroft improved immeasurably after a plea from McGeechan to get more involved in the game than he did with England or Leicester. A brilliant athlete and lineout forward, Croft often missed phases of play but on this trip the coach told him to roll up his sleeves and graft as well as doing the fancy stuff out wide and he did \u2013 to spectacular effect.\n\nMcGeechan also abandoned the principle of having a separate coaching team for the midweek side thus encouraging players that everyone was in the running for a Test place from the word go and that he had no preconceived ideas of what his best XV would look like.\n\nBut the Scot was hamstrung with injuries before the Lions had even left Pennyhill Park, their base near Bagshot, a luxury hotel that England use for national training. Irish hooker Jerry Flannery went lame, Welsh winger Leigh Halfpenny was struggling and centre Tom Shanklin and scrum-half Tom\u00e1s O'Leary were other casualties.\n\nYet there was also the eternal question of the Lions place in the game at home. The players arrived immediately after major end of season games. Northampton would not even allow Euan Murray, their prop, to attend an administration session. Everything appertaining to proper preparation for a great rugby team had to be curtailed, short-circuited. It was a crying shame.\n\nThe list of injuries would, as ever, grow longer during a brutal tour and by the end of the trip James Robson, the Scottish doctor on his fifth Lions trip, would be questioning in a major media conference how long players' bodies could stand up to the extreme demands of modern rugby.\n\nMcGeechan was also restricted by a fixture list that he had had no input in putting together, as the itinerary had been formalised before his appointment. Before the Second Test, for example, the Lions were forced to fly up to altitude without much time to get acclimatised, but typically they just got on with it. While they were playing at sea level in Cape Town, and flying up to altitude only 48 hours before the game, the Springboks had long been checked in to their Pretoria hotel.\n\nWith the First Test looming the Lions were six from six with wins over the Royal XV, the Golden Lions, the Free State Cheetahs, the Sharks, Western Province and the Southern Kings in the bag and McGeechan's idea of his Test team was forming. Perhaps the only drawback was that the top Springboks were kept out of the provincial games, diminishing them as occasions. That was sad.\n\nThe Western Province clash and the match with the Cheetahs were close-run things resulting in three and two-point wins respectively and by the time the Lions arrived in Durban for the First Test the massed ranks of red-shirted fans were there to greet them. Croft had forced his way into the side and would score two tries in a game that ultimately ended in a 26-21 defeat for the Lions who at one point were 26-7 down before battling back.\n\nThe 2009 tour party.\n\nThe major talking point occurred at the scrum where Phil Vickery, the Lions tight-head, struggled against Tendai 'The Beast' Mtawarira. McGeechan still maintains that the penalties that went against Vickery could just as easily have gone the other way. Yet although the Springboks took a big lead, once driving through the Lions pack as if it was made of paper, the Lions came roaring back, dominated most of the second half, and could have won.\n\nThe final midweek match, against the Emerging Springboks at Newlands, ended in a 13-13 draw and then all roads led to Pretoria for one of the most astonishing Test matches ever played, and in which Simon Shaw, the giant lock finally making the Test team on his third Lions tour, achieved the admittedly unwanted distinction of giving arguably the greatest individual performance in a losing cause in Lions history.\n\nWith fullback Lee Byrne joining the ever-expanding casualty list, Ireland's Rob Kearney came in at fullback, the front-row was rejigged and the remarkable Shaw was given his start. O'Driscoll set the tone with a big hit on massive second-row Victor Matfield then controversy struck when the South African flanker Schalk Burger, in his 50th cap, appeared to gouge Luke Fitzgerald, the Lions winger. Burger got an eight-week ban and there were also two weeks off for home lock Bakkies Botha for a charge on Adam Jones that dislocated the prop's shoulder. No one could explain why a gouging should only be a yellow card.\n\nGoing into the final quarter the Lions were 19-8 in front until the unthinkable happened. Gethin Jenkins and Adam Jones, clearly on top in the scrum, were both injured within seconds of each other, O'Driscoll and Roberts both went off, with the Irishman reeling about like a drunk after a clash of heads. Suddenly, key Springboks like Fourie du Preez, the scrum-half, and Pierre Spies, the No 8, were seen in a game from which they had been entirely shut out.\n\nBryan Habana and Jaque Fourie scored for the 'Boks and gave them a three point lead. Somehow, the Lions rallied with a penalty from Stephen Jones to make it 25-25. But then O'Gara made his calamitous error. He kicked ahead but lunged into du Preez as the scrum-half leapt to gather the ball in the air. This gave Springbok stand-off Morn\u00e9 Steyn a penalty from halfway to erase 12 years of hurt that had built up since the 1997 series. Steyn kicked an ice-cool goal in the last second and the tourists were left numb.\n\nWith the full support of the coaching team, many of the party went to lick their wounds on safari, with a few drinks to ease the pain, whilst the coaches tried to pick up the pieces of a battered group of players. There were plenty of enforced changes for the final Test which was held at Ellis Park, the traditional stronghold of Springbok rugby and the Lions were up against it to salvage anything from the series at a venue where South Africa rarely lose.\n\nBut it was now that the expertise of McGeechan and his deputies and the spirit of O'Connell and his team shone through. Shaw delivered another huge performance, a rejuvenated Shane Williams scored two tries, one beautifully created by Riki Flutey (who created his own piece of history by becoming the first man to appear both for and against the Lions on a tour, having faced the 2005 team in New Zealand playing for Wellington), and there was a sensational breakaway try from Ugo Monye.\n\nVickery took his revenge on The Beast up front, taking total control as the Lions recorded a 28-9 win \u2013 equalling the biggest winning margin by the Lions against South Africa and their first Test win for eight years. In truth, the South Africans were never in it even though they desperately wanted to chalk up a clean sweep in the series. It was an epic Lions day, even if it threw their disappointment over losing the series into even sharper relief.\n\nIt was the last time many of the players would wear the Lions shirt, as Gatland had told them in the dressing room before the match, but they had done their bit to restore pride in the jersey and ensured that the players who were to wear it in Australia in 2013 have a legacy to defend, and embellish.\n\nIn the aftermath of the tour, debate once again centred on the position of the Lions in the sporting scenery in Britain and Ireland. Preparation and recovery time is now so vitally important, and if the Lions are as important to as many people as all the evidence suggests, then why is there so little stomach to alter the domestic season in order to accommodate their needs?\n\nHistory has proved that it is a herculean task to win in the major southern hemisphere nations. But with an arm tied behind your back, it becomes almost impossible.\n\nTour captain, Paul O'Connell.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nI came home one night and found five missed calls on my phone. There had been a guy on an English number trying to sell me shares over the last few weeks, so I was avoiding his call.\n\nThen I saw the number again on the Tuesday morning. The voice on the other end said he was Ian McGeechan but I still wasn't sure because we've got people at the club like Brian Carney and Frankie Sheahan who are always making crank calls.\n\nThis time I thought the accent was too good. Once I was sure, we had a chat and, straight out, he asked me to be captain and I said I'd be delighted to do it.\n\nThe results secured by Willie-John McBride and those fellas back in 1971 and 1974 has made all those players legends. The same can be said about the guys in '89 and '97. That was the goal that we all set ourselves \u2013 to join them in the history books.\n\nA Lions tour of South Africa is the ultimate, the pinnacle for any player from the Four Home Nations. I wanted to make sure we do justice to the Lions jersey; I don't think we did that in 2005. It was essential that we lived up to the tradition and history of the Lions. A lot of things went against us in 2005 but we did not do the tradition justice. That was a big motivation for me and for a lot of us who were on that tour. We saw 2009 as a big opportunity to put that right.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nWhen the management board asked me to have one more crack at being Lions coach, I told them, 'There are certain principles I think we have to work to. If you don't agree with them, please don't appoint me because I am not going to change my values.'\n\nThose values meant improving the future by using the best of the past. Things like players sharing rooms, hanging out together, travelling together, really getting to know each other. It did not mean staying in one big centre in the country, flying in and out and never coming into contact with the country or its people.\n\nI also wanted the players to understand the rugby \u2013 with one coaching team, one medical team and one strong management team that set an example to the players. In every way it was a blueprint put together from all my tours and all my experiences, good and bad.\n\nLEE MEARS (England)  \nToured: 2009\n\nThe squad announcement was a weird experience. I was in the club bar at Bath with a few of the boys and a couple of the management waiting for it to be announced on TV.\n\nIn true Gerald style, he went through the squad backwards from 15, 14 and I was thinking 'Oh God'. Then I thought, 'At least two is before one,' but then he did all the props! I think I was the second to last name to be read out so it was pretty nerve-wracking.\n\nYou never know if your name will be read out. I've been in similar situations quite a few times. Sometimes you're picked, sometimes you're disappointed. It was amazing just to see my name up there. Everything Gerald did in the build-up was just fantastic.\n\nIt dawns on you that, if you have a good Six Nations, you could be a British & Irish Lion, something no one can ever take away from you.\n\nIan McGeechan and Paul O'Connell did an amazing job at Pennyhill Park. Paul stood up in front of the boys and said, 'This is a different tour to normal. It's harder than an international tour, but we've got the best players here and you can't just shut yourself off and hide away. You've got to come out and be open and friendly. If you do, you'll have a better time for it.' That's what we all tried to do.\n\nIt probably took a couple of weeks to get to know everyone properly but it was really interesting to see how friendly everyone was. Everyone bought into the camaraderie side of things and it was a fantastic tour. We bonded over a beer or out for dinner. Paulie O'Connell said early on, 'I won't refuse a beer with anyone. If you want to come and be social, come and be social.' That's pretty much how it went. We all went out for food as often as possible. A few of us went to watch the golf at Wentworth and we went to the races \u2013 all the things that boys love doing. That bonding carried on on tour.\n\nMIKE PHILLIPS (Wales)  \nToured: 2009\n\nI tore medial and anterior cruciate ligaments playing for the Ospreys a year or so earlier and I went through some very low moments \u2013 dark times when I didn't think my knee would ever come back right, times when I thought I'd never be the same player. If you get dropped, you only have yourself to blame, but when you're injured it's so frustrating because you can't do anything about it. You just don't know what's going to happen. It was my first injury as well so I wasn't sure how to cope with things.\n\nBut I kept my focus on recovering and coming back as the number one scrum-half for Wales. So it was huge for me when I did that. I played well and things were topped off even more when I was selected for the Lions. It was amazing.\n\nUGO MONYE (England)  \nToured: 2009\n\nYou go into the Six Nations with a thought at the back of your mind which says, 'If you play well here, you might be in with a shout.' Fortunately, I was able to give a good account of myself and then it became a realistic target. I knew I was in the mix somewhere but no more than that.\n\nI couldn't bring myself to watch the squad selection on TV so I stood outside. I've never been so nervous and I've never experienced a more anxious wait in my life. Then I heard the lads shout out my name and I just screamed with delight.\n\nI watched the last Lions tour of South Africa as a 14-year-old schoolboy. It was beyond my wildest dreams to be part of the tour in 2009. I felt so drained emotionally after the announcement that when it came to training, I'd used up so much nervous energy that I felt exhausted. It was the proudest moment of my life. I phoned my mum straight away and she was so happy, shouting down the phone. Then I called my dad. We didn't say anything for a while and then we both laughed in sheer delight.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nI must say from a players' point of view and getting to know guys and the whole Lions experience, I feel I can finally relate to the guys from the '70s who talk about the Lions being the ultimate thing. You read a lot of guys from the modern era talk about their Lions experiences from 1993 to 2005 and they were really, really tough slogs that fellas didn't enjoy very much \u2013 with the exception of '97, of course. And I can see that, definitely. You're miles from home, you're with a bunch of guys who, no matter how sound they are, they're still fellas you don't know very well and it can be a strange place to find yourself at times.\n\nBut this tour was quite old-school in that we actually went out quite a bit at the start of it. The big challenge of tours in Australia and New Zealand is that all the games kick off at seven or eight at night because of TV. But because South Africa is more or less the same time zone as us, most of the games were three o'clock kick-offs. So we had all this time to spend with each other in the evenings after the games which was a big thing for us coming together. In the context of a Lions tour, that's massive because you've got to become a team some way. You've got to become team-mates and not just fellas wearing the same shirt.\n\nPHIL VICKERY\n\nGeech gets the best out of you because he trusts you to do the right things. Nobody went over the mark and everyone respected the rules, and it was nice and refreshing to be on a tour where people wanted the best for you.\n\nThe management told us just because we're the Lions we didn't have to be tee total. As long as we did our prep work they didn't have an issue with us going out for dinner or drinks. It was like, 'Christ, we're actually being treated like adults.'\n\nSTEPHEN JONES\n\nIan McGeechan made a point of trying to reclaim the Lions ethos and values, and that really struck a chord with all of us. The way the tour was structured and the attention to detail was just startling. The coaches all knew that they had to manage players who had come off the back of a long season and they did it really well. I felt it was the little things, like all the players sharing rooms, something that we didn't do in New Zealand, which had the biggest impact on the squad. It brought the squad together and it's fascinating how something like that could bring such a positive feeling to a Lions tour. It was these kind of things that made the 2009 Lions tour one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career.\n\nSIMON SHAW\n\nGeech had a massive impact on the 1997 tour. While the New Zealand tour in 2005 wasn't that successful in terms of the Test matches, the side that he looked after went unbeaten and that says a lot about him. That side probably enjoyed the tour more than the side that predominantly played on a Saturday. He was able to keep spirits high and to keep things positive. That's something he does very well and was at the core of what he brought to 2009.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS (Wales)  \nToured: 2009\n\nGeech is a pretty special bloke, he's down to earth, a lovely guy and he knows what he wants from players \u2013 commitment and effort. And that's what we gave.\n\nMIKE BLAIR (Scotland)  \nToured: 2009\n\nThere was a big farewell dinner at the Natural History Museum before we left. It finished about midnight and then we all headed back to Pennyhill Park, pretty tired. We were scheduled to have a day out sailing, which was a couple of hours' drive away, and doing various bits and pieces like that, so Leigh Halfpenny and I, who were sharing a room, piled back and started getting ready for bed, when we both got missed calls from a number neither of us recognised. We listened to the voice mail and it said that the activities and training the next day had been cancelled and that we were all to get down to the hotel bar immediately. Geech and Gerald had obviously discussed things and decided that the best thing for team-bonding was for us all to get together and have some beers. And it was excellent, an old-school attitude to things that created a great atmosphere with everyone just chatting and mingling and having a laugh over some drinks. They were obviously so conscious about the mistakes made in 2001 and 2005 and wanted to get back that old Lions feel to things. For all the team-bonding exercises that you can do, there are few \u2013 if any \u2013 that work as well as going out for some beers, relaxing and just enjoying one another's company.\n\nThings like that were organised and handled so well on the tour and the coaches and backroom staff were all tremendous choices. Gerald Davies was magnificent; a true gentleman, in every sense of the word and such a legend. Chatting to him and hearing him talk about his rugby experiences, especially with the Lions, was just incredible \u2013 he was so knowledgeable, great fun and such a nice guy. He struck the chord as tour manager perfectly.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nIt is very important for those who have been Lions to be part of the administration, because they are passing on the inheritance from one generation to another and that is crucial. You have to understand deep down what it means to be a Lion. It is only a Lion who can truly understand what the experience is like.\n\nRight at the start I stood up in front of the team, me from an amateur era, managing a totally professional team. Why should I do it? I was only an amateur. But what I told them was that I had come from an amateur era to join them in their professional era, but that being professional never simply meant being paid to play \u2013 it is a philosophy about giving your very best, using your talent to the maximum and being highly, highly competitive in all those things. I told them that there were players I knew in the amateur years who were as professional, and in a few cases more professional, than some people in the room. It was an attitude of mind.\n\nThere were a lot of things I wanted to bring from the past into the present, into this ultra-professional tour. Players sharing rooms, which is what we had always done; the need to be mixing with the supporters, not to be aloof; to touch the community in South Africa, not to tour in ignorance, not to divorce ourselves from the media.\n\nAnd I told them that for one point in our lifetime, we would be together as one group. Some people might again go on a tour in the future, but that would be a different group. We needed to focus on doing it then, that day, not the next day, not tomorrow.\n\nThe managership is an odd post. He is part of a team but not part. The coaches are always in the room together. The medical people are always together. The media have their own team. The manager is not part of anything, just overseeing everything. He tries to set the tone.\n\nLEE MEARS\n\nPowelly (Andy Powell) was our main entertainment but there were so many characters. I had some great room-mates. I had Powelly, 'Bomb' [Adam Jones], Alun-Wyn Jones, and Brian O'Driscoll. Nathan Hines gets a special mention \u2013 we were little and large and we bonded really well.\n\nMIKE BLAIR\n\nPowelly was hilarious. He was the butt of a lot of jokes, but I think he quite liked it. He's the perfect guy to have on a tour like that \u2013 a great player and a great guy off the pitch. We always used to start training with a piggy in the middle game of football and Powelly was hilarious when he was in the middle one time. He was there for about five minutes \u2013 which is a pretty long time when you're doing something like that \u2013 and he was charging around, almost getting to the ball time and time again, but just missing it. Everyone was roaring him on, but eventually we could hardly breathe it was so funny. Eventually he got to the ball and just hoofed it out of the circle, shouting, 'Have it!' like Peter Kay in the John Smith's advert.\n\nThe tour was full of great characters like that \u2013 Wagga (Nathan Hines) is a great tourist; he has the ability to break the ice with anyone almost immediately and get on with them as if he's known them for years. I had some great room-mates, guys like Leigh Halfpenny, Tom Croft, Tommy Bowe, Donncha O'Callaghan \u2013 everyone I shared with was great. Donncha is one of the funniest guys I've ever met, he's a great guy and a great man to have on tour \u2013 the life and soul of the party on big nights out, even though he's tee total. I was hugely impressed with how he reacted to his dirt-tracker status as well; it was pretty evident early on that it looked like they were going to go with Alun-Wyn Jones and Paul O'Connell in the second-row for the First Test, but Donncha just worked his balls off all the time and was incredibly supportive to both of them. He typifies what makes the Lions so special.\n\nTOM CROFT (England)  \nToured: 2009\n\nThere were great characters on the tour. I had never met Donncha O'Callaghan before, but one day in Cape Town I returned to the room I was sharing with Tommy Bowe to find my bed missing.\n\nDonncha told me that he had seen everything and one of the cleaners had nicked it. So I went up to the cleaner to ask why they had moved my bed, and it turned out that Donncha had dismantled it and put it down the fire escape.\n\nSTEPHEN JONES\n\nSome real characters did emerge on the tour and usually had us in stitches. Ugo Monye, the England and Harlequins wing, was our travel guide and took it upon himself to always give a speech, detailing the history and facts and figures of every new place we had arrived in.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nWe reverted to old-style touring, all training as one team instead of being split. It was a big difference to 2005 and even, in many ways, to 2001. You felt a real togetherness throughout the squad and we were all playing with smiles on our faces.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nThere was a big buzz within the squad. There were a lot fewer people than I was used to in 2005 and that was the best thing about it. Everyone was on the pitch at the same time, everyone was in the gym together and everyone fitted into the team room as one.\n\nClive tried something different which looked good on paper but we struggled. It was a tough tour because so many things were not in our favour. We had a very big squad and a very big coaching staff and, straight away, we failed to come together as a team.\n\nFirst of all, you have got to be a team. You have got to want to play for each other, first and foremost. If you have bonds, you will always be willing to play for others in the team and that always makes a big difference.\n\nMIKE BLAIR\n\nThe strength and conditioning guys, (Paul) 'Bobby' Stridgeon and Craig White, also played a big part with raising spirits and keeping everyone's morale high. They were hilarious, totally mental. They assigned Euan Murray the task of telling a daily joke on the bus to training \u2013 which was always terrible \u2013 they organised a Through the Keyhole video thing of people's rooms, had all sorts of weekly challenges and so on \u2013 really, really good guys. There was one video thing they did where they asked various members of the team and management a question, but then dubbed a different question over the final cut. So you had someone like Alun Wyn Jones being asked to describe a gorilla, which he did, but on the video they changed the question to: 'How would you describe Warren Gatland?' So, he's there saying, 'Silver hair, long wrinkly face, big nose, massive head, pretty grumpy, likes to lie around eating and sleeping all day...' It was hilarious.\n\nROSS FORD (Scotland)  \nToured: 2009\n\nHe's called 'Bobby' after Adam Sandler's character in The Water Boy. He's the perfect kind of guy to have on tour. He has so much energy, he was always bouncing about the place causing mischief and keeping everyone going. There was never a dull moment when he was around.\n\nMIKE BLAIR\n\nAnother really good guy was Rala (Paddy O'Reilly), the Irish kit guy. He's an absolute legend among the Irish players. They have a tradition in the Ireland squad of the players going to pick up their socks and shorts from Rala the night before a Test match and the players spend the evening coming in and out of his room, hanging around for quite a while getting his banter and chatting to the other guys, and they instigated that on the tour. He was such a nice guy. I remember one evening having a chat to him about sweets that we all liked and I said that I loved Skittles. The next day after training we headed over to the tables where all our recovery shakes and protein bars and things like that were laid out for us, and in my compartment he'd put a bag of Skittles. Little things like that can make such a difference when you're away for so many weeks on tour \u2013 you really felt well-looked after.\n\nI was disappointed not to make it into the original squad selection, but was obviously delighted when I was called up after Tom\u00e1s O'Leary was injured playing for Munster. I loved working with the coaches \u2013 I thought they were all tremendous, particularly Rob Howley and Shaun Edwards. It was interesting seeing Shaun's approach to defence. Everyone calls it a blitz defence, but as he says, it's not really a blitz \u2013 the players stand a little wider than in other defensive formations and go up straight \u2013 and just keep going, as opposed to pushing up and out, or up and in. By continuing to push on, you hold your line and close down the options out wide. Then the key is in the aggression and power of the hit. As a scrum-half, I'm used to a kind of sweeper role in defence, but Shaun likes to have his scrum-halves in the line; so I could see with the systems they had in mind and the style that they wanted to play in South Africa, why I maybe hadn't made the initial squad \u2013 they picked Mike Phillips, Tom\u00e1s and Harry Ellis, all solid, robust players that could hold their own in the defensive line. What was really great, though, was the sense that once you were there you stood as good a chance as any to make the Test team. I had visions of coming in and making a big push towards the Test team. Things went really well in training at Pennyhill Park and they selected the team for the game against the Royal XV while we were still there \u2013 and I was in. At the time, I thought, 'Brilliant, what a great opportunity,' but it didn't really turn out as well as I'd hoped.\n\nPlaying in that game was obviously an early opportunity to catch the eye, but it was the first time we had really played together as a team and we were all a bit rusty.\n\nRONAN O'GARA\n\nThe altitude we played at for that first game made me feel like an imbecile. The mind was telling me one thing and the body wouldn't get into the position to do it. I certainly underestimated the effects.\n\nJOE WORSLEY (England)  \nToured: 2009\n\nThe Royal XV match was my first game for four weeks and the altitude just made me feel like a zombie. Once your lungs are struggling, the rest of your game suffers. It was really, really tough.\n\nMIKE BLAIR\n\nWith 13 minutes to go we were 12 points behind and you are thinking that you are going to be involved in the most disastrous start to a Lions tour ever. Then Lee Byrne sent an up-and-under out of defence and it bounced into his hands for a try, Ronan O'Gara kicked a penalty and Alun-Wyn Jones barged over from a driven lineout to put us ahead with five minutes to go.\n\nIn the last play of the match, Rog (O'Gara) touched down under the posts and we ended up winning by 12 points \u2013 but it had been touch-and-go for a long time.\n\nThere was a really small crowd and there was a racetrack around the pitch, so it was a pretty strange atmosphere for a Lions match. And I remember Martyn Williams saying at the end of the tour that the toughest match we had was that first one. But we got through it, and that was obviously the important thing so far as the tour was concerned.\n\nLee Byrne.\n\nSIMON SHAW\n\nWith Warren Gatland as your coach, if you play badly, he'll tell you. After that first game he told me in no uncertain terms I'd played crap.\n\nI'd probably have given myself a C-minus and accepted that I hadn't played for five weeks. Warren was blunt but that's his way. But the flipside was that after I got on against the Sharks and played well, he said it was a remarkable turnaround. I like that honesty in a coach.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nGeech and the others were always straight down the line. The coaches didn't tell the players anything that wasn't true and in that respect all places were up for grabs. Having a wise management like that was massive for us.\n\nMike Blair spins the ball away under pressure from the Royal XV's Jacques Lombaard.\n\nMIKE BLAIR\n\nWe were invited to a big party one evening at the British High Commissioner's house in Johannesburg and we were all in our number one suits. Brian O'Driscoll was out in the garden and there wasn't much lighting. He thought he was walking over some paving but it turned out to be the cover of a swimming pool and he ended up in the water \u2013 maybe not up to his neck but certainly past his ankles. He was obviously fined for that.\n\nTommy Bowe crosses the line to score against the Golden Lions.\n\nUGO MONYE\n\nWe played the Golden Lions in our second match on tour and they weren't perhaps the best opposition, but it was a great confidence booster to score 74 points and answer a lot of chat that was coming from the Springbok camp after the Royal XV game that we were in for a hiding. We really showed a ruthless edge. When you have guys like Stephen Jones who can put anyone through a hole, a fantastic footballer like Brian O'Driscoll and someone like Jamie Roberts who always gets over the advantage line, it's a great place to be a winger \u2013 there are so many opportunities for you to sniff around to take advantage.\n\nPHIL VICKERY\n\nI was asked to captain the side against Western Province. When you're asked to be captain you say, 'Fantastic.' Then, within two seconds, you think, 'Shit, this is quite a big deal.'\n\nWhen you play for the Lions you're carrying the dreams and frustrations of millions of people. Sometimes you have to remember that there are a hell of a lot of people who are right behind you and want you to do well.\n\nWhen you're in that environment it's a small bubble. You can get carried away and the most trivial little things become a real big problem. It's important to step outside it, realise what you're part of and enjoy it.\n\nI've captained England to a World Cup final, won a bundle of England caps and been asked to be captain of the Lions. That 2009 tour was the most unbelievable experience and I can honestly say it far surpassed anything I thought I'd reach.\n\nLee Mears scores against the Natal Sharks.\n\nSIMON SHAW\n\nI came off the bench against the Sharks and then again against Western Province and it's always difficult to make an impression off the bench. While we all have ambitions, the main thing is to try and maintain the winning streak by playing for the team.\n\nBut we all knew that a huge performance could just as easily get us into the starting line-up with the Test team. Geech had a three-word sentence that he said to me: 'Remember Jeremy Davidson.' In '97 I thought I had done enough to get in the Test side, but then Jeremy played against the Emerging Springboks in the last midweek game before the First Test and played so well that he was selected to partner Johnno in the Test. He held that place for the series and I never got capped. So I know that selection is never decided until the last minute \u2013 you always have a chance to play. As it turned out, I missed out on selection for the First Test again, but I didn't give up. I knew that there were still other games to go and at that stage you had no idea how the Test squad would go in that first match of the series. So I just kept my head up and kept working.\n\nThere were a lot of parallels between 1997 and 2009 \u2013 the togetherness, the ability to grind out wins when not playing well and also to play some good-looking rugby at other times. The older I've got, the more I've come to appreciate that a Lions tour is more special than anything else.\n\nRONAN O'GARA\n\nThe game against the Southern Kings was our last before the First Test, and it was brutal. There were more cheap shots in that one match than in the whole tour put together. The general consensus in the dressing room was shock over some of the things which went on.\n\nGordon D'Arcy took an awful cheap shot from an elbow when he was running wide. He was disgusted with De Wet Barry. James Hook got smashed and had to go off. There was a lot coming at us but we backed each other up 100 per cent. We weren't prepared to sit back and see one of our own side going through that.\n\nJaco van der Westhuyzen, their fly-half, was still being lippy at the end, saying, 'You're going to get smashed in the Tests.' I didn't think there was any need for stuff like that. I had it out with him and we then made our peace.\n\nThere's no doubt they were more interested in the man than the ball, but we stuck in. It wasn't pretty but it was another win and we were six out of six on the tour, which was a big thing going into the Test series.\n\nCaptain's words: Paul O'Connell gives a final changing-room pep talk.\n\nMIKE BLAIR\n\nIt was a pretty horrible old game. I'd knackered my ankle in training a week or so earlier, but was asked to play that game and to try and make it through the whole 80 minutes. The management wanted to keep Mike Phillips and Harry Ellis fit for the First Test, so I knew that unless I was badly injured, I was going to play the whole game. With the stuff that was going on off the ball, I was just happy to make it through unscathed \u2013 and I'm sure the management were pleased I did too because it meant that Mike and Harry weren't exposed to potentially being taken out deliberately before the Tests. A lot of other boys were less fortunate, and James Hook was poleaxed early on and had to be helped off, which was a shame because he is class and I'd been looking forward to playing with him.\n\nAndy Powell leads the celebrations after the Lions scraped past the Free State Cheetahs.\n\nLEE MEARS\n\nPutting on the shirt for the first time brings a bit of pressure but also lots of excitement. But it's the same even in training when you look around and see all the boys that you're surrounded by get that buzz.\n\nI thought I had a reasonable tour and was in with a chance of a Test place but everyone's so good at that level that you don't know if you're going to get the nod. When Geech read out the team and you turn the page over and there it is, I was just thinking, 'Here we go \u2013 this is everything I've ever dreamed of.'\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nThe competition throughout the squad was intense. There were some great players who didn't get into the starting Test XV. Not only did that drive up the intensity of our training and the way we played, but it kept those who were starting completely on their toes. When people get the jersey, they know they don't own it. They know they are only borrowing it.\n\nThe pack prepares for engagement during the brutal encounter against the Southern Kings.\n\nUGO MONYE\n\nTwelve months before the First Test, I was on the bench for the England Saxons against the USA in Chicago. It was some journey to go from that to starting a Test match for the British & Irish Lions.\n\nOn paper, everything was against us \u2013 we were playing the world champions in their backyard, and they were a hugely experienced and physical team \u2013 but we all felt that we were part of a fantastic squad, with real speed and a big power game available to us.\n\nTOM CROFT\n\nWe were given our First Test shirt by Willie-John McBride and he gave us a talk at the hotel before we got on the bus. Half the boys were on the verge of breaking down. He explained what the shirt represented and spoke of the history of the Lions.\n\nI still find it bizarre discussing that tour. Before I went I didn't realise it was such a big thing. It was almost as if the fact that I was involved meant that it couldn't be important. But in South Africa it was humbling to see how the Lions fans reacted whenever we drove past in the bus.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nWhen I got picked for the tour it was certainly a life-changing moment. I was one of the inexperienced guys out there but halfway through, I found myself in the Test team.\n\nIt was nerve-wracking before the First Test, and doubts are always on the edge of your thoughts. The Lions is a unique and special team. Not many people get the chance to pull on a Lions jersey and you are just desperate to give a good account of yourself. You have to remember, and keep telling yourself, 'You have been picked because you are good enough to be there.' I was the youngest player in the Test team but I was with a good bunch of guys that I had grown with throughout the tour. You have to trust yourself, trust those guys around you, and then prepare yourself to go out to do battle for one another.\n\nRunning out for the First Test match was incredible. There is nothing else like it as a player. It is like running out in the Coliseum as a gladiator. You expect it to be a sea of green. But it was full of people in red following us.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nUnless you've been in a Lions Test before, nothing prepares you for it. You are in for something you have never experienced before.\n\nPHIL VICKERY\n\nI've never known a Test match start so fast or so furiously. After 15 minutes, we were all absolutely hanging. There were guys calling for the ball to be kicked out so we could get a breather. It was incredible.\n\nThen the problems with the scrum started. To be honest, I still don't know to this day exactly what the problem was. The Beast got under me every time, squatting low and forcing me up \u2013 which is illegal, by the way \u2013 but there was nothing I could do to counter him and Bryce Lawrence, the referee, did nothing about it. He just gave penalty after penalty away against me.\n\nI was eventually subbed off to chants of, 'Beast, Beast, Beast!' from the home crowd. It was the most humiliating experience of my career.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nWe were steamrollered in the first half of the match. Going into the second half the Springboks made this long, long drive and scored with seeming ease. But from that moment on, the game went completely our way, and we were steamrollering them. Carwyn James felt after the Second Test in 1971, when we lost, that maybe we did have the measure of them, and I had some feelings like that in Durban.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nIt was incredibly frustrating. We had a couple of great try-scoring opportunities. Jean de Villiers made a superb try-saving tackle on Ugo Monye, then Mony\u00e9 Steyn tapped the ball out of Ugo's hands when he was about to touch down a second time. A couple of opportunities really went begging. The controversy of the scrum has been well documented and we certainly felt we were in the game, so it was hugely frustrating. But that game was the best buzz I've ever had in rugby \u2013 running out in Durban to a sea of red. It was the stuff of dreams.\n\nThe Lions line up before the First Test, with a sea of red in the stands behind them.\n\nUGO MONYE\n\nYou look back on a series like that and you see all the fine margins that changed each game \u2013 the red card that should have been shown to Schalk Burger at the start of the Second Test, the problems we had in the scrum in the First Test, the injuries to key players \u2013 and then you have things that you were personally responsible for, like the two tries that I nearly scored in the First Test, and I can't escape the truth of how crucial those two moments were because we lost the First Test by five points. Tries are so invaluable and opportunities to score them so few and far between that when the opportunities do arrive you have to take them.\n\nMy initial impression, for the first one, was that I had scored. I celebrated and ran back to the halfway line, not thinking it would be referred to the television match official. When he took a while to decide I began to have some doubts. Eventually it was concluded that Jean de Villiers had managed to get under the ball and stop me from grounding it. I'm not sure you will ever see a tackle like that again. I was six inches from the ground at the time and God knows how he got his hand under the ball. Sometimes you have to sit back and applaud great defence.\n\nThe worst was the second one where I had the ball knocked out of my hands. If I had my time again, it would have been a simple case of tucking it under my left arm and diving over. At the time I didn't think that was necessary otherwise I'd have transferred it to my left and looked to fend off with the right, but I didn't think Morn\u00e9 Steyn was in a position to make the tackle. But hats off to him, that was fantastic defence as well. I stepped off my left to get past the full back and I was getting ready to get the ball down. I didn't see Steyn coming across but you've got to credit him. He attacked the ball and knocked it out of my hand.\n\nWhile the first Test was the proudest moment of my life, I was absolutely gutted at the end, not just because we lost but because I probably contributed towards it. That's what sport at this level does to you. It takes you to the highest peak and brings you down to the darkest troughs, all in a few days.\n\nLEE MEARS\n\nIt was a tough old arena. We probably played against South Africa at their height. Being selected was definitely the highlight of my career \u2013 it would just have been nice to have won.\n\nBut that's sport: the what ifs. The margins are so fine. I've got so many good memories but, unfortunately, we didn't get over the final hurdle.\n\nTom Croft dives over for his second try of the series.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nI think in the end we just ran out of time in that First Test. We started slow and got better and better, but when the ref gives that many penalties against you, you don't really stand a chance. It was just penalty after penalty after penalty. Undoubtedly some were our fault but it was a killer for us.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nWith four minutes to go we still had everything to play for. We were in the ascendancy, had ball and they were panicking a bit. So the overriding feeling was huge disappointment at a missed opportunity.\n\nWe scored three tries against the world champions and looked like we were in full control by the end. There were a lot of missed opportunities in that game, but I really felt that if we had just a few more minutes we could have done it. But that's sport.\n\nMike Phillips celebrates his try in the Durban Test.\n\nSIMON SHAW\n\nI'm a bit of a pessimist when it comes to selection and always think the worst is going to happen. I suppose it is so that if anything good happens it is a bonus and I get excited. But before the First Test the way Gats (Warren Gatland) was going in training I thought I had a good chance of being an impact replacement, and when I was left out completely I was absolutely gutted. It was even worse being in the stand during the game and seeing the Lions scrum and driving maul go backwards and thinking, 'That's my bread-and-butter, I should be out there.' There was the added frustration in Durban of thinking that if it had gone on another five minutes we would have scored again.\n\nFor the Second Test it was back to pessimism again because I thought they wouldn't change much \u2013 but they did. Once I knew I was in the starting line-up I had a very strange three or four days. I got nervous, which is something that had never happened to me before in 19 years of playing. I couldn't sleep. I thought to myself that it was because of the weight of expectation on me and Adam Jones, the incomers in the pack, to fix things. So, if I'd been picked to fix things, I came to the conclusion that I better go out there and do it.\n\nIt had taken a lot of hard work to get to that point. The tour didn't really start that well for me and I then began to think I might go back empty handed again in terms of a Test cap. Over the years I've learnt you've just got to keep plugging away and keep trying. Then, hopefully, someone will see something positive in you and give you a chance. I think it's just self-belief. Your friends and your family will keep telling you that you're the best but, at the end of the day, you have to believe it yourself. I just kept trying to believe it and then it finally happened.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nShawsy's passion for the Lions jersey is tremendous. There's not a lot of talk from him on the pitch but he gets the job done and he couldn't have done it better than in the Second and Third Tests. I hope I'm going as well when I'm 35.\n\nJamie Roberts thunders through the Springbok's defence.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nWe said to the players we would pick on form and we did that. We thought we'd got the right combinations and we weren't far off. Yes, there were some things in the scrum that the referee picked up on, unfortunately. It made it difficult in that first half in the First Test, but they were redressed and it was just about analysing and tweaking and I felt we had a good balance.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nWe went into the Second Test and it was an incredible, incredible occasion, and crikey, did we play. The game was ours. Then we made a few errors, and there were lots of injuries. Towards the end we were level. I said to Andy Irvine beside me that after all the hurly-burly, I might even settle for a draw \u2013 we would then go to the last Test with everything to play for. Then they got the final penalty. That was a rollercoaster... tough game... great game.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nIn the first half, we played the rugby for which I have always searched. We were playing the best international side in the world and taking them apart. It was superb. South Africa knew they were lucky to be anywhere near us at half-time and lucky to have 15 men on the field after Schalk Burger gouged Luke Fitzgerald. But we were still 19-8 in the lead going into the final quarter.\n\nThen Gethin Jenkins and Adam Jones were hurt in the same move, we lost both centres, Jamie Roberts and Brian O'Driscoll, to injury and a Jaque Fourie try was given although the question remained over whether he had a foot in touch. But we will never know because none of the television cameras provided a definitive answer.\n\nAt 25-22, Stephen Jones struck a late and courageous goal from distance but then Ronan O'Gara ran into Fourie du Preez and the referee awarded a penalty. Morn\u00e9 Steyn kicked the goal and the whistle was blown. It was a horrible moment, the lowest I have felt.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nIt was very disappointing the way the game panned out. We had a lot of injuries and I suppose they told. It was tough, but we just didn't play enough in the second half. We were all over them when we played in the first half.\n\nI thought we had done enough to get the draw and keep the series alive. Before we went on tour I knew we could do it \u2013 but we needed to do it for 80 minutes. We did it for the second 40 in the First Test and the first 40 in the Second. The commitment was incredible, but in the end it came down to the finest margins \u2013 and we were on the wrong side of them. It was a tough finish, but it had been tough all the way through \u2013 right from the kick-off and then a few minutes later that whole thing with Schalk Burger gouging Luke Fitz.\n\nLUKE FITZGERALD (Ireland)  \nToured: 2009\n\nIt was a proper gouging. I kind of panicked because I had blurred vision in that eye for about 10 minutes afterwards, and it put me off. But look, those things happen. You could say it changed the series in that he should have been sent off and the series would probably have been 1-1 but I'm not bitter about it.\n\nHe was probably a bit more friendly to me than I was to him when I met him after, but there were a few things going on. We had just lost a series we know we could have won and I had made a mistake for a try. Plus, I had to miss a safari tour I was dying to go on to go to this disciplinary hearing two hours out of my way, and to talk about something that wasn't going to change the way the series had gone, so I wasn't in good form. He had a big smiley head on him having been out celebrating, so I was probably thinking, 'Arsehole,' at the time but if I met Schalk now I'd shake his hand and say, 'How's it going?' There's no issue.\n\nMIKE PHILLIPS\n\nIt should have been a straight red card. Luke had to pull Burger's hands off his eyes. That's not sport, that's not the way we play, that's not a gentlemanly thing to do, it's disgusting. It should have been a red card, simple as that \u2013 and it cost us the game. You can't go doing things like that or throwing punches off the ball. That was all they seemed to do \u2013 there were lots of punches off the ball all through the game.\n\nUnfortunately, you've just got to leave it in the referee's hands and if he doesn't see how bad something is, like the gouging, the guy who did it gets away with it. It was a clear thing and the referee is paid to do a job. We're paid to play and entertain, not to ref. But there should have been no other thought than to give a red card.\n\nThen to make it all worse, Peter de Villiers came out after the match and said he didn't think it even deserved a yellow card and that stuff like that is all part of the game. That was a ridiculous thing for the head coach of the Springboks to say.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nI was very disappointed that he said that. I cannot see that ever being part of the game. It certainly won't be part of a game I want to be associated with. I could never condone actions like that. I would hate to see that sort of thing happen again. It should automatically be a red card.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nWhen I first heard Peter de Villiers' comments, I wondered how someone could get away with something like that. Irrespective of any apology, I find it an absolute disgrace that a coach of a national team can make comments as he did about gouging being part of the game. Someone made a really good point to me that youngsters watching an interview like that, questioning whether they should play rugby or soccer, that's their decision made right there.\n\nTo hear a national coach saying, in any shape or form, that gouging is acceptable in the modern-day game is despicable. I find it mind-boggling that you can have a national team coach saying something like that. It brought the game into disrepute.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nThe Second Test was the most brutal Test match I have played in. Schalk Burger should have been sent off. I ended up in the hospital with four others. My wrist was done, Melonhead [Gethin Jenkins] had his face smashed up, Adam Jones had done his shoulder, Brian O'Driscoll was in no man's land and Tommy Bowe injured his leg. The hospital was a sombre scene afterwards and I always remember seeing Gethin Jenkins lying there with his face in a state. The boys were chatting away but it wasn't a good place to be.\n\nTOM CROFT\n\nThat Second Test was the most physical I have played, one of the biggest games I have played. At the end of it I was absolutely battered.\n\nSIMON SHAW\n\nAfter we kicked off they received and drove it 10 metres into our half before winning a penalty. I remember Bakkies Botha shouting to me, 'I thought you were meant to be here to stop this!' The rest of the game is a complete blur. I remember carrying the ball once, but that's it. I didn't know what the fuss was about \u2013 and I've never watched it since, so I still don't know.\n\nDuring the game I try not to get too emotionally caught up in refereeing decisions \u2013 like the Schalk Burger gouging incident \u2013 you cannot change a ref's mind, so I get on with it. Seeing TV replays of the incident afterwards it was pretty clear. I remember them scoring in the corner through Jaque Fourie, but I wasn't really aware of the score at the time. I was just head down and playing, not really aware of the impact.\n\nThe decisive moment: Rona O'Gara chases his up-and-under and takes out Fourie du Preez.\n\nRONAN O'GARA\n\nI got knocked out [by Pierre Spies] and I tried to get back into the defensive line and missed a tackle. I was aware of Shaun Edwards in my ear going, 'Are you badly hurt? Get back off the ground.' That's exactly what I was trying to do. I wasn't really badly hurt. I was knocked out and didn't really know what I was doing. I can't recall the incident. I was knocked out. I just remember trying to throw myself at Jaque Fourie and I couldn't see him properly, you know. So I missed him and he scored.\n\nUnder the posts I kind of had a little time to get myself together. But that decision [to keep the ball in play when the scores were level at the end] doesn't cost me a second thought because I'd do the exact same tomorrow. People ask me, 'Would you not kick it out?' but it never entered my head to kick the ball out. I couldn't see what a draw would do for anyone. The way I look at it you want the win. I know a draw is better than a defeat, but it didn't enter my head to go for touch. I kick a contestable garryowen and maybe we'd score the other end of the pitch if we could get ourselves back in possession and look to score a try, get a penalty or drop a goal. That's the way my mind works anyway. Obviously now people will remember me for those incidents in the Second Test. What frustrated me was with Paul as captain, it was a massive opportunity in both our careers and I felt we left the Test series behind. I find that hard to take.\n\nSimon Shaw carries strongly into the Springbok defence.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nRog was in pieces after the game, as you can imagine. There wasn't much we could say to him, except that we'd all been there and experienced similar tough times. The truth is we shouldn't have got ourselves in that position to lose at the death in any case. We should have played more rugby in the second half. It was another opportunity lost. It was very disappointing to concede a late try we should never have conceded and then the penalty at the end was heartbreaking.\n\nWe had a lot of injuries and that told. We lost Brian O'Driscoll, the linchpin of the team. We were all over them when we did play in the first half. That was the way I knew we could play on this tour. But we had to play like that for 80 minutes.\n\nSTEPHEN JONES\n\nWhat happened at the end was a prime example of how brutal and ruthless professional sport, let alone professional rugby, can be. Ronan, who had been the Grand Slam hero of Ireland a few months earlier with his last-ditch drop-goal, became the so-called pantomime villain of the contest... He tackled Fourie du Preez in the air and the 'Boks were awarded a penalty. I knew they would convert it.\n\nRONAN O'GARA\n\nI wish I could change the way it finished. It was grim alright but there is nothing I can do about it now.\n\nSIMON SHAW\n\nYou couldn't have asked for more from anyone. The way we went about it, approached it, you wouldn't change a thing. Leaving it all out there is the best way, and that's what we did. Then you can't argue with anything. It could have gone either way, just like Jerry Guscott's drop-goal in 1997.\n\nBloody battle: Gethin Jenkins is helped from the field.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nTo look around the changing room and see such a lot of sadness is something I shan't forget. It was as low as I have felt in a very long time because I knew how much it meant to the players. I told them I was very proud of them, and that they didn't deserve to be 2-0 down in the series. They put in a fantastic effort and it was a tremendous performance.\n\nWe had a couple of chances but needed a bit of composure to put them away. We could have been almost out of sight by half-time but in the second half we sometimes didn't make the best decisions to keep the pattern we wanted, which caused problems.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nIt was easily the worst I have ever felt in the changing rooms after a match. But you learn from those defeats. Someone always has to lose but to lose a game of that magnitude and after performing so well was soul destroying.\n\nSIMON SHAW\n\nIt was devastating to lose, especially in that fashion. There is no doubt the injuries disrupted the second half performance. We hoped to keep a better tempo and a bit of continuity, but unfortunately, for one reason or another, we didn't and the injuries were part of that. Even if we'd drawn and taken it to the last game it would have been some comfort. Geech said we should be proud of ourselves but it was a bleak atmosphere in that changing room \u2013 we'd just lost the series that we had come to win and worked so hard to do.\n\nI'd have rather been taken off at half-time for playing poorly than won man of the match and lost. I would rather have won that game and played badly \u2013 but that's how it goes.\n\nI watched Steyn's kick all the way. It went straight down the middle. I thought at the time that we might have had a chance to kick-off and go for another penalty but we didn't. That's the way it goes. When it's all-or-nothing and you lose by such a narrow margin, and then you realise that you will never be able to contribute to a winning Lions series, it is really gut-wrenching. I gave it my best but I know that in the years to come we'll all look back at that series and always wonder about what might have been.\n\nA few minutes later, Adam Jones is also helped off after dislocating his shoulder.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nWe abandoned the policy of recovery with a bottle of water and a health drink and went back in time with a fair amount of alcohol. But we drank together, we stayed together, we slept it off and then we found that defeat was out of our systems.\n\nWe took three days off and then the players came back in on the Wednesday and had three superb days of training.\n\nEllis Park was an epic finale and we reached another Lions height with that 28-9 victory. But it was important to remember who had won the series.\n\nPHIL VICKERY\n\nThe Third Test was a fantastic day. We won the match and I felt that I made some amends for my performance in the First Test. When we won a penalty at the first scrum, it was a huge, huge moment.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nIt was a great feeling to see the boys win the Third Test. It was tough because I was not involved but we had all become such good mates on the tour. To see them win in Johannesburg we were all so happy. There were tears of joy for everyone. Seeing guys like Stephen Jones, Shawsy and Martyn Williams, none of whom will play for the Lions again, win a Test match was great; that was the most special thing for me.\n\nThe Lions' front-row put in a dominating performance in the Third Test.\n\nSHANE WILLIAMS (Wales)  \nToured: 2005 & 2009\n\nIt was a massive game for me. I knew eyes were on me because there were a lot of doubters out there and I knew it was my last Lions game, so I would have to perform.\n\nI wasn't going out there to dazzle but to work. I got involved as much as I could, played first receiver, second receiver and nine when I had to. I could see when I got my hands on the ball that the Springboks were looking for me to do something and when I was offloading to other players, that gave me as much satisfaction. We were a tight-knit family on and off the field from the start. We worked hard from day one and we felt we deserved something out of the tour \u2013 and to score two tries in my last ever match for the lions and to a win a Test match was fantastic.\n\nUGO MONYE\n\nI thought I was going to pull my hamstring when I ran in that intercept try! And then after I scored, I thought I was going to break down and cry.\n\nWe didn't deserve what we got the way the Second Test finished, but it finally came right in the Third Test, which was hugely satisfying.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nIt was a massive win. The players were superb. The dressing room after the Second Test was one I never wanted to be in. To come and play like that in the Third Test showed that they were an outstanding group of players. I was worried that we might go into our shells but we didn't do that and we scored some great tries.\n\nTo finish off the way we did give us satisfaction but it was secondary satisfaction because we went to win the Test series and we didn't manage that.\n\nSHANE WILLIAMS\n\nWe proved the Lions have a massive future. I've never been on such a good tour and it's the toughest rugby you're ever going to play. Playing for the Lions is the pinnacle of my career and it is something that should continue for ever.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nIt was the ultimate challenge \u2013 the British & Irish Lions touring South Africa, a real rugby-mad country. To go there and win a series is a huge ask. We didn't grasp it and missed out by fine margins but that's top international rugby.\n\nMIKE BLAIR\n\nAbout half an hour after the Third Test was over, I was one of four or five of the dirt-trackers that were pulled aside and asked to come through to do a Q&A at the HSBC corporate hospitality event. There were 300-odd people in there and we sat up on a stage, with Gavin Hastings compering. I was sitting between Lee Mears and Donncha O'Callahan and we'd had a few beers by this time having watched the game and then been celebrating with the team in the changing room. Gav eventually asked a sort of general question about the experience of South Africa and how we'd enjoyed ourselves. There was a bit of a pause as no one stood forward to answer, and then Donncha took the microphone and said, 'Well, that's a very good question, Gavin, and it's probably not one that any of the players feel qualified to answer, so I think we should maybe ask Ian McGeechan about it,' and he turned the microphone towards me. I'd been sharing a room with Donncha that week and we'd been doing impressions of various people on the tour and he'd loved my one of Geech. Now, normally, you would sort of laugh that kind of thing off and not do it, but we'd had a few fairly swift beers and the atmosphere was pretty euphoric, so I went for it. I'm not quite sure if the audience really had any idea what on earth I was doing at first, but they got into it pretty soon and it was well received. Donncha and Lee were pissing themselves about it, at any rate.\n\nLEE MEARS\n\nI've stayed quite good friends with a few of the boys. I still speak to Gethin Jenkins a fair bit, plus Jamie Heaslip and Paul O'Connell. The whole experience was amazing. I had a wonderful time.\n\nMIKE BLAIR\n\nLike any guy who has ever been a dirt-tracker and not made the Test squad, I felt like I'd failed to play to my potential on the tour. I was hugely disappointed not to make the original tour squad. I felt that I was definitely one of the best three scrum-halves in Britain and Ireland at the time, and so also felt that once I made it on tour, that I was good enough to make the Test team. But it wasn't to be; these things happen \u2013 and I know that every midweek player who has ever toured with the Lions but failed to make the Test team will have felt the same as me. But the 2009 tour was still one of the most incredible experiences of my life.\n\nI grew up with the mystique of the Lions firmly imprinted on my mind. As a rugby player, that's your pinnacle. I remember watching the 1989 tour with my dad and just loving it \u2013 remembering how great it was, as a young Scottish kid, to see Gavin Hastings scoring that crucial try in the Second Test, then my jaw dropping at the beauty of Jerry Guscott's try, before going through the roof when Ieuan Evans scored the winner in the Third Test.\n\nI was hooked after that and as the years passed I followed the '93 tour closely and then got swept up in the whirlwind of '97. I was playing for my school first XV and at that stage all your dreams of playing international rugby gradually become more focused as you play with increasing seriousness; Living With Lions had a profound impact on me \u2013 and it cemented the Lions' jersey as the Holy Grail in the sport. I was disappointed not to tour in 2005 \u2013 but then, I was disappointed to be sitting on the bench for Scotland throughout 2004 and 2005, so I knew I never stood a chance of going \u2013 so to make it on tour in 2009 was an incredible moment... and to be handed that jersey for the first time, with my name on it... well, that was something else altogether. I'm a bit obsessive about the history of the game, so to be holding a number 9 Lions jersey... all I could think about were the players who had worn it before. Utter legends, from Haydn Tanner and Dickie Jeeps to guys like Roy Laidlaw, Robert Jones, Gary Armstrong, Matt Dawson, Rob Howley, and, of course, the greatest of them all \u2013 Gareth Edwards. And I'm sitting there in the company of guys like Geech and Gerald Davies. Amazing, incredible... an experience that no words can come close to describing. Those six weeks will stay with me forever. Did I play to the best of my ability? No. Does that hurt? More than you can imagine. But does that take away from my pride in realising my childhood dream? No. Nothing will ever take that away.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nI hope people didn't misconstrue our lap of honour after the Third Test. We were under no illusions that we had lost the series, but a lot of people had paid a lot of money to go out follow us, and their support was just incredible, so we wanted to thank them.\n\nThe guys are very conscious of the Lions ethos and wanted to do it proud. The First Test we could have won, the Second we should have won... we were eager that people's memory of the Lions wouldn't be upset by a poor performance in the Third Test, knowing we were beaten and throwing in the towel.\n\nIt was a tough week mentally for everyone. We just had to dig deep. Some guys produced some serious form and produced some great scores. We were determined to put in a performance for each other, the fans and the jersey. We managed to finish the tour with a Test win, so the next time the jersey is worn, it has that history and momentum attached to it. That's our legacy.\n\nPHIL VICKERY\n\nIt was a great tour, one which I certainly won't forget in a hurry. I'm very, very proud of the guys. Ultimately, we lost the series but we'd taken home a huge amount of pride. I just hope and pray that Lions tours will always go ahead. That tour was very special for me, being with that group of guys, that group of coaches, the backroom staff and everyone else. It was just absolutely fantastic and a real privilege to be a part of it.\n\nGERALD DAVIES\n\nPeople are asking what will happen to the Lions now, where will the Lions go? They are as big as ever, probably even bigger. There is massively keen interest from Argentina, Japan, and other places keen to have the Lions.\n\nBut we cannot expand under the current system because all we have is a ten-week window every four years. We would love to incorporate new countries because everyone believes the Lions is a great thing for the game. Though perhaps one of the great things about it is that it does only happen every four years.\n\nTo be a Lion in 1968 and 1971, and especially to be manager of the 2009 Lions, was a great privilege and one of the highlights of my career. We had great rugby players and good people, which you need when you are living in each other's pockets and for ten weeks. You need that if you are to develop the togetherness which is the feature of the Lions.\n\nWhat we must do in the future is take that and make it even better. The Lions spirit is the quintessence of rugby and the quintessence of great sport.\n\nIAN McGEECHAN\n\nThe Lions changed me. When I came home after the 1974 tour, Judy, my wife, said that I came back with a new confidence and a belief in what I had been involved in, and my part in it. You look back on those experiences and you realise that they were exceptional, and incredible. They change the way you see rugby and the way you live. They give you a completely different perspective on life. Those were the memories that stayed with me when I coached the Lions, because I wanted the players to have that kind of life-changing and positive experience, just as I had. It is so rewarding when you hear great men such as Phil Vickery and Brian O'Driscoll talking about the Lions experience after 2009 \u2013 they both said that now they understand what being a Lion is, they understand its uniqueness. If you can get the chemistry right, that group of players, brought together for the first and only time, can do something that they will never repeat.\n\nLook at Brian O'Driscoll and Jamie Roberts on that tour. It gave them the chance to play as the best centre partnership in world rugby in three Test matches, and because of their quality together and the quality of the people around them, they had an experience that was incredibly special. We were disappointing in the first half of the First Test in 2009, but even in that 40 minutes we made eight line breaks.\n\nDick Milliken and I were the centre partnership in 1974 and our friendship has never wavered \u2013 I was at his house recently to visit. Sometimes you don't have to say anything to a fellow Lion, there is just a look. Many of my Lions feelings spring from the Third Test in 1974 in Port Elizabeth. We had to win it to take the series and the first 38 minutes at the start of the match was the toughest thing I have ever been involved in.\n\nDick and I were so under the cosh with these big men running at us time and time again that we never even had time to speak to each other. But we didn't have to. We just looked at each other and got on with it, we had to find a way to exist in those long minutes, with the big men coming at us in waves, until the course of the match changed.\n\nThe Lions chemistry, the communal feeling, springs from respect. Even if you are battling against each other for different countries at international level, you have an inbuilt respect for the people who do it, in whatever jersey. The challenge for the Lions is that you are bringing the best of the best together, and the best from another team is coming to play alongside you. Then you are both going to challenge each other in a different way, this time internally. It is that new level of competition that you must come to terms with.\n\nThe chemistry can be elusive, and its importance is something I grew to appreciate more and more. Selection is so important, which is why some of the least happy tours were those chosen by committee, such as in 1993. Selection of the Lions is the art of acknowledging the differences in people as well as their similarities. You have to pick complimentary qualities. You look for players who don't have an ego, and for players who will come with an open mind. You have to be prepared to give whatever you have got, however you came by it, whatever journey you took. You lay it out on the table.\n\nIf you have this open and honest approach and the characters come through, it will all come together. The chemistry is also important in the management. In my early tours as coach, there were only two people. Dick Best and I coached in 1993 and are still the best of friends. I would still walk across half the country to talk to Jim Telfer. I still enjoy their company and hopefully they still occasionally enjoy mine.\n\nAnd if you talk about the need for open minds, then those with the most open minds have to be the coaches. They have to put a Test team together based on what is happening in front of them, not based on what has happened historically. People say that you have to get your Test team together in the first week and give them every opportunity to play together. But personally I think that goes against everything that the Lions challenge represents.\n\nEvery tour has been special, win or lose. My vote as the greatest Lions marginally goes to 1974, for the unbeaten tour in a fierce environment. But 1997 was the highlight of my involvement as a coach because we won the series but also because of some of the rugby that we played; the South Africans expected us to be pretty cautious and we blew that expectation apart.\n\nYet in a strange way, despite the 2-1 defeat in the series, 2009 gives me an incredible amount of satisfaction as well. We played really intense Test match rugby and the quality in those matches was way above anything that we had been playing in our own internationals at home. If you watch it all again and take in that physicality, intensity and the quality of involvement that the players put in, and you can start to appreciate it properly.\n\nObviously that Second Test in Pretoria, lost so agonisingly, is one people often talk about. People ask me whether I feel frustration that all the coaching work we did during the tour and in the run-up to that Test match was, essentially, invalidated \u2013 because the result seemed to be decided on ill luck and circumstance. Well frankly, I think that about many matches!\n\nIn Pretoria, though we never said it publicly, the injuries we had to both props and both centres quite clearly affected the result. All the momentum that we had, all the things that we got right to build on as the game progressed suddenly evaporated because of the injuries and the whole match became a different ball game. Suddenly we were managing the situation rather than trying to dictate the tactics as the game evolved. It was a bitter disappointment, but I am proud of many of the things that we achieved.\n\nPeople talk about extending the Lions to other venues, but realistically we are going to have to concentrate on beating the three old enemies. The Lions and the World Cup are the first things that go on the fixture list of world rugby when the IRB are planning it. Quite right. It was a worry when the game went professional as to whether the jersey would lose its value but the 2009 players talked about it in such a very powerful way that the impact and appeal is probably bigger than ever. Commercially we have become one of the biggest teams in the world, we have become one of the best supported teams in the world, and we have nothing that so rigorously challenges the players. They are still desperate to wear the jersey. If there is one thing that is easy when you are coaching the Lions, it is motivation. The chosen want to be part of that tradition and the history that goes with the jersey. They are holding that jersey for a few moments in time, and they are adding to it. Then they are passing it on, they are part of it without ever owning it.\n\nMy great worry is that there are administrators around in the game who've never been closely involved with the Lions who completely underrate its impact, not just on players but on supporters and on the whole game. This means that the players, pretty much starting from scratch, now only have seven incredibly short weeks to win a Lions series. When I played for the Lions, we were away for what seemed like half a lifetime; our wives back at home had to write to a PO Box number to stay in touch. We had four months to develop our game, our playing style and our friendships, and we had time between the Tests to recover.\n\nRob Kearney leads a counter-attack during the Second Test.\n\nCould we not find a way of spacing things out, so that players are no longer coming to the Lions just after leaving the field of a major domestic final? We must appreciate, totally, what is of importance to the players and we have to work together to plan it. If we can prepare teams properly for a World Cup and all that that entails, surely we can find an extra week's preparation for the Lions?\n\nAnd whichever country the Lions are visiting, they have to come to the party, they have to go out of their way to give the Lions their best opportunity. They have to come to it with the same open mind as the Lions \u2013 not making the itinerary deliberately awkward, not switching the tour from altitude to sea level and back, not putting deliberate obstacles in the way. It is the peak for them too, and for their players, to play against the Lions.\n\nThis book shows how strong the link is with the first touring teams, how similar such tours are, and how different. How remarkable are the legends and the standard of play on both sides. The Lions are an awesome story. Those who do not give a priority to the Lions should be harshly judged. They are standing in the away of the most magical experience that sport has to offer. It can change the lives of everyone who takes part. Long may they roar.\n\nUgo Monye and Phil Vickery embrace after the Third Test victory.\n\n## CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE\n\n# [WARBURTON'S WARRIORS  \n2013](006.html#a3)\n\nHONG KONG & AUSTRALIA\n\nWHEN WARREN GATLAND, with his 37-man party and their army of back-up personnel, arrived in Australia for the third Lions tour of that country in the modern era, he was under more pressure than many head coaches who had travelled before him.\n\nIt had been 16 years since the Lions had last won a Test series, and a defeat in Australia 2013 would have seen the Lions arrive in New Zealand in 2017 two decades after their last victory. It was probably alarmist to suggest that the whole concept of the Lions was at stake, but it is certainly true that harsh questions would have been asked had Gatland's men not brought home the series bacon.\n\nIn the end they did triumph, thrillingly and magnificently. They concluded their tour, which had seen some outstanding quality alongside some patchy form, with a resounding 41\u201316 victory over the Wallabies in the epic final Test in Sydney, the decider. This was a display containing powerhouse play all over the field and yet also some devastating attacking running; it was a display to rank with any in the history of the celebrated touring team.\n\nWith the enormity and warmth of the welcome and spotlight put upon them from the host nation, who clearly loved every moment of the tour save for the deciding Test, and with the tens of thousands who travelled to support the Lions despite the recession and the relatively high cost of living in Australia, it was clearly a tour which burnished the legends.\n\nBut not all the backdrop was satisfactory \u2013 there was controversy that the Lions could not get the whole party released from their clubs and provinces until six days before the first game, against the Barbarians in Hong Kong. The minuscule preparation time set a grim new record and was at variance with the requests made in every end-of-tour report by all recent Lions coaches, who demanded that the Lions be given preparation time commensurate with their soaring status.\n\nThe Hong Kong game itself drew criticism because it sent the Lions into a furnace of heat to play a scratch Barbarians team \u2013 a game which appeared to have little relevance to the conditions and imperatives of an Australian tour. Given all this, and the resultant high injury incidence, to triumph in the Test series spoke volumes not just for the players but for Gatland's fellow coaches \u2013 Graham Rowntree and Andy Farrell of England and Rob Howley of Wales \u2013 as well as the backroom staff of medics, analysts and other specialists, among whom James Robson, doctor on every tour since 1993, has attained near-mythical status.\n\nSam Warburton celebrates the First Test victory at Suncorp Stadium, 2013. Getty Images\n\nGatland's party of 37 players contained 15 Welshmen, a ratio that was justified given that Wales were coming off the back of a Grand Slam and that none of the other countries had been particularly impressive in the 2013 RBS Six Nations. Ireland had only just avoided the wooden spoon, and England, after beginning the season in convincing fashion, had been overpowered and badly beaten by Wales in Cardiff \u2013 a result which tilted the battle for the captaincy in favour of Sam Warburton, the young Cardiff flanker.\n\nWarburton was in some ways a controversial choice, since both Paul O'Connell and Brian O'Driscoll, the Irish legends, were available to lead. But Gatland was proved absolutely correct to have the two Irishmen as lieutenants and Warburton, with both his play and leadership, went down as a different but outstanding sort of Lions leader.\n\nThe party itself was to throw up world-class performances. Leigh Halfpenny at full-back, and the monster George North on the wing, came back from the tour numbered amongst the true world-class players of the era \u2013 Halfpenny for his brilliant footballing skills and metronomic goal kicking and North not only for his power but also his dazzlingly quick feet.\n\nConsidering that Gatland's team played exciting and fast rugby against the Waratahs, the Reds and in the Test series, it was odd that in some quarters they were regarded as a stodgy team. At their best, and when the forwards had given them quick ball, they were superb.\n\nUp front, the latter stages of the tour catapulted Alex Corbisiero, the English loose-head prop, into the world reckoning; the team also had two world-class hookers in Richard Hibbard and Tom Youngs, who, with their different playing styles, were also wonderful.\n\nThe veteran O'Connell belied his years with an insatiable exuberance before he broke an arm during the First Test, and the two Ospreys, Adam Jones and Alun Wyn Jones, formed the core of a pack which, when at its best, was fearsome. Sean O'Brien, the Irish flanker, came through strongly after a slow start, stepping into Warburton's shoes when the captain was injured in the Second Test, and then playing superbly in the decider.\n\nThough Halfpenny deservedly won the player of the tour, Jonathan Davies, the outside centre, came very close. Davies was brilliant in the early stages \u2013 he coped well at inside centre, an alien position for him, when the giant Jamie Roberts missed the first two Tests through injury, and was again brilliant in Sydney as the Lions ended with a magnificent flourish.\n\nYet we also saw how fragile momentum and success could be. The Lions probably deserved to win an anxious First Test in Brisbane but they only did so after Kurtley Beale, the hapless Australian goal kicker, missed two shots from a relatively comfortable range in the closing stages.\n\nThe Lions also lost sight of their own philosophy a little for the Second Test, choosing a team which was not equipped to beast Australia up front and therefore allowing Australia back into the series with a victory in Melbourne \u2013 and this time it was Halfpenny, out near the edge of his range, who was to miss the final shot at goal.\n\nAustralia may not have been the finest team ever to represent that country but they showed great commitment and were tough to beat. When the Lions toured, rugby union in Australia was not on a high, playing numbers had stopped rising, and there had been little recent success for the national team in the Tri-Nations or the Rugby Championship.\n\nThe pressure was immense, and so too was the sense of urgency. There is no such thing as an easy victory away in Australia in any sport, and this was a win for which the Lions had to fight. In the end, they were more powerful, more skilful and, in the end, thumpingly superior across the field.\n\nFurther controversy surrounded the relative weakness of some of the provincial teams which the Lions met \u2013 Deans demanded that his international squad players should not appear against the touring party, but stay in camp. There are those who believe that having the provincial teams field their best players against the touring team should be a stipulation of future tour agreements. The complaints reached an early peak in the second tour game when Western Force selected a very weak team in Perth, with the Lions winning 69\u201317.\n\nThere was further controversy in Newcastle, where the Lions beat a Combined Country team 64\u20130 \u2013 yet the criticism this time was largely misplaced, since the home players thoroughly enjoyed the experience of meeting the Lions, the Newcastle stopover was enjoyable and the crowd \u2013 like every crowd on the tour \u2013 was large and excited. The Lions need a balance \u2013 they need the epic fixtures, but they also need to play the missionary games.\n\nThere were no such problems for the Brumbies, who beat the Lions 14\u201312 in Canberra. The Lions, afflicted by injury, bizarrely had to choose a three-quarter line comprised of four players who had never trained together until a brief run the day before the game \u2013 Christian Wade, Brad Barritt, Billy Twelvetrees and, making a one-off guest appearance, the great Shane Williams. Even so, there is no doubt that the Brumbies deserved their victory.\n\nThe First Test was won by a hair-raising two points \u2013 the Lions are still to lose a Test match in Brisbane, even though it is a traditional strong-hold of Australian rugby. Suncorp Stadium, one of the best arenas in the world, was packed in the build-up, which was of sensational magnitude.\n\nThe Lions' hopes in the First Test appeared to diminish early when the outstanding Will Genia, the scrum-half and the Wallaby of the series, broke out of defence to make a try for winger Israel Folau, highly-publicised after his arrival in rugby union after playing professionally in both rugby league and Australian Rules.\n\nBut the Lions responded by dominating possession and the game opened up when North scored a wonderful try, running back a kick from deep defence and scorching for the line. Alex Cuthbert also scored after the break with a devastating finishing burst in the second half, but a tremendous solo try from Folau kept Australia bubbling and when a combination of odd refereeing and Lions nerves afflicted the tourists' momentum, the Wallabies came back to within a point.\n\nThe Wallabies did extremely well to stay in contention because there was carnage behind their scrum. Christian Leali'ifano was injured in the opening passage of play and they also lost full-back Berrick Barnes, wing Digby Ioane and centre Adam Ashley-Cooper. They ended with a raft of men out of position, including open-side flanker Michael Hooper moving into the centre.\n\nIt was the fault of the Lions that the Wallabies were still within range but they were mightily glad when Beale slipped while taking his late penalty and the kick went wide, to put them 1\u20130 up and in control of the series.\n\nFor the Second Test, Gatland attracted criticism for his reconstituted pack, with the inexperienced Mako Vunipola on the loose-head, in place of the injured Corbisiero, often struggling against the unrated Wallabies scrummage. It was a poor game in Melbourne, gripped by tension, and a late try by Ashley-Cooper proved to be the difference between the teams. The Lions failed to break Australia on the gain line, and with Jamie Roberts missing the first two Tests with a persistent hamstring injury it was left to Jonathan Davies to play at inside centre \u2013 something he did with courage though not quite the same brilliance.\n\nThe decider came at the end of a build-up of heroic proportions, commanding attention throughout Australia and well beyond and with supporters of both sides mobilising across the city of Sydney in the days before the game \u2013 but always in an apparent harmony.\n\nThe final Test was remarkable in all respects, with the Lions establishing themselves early on with a try by Corbisiero, and running up an incredible 19\u20133 lead as Halfpenny's brilliant kicking boots delivered the goods.\n\nAlthough Australia did come back before half-time with a try by James O'Connor, they were taken to pieces in the second half, with Davies making the approach work for tries for Jonny Sexton (a try containing dazzling sleight of hand) and George North \u2013 this latter on the end of a delightful arcing run by Halfpenny.\n\nThe series was sealed when Conor Murray, an effective replacement at scrum-half for a misfiring Mike Phillips, brought Jamie Roberts on to a clever lateral pass and the giant Welsh centre motored on to score. It was one of the great halves of Lions play and the celebrations, joined by James Bond actor Daniel Craig, were long and loud.\n\nThe week had also been remarkable for something that had never happened on previous Lions tours \u2013 a storm on social media. Gatland had decided to drop Brian O'Driscoll \u2013 not only from the Test team for Sydney, but also for the squad. Possibly, with Roberts and Davies in such strong form as a partnership, the decision may have been made for the First Test \u2013 which Roberts eventually had to miss. But the outpouring of fury and incredulity from Irish followers on various social media platforms \u2013 and also from famous Irish Lions \u2013 almost defied belief.\n\nIt also defied the evidence that while O'Driscoll had been on decent form he was surpassed by the brilliance of Davies, who clearly deserved to play in the Test in his normal position. Sadly, Gatland was affected by the fury, claiming in the aftermath of the Third Test that he felt very little satisfaction.\n\nYet when the fuss died down, the Lions had won, and the wily Gatland, one of the most successful coaches in rugby history, must have felt the deepest pleasure. Despite the truncated preparation time and the injuries, despite the seriousness of the Wallaby challenge, the Lions had come home in style.\n\nThey were a happy and unified group with real talent and depth and they are fit to be ranked in the top four Lions teams since the War. Perhaps the lessons that they learned in terms of preparation and fixture-making will be carried forward so that the momentum is sustained in New Zealand in 2017. Victorious Lions, that rare and most happy breed.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nNow, the manager probably has the biggest sway when it comes to the choice of coach, but in all the years that I have been involved with the Lions committee, there has never been a vote. We're all mates who know each other well and we discuss everything and come to a unanimous decision. I think it works well. After that we have no involvement with player selection. In the old days, selection would go on for hours, with deals being done between countries \u2013 'you can have him if you select him,' and so on \u2013 but that just doesn't work, and there have been some disastrous results when that has happened. Of course, if Warren were to come to me and ask my opinion on a player then I'd give it, but it's not my job to be part of the selection process.\n\nRugby is a science now as much as it is a game. There is so much statistical information available from each game and even training sessions are videoed and analysed now. The great skill lies in interpreting that information. For example, you might have two blind-slide flankers and one may have made 15 tackles in a game and the other may have made only 10. On the face of it, one clearly wins out, but you have to look at the style of those tackles. Warren tells me that they have a grading system of A, B and C. A tackles drive the attacker backwards or turns the ball over. B tackles are made in the gain line and C are more passive and made on the attacker's terms. That same grading system works on rucking efficiency, mauling, set-piece play, everything. What a spectator might see or think from the touchlines might be totally different to what the coaches and analysts see. If a number 8 makes a couple of big runs, that's great \u2013 but he might be bringing less to his team than his opposite number who has turned over the ball, won a quick ruck ball for his scrum-half, stopped rolling mauls and so on. It's a completely different game to the one I used to play, which is why I won't be interfering with the playing side. What I can bring is my knowledge of touring and how to build a positive team environment. I went on three very different Lions tours with three very different sets of managers, coaches and playing personnel. I also toured a lot with Scotland. Some tours were fantastic, some less so \u2013 my role with the Lions was to use all of that experience to good effect for the players going on the tour.\n\nJAMIE HEASLIP (Ireland)  \nToured: 2009 & 2013\n\nMeeting new guys is always one of the highlights. You go into camp and you always have an opinion of people that you've never met, just from playing against them. You think whatever about them and then you're surprised that what you thought was completely wrong. There wasn't a bad egg in the bunch.\n\nDAN COLE (England)  \nToured: 2013\n\nYou look at the Lions' last tour of Australia and it was huge. The whole of Australia got behind the Australian team, and the Lions team travel with a massive amount of support. I'd followed the 2001 tour of Australia briefly, but '05 was the first I watched in detail. It was such a great tour. It's one of those things that you can't not follow, if you know what I mean? It's everywhere.\n\nOWEN FARRELL (England)  \nToured: 2013\n\nI've loved every minute of it. From meeting new people to getting to know the brilliant players around you, and travelling and seeing new places, it is such a special thing. You are able to express yourself because all your team-mates know their jobs and do them brilliantly and it is easy to go out there and show what you can do. Every time you get the chance you have got to try and take it. You can't do it one week and not the next. Whether you're involved or not in the Tests it's massive.\n\nSEAN MAITLAND (Scotland)  \nToured: 2013\n\nSix months before the tour I had only just arrived in Scotland. If you had told me that in six months' time I would have played in my first Six Nations, scored on my debut at Twickenham and then been picked for the Lions I would never have believed you. There was such a buzz on the tour and everyone really enjoyed it. The whole operation was such a well-oiled machine that is so professional to the smallest detail.\n\nI'm like a sponge and I loved learning off everyone. Rob Howley is an experienced coach and his ideas in the game are really awesome, so I learned a lot from him. Brian O'Driscoll and Tommy Bowe were really great as well. It was so good to study them and see how professional they are off the field as well as on it. That's what's so special about a Lions tour \u2013 it is four countries coming together and learning from one another. It is totally unique and the history of the team is incredible \u2013 it's unbelievable to have been a part of it all.\n\nTOM CROFT\n\nIf you are not thinking about the Lions history it is soon drummed home to you. We are all aware of what this jersey is and of those who have worn it. It is massive. It is the pinnacle of our careers. The lack of preparation time makes it hard. The key is to spend time with the guys you don't know very well. But just a few days after arriving in Australia I was sitting with Ben Youngs and looking around the room, we were surrounded by class, exceptional players in attack and defence. O'Driscoll, Bowe, Roberts. It felt comfortable. It is what makes it extra special. You come in after your club season and maybe the Heineken games, you meet up, bond, work as hard as you can and you learn on the job. It's part of the fascination that you are picking things up during games. And at the end of it all to win the series is something even more special.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nThe 2009 tour was so enjoyable. We had such a harmonious and tight bond and we probably gained back a little bit of the belief in what the Lions was about by creating such a great series, albeit we lost 2\u20131. They were keenly contested games and could have gone either way, which was important coming off the back of a 3-0 loss to the All Blacks in 2005.\n\nBut I love Australia as a country and enjoy touring there most. In 2001 we probably trained too hard and that caught up with us in the end. Training sessions in 2013 were like a mini-game every day because the skill levels were so high. I love playing with guys who have the ability to think a couple of phases ahead and see opportunities that others at a lesser level aren't capable of doing. We had great balance and the competition in the back row, centre, half-back and front row spoke of our quality. The Australian media came out with these quotes about 'slabs of meat', but they were unpleasantly shocked by the calibre and range of our skills.\n\nDAN COLE\n\nEverybody wanted to play in a Test match, so everybody pushed each other in that collective spirit to beat Australia. I think that's what made the standards higher and drove the tour.\n\nTOM YOUNGS (England)  \nToured: 2013\n\nIt's been a ridiculous year and it has been difficult for it to sink in, because as you go from game to game, you don't get time to think about it. When I get my down time, it will sink in and I will probably say to myself, 'Yeah, that was a pretty special season.'\n\nLots of people have been important, and have always been there for me. Glenn Delaney at Nottingham was great when I was playing there, moving from playing centre and learning my trade as a hooker. Then there are the players at Tigers, like George Chuter, who was just outstanding with me, and the likes of Dan Cole and Boris Stankovich, too. I used to stand over their shoulders and watch them scrummage, asking them questions all the time. Even if it was the stupidest question in the world, they wouldn't laugh, they would just help me out. Then there's Geoff Parling, running the line-out and helping me to get an understanding of that. I have learned a lot from these guys.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nBecause of injury I wasn't involved in the Six Nations, I was a spectator, but someone would play a good game one week and they'd have pencilled themselves in for the tour, they'd play badly the following week and have written themselves off, they'd play well the next week and pencil themselves in for captain! So I tried to avoid the speculation about whether I'd be selected as much as I could. It's something that probably does you no good following it too closely. I just concentrated on training as hard as I could and tried to play as well as I could when I got the chance. Right up until selection, I didn't know \u2013 having not played any international rugby since last March and very little rugby since the previous May. It was hard to know if they'd even consider me. I hadn't spoken to Warren Gatland or anyone during that time. So up until my name was read out, I wasn't sure. I suppose being involved in some big Heineken Cup games with Munster probably helped, but I just wasn't sure at any stage if they were even considering me or not. So I was delighted when my name was picked out, but that was the only time I probably let myself believe or think that I had a chance.\n\nPeople asked me would I have been disappointed if I hadn't have been selected, but I wouldn't have been really because I got back from a fairly serious injury as quick as I could, got fit as quick as I could and played as well as I could in the games. When you give everything you have and come up short, that's just the way it is. There's no point in complaining about it and I wouldn't have been overly disappointed.\n\nIt's incredible how quickly it's gone since 2009. There are a few familiar faces like Adam Jones, Mike Phillips, Alun Wyn Jones \u2013 it almost seemed like we were on the same tour in some ways.\n\nI didn't ever really speak to Sam directly about the captaincy and how he would approach it. We roomed together and chatted non-stop all week about all manner of things. It was important that he knew that myself, Brian O'Driscoll and all of the senior players were there for him. As captain, there's a little bit more pressure on you, in terms of being wary of what's going on. But he's a very relaxed guy and confident in his own ability. I was 25 on the Lions tour to New Zealand in 2005 and was probably a lot more naive than Sam is. He's quite a wise guy, wise beyond his years. Fair play to him, he seems to be very much in control of his own ability.\n\nALUN WYN JONES (Wales)  \nToured: 2009 & 2013\n\nLooking at a tour like this, we knew that it was not about the individual Tests, and it was not about winning all the games on tour. If you have to suffer a loss in the provincial games in order to get a Test series win then no one will remember that loss. It does not matter if you win a Test, you want to win the series \u2013 because no one remembers a Lions tour if you do not win the series. I will never forget Paul O'Connell saying that in South Africa. If you want to be up there with the likes of Willie-John McBride and the rugby royalty those types of players are, then you have to win a Test series in the southern hemisphere. The Tests are the crescendo of everything that has gone before.\n\nSam Warbuton holds a wreath in front of the grave of Robert Seddon, the 1888 Lions captain, at the Campbell's Hill Cemetery in Telarah, near Newcastle, 125 years after the first Lions captain died on the pioneering tour. Getty Images\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nYou've got to win a series to be properly remembered. Until you win a series it's difficult to place yourself in that elite group of great Lions players. It's not enough to produce one-off performances or be nearly-men.\n\nI've talked to Matt Dawson about that dummy over-the-head pass that secured the first Test win in South Africa in 1997. How many times have people spoken to Scott Gibbs about his big hit on Os Du Randt? These moments are timeless \u2013 but they're only timeless because of the victory that followed. To be considered a great and a custodian of Lions rugby you have to achieve that success.\n\nSTUART HOGG (Scotland)  \nToured: 2013\n\nIt was surreal putting on Lions T-shirts, looking at the badge and thinking, 'I'm not here as a supporter; I'm here as a player.' You know the players that have played in your position for the Lions, and for their countries, and it was just a massive honour to be there. I was trying to follow in the footsteps of legends who have been there before \u2013 it was an amazing feeling.\n\nALEX CUTHBERT (Wales)  \nToured: 2013\n\nLions selection is what we all dream about. It is one of those talked-about things in every pub in Britain. I'm a massive fan. My dad used to buy me the replica shirts, which I've still got in my wardrobe. And had I not been selected I probably would have gone down to Australia with my mates to cheer them on. It was a great feeling to be selected and I don't think I will ever get that feeling again. It took a couple of days to sink in, thinking, 'Wow, I'm an actual Lion.' Four years ago, I would never have expected to be in this position. When the Lions lost the Second Test in Pretoria, I was playing in my first sevens tournament, in Bath. I was watching the game with some mates and having a laugh \u2013 it was more of a beer drinking competition. I never thought I would be on the next tour. I was just starting out. I didn't even think I'd become a professional player, let alone get to put on a Lions shirt. For it all to happen so quickly is a bit of a shock to say the least.\n\nIt's a step up from international rugby and the pinnacle for any player. Training with these boys you can tell the difference. There are no mistakes and everything is at 110 per cent in terms of intensity \u2013 that's the quality that we took with us down under.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nThe Lions is something that you dream of as a kid. I remember watching them play when I was growing up, the famous fly-on-the-wall video of the 1997 tour of South Africa. Going on the 2009 tour of South Africa changed my life as a player and a person because the Lions is unique and you learn so much. When I was picked in 2009 it only took a few seconds to have a flashback to all the tough games and tough training sessions I'd had in my career. And you say, 'Jesus, I have done it, I have managed that ultimate achievement of going on a Lions tour as a player.'\n\nWhether you are in the midweek or the Saturday team, the key thing about the Lions is mixing with other players and coaches, players you are used to playing against and you have to immerse yourself in the environment. South Africa was the most enjoyable time of my career up to 2013. It's about handling pressure well, it's about complete enjoyment, getting along with everyone on the tour, taking every opportunity that comes your way and giving your all to the shirt. If you don't give your all you are doing an injustice to all those that have been selected before you.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nYou have the squad announcement, and you hope to be included, then you get it and you are hopeful you don't pick up injuries in the games before you join up. You get on tour and you have to perform to try to get in the Test team. We might be on tour for six and a half weeks, but three weeks into the tour it's Test time. It happens in the blink of an eye.\n\nI don't think you can ever tire of this feeling of being involved in the Lions set-up. One hit of it is not enough. If you can get a second or third hit, well, you crave that. It is so unique that four countries are shouting for you for a six week period. It is kind of bizarre but brilliant. For them to have love for you for that time is special. That is why you will never see a Lions player going in to swap a jersey. That says it all. The respect that jersey holds is seen in players always wanting it.\n\nRYAN GRANT (Scotland)  \nToured: 2013\n\nRugby's not that high profile in Scotland so it's great driving in on the bus to Murrayfield and everyone's standing there, but that's what everyday life is like on a Lions tour. That's what it's like when you nip out for a coffee. If you go for a walk with Richie Gray then don't expect to get very far. On game day, the streets are packed with red shirts.\n\nI wasn't involved in the Third Test Sydney so I went out for a beer with my Dad and Alun Wyn Jones was in the same bar with his family. He was slouching low in his seat with a baseball cap and sunglasses on, and I remember thinking: Shit, man, some of these boys really are celebrities out here.\n\nSo the thing that really stuck in my head was just how high profile it all was, how many people had made the trip over and how much support the Lions had. The only thing I can compare it to was that last 100 metres of the bus trip on the way to a Scotland game, but that's what it was like all the time.\n\nSTUART HOGG\n\nBeing the youngest in the squad I had to carry Bill the mascot everywhere, and to begin with I thought this was going to be great \u2013 being entrusted with such an important part of Lions folklore \u2013 but by the end of it I was completely sick of it. I was getting more attention for that little lion than myself.\n\nHaving said that, it really helped me settle in. Straight away I was mingling with the other boys \u2013 they were winding me up by saying they were going to steel him and hide him so that I would get a big fine \u2013 so it was a good bit of banter to begin with. When I was getting ready to go to training the first thing I would check is that I had Bill. If I forgot my gum-shield or my boots or something like that then they could send me back to the hotel to get them \u2013 as long as I had Bill I was okay. But every couple of days he would go missing \u2013 and I would find him in somebody else's room. One time I found him on the roof of the bus \u2013 it was some mission trying to get him back down from there. It was great that I actually got to keep Bill after the tour because I think we bonded in the end.\n\nADAM JONES (Wales)  \nToured: 2009 & 2013\n\nThe first game of the tour, out in Hong Kong, was in the toughest conditions I've ever played in. It was like there was no air. I felt quite good up until about seven minutes into the second half then we had two scrums and it was tough after that. It's difficult to explain, it felt like high altitude because it was so hard to get your breath. Justin Tipuric is one of the fittest players I know so if he found it hard you know it was. We just tried to take on a lot of water. We went back to the hotel after the game and had some food, but we had to stay off the beers, as much as we might have fancied one, because of how much we had dehydrated during the game. Richie Gray got through 80 minutes having not played since the Six Nations, which speaks volumes for him; it was an incredibly impressive shift he put in, especially in those conditions.\n\nSEAN O'BRIEN (Ireland)  \nToured: 2013\n\nPutting on the jersey for the first time before the Western Force game was a big thing and I'll never forget that night. There were a lot of things going through my mind putting it on; there is a lot of tradition you're putting on, and with the lads winning in Hong Kong we wanted to put in a good performance and kick on. All the focus was on putting in big performances, playing for the team and building momentum towards the First Test. The attitude to put the team before individual ambitions was the biggest thing about the squad \u2013 everyone bought into the larger picture. But saying that, it was tough, really tough, seeing guys like Cian Healy being injured out of the tour so early on.\n\nJAMIE HEASLIP\n\nA lot of people might think playing rugby is a pretty easy thing to do, but at the elite level it's not. Especially to do it consistently, to back up games. When Church (Cian Healy) got injured against Western Force that was an illustration of how precarious things are. Favourite for a Test spot one minute and gone the next. He's a very good friend of mine and I was proud to be on the same pitch when he became a Lion. He took the injury like a trooper. You can't cry about it, just get on with it. He showed a lot of character in the way he dealt with it. Having played with him for so long. to see him on the ground screaming I knew that this doesn't happen, even when he gets a very bad bang he doesn't react like he did that day, so I knew it was not good. When there was a break in play I legged it over to him and he was on the floor and he was in a bad way and I knew it was serious whatever it was.\n\nSTUART HOGG\n\nThe night after the initial squad was announced I spoke to Rob Howley about me being picked as a back-up stand-off as well as a back-three player. He told me I had the 'X-factor' and that if I was required to play ten he had every confidence I could step into that position without a problem. I always played there when I was a youngster so I was quite happy with giving it a go if required.\n\nWe played the Reds on the Saturday night and the Combined Counties on the Tuesday. The message was sent out late on the Saturday night so I woke up on Sunday morning to find I was playing at stand-off, and straight away I started to get nervous because all of a sudden it was really happening and it is a big change from playing full-back, which is what I have been used to in recent years. Trying to get everything memorised was tough but in terms of the game itself, you look outside and see Jamie Roberts and Brian O'Driscoll and that helps your confidence. Rob Howley stressed that nothing was to change, if I saw a gap I was to back myself. So, while I was just taking and giving passes early on, the first time I really had a go I scored \u2013 the gap just opened up and I wasn't going to pass up a chance like that.\n\nBrian said before the game: If in doubt just give the ball to me and I'll get smashed. You keep yourself in the game. I didn't want to do that because he's my hero and with the bad luck with injuries that was the last thing I wanted him to be doing. I wanted to be giving him the chance to show his class. I didn't know much about Brian off the field before going to Australia, but I did know there has been no better number thirteen on the field during my lifetime \u2013 so it was great to see that his character off the park reflects the way he is on it. He's had his ups and downs in terms of injuries and always come back a fitter and better player, which shows his true professionalism. Not many people can say they have been for coffee and played alongside their hero.\n\nJAMIE HEASLIP\n\nIt's hard to describe what it's like when you hear that you're starting the First Test. I met a friend and we were talking about how we watched the 2001 tour in the rugby club at Naas at 8am and how funny life is. Dreams coming true kinda thing. Childhood dreams. To play alongside that calibre of player, it was a big moment for me, my family and friends, all the coaches I had. Just like playing in the Test series in 2009; it was huge. All the sacrifices I put in, I don't think people realise how much sacrifice is involved for a rugby player today. Away from match day, it's a whole lifestyle, so days like that make you feel like it wasn't all for nothing.\n\nSEAN O'BRIEN\n\nIt was a big, big disappointment not to play the First Test. I hadn't dealt with something like that before. I was used to starting games and I was upset. In my own head. I spoke to the coaches after and expressed my feelings, told them what I thought I could bring to the game, but that was the team they picked and I had to row in behind it and give the lads as much support as possible. My idea was to train as hard as I could and I did that following day. Even being upset and disappointed you have to keep the standards high and see the bigger picture. I remember speaking to Warren the week afterwards and he said he was delighted that I approached him. I went out the next day in training and I was furious. I was a man possessed. I just wanted to show that I was still around, I was still ready.\n\nALEX CUTHBERT\n\nIt was really special to have been given our jerseys by Sir Ian McGeechan the night before the First Test. He's not a big guy but you can feel his presence and of course his words make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.\n\nGEORGE NORTH (Wales)  \nToured: 2013\n\nWe knew Australia would bring a massive tempo, that's part of their game. The first 20 minutes a lot of the boys did look around as if to say, 'this is fast, let's keep on going, let's push and push.' We came through OK and the fitness told.\n\nJONNY SEXTON (Ireland)  \nToured: 2013\n\nAustralia had some pretty dangerous backs and at times we gave them some space and they exploited it. They probably didn't make clean line breaks but they threatened. And we all saw how dangerous Israel Folau can be; every time Digby Ioane got the ball he seemed to cause trouble. A couple of times we bit in in defence and left the last man over when we shouldn't have done. It didn't feel easy but it felt like we deserved to win the game at the same time.\n\nWhen I got one-on-one with Folau, I tried to show him one way \u2013 the outside \u2013 and he took me on the inside. I thought there was cover coming across. I didn't really identify who was inside me, which I should have, and I got stood up. When you give someone of that size and speed the space that we gave him, it's pretty hard to stop, and it was a great try he ended up scoring.\n\nIt was pretty hectic and it was pretty crazy out there at times. It was frantic and it was tough to control. Luckily we had a lot of good leaders in the team. At times we didn't manage the game so well, especially when we got the try to go eight points up and then we let them get a penalty straight away. We should have cleared our lines there.\n\nALEX CORBISIERO (England)  \nToured: 2013\n\nWe wanted to make sure we put a marker down at set-piece time and to get some dominance there. I think we were able to do that. We worked on our drills, we tweaked a few things, and the referee perceived our dominance as well. That made it a lot clearer in terms of getting those penalties. The set piece was a real strength, we just stayed together and we worked hard as an eight. Even if we lost a hit, we stayed patient and we came back through \u2013 we were just smart and we were well-drilled.\n\nGEORGE NORTH\n\nTo score a try like the one I did in the First Test was pretty special. My first thought was to run at them and set up a ruck, but it just seemed to open up and then I just had to finish it off. We do a lot of work on phase play and patterns, but sometimes it's nice just to see a gap open and run into it.\n\nI apologised to Will Genia after the game and can't really explain why I taunted him as I went in to score. I got caught up in the emotion of the try. I felt horrendous for doing it and I'll have to live with that. I had big words from Andy Irvine; rugby is a gentleman's game and that kind of thing shouldn't be involved. Andy said that to me and I knew it as soon as I'd done it. It's very difficult to explain your emotions when you've scored. I know it was out of line with sportsmanship and feel terrible for that. I had a lot of stick from the boys and am pretty sure it will go on for a while longer.\n\nGeorge North points back at the covering Will Genia as he scorches in to score the Lions' sensational opening try in the First Test, 2013. Getty Images\n\nBEN YOUNGS (England)  \nToured: 2013\n\nIt was a rollercoaster game. We could never quite get away from them. The biggest thing for us was not to get deluded: they missed 14 points and five kicks; we missed one kick. It is a wonderful feeling to be awarded a penalty and know you have Leigh Halfpenny, a world-class kicker that makes the difference in Test-match rugby.\n\nLEIGH HALFPENNY (Wales)  \nToured: 2009 & 2013\n\nI have a picture in my head of how I want each kick to go. I always try and hit the middle of the goal and there's a lot of work that goes in with Neil Jenkins and the other kickers. I can't think of a better guy to have teaching me and have alongside me in games and in training than Jenks. He's a legend of the game, a real top points scorer and his record speaks for itself. He's a world-class kicker and I'm really lucky to have him around. He's brought me on hugely, having worked with him since I was a kid growing up in the academy days.\n\nTo be honest, the pressure is a real privilege. You're really lucky to be in a position to be kicking for the Lions. It has been a huge dream of mine and I would never have thought I would be doing it. But I loved every second of it.\n\nYour nerves kick in when you're told you're playing but you just do what you've always done: it's about staying focused. I always enjoyed goal-kicking as a kid and I've tried to work hard at it. You dream of it and watch the likes of Neil Jenkins, Jonny Wilkinson and Dan Carter and you want to be like that. That's how I always felt and to have kicked for the Lions is just a really special feeling.\n\nBEN YOUNGS\n\nWe spoke about the issues at the breakdown and just agreed to leave it, simply because we weren't getting the rub of the green with regard to competing over the ball. The best thing was to stay on your feet and try to get through the breakdown rather than play for the ball. That is what we did. In the second half it got better and we adapted to the referee.\n\nWhen Australia won that last penalty, we couldn't believe it. We knew it was going to be the last play of the game and that we wouldn't get another crack if he kicked it. You stand there in a daze, praying he will miss it, hook it. It was worse for the front-rowers: it was a penalty against them and they had to stand and watch it helplessly, especially because only two minutes before that we were five metres from their line, and another scrum went wrong. I was lined up on the posts and faced to watch it. Once he hit it and slipped it was 'Thank God'. After 2009 when Morn\u00e9 Steyn kicked the Boks to victory maybe the Lions were due a bit of luck.\n\nAlex Cuthbert tears past James O'Connor to score in the First Test, 2013. Getty Images\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nThere was big frustration with the way the breakdown was refereed in the First Test. I was talking out on the pitch and in the dressing room because certainly I felt I was on the right side of the law with it. He adjudged it differently and penalised me. Thankfully, James O'Connor missed both kicks.\n\nIt felt strange at the end of the game \u2013 hearts in the mouth with Kurtley Beale lining up that penalty and then missing. We probably should have lost conceding those two penalties there. We wouldn't have deserved to lose. It felt like we were better than two points better than that side. We didn't get much luck in the game \u2013 deflected kicks seemed to bounce into their arms more often than not but maybe we got our luck at the end.\n\nI think the important thing was that we didn't play too much of the game in our own territory. We felt fairly in control. The tries we conceded \u2013 one was a counter-attack and the second one was maybe a couple of bad decisions. At crucial times, we got into the attacking zone and gave up penalties and turned ball over. Every time you get down there, you've got to put points on the board.\n\nI'd been in that situation before \u2013 1\u20130 up in the Lions Test series against the Wallabies. I said to the boys that we needed to try and finish it the next week because it's a hell of a lot easier to win a series in two games than it is in three. The pressure goes through the roof if it goes into a deciding third game.\n\nJONNY SEXTON\n\nI felt for Kurtley because he slipped. We'll never know if the ball would have gone over if he hadn't slipped. As a kicker you don't want to see him slip: if he misses, he misses, but to see him slip was tough on him. It's a difficult place to be, but it's what you work for as a kicker. It's a great place when you're going well and it's a tough place when you miss. I don't think you'll ever know until you're standing there. At times you're almost shaking, but you just have to learn how to deal with that. The pitch was tough. It was a scrum penalty as well so the ground was all churned up and it would have been tough for him to find a decent spot. I don't think the ref was letting him move a metre left or a metre right \u2013 he made him take it from the exact spot.\n\nYou work on your routine and that's what you try and go to when the pressure comes on. If you've got high standards, every kick is high pressure because you want to get it. Kurtley was feeling the pressure I'm sure. And I'm sure Leigh was feeling pressure every kick that he took. We've seen the value of a place kicker \u2013 Leigh kicked well again and they missed a few, and that was the difference in the end.\n\nMIKE PHILLIPS\n\nWe played some good stuff in the First Test but it was frustrating that we couldn't put them away. We left a few tries out there and our defence was sloppy at times. Brian O'Driscoll didn't hold back afterwards and he was clear we had more levels to go up and that we were a better team than that. We showed plenty of character and scored two brilliant tries, but Drico made it clear we had a lot of improvements to make. When someone like Brian, who has so much respect from the group, speaks, it does hit home. He was here playing 12 years ago, so when he talks everybody listens.\n\nKurtley Beale of the Wallabies slips while taking a potentially match-winning penalty \u2013 handing the First Test to the Lions, 2013. Getty Images\n\nLast-minute defeats are the worst to take psychologically and it would have been hard to pick ourselves up if we'd lost that game in those circumstances. I've been there so many times with Wales against Australia when we've lost at the death and I couldn't believe we were in the same position again. When Beale missed it I just breathed a huge sigh of relief. It would have been agonising to lose in that manner again.\n\nGEOFF PARLING (England)  \nToured: 2013\n\nDrico spoke afterwards on the pitch, and he said we didn't actually play anywhere near as well as we could have done. We won the game, but there were things we had to work on. We knew straight away what he was saying and we all remembered what had happened in 2001. That focused everyone's minds and stopped us getting ahead of ourselves.\n\nROB KEARNEY (Ireland)  \nToured: 2009 & 2013\n\nThe midweek game between the First and Second Test is always a difficult one for the boys involved. Obviously the guys who were playing were disappointed because it meant that they weren't going to be starting the Second Test and only had an outside chance of making the bench, but it was important at the same time that we saw the bigger picture, and that it was a three-Test series. We had a difficult game against the Brumbies and losing was hard to take, but we had very little time to prepare as a team \u2013 and especially as a back-line \u2013 because of all the injuries and guys joining the tour just a day or two before the game, so we had no time to really practice together. It was a hard pill to swallow, but we knew that we needed to get back on our feet fairly quickly and realise that yes, this was a setback, but it wasn't going to be what the tour was remembered for, and if we could win the series, then that Brumbies result would become a distant memory.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nWe had some injuries, with Corbs (Alex Corbisiero) ruled out with a calf injury, but we also got a real boost with Tommy Bowe making a Lazarus-like return from a broken hand.\n\nTOMMY BOWE (Ireland)  \nToured: 2013\n\nI broke my hand playing against the Queensland Reds and I thought, 'That's it, tour's over.' But the medical team were unbelievable. The swing in emotions was huge, going from the lowest of the low to the high of being told that I still had a chance of playing in the Test series.\n\nIt was tough to see the X-ray of the fracture put up on the board and be told that was pretty much my tour over. Everyone in the hospital said I would be out for at least six weeks. To then be told by the surgeon that he's had guys come back within three weeks, which would enable me to get back for selection for the Second Test; to then have to go through all the physio and everything else to try and get myself back and available; and to then be picked, it was a bit of a roller coaster.\n\nThe first week, I had my hand in a cast and was keeping it elevated, taking calcium tablets and omega tablets and whatever else to try and get the vitamins in. I had to keep it in a glove anytime I wanted to ice it \u2013 I couldn't get it wet. I had to constantly massage it and try and get the swelling down. It had swelled up like a fat man's hand, like Richard Hibbard's hand! You couldn't see my knuckles. But eventually the swelling started to go out of it and that's when I really started to get my grip back.\n\nJAMES ROBSON\n\nTommy's recovery is up there with the best stories. People will say 'Tommy Bowe, bloody hell, how did he do that?' The immediate feeling was 'Oh my God, we have just lost somebody who we greatly respected and was back to his full peak.' We experienced an immense low, then a glimmer of hope and then over two or three days a feeling of 'Shoot, we actually might pull this off.' Now there is the pride that he returned to full training two weeks after an injury that should have normally sent him home. Injuries can drag a squad down; recovery in the face of adversity can really boost a squad.\n\nYou can't praise Tommy highly enough. You have to have a special person to be able to cope with that regime we did while also knowing that at some point it may go wrong and he may have to go home. To make it back for the Second Test was unbelievable.\n\nALEX CORBISIERO\n\nThe calf injury happened to me in the first five minutes of the First Test, and I felt it go as I chased back after Israel Folau when he scored the opening try. There was no way I was going to come off. There was so much at stake, and I just thought, 'You have to deal with it'. But I was frustrated that I had to battle with something like that with so much on the line. The news later was not good. I had a grade one tear and initially the medics said that it could be 4 to 6 weeks until it healed.\n\nHowever, Phil Pask and the physios worked so hard, and it showed such improvement after four days that they decided to keep me on tour. There were long hours of treatment, with three solid hours of physio each day and the rest of it spent in rehab of some sort. Because you are in camp 24-7 you are doing all the right things \u2013 you're getting the right food, the right rest, and the right rehab, and that was massively influential in the speed of recovery of Jamie Roberts, Tommy Bowe, George North and myself. It is why I was back training within 10 days.\n\nMAKO VUNIPOLA (England)  \nToured: 2013\n\nCorbs picked up a calf injury during the First Test and was ruled out of the Second and it was an incredible moment when I was named in the starting line-up. It's happened really quickly for me. This time last year I was back home just relaxing. To be starting for the Lions in a Test match was beyond my wildest dreams. As a player, it's the highest honour to represent the Lions, the best of the four countries, the elite.\n\nBrian O'Driscoll said it after the Brisbane game: 'This is a massive chance now for us to make history.' To be named in a starting team is an honour in itself, but to represent the Lions is the biggest thing. It was a bit heart in mouth at the end of the First Test. Before that penalty even, when Kurtley Beale missed his first one, I was a bit nervous watching that one as well. To have two kicks missed, I took it as a good sign that there was a bit of luck on our side.\n\nThe three boys that came on in the second half of the First Test \u2013 me, Hibbs (Richard Hibbard) and Coley (Dan Cole) \u2013 all felt disappointed with how the scrums went. The penalty they got at the end, we all knew it was our fault. The Aussies got a bit of confidence in their scrum. The players they brought on had a massive impact. Sekope Kepu came on and he's a strong scrummager. They added a bit of impetus for them and we didn't stick to our drills and the things that we do well.\n\nRYAN GRANT\n\nFor me, it wasn't a question of whether I was going to get on or not. In my head it was about when I was going on, because as a front-row you expect to be used. I remember points in the game when I could feel the camera burning on my face \u2013 they were obviously talking about the scrums and whether I needed to go on. But as the game wore on the doubts started creeping into my mind and when it got to about seventy minutes Mako went down with cramp but they never made the change then \u2013 and that was it for me, I knew I wasn't going on then. That was hugely disappointing and then to lose the game as well, it was just a double blow that night.\n\nI didn't really speak to Warren. I spoke to Graham Rowntree, the forwards coach, but not that night. We were travelling early the next day and everyone was pretty pissed off and low, myself in particular, so it was probably best from both our points of view that we gave it some time. After a couple of days, once the dust had settled, Graham Rowntree spoke to me. We just talked about the reasons he didn't put me on, and that was that. I still don't really know the ins and outs of it \u2013 I know the reasons he gave me and I'll keep them to myself. Whether I agree with what he said or not, he's the coach and at the end of the day he has the final say. It is what it is.\n\nAll the disappointments are over-shadowed by the fact that I was a Lion and I was part of a winning series, which is the greatest achievement in British rugby. I was a part of that, whether I got on or not.\n\nSAM WARBURTON (Wales)  \nToured: 2013\n\nI thought the first 20 minutes of the Second Test were crucial. They went really well for us, but we didn't get the points we should have. We had the Australians under real pressure. We had that 13-man lineout, which they defended really well to be fair. If that had come off, it might have been a very different game. But then we made some mistakes and they got the momentum. After that it was pretty much tit for tat, with us doing a lot of defending.\n\nJONATHAN DAVIES (Wales)  \nToured: 2013\n\nIt was very difficult at times because we had such long spells without the ball that we went away from the game plan and tried to do other things. We lost our shape and our composure because we were just scrabbling to try and get ourselves back in the game and to do something with the ball when we had it. We lost our composure and although I felt that we were definitely the better team, we didn't get a chance to show it because we didn't have enough of the ball.\n\nGEORGE NORTH\n\nPeople keep sending me pictures of that 'wrestling' moment when I picked up Israel Folau \u2013 the truth is I still don't really know what I did. I caught the ball and he was right on top of me so we grappled as I tried to stay on my feet to buy time before support arrived. I pushed off him, ducked under his arm and ran towards him and he came up with me. After that I didn't know how to put him down because I was the one with the ball.\n\nIn an iconic moment from the 2013 Second Test, George North lifts Wallaby Israel Folau while carrying the ball. Getty Images\n\nWhen the cavalry arrived I ended up being 'tombstoned' right on my head like a wrestling move. I got up with a bit of a sore neck. It was one of those random things \u2013 it isn't the most efficient way of going forwards.\n\nI was never allowed to watch much wrestling as a kid because my mum always thought it was too violent. The boys are saying I should move to America and throw some men around for a living. In fact Gerald Davies said to me, 'In all my years in rugby, George, I've seen many an amazing thing happen \u2013 tries scored from 100 metres out, forwards doing beautiful things, but I've never seen an attacker carry a defender back!' That made me laugh.\n\nTo lose the Second Test by one point was gutting. If you lose by 50 points you know you have been outclassed but to lose by such a small margin can break a man. But we were determined that it wouldn't break us.\n\nI set myself the target of at least fifteen touches in a game but it was the sort of match where the wingers only get four or five at best. We should have played more possession and territory, kicking to the corners rather than trying to slog it out in the centre of the field. Australia had better game management and played their rugby in the right areas. The final penalty dropped just shy and that was a kick in the teeth for all of us. Leigh Halfpenny took it hard because he prides himself on perfectionism, but he could have belted it to get the distance and pulled it wide. It comes down to those fine margins and the boys have nothing but admiration for the guts he showed to go for it.\n\nI was sharing a room with him in Melbourne and on the Saturday night I just tried talk to him about anything but rugby. I hate losing at the best of times \u2013 any professional sportsman does \u2013 and nobody came here to almost win a Test series. You never want to be in a changing room after a game when it's so silent you can hear your own thoughts. Normally we are an upbeat team full of energy but the bus journey home was quiet \u2013 there was no music because nobody wanted to put any music on. Even when you see your family nobody knows quite what to say because of the extremes of the ride, both physically and emotionally.\n\nEveryone deals with it their own way \u2013 I stew on it for 24 hours and then leave it behind. In any walk of life you need to deal with a problem straight away or it can come back and bite you.\n\nWe were at the airport on Sunday and it is a difficult situation to be in when people want photos. It is important we give our supporters all the time we can because they have spent a lot of money coming out here to cheer us on and we are so grateful for that, but after a defeat you often just feel like disappearing to gather your own thoughts.\n\nGEOFF PARLING\n\nThat evening in Melbourne was the lowest I'd ever felt in rugby. It had been in our grasp to win the series and we had let it slip. The quality of our ball had not been that good, and therefore we never really got our attack going \u2013 the only positive was that we knew what could happen if we actually put into practice what we were meant to do. It took me a bit of time to come around to thinking that there was another final on Saturday and that we had a chance to put things right.\n\nLEIGH HALFPENNY\n\nI had the chance to win the series in Melbourne \u2013 we had the chance to kill it there, 2\u20130. We weren't able to do that, and it was a case of picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off. It was hard after the game, I was pretty down. It was really tough. I had the chance to win it for the Lions and I didn't take it. That is what all the hard work is for, for moments like that. I was devastated at not being able to do it. It was touch and go, that kick. I felt if I connected with it I would make it, but I didn't connect and it took me a few days to shake it off.\n\nBut we had another chance, and people made that clear to me. Not often in sport do you get a second chance. I had to put it behind me, but I also used the experience. I didn't want to feel like that again. I used it as a motivation because the disappointment can stay with you. I wanted to be a part of a Lions series win, and it helped me as I prepared for the Third Test. I worked harder and harder in training, and hoped it would all pay off.\n\nLeigh Halfpenny watches his last-minute penalty drift agonisingly wide in the Second Test at the Etihad Stadium in Melbourne, 2013. Getty Images\n\nSAM WARBURTON\n\nI have seen Leigh kick those before so it was the right decision to go for goal \u2013 in training he will bang those over. He had to go for it, it could have won us the Test series, but that's the way it goes. It was like my injury \u2013 it's just one of those things. I felt something in my left hamstring straight away, and I knew I was in trouble. I was 'jackling' on Australia's replacement flanker, Liam Gill. Something similar had happened a couple of times in the last couple of seasons where my legs had gone straight and I had been hit, and I remember thinking, 'That was close' just as I managed to escape.\n\nBut this time I had no such luck. I fell backwards and, as I did so, I was thinking, 'This is not good' and then the last guy, replacement prop James Slipper, came in and finished me off. I could feel it coming but couldn't do anything about it. He hit me and that was that. My hamstring had gone.\n\nDid I know my tour was over immediately? You never know because sometimes you do these things and they feel more painful than they actually are. I thought for a moment, 'Maybe it's a one or two-weeker and I can rush back,' but if I'm honest I always thought deep down that I was struggling.\n\nJAMIE HEASLIP\n\nThe squad was named for the Third Test and I wasn't in it. Quite frustrating. What can you do? The coaches make a decision and you get on with it. Toby was in. Some people might think that I hate Toby. No! I roomed with Toby before the First Test. Toby is an absolute gent, such a nice guy and I can only say good things about him. Nothing against him, but I was pissed off and would have argued for a different decision, but what's the point? You gotta go with it.\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nAfter the Second Test we were down, but we had it all still to play for. We'd had two incredibly keenly contested games. Both of them should probably have gone the other way than they did, and it culminated in a winner-takes-all in the Third Test. We knew we were never going to get it easy against Australia, and so it proved.\n\nYou have to have a little bit of a mourning period after any loss. It is important to be able to feel the disappointment because if you try to banish it immediately it will come back to you, and it still does at times throughout the day. You kind of think how scenarios could be different, having a series in the bag rather than one still to go and fight for. But then after a couple of days you just have to shelve it and focus on the target. One more 80 minutes of the season is all that is asked of everyone in the squad \u2013 the 80 minutes of their lives.\n\nThere is always a mental toll but thankfully you do get seven days to try to get over one game and then build for the next one. You would hope that within a week you would be able to forget the negative parts of the game you played and think positively towards what you are going to do the following week. Rugby is very much mental as much as it is physical, and all the more so when you play the same opposition three weeks in a row. You get to know each other an awful lot more and you are almost anticipating certain things.\n\nThey set out their intent when they had a penalty in front of the sticks that they wanted a try \u2013 they didn't want to be trying to kick penalties. Credit to them. It was what it was, and we just had to be able to look back, regroup, realise where we went wrong and try to plug those holes for next time.\n\nI got the tap on the shoulder on the Wednesday morning, when I was at the coffee machine. Gats and Rob Howley wanted to have a quiet word. I realised a quiet word in the meeting room was not a good sign. They were not about to ask me to be captain. That would have been said to me there and then. It was a blow.\n\nHaving seen others react in the past to being dropped has given me an insight into how to respond and behave properly. I have seen guys who are dead men walking on tours when they have not been selected and you cannot be that person. The tour is not about you. For you, the decision is huge. For everyone else, you are just one component of it. You deal with your own disappointment in your own way, behind closed doors, but publicly you have to realise that the bigger picture is not your selection, it is about winning the series. It is about doing the right thing for everyone, setting the tone around the lads, doing what needs to be done at training, trying to be positive when you have a big inner disappointment.\n\nCredit to squad players who have had to do this sort of thing before me, put on the defence bib at training and really mean it out there. It is not easy, keeping your standards up at training. I have said all along on this tour that it is the contributions of everyone that will make or break it. That was true and remains true. Suddenly I was that person. You cannot say things one week and then behave differently. You have to suck it up. I hope I did my bit.\n\nJONNY SEXTON\n\nIt felt almost like I'd been dropped myself.\n\nTOMMY BOWE\n\nFor someone to take such a knock like that \u2013 I think someone said it was his first time being dropped, but he trained with the team, he spoke up, he told us exactly what it meant to him. Everybody knows the disappointment he had for not being involved but for a guy like that, who has such a presence around the squad, for him to really be rallying around the team, to really want us to push on to win the series, it was a huge motivation for us to go out and do the job for him as well.\n\nJAMIE HEASLIP\n\nBrian is on a different level to everybody else in terms of public affection. He's like royalty in Ireland so I wasn't surprised at the reaction. When I came home everybody was like, 'Well done on the Lions tour \u2013 but isn't it terrible about Brian?' I was like, 'Yeah, I feel for the guy'. It was a bitter sweet moment that last week for a few of us. To be honest, the squad was announced on Wednesday morning, we trained that morning and that was my last session and I didn't train again. I didn't have to go to any meetings. I pulled myself back. We all did. The guys not in the 23 withdrew to a certain degree to allow the lads to focus on what they had to do. We obviously supported the guys but we kept our distance a little bit because we needed a little head space as well.\n\nSEAN O'BRIEN\n\nNo better man to react to something like that than Brian. In fairness, there was shock in the squad. Even the lads starting in the centre were surprised, I think. Brian is the type of person who is all about the team. The way he reacted to it was an example to all of us. The reaction to that decision was never going to be pretty. Fair play to Gats, once he has something in his head, that's it. He made a decision and that's that. I didn't speak to Brian that afternoon but I went up to his room that night and knocked on his door. I texted first to see if he was there because sometimes you're better off leaving lads to themselves for a while and let it sink in a little bit. He was in okay-ish form I suppose, all things considered. He knew it was the last chance he had to be involved in a winning Test.\n\nJAMIE HEASLIP\n\nYou fall, you dust yourself off and you go again. That's what it's all about.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nBrian is one of the most incredible players I have played with, or against, in rugby union. He will be remembered as a Lions legend. Brian is a leader; I've tasted that playing alongside him. He's a force, but once Warren made his call it was up to me and Jon to lead the way in midfield. Jon and I had played together a lot. He had been one of the standout players on tour. His all-round game is pretty special, he's a great athlete, he can kick a ball, he is a good distributor and he's got an eye for space.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nAh look, Brian was brilliant the way he handled it. He is so experienced. I had never seen him so disappointed and devastated in my life. But he did both training sessions after he got dropped and stayed on and I think he was the last man on the bus. We had a community initiative with coaching and signing and Brian was the last man on the bus. He didn't touch a beer until after the Test, he was just very impressive because it was probably the toughest few days of his career. I was shocked and disappointed. After playing so long with him, you end up being a bit of a fan. I wouldn't say it took the gloss off it a little bit for me... but it probably did. I thought Brian was playing really well. If you look at the first two Tests there wasn't a whole lot of quality ball given to the back line. Apart from George North, who had a ball kicked down his throat and created an unbelievable try, there weren't any backs that stood out. So it's hard to fathom the logic behind the decision, certainly from my point of view, but obviously I'd be biased.\n\nJONATHAN DAVIES\n\nBrian was an inspiration to me as I was growing up and playing with him on tour was very special. He came straight up to me at training and shook my hand. That's the way it is with everyone. We have all been close and together on this trip. Brian is one of the greats because of what he's achieved. I was very grateful to him for coming up and congratulating me. I wouldn't say there was extra pressure on me. I was just grateful for the opportunity to play in such a big game. You can't fear it. You've got to embrace it.\n\nSEAN O'BRIEN\n\nI heard a couple of the lads saying some people were saying that we shouldn't have gone to Noosa before the Third Test. Clive Woodward, was it? Noosa was one of the best things we did because we were in a bubble for weeks at that point, a real pressure environment, so relaxing and having the beach beside us and having a couple of beers and completely chilling out really stood to us. It was important. The only thing about Noosa is that we didn't train that well in the few days leading up to the Test. Maybe we were too relaxed. We were just dropping a few balls and other small things. A few lineouts went wrong. That was the first day, but we knuckled down and got our heads together and by the time of the captain's run we were flying around the field. Probably had the best captain's run of the tour, actually.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nAs soon as I walked off the pitch in the Waratahs game I thought I was going home. I have to say a massive thanks to the medical team who worked wonders with the rehab on my hamstring. I had a scan the day after the injury and then they sat me down and said they would keep me on tour, stay positive and do everything in their power to get me fit. Luckily the gods smiled on me and I was able to make it back for the Third Test.\n\nThe management decided not to put me in contention for selection for the Second Test and seeing the boys lose by a point was heart-breaking, but the series was then poised nicely at 1\u20131 and we were presented with a golden opportunity to make history in the most dramatic of ways. I like to peak for the big games \u2013 I really thrive on them. The bigger the occasion the bigger the pressure I put on myself to perform. I was picked to do a job and I knew how important it was that I delivered.\n\nTOMMY BOWE\n\nI knew that if we could keep hold of the ball and keep battering over the top of the Aussies, we would cause a bit of damage. There was a huge amount of emotion in the squad to win the series. We knew that it had been 16 years since we last won a Lions series. The disappointment of losing out to a try in the last six minutes of the Second Test in Melbourne was heart-breaking. We took a lot from that and from the disappointment of it all in 2009 when we lost to that last kick\n\nThe first two Tests against Australia had been really close, neck and neck stuff. But we'd had so little ball in the Second Test that we knew if we could secure some more possession we could do some real damage \u2013 we just needed the ball and we wanted to go out and play some rugby.\n\nALUN WYN JONES\n\nI spoke to Leigh before the game and told him to give me the heads up about where he wanted to take kicks from. He said, 'anywhere from halfway,' and that was it, that was the conversation.\n\nHe was brilliant, not just off the tee but from hand as well. I think he's already established himself as an icon in the game. He's been a talisman throughout the tour. The plaudits he gets are well deserved. Australia knew that anywhere in their own half they had to be whiter than white in the contact area and not concede penalties.\n\nJONNY SEXTON\n\nWe were all fired up. Andy Farrell spoke brilliantly about having a different type of mentality: 'We're Lions and we have to be a step above what we expect at international level.' The lads really produced that. Outstanding in defence, outstanding up front and we showed some glimpses in the backs of the kind of attacking play we had displayed in the warm-up games and got some really nice tries.\n\nWe were up for it for the first two Tests, but we just played a bit better in the Third. We got more set-piece and were more accurate, that's the bottom line. We wanted it as much as we did the week before, but sometimes you can want it too much. We maybe wanted it a bit too much when we got to 15\u20139 and went into our shells a bit and wished the clock away.\n\nIn the Third Test we grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and went for it and scored some tries. Rob Howley said before the First Test that if we scored two tries we'd win and he re-emphasised that point. We had Leigh with the boot keeping us ticking over, but we couldn't just rely on that. We talked about the 16 year wait a bit too much before the Second Test. We forgot about our performance and actually trying to do the things that we needed to do to win the game. We knew we weren't going to just be able to dog it out against a team like Australia, with the firepower that they have and guys like Genia pulling the strings, so we did a lot of homework before the Third Test on him and we managed to shut him down. He caused us some trouble at times, but we did a good job.\n\nSEAN O'BRIEN\n\nIt was one those games that you'll never ever forget. From the very word go, from the first whistle to the last, from when Will Genia dropped that ball at the kick-off, it was special. I remember Genia shouting something at the second-row and the second-row looking down at the ground and I said to myself, 'We're going to break these lads today'. That's what I remember saying to myself. Then we got a run on them in the scrum, some good carries and Alex went over. The perfect start. I just said we need to keep on top of them now. We'd spoken about that during the week. We had to stay on it.\n\nALEX CORBISIERO\n\nWe had trained to a high intensity throughout the tour and the more relaxed few days in Noosa paid off. The squad had bonded strongly and the coaches gave us confidence and emphasised that we were well prepared and in good shape for what was the last game of the season. I made sure I stayed mentally focused and knew my detail at the set piece and around the park.\n\nWhen I picked up the ball and twisted my way over the line for the first try I was pumped, but my next thought was, 'Don't lose your head, it's only one minute and 42 seconds into the game'. It was hard to keep focus with all the boys jumping on you but I knew I had to concentrate on the next job, keep my head down, and not run around in a mad adrenaline rush and gas myself.\n\nLEIGH HALFPENNY\n\nI wouldn't be able to kick the goals without the hard work of my teammates. And it wasn't just about the starting XV or the 23 that appeared in the Third Test, but the whole squad. It was nice to be able to create some tries for the boys. We made a counter-attack and we gave Jonny and George great support for their tries. The emotion after seeing the boys go over for tries... There's no better feeling.\n\nAlex Corbisiero crashes over to score the opening try of the Third Test in Sydney, 2013. Getty Images\n\nIt wasn't the best start to the second half and we were disappointed to have let them in before half-time. We said it was important to get the first points after half-time but we failed to do that and you do start thinking, 'Oh, not again.' But the character the boys showed... You could see how much we wanted it through our defence and our kick-chase.\n\nWe managed to keep them out this time and that was huge for us. We talked about keeping the emotion high, and we did that the whole game.\n\nSEAN O'BRIEN\n\nI never felt at any stage that we were going to lose that Test. They were clocking up three points here and there with penalties but with the lads we had on the bench I had great confidence. The bench was as strong as the boys on the field and they gave us some extra intensity when it was needed. Once we got our composure back and got our hands on the ball there was no doubt in my mind that we would score more tries.\n\nJAMIE ROBERTS\n\nI've never experienced anything on the pitch quite like scoring in a Test series for the Lions. The stadium was so loud and the noise was incredible, but inside it all went a bit quiet. You don't know what to think but it's one heck of a buzz.\n\nI've had to watch it on replays because you can't really remember a moment like that, but it's a highlight of my career and it'll remain a moment to treasure. Tries don't come around too often so to get one in a game of that magnitude and at that moment was a fantastic feeling. It was made better by the team performance on the day, and not many people would have predicted that scoreline before kick-off, so it was all the more special to finish the tour in style.\n\nWith Australia winning the Second Test, we certainly had the pressure on us, but thankfully came up with what was needed in the game that mattered. It dawns on you a bit when you score like that, but I don't think it'll actually hit us for a few months until we realise what we've actually achieved.\n\nJonny Sexton crosses to score in the Third Test, 2013. Getty Images\n\nADAM JONES\n\nI was pleased with the way things went in Sydney. There had been a few issues in the first two Tests regarding the reffing of the scrum, but by the final one it was plain to see who was dominant. To get so many points and penalties from the scrum was huge, not just for myself but for all the boys who played in the front-row \u2013 Richard Hibbard, Alex Corbisiero, Mako Vunipola, Tom Youngs and Dan Cole. Rich has copped a lot of stick about his fitness in the past but he's shut up the knockers now. He's proved he's the best hooker in Britain and is going to be pushing over the next couple of years to be the best in the world.\n\nALEX CORBISIERO\n\nThere is no tomorrow as a Lion, there is no next year, it may never happen again for you, and that was the mentality we had. It has only just started to sink in what we have actually achieved. At the time you are just focusing on it being another game and seeing it through, and once that final whistle goes you think, 'Wow, we've done this.' Alun Wyn said it was an opportunity to wear the shirt forever and achieve something, or never wear it again. It's a dream come true.\n\nJamie Roberts is mobbed by team mates Conor Murray, Owen Farrell and George North after scoring the Lions' fourth try in Sydney, 2013. Getty Images\n\nSAM WARBURTON\n\nPeople might have thought I would relax in the 60th minute but, being the pessimist I am and knowing Australia can always strike back with a few tries in a few minutes, I could not relax until it was five minutes to go. I figured out in my head that they had to get a try every 75 seconds to win, which I would have backed our defence on that one. That's the point I started smiling and celebrating.\n\nIt's a great feeling. This Lions tour has been a long time coming so it is nice to come back with a trophy. It has only been done a dozen times in 125 years so all the players know they are part of a very prestigious group and are very proud of that.\n\nMIKE PHILLIPS\n\nThe Lions is the ultimate. You want to play your best and, fortunately for me, I thought I played some of my best stuff in South Africa in 2009. You are surrounded by great players, and, to be honest, that tends to bring out the best in you. You don't want to let anyone down. You know what big occasions they are and what they mean to everyone.\n\nI was pretty pleased with my performances in 2009, but I wanted to go one step further, to top those performances and be part of a Test series-winning team. In South Africa we lost the series, but to finish on a high note like we did in the Third Test in 2009 was important for the build-up to 2013 and for the players coming into it. The 2009 tour was a huge success in many ways, and it was just gutting we lost the series, but the deciding margins in those games were very small. So we all knew how important it was not to make the same mistakes again and to do what we had to do to come away with a series win in 2013. The fact that the series was so close again shows what the Lions are up against and how hard you have to work to win, but we learned so much from 2009 and it all paid off in 2013.\n\nADAM JONES\n\nWinning the series with the Lions has probably surpassed everything else in my career. It's the whole thing, the history that goes with the Lions, the players who have worn the jersey in the past. I was pleased as punch to win Grand Slams and championships with Wales, and all the leagues with the Ospreys, but this is the pinnacle \u2013 I'm so happy. It's nice just to be able to enjoy what we achieved in Australia. It was a great trip, the camaraderie was good and there weren't any cliques.\n\nWARREN GATLAND (Head coach)  \nToured: 2009& 2013\n\nThe guys played exceptionally well. We came under pressure but the boys kept their composure and finished really strong. They deserve a lot of credit. At half-time we spoke about going to a place that not many players go to in terms of pushing your body to the limit. And the players did that and ran themselves into the ground. I think we played some great rugby on this tour. Four tries in the deciding Test was a vindication of that. I was so pleased for the players for finishing off a fantastic and hard-fought series.\n\nJONNY SEXTON\n\nThe Third Test decided whether the tour was a massive success or a massive failure. Everything that had gone on before was irrelevant if we'd lost and it means everything now that we've won.\n\nThe changing room was an incredible place to be in with the guys, even the guys that didn't play were over the moon and celebrating just as much as the guys that were on the pitch. The big motivation as a player is that you want to be remembered when you hang up your boots and you try to win as much as possible and do the right things as much as possible. Winning a Lions series is definitely part of that and we're in, I suppose, an elite group and it's a big privilege to be a part of that.\n\nThe dressing room atmosphere was unique, just totally different to anything I've experienced. It was my first Lions tour so everything's been different and really special from that point of view. But that dressing room, it's a bit surreal because I suppose when they last won it, in 1997, I never thought I'd be in the next dressing room that won it. I remember watching the 1997 tour in Ciss Madden's with the Bective crew and that's one of my first big rugby memories. That Lions DVD is a very special documentary and to be a part of something similar is really special. You're playing with guys you barely know and you have to forge that bond. I think you saw by the celebrations that we did that \u2013 we did the Lions tradition proud.\n\nPlayer of the 2013 series Leigh Halfpenny kept the scoreboard ticking during all the three Tests to help the Lions sink the Wallabies. Getty Images\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nIt was a massive mix of emotions: delight at being part of this historic moment alongside guys you have battled with, but tempered by not playing. It was hard and I would be lying if I said otherwise. You are desperately envious of those who are out there but there is not a sliver of ambiguity about wanting to see the boys win \u2013 that is non-negotiable. 100 per cent you want to the team to go well. I have spent a lot of time with these guys.\n\nBut thanks be to God, I am a series winner with the British & Irish Lions, albeit it did not finish as I would have liked it to. But you cannot write your own script. Other people write it for you.\n\nRICHIE GRAY (Scotland)  \nToured: 2013\n\nHaving the experience, not just over the last couple of days of the tour, but over the course of the whole event since we met up mid-May, was unbelievable. We all learned a lot from the experience and we've come back better players. The most remarkable thing is how all these guys came together, guys you'd knock lumps out of during the season, and you have to forge this bond.\n\nThe 2013 Lions squad celebrate their first series win in 16 years. Getty Images\n\nBRIAN O'DRISCOLL\n\nI am glad that we have been able to justify the ethos and the brand by winning a series. I have heard some moronic stuff about how there is no place for it any more. That comes from people who do not understand the Lions, who have never played for them, have never travelled to watch them, never reported on them, never got what they are all about. If you have done any of the above, you cannot help but be affected by it. It is special.\n\nJONNY SEXTON\n\nEverything you win is very special but this is just unique. You are playing with guys you barely know, and you have to forge that bond. You saw by the celebrations that we did that. We did the Lions tradition proud.\n\nANDY IRVINE\n\nLooking at the structure of a season in a Lions year is crucial going forward. In 1995, when the game went pro, the administrators did a fantastic job to keep Lions tours because they were close to being put out to pasture. What we have to do, now that the whole concept has taken off so much, is to refine how things are structured because although people love the Lions, if we don't start to win more that love is going to wane. And it must not be forgotten how important the tours are to the host nation. They generate tens of millions for the host nation and to play the Lions is a career highlight for the opposition. I spoke to Robbie Deans when we launched the tour schedule and I asked him if Australian rugby was seeing a player-drain to France like we've seen here. He said, 'No, it's not a problem at all because they all want to stay and play you boys. But we're going to have serious issues when the tour is over.'\n\nSo for everybody's sake we need to find a way to make the Lions work in the future. I would like to see at least a two-week break introduced at the end of the season, before we even meet up for the first time. At the moment we are meeting on the Monday after the Aviva and Pro 12 finals. A Lions tour is going to be the highlight of a player's career, but they have to get through a major final first, which I don't think is fair \u2013 particularly for first time Lions. And the Top 14 final being played a week later is also a major headache. I'd like to see a longer tour with more mid-week games and ideally another Test, but the danger is player welfare and spectator overkill.\n\nI remember being so excited when the All Blacks toured the UK and came to Murrayfield to play Scotland because to see them play was so rare. Now with Sky and all the Test matches they have lost a lot of that magic. The Lions still retain that, but we have to be careful not to take that for granted. And the players need to be looked after. The game is so physical these days that I sit and watch the collisions and they look horrendous. And the season is far too long as well. It used to be a case that you would come back from a Lions tour and you would have a fantastic Five Nations because you were big and fit and confident. Nowadays the season after a Lions tour is often relatively poor. So again we have to be very careful with what we're doing.\n\nPAUL O'CONNELL\n\nEvery tour is different, but 2013 was really special. To this day the 2005 tour is still the toughest rugby experience of my life. New Zealand is a tough place to be when you don't play well, when you don't justify your selection, and in 2005 unfortunately a lot of us didn't play well. It was different in 2009, we produced a big performance in the last Test and there was a huge buzz. At the same time it was a missed opportunity. It felt like we righted a lot of wrongs in 2013 \u2013 the legacy required us to win the series and we did it. A Lions tour is like a World Cup, it's a shot at forever. And we have now put our names alongside the greats of the game. It is a very, very special feeling.\n\nJAMIE HEASLIP\n\nIt's really quite humbling to be part of 125 years of history. You see all the thousands who travelled, you hear about the amount of money they contributed to the Australian economy, the vast business that is the Lions and it's like, 'Woah, this is a different type of animal'. The 2009 tour was all about re-establishing the Lions, all about getting some pride back in the jersey. This time was all about 'Let's just go out and win this bloody thing'. In 2009 we kicked it up a few levels from 2005 and now it's gone to somewhere it hasn't been in a long time. In 2017, God only knows what it's going to be like. New Zealand? Frightening. That is going to be one interesting tour.\n\n1888\n\nAustralia & New Zealand\n\nCaptains: Bob Seddon & \"Drewy\" Stoddart\n\nManagers: Alfred Shaw & Arthur Shrewsbury\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Unbeaten at rugby in Australia but defeats by Taranaki and Auckland and four draws in NZ prove that the game in the \"land of the long white cloud\" is a serious business.\n\n\u2022 Skipper Seddon drowns near the end of the Australian leg of the tour and is succeeded by Stoddart.\n\nTests\n\nNONE\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Wise to get RFU patronage for future tours. They had permitted its go-ahead, but allegations of professionalism surround the visit.\n\n\u2022 New Zealand and Australia learn the benefit of the passing game, heeling from the scrum and the \"dummy\" pass.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 \"Drewy\" Stoddart \u2013 even shone at Aussie Rules of which 19 games (nine won, ten lost) were played in Australia\n\n\u2022 John Nolan, prolific try-scorer who was offered a job to stay in Australia.\n\n\u2022 Harry Eagles, Swinton forward who played in every match.\n1891\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Bill Maclagan\n\nManager: Edwin Ash\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 The only British\/Irish team to win every tour match (19). Test series won 3-0.\n\n\u2022 The side concedes only one score: a try by the Cape Town clubs in the first game of the visit.\n\n\u2022 Tour underwritten by Cecil Rhodes, Prime-Minister of the Cape Colony.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Port Elizabeth Cricket Club Ground, Port Elizabeth)\n\nW 4-0\n\nCentre Randolph Aston scores the first Test try credited to a British\/Irish tour side. Match refereed by the former Edinburgh medical student and Welsh international, John Griffin.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Eclectic Cricket Ground, Kimberley)\n\nW 3-0\n\nOnly score of the game is a goal from a mark kicked from near half-way by England full-back, William Mitchell.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nW 4-0\n\nTourists wind-up the series 3-0 and finish the official leg of their \"missionary\" tour with a unique 100% winning record.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Touring with the full blessing of the RFU brings a smooth passage through SA both on and off the field\n\n\u2022 Hard grounds, long journeys between playing centres and South African hospitality take their toll of the players\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Randolph Aston, England centre who scored 30 tries and played in every match\n\n\u2022 \"Judy\" MacMillan, stalwart Scottish forward who also featured in every game\n\n\u2022 Paul Clauss, magnet of the social side of the tour who later remembered the visit as: \"all champagne and travel.\"\n1896\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Johnny Hammond\n\nManager: Roger Walker\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 The first tourists to include Irish international players.\n\n\u2022 Test series won 3-1. Only blots on the playing record are a draw against Western Province and defeat by South Africa in the fourth and final Test.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Crusader Ground, Port Elizabeth)\n\nW 8-0\n\nTries by Walter Carey (who coined the famous Barbarians motto) and Irish wing Larry Bulger either side of half-time seal victory.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Wanderers Ground, Johannesburg)\n\nW 17-8\n\nFroude Hancock, the giant English forward and a veteran of the 1891 series, caps an outstanding performance with a second-half try. Two late tries by Theo Samuels are the first points scored by South Africa in Tests.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Athletic Club Grounds, Kimberley)\n\nW 9-3\n\nSouth Africa lead 3-0 at the interval but Fred Byrne's conversion of Bert Mackie's try and his late dropped goal bring a hard-earned victory.\n\n4th v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nL 0-5\n\nThe British are regularly penalised for wheeling by local referee Alf Richards. The tourists are upset by his off-side rulings and fall to their first-ever defeat on South African soil.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 South Africa becoming a force having absorbed the lessons in passing and scrummaging handed down by the 1891 \"missionaries\".\n\n\u2022 The tourists discover the benefits of wheeling tactics and what would nowadays be called the \"snap-shove\" to overcome the scrummaging power of the South Africans.\n\n\u2022 \"Homers\" \u2013 referees from the host nation \u2013a problem for tourists in Test matches.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Fred Byrne, England full-back who scored more than a century of points on tour and played in every match, transferring successfully to centre for the Tests.\n\n\u2022 Tommy Crean, great character, powerful Irish forward and tour vice-captain who also featured in every game. It was said that he could wheel a scrum through his own strength. Laid the law down to his forwards on tour: \"No more than four glasses of champagne for lunch on match days.\"\n1899\n\nAustralia\n\nCaptain & Manager: Rev Matthew Mullineux\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 First tour to include players from all four of the Home Unions.\n\n\u2022 Test series won 3-1. Three of the 21 games lost: the first Test against Australia and matches against Queensland & the Metropolitan Districts.\n\n\u2022 Only British tour to visit Australia exclusively until 1989, although the New Zealand Rugby Union did try to arrange a part-visit.\n\nTests\n\n1st v Australia\n\n(Sydney Cricket Ground)\n\nL 3-13\n\nAustralia win their inaugural rugby Test with two converted tries in the last ten minutes. The hosts are bolstered by two New Zealanders and there is a New Zealand referee.\n\n2nd v Australia\n\n(Exhibition Ground, Brisbane)\n\nW 11-0\n\nFrank Stout, the experienced England forward, takes over from the uncapped Mullineux to lead the British side for the remainder of the series. The crowd of 15,000 is a record for an international sporting occasion in Queensland.\n\n3rd v Australia\n\n(Sydney Cricket Ground)\n\nW 11-10\n\nScottish wing Alf Bucher crosses twice in a tight game that Australia would have won had they landed a late penalty attempt.\n\n4th v Australia\n\n(Sydney Cricket Ground)\n\nW 13-0\n\nIn a desperate bid to square the series, Australia call on five Kiwis. But the British forwards relish the wet, heavy conditions and pave the way for a convincing victory in the final Test.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 British devotion to open play captures the imagination of the Australian public.\n\n\u2022 Sharp Australian practices such as line-out pushing and obstruction in open play are criticised by the British captain in his end-of-tour speech.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Charles Adamson, uncapped Durham half who was the tourists' top-scorer with more than a century of points.\n\n\u2022 Gwyn Nicholls, legendary centre who became the first Welshman to appear in a Test for a British side. Described by an Australian sporting newspaper as possessing \"intuitively quick judgement.\"\n1903\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Mark Morrison\n\nManager: Johnny Hammond\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 1-0 with two drawn.\n\n\u2022 Side wins only 50% of its matches.\n\n\u2022 Seven of the 21 tour party come from Scotland.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Wanderers Ground, Johannesburg)\n\nD 10-10\n\nBritish trail 10-0 before Reg Skrimshire scores a spectacular try at the posts just before half-time and draw level in the second half. Alex Frew, a former Scotland cap, captains South Africa and Bill Donaldson, another Scottish internationalist, referees.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Athletic Club Grounds, Kimberley)\n\nD 0-0\n\nPatrick Hancock, the English half-back, is outstanding in defence and attack. British come closest to scoring a try when Reg Skrimshire goes over only to be recalled for a forward pass.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nL 0-8\n\nSouth Africa adopt green jerseys in a Test for the first time and run out winners with all the scoring coming after the interval.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Pupils become masters \u2013 British team beaten in a series for the first time.\n\n\u2022 British forwards unable to \"beef-up\" to suppress South African pack power.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Reg Skrimshire, Newport and Wales centre who played in every match (22) and was the leading try-scorer and points scorer.\n\n\u2022 Alfred Tedford, singled out by the South African captain as the best of the forwards: \"the finished article in every department of the game.\"\n1904\n\nAustralia & New Zealand\n\nCaptain: David Bedell-Sivright\n\nManager: Arthur O'Brien\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Eight Welshmen in 24-strong tour party.\n\n\u2022 Only British team to win all its matches in Australia.\n\n\u2022 Test series won 3-0 in Australia. Lose only Test in New Zealand; also defeated by Auckland.\n\n\u2022 Denys Dobson becomes first tourist sent-off, getting marching orders in the game against Northern Districts at Newcastle.\n\nTests\n\n1st v Australia\n\n(Sydney Cricket Ground)\n\nW 17-0\n\nAustralia hold the British scoreless until half-time, despite losing their winger through injury. Two tries by Willie Llewellyn and a Percy Bush dropped goal set the visitors on the path to a clear-cut win in the second half.\n\n2nd v Australia\n\n(Exhibition Ground, Brisbane)\n\nW 17-3\n\nAustralia lead 3-0 at the break but tries by Llewellyn and Bush, who also kicks a goal from a mark and a dropped goal, are highlights of another strong second-half performance by the visitors.\n\n3rd v Australia\n\n(Sydney Cricket Ground)\n\nW 16-0\n\nTeddy Morgan scores the only points of the first-half with a try but the floodgates open again in the second half for Rhys Gabe, Llewellyn and Blair Swannell to cross for further British tries.\n\nOnly Test v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington)\n\nL 3-9\n\nTourists hold the New Zealand side to 3-all before conceding two second-half tries. Host forwards lay the foundations of a well-deserved victory.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 British struggle to cope with the loose wing-forward (or \"rover\" ) standing off the 2-3-2 scrum formation favoured by New Zealanders.\n\n\u2022 New Zealand get fair warning of the threat the Welsh backs will pose when their first tour to Britain comes off in 1905.\n\n\u2022 British learn that to beat New Zealand their forwards need to win at least 40% possession.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Percy Bush, Welsh fly-half and livewire who topped a century of points (including eleven tries) on tour.\n\n\u2022 Willie Llewellyn, Rhys Gabe & Teddy Morgan, the Welsh threequarters who scored 19 tries altogether and who (with Bush) would get even with the All Blacks on their first tour to Wales the year later.\n1908\n\nAustralia & New Zealand\n\nCaptain: \"Boxer\" Harding\n\nManager: George Harnett\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Anglo-Welsh combination, the Scots and Irish declining to take part.\n\n\u2022 No Tests played in Australia (two tour defeats there) because the first Wallabies en route for a tour of Britain. Series in NZ lost 2-0 with a draw. Five defeats against provincial sides.\n\n\u2022 Strong Welsh contingent among the 28-strong party, including six former pupils of Christ College, Brecon.\n\nTests\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Carisbrook, Dunedin)\n\nL 5-32\n\nAnglo-Welsh forwards overwhelmed in the line-out and hardly won a scrum against the New Zealanders' two-man front-row.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington)\n\nD 3-3\n\nVisitors adapt well to the wet and muddy conditions. New Zealand lead through a penalty before Jack Jones shows a fine turn of speed to put the tourists level with a second-half try.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Potter's Park, Auckland)\n\nL 0-29\n\nNew Zealand again overwhelm the Anglo-Welsh who fail to register a point. The visitors play with 14 men for most of the match, skipper Harding suffering a serious injury in the third minute.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Conflict arises over NZ\/Australian practices such as using substitutes for injured players and leaving the field at half-time. Wing-forward play still a contentious issue.\n\n\u2022 Criticism levelled at the tourists for putting socialising before match preparation.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Jack and Tuan Jones, the Pontypool brothers, were the linchpins of the threequarters. When on song behind a winning pack they attracted praise for their dazzling style.\n\n\u2022 Fred Jackson, giant West Country forward who, like captain Harding, settled in New Zealand. Jackson's son, Everard, played for the All Blacks in the 1930s.\n1910\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Dr Tom Smyth\n\nManagers: William Cail & Walter Rees\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 First fully representative British\/Irish side to tour, the side wearing a blue jersey with four Home Unions quartered crest.\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 2-1 and altogether eight of the 24 games lost.\n\n\u2022 Seven Newport players in the party.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Wanderers Ground, Johannesburg)\n\nL 10-14\n\nJack Jones dropped goal and a converted try by Jack Spoors are the highlights of an exciting second-half British rally that leaves the match balanced at 11-10 before a late Springbok try puts the issue beyond doubt.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Crusader Ground, Port Elizabeth)\n\nW 8-3\n\nSpringboks lead 3-0 at the interval but tries by Jack Spoors and Maurice Neale, the latter converted by \"Cherry\" Pillman, enable the visitors to square the series.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nL 5-21\n\nStanley Williams, Newport full-back later capped by England, is seriously injured early on and the visitors crash to their (then) heaviest Test defeat in SA. Spoors scores a late consolation try which Pillman converts.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Although the Four Home Unions were responsible for selecting the tour party, unavailability of leading players owing to business and family commitments weakens the strength of the representative team.\n\n\u2022 Less strenuous itineraries, with no mid-week matches before internationals, required for British sides to be more competitive at Test time.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Jack Spoors, uncapped Bristol centre-cum-fly-half who scored a try in each of the three Tests.\n\n\u2022 \"Cherry\" Pillman, England flanker who was the tourists' top-scorer and was pressed into fly-half duties late in the tour when injuries decimated the squad.\n1924\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Dr Ronald Cove-Smith\n\nManager: Harry Packer\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Won fewer than half (9) of the 21 matches played.\n\n\u2022 Phil Macpherson, Leslie Gracie (both Scotland), George Stephenson (Ireland) and Wavell Wakefield (England's captain) among the leading Five Nations players unavailable for the tour.\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 3-0 with one Test drawn.\n\n\u2022 Blue is still the jersey colour but a new innovation \u2013 a tie bearing a lion \u2013 leads to the tourists being called \"Lions\" for the first time.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Kingsmead, Durban)\n\nL 3-7\n\nBennie Osler dictates the tactical course of the game as a kicking fly-half for the Springboks. His early dropped goal gives the home side a lead that is never relinquished, despite a rousing second-half try for the Lions by Arthur Blakiston.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Wanderers Ground, Johannesburg)\n\nL 0-17\n\nOsler's tactical kicking and the power of the Springbok pack sinks the tourists in the second-half.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Crusader Ground, Port Elizabeth)\n\nD 3-3\n\nBest Lions show of the series. Bill Cunningham, a former Irish out-half who had migrated to South Africa, is seconded to the squad when their leading midfield players are injured and opens the scoring with a try. The 'Boks level on the stroke of half-time.\n\n4th v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nL 9-16\n\nThe game goes down as one of the most exciting seen on South African soil. England's Tom Voyce and Stanley Harris keep the tourists in touch. Voyce kicks a first-half penalty and scores a late try while Harris sells a lovely dummy to score the Lions' first try.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Injuries bring home the need for cover to be available (or even three specialists chosen) in the key positions of scrum-half and hooker.\n\n\u2022 Heavy itinerary and distribution of Test Saturdays still an issue. Mid-week matches take place before each of the internationals. The first two Tests are played on successive Saturdays, so too the last two.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Tom Voyce, versatile England wing-forward who turned out at full-back and on the wing when injuries depleted the party and was the tourists' top-scorer.\n\n\u2022 \"Jammy\" Clinch, legendary Irish character who also showed his versatility by appearing at full-back in a couple of the tour games.\n1930\n\nNew Zealand & Australia\n\nCaptain: Doug Prentice\n\nManager: James Baxter\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Popular side lose 6 (of 21) matches in NZ and twice in Australia.\n\n\u2022 Series in NZ lost 3-1 and sole Test in Australia lost.\n\n\u2022 First side to tour as \"Lions\", the side wearing three-lions badge on their blue shirts and carrying lion brooches to present as gifts to well-wishers.\n\n\u2022 First fully representative side to visit NZ and Australia, though Wavell Wakefield, Morgan Crowe and George Stephenson are among the leading players unable to tour.\n\nTests\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Carisbrook, Dunedin)\n\nW 6-3\n\nIvor Jones's thrilling last-minute run out of defence sends Jack Morley haring over for the Lions' winning try.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Lancaster Park, Christchurch)\n\nL 10-13\n\nAll Blacks (wearing white shirts for this series) level series despite late British comeback. Another last-minute Ivor Jones break creates a late score for Carl Aarvold which skipper Prentice converts.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Eden Park, Auckland)\n\nL 10-15\n\nNeck and neck at 5-all at half-time. New Zealand pull away, backed by a strong wind, to win in the second half after Brian Black has a penalty goal for the Lions disallowed by the New Zealand referee.\n\n4th v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington)\n\nL 8-22\n\nLions hold their own until the break. Then All Blacks' forward superiority tells as New Zealand add four second-half tries.\n\nOnly Test v Australia\n\n(Sydney Cricket Ground)\n\nL 5-6\n\nAussie fly-half and captain Tom Lawton masterminds his side's win. The Wallabies lead 6-0 in front of more than 30,000 before Lions rally and Tony Novis scores a try for Prentice to convert. Ivor Jones nearly wins the match, tackled a metre short of the try-line by Cyril Towers in the dying moments.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Manager James Baxter's invectives against the New Zealand rover wing-forward finally lead the International Board to amend the scrum laws, leading to the extinction of the 2-3-2 scrum.\n\n\u2022 Lions show how to use the blind-side wing as an attacking ploy off an inside pass from the fly-half in moves off the set-piece.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Roger Spong, English fly-half and mainspring of a strong attacking back division.\n\n\u2022 Ivor Jones, Welsh loose forward with a rare turn of speed and a more-than-useful place-kicker.\n1938\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Sammy Walker\n\nManager: Col \"Jock\" Hartley\n\nAssistant Manager: Jack Haigh-Smith\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 2-1 and altogether six defeats from 23 games.\n\n\u2022 24 of the 29-strong party gain caps for their Home Union.\n\n\u2022 Charles Dick, Wilson Shaw and George Horsburgh (Scotland); Cliff Jones, Willie Davies and Wilf Wooller (Wales) and England forward Fred Huskisson are the leading players who declare their unavailability for the visit.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Ellis Park, Johannesburg)\n\nL 12-26\n\nViv Jenkins's three penalties from around half-way keep the Lions in the hunt, but two tries by wing Dai Owen Williams steer the Springboks to victory in a fast, open game.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Crusader Ground, Port Elizabeth)\n\nL 3-19\n\nLions are overwhelmed by stifling heat and South Africa's juggernaut pack.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nW 21-16\n\nBest performance of the tour. Despite windy conditions, the sides join in a wonderful exhibition of running rugby to treat the crowd to a seven-try spectacular.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 South Africa's development of the \"Eighthman\" (later No 8) demonstrates the superiority of the 3-4-1 scrum formation over 3-2-3.\n\n\u2022 Injury problems \u2013 especially to hookers and scrum-halves \u2013 still a major issue playing on the hard, fast grounds of the high veldt.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 \"Bunner\" Travers, technically brilliant Welsh hooker who despite injury still turned out in more games (20) than any other Lion.\n\n\u2022 Jimmy Giles, Coventry and England scrum-half whose versatility was a godsend to the tourists. Three different scrum-halves were employed during the series, Giles deputising as centre in the Newlands Test win and also playing fly-half on tour.\n1950\n\nNew Zealand & Australia\n\nCaptain: Dr Karl Mullen\n\nManager: Surg-Capt \"Ginger\" Osborne\n\nAssistant Manager: Ted Savage\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 First side to wear red jerseys loses five (of 23) matches in NZ and once (against New South Wales) in Australia.\n\n\u2022 Series in NZ lost 3-0 with one drawn and won 2-0 in Australia.\n\n\u2022 For the first time every tourist is an international player. Only leading players unavailable are Wales's Grand Slam-winning captain, John Gwilliam, and England's John Matthews.\n\nTests\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Carisbrook, Dunedin)\n\nD 9-9\n\nTries by Ken Jones and Jack Kyle and a John Robins penalty give the Lions a 9-6 lead into the dying minutes. Skipper Ron Elvidge ties the game with a last-gasp corner try for the All Blacks.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Lancaster Park, Christchurch)\n\nL 0-8\n\nAll Blacks forwards eclipse the Lions pack and all the scoring occurs in the first half. Only courageous defence keeps the New Zealanders at bay after the interval.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington)\n\nL 3-6\n\nJohn Robins, who gives the Lions a half-time lead with a first-half penalty, narrowly fails to level the scores with another attempt near the end after Elvidge (try) and Bob Scott (penalty) put the All Blacks ahead.\n\n4th v New Zealand\n\n(Eden Park, Auckland)\n\nL 8-11\n\nTour replacement Lewis Jones sends compatriot Ken Jones on a late 45-metre run for a spectacular try that brings the Lions within a score of victory. Two late scoring attempts by Bleddyn Williams are desperately but successfully defended by the All Blacks.\n\n1st v Australia\n\n(Exhibition Ground, Brisbane)\n\nW 19-6\n\nTeenager Lewis Jones goes through the card of scoring actions to collect 16 points \u2013 a new Test record for a Lion. Tourists win with 14 men after Malcolm Thomas breaks collar-bone early on.\n\n2nd v Australia\n\n(Sydney Cricket Ground)\n\nW 24-3\n\nIreland lock Jimmy Nelson scores two of the five tries in a Lions record win for a Test against Australia.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Tour preparation comes into sharp focus after one Lions prop used to living on rationing in austere post-war Britain balloons by two stones after tucking into the first-class travel fare on the outward sea-journey.\n\n\u2022 The ruck as a means of winning second-phase possession is a revelation to the Lions in their provincial defeat against Otago.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Bleddyn Williams, inspirational Welsh centre who led the Lions in Mullen's absence in three of the six tour Tests. Created countless tries for the visiting backs with his clever side-step.\n\n\u2022 Jack Kyle, quick-thinking Irish fly-half whose polished play endeared him to a generation of New Zealand rugby followers.\n1955\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Robin Thompson\n\nManager: Jack Siggins\n\nAssistant Manager: Danny Davies\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 First Lions team to fly to their destination.\n\n\u2022 Test series shared 2-2 and altogether five defeats from 24 games.\n\n\u2022 Only uncapped player is Dickie Jeeps who partners Cliff Morgan throughout the Test rubber.\n\n\u2022 Strict under-30 age rule rules out 1950 Lions stars Rex Willis, Jack Kyle and Ken Jones.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Ellis Park, Johannesburg)\n\nW 23-22\n\nCliff Morgan's tactical brilliance and the finishing of the Lions backs bring a one-point victory in the most exciting Lions Test of all-time. Record crowd of 95,000 see Jack van der Schyff muff his last-minute conversion attempt to win the match for the Springboks.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nL 9-25\n\nSpringboks level series with a hat-trick of tries by Tom van Vollenhoven backed up an impeccable kicking display from new full-back Roy Dryburgh.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Loftus Versfeld, Pretoria)\n\nW 9-6\n\nCliff Morgan takes over as captain to mastermind Lions into an unbeatable position in the series. Jeff Butterfield contributes a try and the only dropped goal of his distinguished international career.\n\n4th v South Africa\n\n(Crusader Ground, Port Elizabeth)\n\nL 8-22\n\nTony O'Reilly paves the way for Jim Greenwood to open the scoring and the Lions lead 5-3 at the pause. Springboks play sparkling rugby in the second half and, with their forward son top, romp away to an unassailable lead. Late O'Reilly try is a consolation score for the visitors.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 First full tour coverage by British pressmen engenders unprecedented interest in rugby union back home.\n\n\u2022 Best Lions series in SA for nearly sixty years demonstrates that, given sufficient possession, British\/Irish backs are capable of casting off national inhibitions to play attractive, winning Test rugby.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Tony O'Reilly, teenaged Irish threequarter was a tour drawcard with his strong running and prolific try-scoring: his 16 tour tries remain a record for a Lion in South Africa.\n\n\u2022 Cliff Morgan, the irrepressible Welsh fly-half, was the social and tactical focus of the tour \u2013 one of the most popular tourists ever to visit South Africa.\n1959\n\nAustralia & New Zealand\n\nCaptain: Ronnie Dawson\n\nManager: Alf Wilson\n\nAssistant Manager: Ossie Glasgow\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Fourth successive Lions tour led by an Irishman.\n\n\u2022 Series won 2-0 in Australia but lost 3-1 in New Zealand.\n\n\u2022 Only defeat in six matches in Australia is against New South Wales. Five of the 25 games in NZ lost.\n\n\u2022 Tony O'Reilly top Lions try-scorer for the second tour running.\n\nTests\n\n1st v Australia\n\n(Exhibition Ground, Brisbane)\n\nW 17-6\n\nThe pitch is brick-hard and the temperature in the high seventies, but the Lions revel in the fast conditions to run in tries by Tony O'Reilly and Ken Smith to win comfortably.\n\n2nd v Australia\n\n(Sydney Cricket Ground)\n\nW 24-3\n\nTwo tries for Pontypool's Malcolm Price, a glorious jinking run by Bev Risman for a second-half try and a typical O'Reilly effort full of pace and power are the stand-out moments in another easy Test win for the Lions.\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Carisbrook, Dunedin)\n\nL 17-18\n\nNew Zealand referee Allan Fleury incurs the wrath of the Lions (and British press) by awarding so many penalties to the All Blacks that their kicker, Don Clarke, lands six goals (for a world-record). The Lions, whose three-quarters score four tries, lose by a point.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington)\n\nL 8-11\n\nDon Clarke again pips the Lions, this time with a 79th-minute try which he converts to leave the All Blacks two up with two to play.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Lancaster Park, Christchurch)\n\nL 8-22\n\nAll Blacks forwards are outstanding in the tight and loose. New Zealand out-score the visitors by four tries to one and deservedly seal the series.\n\n4th v New Zealand\n\n(Eden Park, Auckland)\n\nW 9-6\n\nIn their best performance of the tour the Lions forwards win enough quality possession for their backs to create lovely tries for Peter Jackson, O'Reilly and Risman (the winning score). Terry Davies is outstanding in a defence that deprives New Zealand of tries, all their points coming (again) from the boot of Clarke.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Don Clarke's match-winning penalties raise calls for the introduction of a differential penalty (not realised until 1977) and neutral referees for Lions Test series (adopted in 1980).\n\n\u2022 Treatment of players injured early on tour (such as Ireland's Mick English and Niall Brophy) and sent home raises concern among fellow-tourists.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Rhys Williams, Welsh second-row whom the All Blacks deem \"good enough to play for New Zealand.\"\n\n\u2022 Peter Jackson, jinking English right-wing who scores 16 tries in NZ. Spectators there call for him to be given a unicycle \u2013 to keep them entertained - when play moves away from his direction.\n1962\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Arthur Smith\n\nManager: Brian Vaughan\n\nAssistant Manager: Harry McKibbin\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Mix of six Scots, seven Irishmen, eight Englishmen and nine Welshmen \u2013 all of them international players \u2013 is the most uniform selection distribution of any Lions tour.\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 3-0 with one drawn.\n\n\u2022 Five of the 24 matches lost.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Ellis Park, Johannesburg)\n\nD 3-3\n\nJohn Gainsford's first-half try for the Springboks is cancelled out ten minutes from time. Lions centre Ken Jones races 55 metres, sidestepping and changing direction before scoring in the corner.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(King's Park, Durban)\n\nL 0-3\n\nThe main action comes in the final two minutes. Keith Oxlee kicks the winning penalty from the touchline but from the restart the Lions throw everything into attack. Welsh lock Keith Rowlands appears to touchdown in a pushover but the referee is unsighted and blows for full time.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nL 3-8\n\nRichard Sharp's dropped goal keeps the Lions in touch at 3-all but Oxlee is again the match-winner for South Africa, converting his own try in the second half to secure the series.\n\n4th v South Africa\n\n(Free State Stadium, Bloemfontein)\n\nL 14-34\n\nDickie Jeeps, making a record 13th Test appearance for the Lions, is captain for the day in Arthur Smith's absence. But South Africa, improving as the series progresses, exploit sloppy Lions tackling to crush the visitors by 20 clear points.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Rough South African play is a feature of both the provincial and Test matches. Sharp's broken jaw (crash-tackled in the N Transvaal game) sows the idea that future Lions might need to get their retaliation in early.\n\n\u2022 Policy of packing the back-row with heavy forwards \u2013 second-rows used at No 8 and No 8s as flankers - adds ballast to the Lions pack but at the expense of mobility.\n\n\u2022 Lions manager Brian Vaughan makes a good stab at drilling his forwards and conceiving match-plans paving the way for specialist coaches to assist future British\/Irish tours.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Alun Pask, the Welsh No 8, adapted well to Test duties on the blind-side as the tourists sought to pack their scrum with big, heavy forwards and dispense with fly-weight flankers. His absence through injury was a major loss for the Lions in the final Test.\n\n\u2022 Richard Sharp, the elegant English fly-half, unfortunately missed the middle stages of the visit through injury. The Lions were a strikingly more potent attacking force when he was present.\n1966\n\nAustralia & New Zealand\n\nCaptain: Mike Campbell-Lamerton\n\nManager: Des O'Brien\n\nAssistant Manager\/ Coach: John Robins\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Unbeaten in Australia but eight defeats in NZ.\n\n\u2022 Series won 2-0 in Australia but lost 4-0 in New Zealand \u2013 first-ever Lions Test whitewash. Provincial defeats against Southland, Otago, Wellington and King Country.\n\n\u2022 John Robins first Lions assistant manager to be designated \"coach\"\n\nTests\n\n1st v Australia\n\n(Sydney Cricket Ground)\n\nW 11-8\n\nFast, open Test in which Lions come from 0-8 down early in the second half to win with tries from Irish front-rowers Ray McLoughlin and Ken Kennedy and two successful goal kicks by Don Rutherford.\n\n2nd v Australia\n\n(Lang Park, Brisbane)\n\nW 31-0\n\nThe floodgates open in the second half, the Lions scoring 28 points including five tries to rack up their highest score and biggest-ever win in a Test.\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Carisbrook, Dunedin)\n\nL 3-20\n\nOne of the best sides to represent New Zealand dominate from the start. Only Lions score is a first-half penalty kicked by Stewart Wilson.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington)\n\nL 12-16\n\nLions drop skipper Mike Campbell-Lamerton and David Watkins deputises, leading the side to their best performance of the series. Watkins's dropped goal and three Wilson penalties keep the Lions in the hunt after the tourists had led by a point at half-time.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Lancaster Park, Christchurch)\n\nL 6-19\n\nDelme Thomas moves up a row to prop to allow Campbell-Lamerton to return to the second-row. But the Lions are deprived of possession and Watkins is suffocated by tight New Zealand marking.\n\n4th v New Zealand\n\n(Eden Park, Auckland)\n\nL 11-24\n\nWatkins is reinstated as captain but is ruthlessly tackled out of the game by an outstanding All Black back-row. Lions play for nearly an hour with only 14 men after Alun Pask is upended at a line-out, falls awkwardly and breaks his collar-bone.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Selection Rule One: Lions skipper must be a player who is guaranteed his place in the Test side.\n\n\u2022 Selection Rule Two: Tough, uncompromising forwards must be a priority for Test series overseas. The omission from the tour party of Wales's Brian Thomas on the grounds that he is \"too rough for New Zealand\" is later seen as an inexcusable oversight.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Mike Gibson, Irish centre making the first of his five Lions tours. His silky skills left a lasting impression on New Zealand critics.\n\n\u2022 Ron Lamont, best of the Lions loose forwards. Despite carrying an arm injury for much of the tour the Irishman's dogged defence and speed to the breakdown made him the unsung hero of the Test series.\n1968\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Tom Kiernan\n\nManager: David Brooks\n\nAssistant Manager\/ Coach: Ronnie Dawson\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 3-0 with one drawn.\n\n\u2022 Only provincial defeat is against Transvaal.\n\n\u2022 \"Judge\" John \"Tess\" O'Shea starts the weekly court sessions that became a feature of modern Lions tours. He is also sent-off in the match against Eastern Transvaal.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Loftus Versfeld, Pretoria)\n\nL 20-25\n\nBarry John leaves the field early on (fractured collar-bone) to be replaced by Mike Gibson. But skipper Tom Kiernan keeps his side in touch with five penalty goals and the conversion of a storming try by Willie-John McBride. Frik du Preez matches McBride, scoring a try in the second half which momentarily puts clear water between the sides.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Boet Erasmus Stadium, Port Elizabeth)\n\nD 6-6\n\nKiernan lands two penalties from two attempts for the Lions while the Springboks kick two from eight. \"Sandy\" Hinshelwood pulls off a match-saving tackle on Corra Dirksen in the second-half.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nL 6-11\n\nKiernan is his side's only scorer again. The penalty-goal deadlock is broken early in the second half when Thys Lourens scores the only try of the match and Piet Visgaie converts.\n\n4th v South Africa\n\n(Ellis Park, Johannesburg)\n\nL 6-19\n\nSpringboks break free after a tight first half and score three tries to emphasise their forward power and the effective finishing of their backs.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 The Sport and Politics debate intensifies with the Lions' controversial decision to undertake a visit to Rhodesia. Moreover, first-hand experience of South Africa's apartheid laws causes revulsion among many of the tour party.\n\n\u2022 Dominance of the penalty goal and Lions objections to the referee chosen for the second Test renew calls for the introduction of the differential penalty and neutral officials. There is also a call for the value of a try to be raised to four points (realised in 1971).\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Tom Kiernan, the skipper who kept his side in the series with his accurate place-kicking. He accounted for 35 (a series record) of the 38 points scored by the Lions in the Tests and was inspirational in his defensive play.\n\n\u2022 Bob Hiller, England full-back who understudied Kiernan, was the model tourist. He was a positive and lively influence behind the scenes and notched up a century of points with his kicking in the mid-week matches.\n1971\n\nAustralia & New Zealand\n\nCaptain: John Dawes\n\nManager: Dr Doug Smith\n\nAssistant Manager\/ Coach: Carwyn James\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Best team to visit NZ winning the Test series 2-1 with one drawn \u2013 exactly as their manager Dr Doug Smith had forecast.\n\n\u2022 Beat New South Wales but lose to Queensland in the two matches in Australia staged at the start of the tour.\n\n\u2022 Lions lose their outstanding props, Sandy Carmichael and Ray McLoughlin, in a brutal match against Canterbury on the eve of the Test series.\n\nTests\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Carisbrook, Dunedin)\n\nW 9-3\n\nIan \"Mighty Mouse\" McLauchlan scores the only try of the Test to open the scoring. Fergie McCormick equalises before half-time but two Barry John penalties seal a famous victory for the Lions.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Lancaster Park, Christchurch)\n\nL 12-22\n\nSyd Going and the New Zealand pack dominate in the second half to establish a 22-6 lead. A late try by Gerald Davies and dropped goal by John give coach Carwyn James the confidence to predict that the Lions will bounce back.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington) W 13-3\n\nGordon Brown and uncapped Derek Quinnell are called in to beef up the Lions pack. Tourists start with a blitz, scoring 13 points without reply in the first 18 minutes. Their forwards take charge in the tight and loose and John kicks with precision to exercise a tactical stranglehold.\n\n4th v New Zealand\n\n(Eden Park, Auckland)\n\nD 14-14\n\nThe All Blacks establish an 8-0 lead in a rough opening quarter. Lions bounce back to equalise with a John penalty and try by Peter Dixon that John converts. Near the end J P R Williams drops a goal from 40 metres to put the Lions 14-11 ahead and all the New Zealanders can muster is a late Laurie Mains penalty. The draw gives the Lions their only series win in NZ to date.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Dr Doug Smith and Carwyn James prove that giving players responsibility for their own actions on and off the field is the perfect recipe for a successful tour.\n\n\u2022 The unpredictability of counter-attack is a powerful tactic against a team winning the major share of possession.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Barry John, the Welsh fly-half, was hailed \"The King\" by admiring New Zealand supporters. He broke records by scoring 188 points but his tactical acuteness was the real key to the Lions' success.\n\n\u2022 Willie-John McBride, courageous Irish lock whose ability to stand up physically and psychologically broke the aura of invincibility surrounding New Zealand forward play.\n1974\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Willie-John McBride\n\nManager: Alun Thomas\n\nAssistant Manager\/ Coach: Syd Millar\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Best record of any Lions side of the modern era.\n\n\u2022 Test series won 3-0 with one drawn \u2013 the last Test (13-all) which is the only blemish on the Lions record in 22 tour games.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nW 12-3\n\nLions forwards triumph in heavy conditions. The tourists come from behind to strangle the Springboks and win gilt-edged possession for Phil Bennett and Gareth Edwards to dictate the tactical course of the Test.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Loftus Versfeld, Pretoria)\n\nW 28-9\n\nLions go two-up and register their highest score and biggest-ever winning margin for a Test against South Africa. Two early tries by J J Williams get the Lions off to a flyer and a second-half dropped-goal by Ian McGeechan stretches them to a two-score lead.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Boet Erasmus Stadium, Port Elizabeth)\n\nW 26-9\n\nLions' technical discipline holds despite a massive first-half punch-up. Gordon Brown's try gives them a 7-3 interval lead and scores come regularly in the second half for the tourists to win their first series in SA for78 years.\n\n4th v South Africa\n\n(Ellis Park, Johannesburg)\n\nD 13-13\n\nLions score two tries (Roger Uttley and Andy Irvine) to one, but Fergus Slattery is controversially denied a winning score in the last minute. Willie-John McBride ends his Lions career with a record 17 Tests to his name.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 British\/Irish back-play showing signs of decline. An over-reliance on the crash-ball and elaborate mid-field moves signals the end of the carefree, straightforward approach that coloured the play of earlier Lions back divisions.\n\n\u2022 For South Africa, the sporting isolation caused by apartheid is depriving them of high-level competition to the detriment of their rugby at international level.\n\n\u2022 The physical fitness and uncompromising mental attitude Syd Millar (coach) and Willie-John McBride inculcate are invaluable qualities for talented players.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Gordon Brown, Scottish second-row and perfect foil to his skipper. Never gave an inch on the field and scored eight tries \u2013 a record for a forward visiting SA.\n\n\u2022 Gareth Edwards, the Welsh scrum-half whose individual brilliance and tactical control behind a winning pack were keys to the Lions' success.\n1977\n\nNew Zealand\n\nCaptain: Phil Bennett\n\nManager: George Burrell\n\nAssistant Manager\/ Coach: John Dawes\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 3-1. Defeats also suffered against the NZ Universities and in the unofficial Test in Fiji.\n\n\u2022 J P R Williams, Gerald Davies and Gareth Edwards unavailable yet Wales supply sixteen to the originally selected party of 30. Three more from Wales fly out later as replacements.\n\nTests\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington)\n\nL 12-16\n\nAll the scoring takes place in the first-half. Grant Batty scores the match-breaking try just before the pause, intercepting in his own half to run 60 metres to the posts. Lions forwards unable to win possession in a scoreless second half.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Lancaster Park, Christchurch)\n\nW 13-9\n\nLions make significant forward changes. Derek Quinnell, Bill Beaumont and Gordon Brown are immense as the Lions strive to level the series. Highlight is a corner try by J J Williams that gives them an early 13-0 lead.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Carisbrook, Dunedin)\n\nL 7-19\n\nNew Zealand score in the first minute through Ian Kirkpatrick and never surrender their lead. The Lions, however, remain no more than a score behind until the final quarter of the match.\n\n4th v New Zealand\n\n(Eden Park, Auckland)\n\nL 9-10\n\nA tight series is settled four minutes from time when No 8 Lawrie Knight storms over from ten metres for a try in the corner. The Lions have only themselves to blame: they win the majority of the possession but their backs are unable to pierce New Zealand's tight defence.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 British\/Irish back-play at low ebb. Forwards win plenty of possession in the Tests, but through ordinary handling (admittedly hampered by appalling conditions during one of New Zealand's wettest winters), the Lions fail to translate possession to points.\n\n\u2022 The policy of packing the squad with Welshmen \u2013 including three uncapped players, two of whom are scrum-halves \u2013 is questioned in the tour aftermath.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Bill Beaumont, the burly English lock, was the \"find\" of the tour after flying out as the replacement for Nigel Horton. His clean line-out catching and power in the rucks and mauls made him an integral part of the Test pack.\n\n\u2022 Terry Cobner, Pontypool and Wales flanker, who rescued the Lions from impending doom after the first Test defeat. Brought the pack together to forge a new spirit of commitment and develop the game-plan that brought reward in the second Test.\n1980\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Bill Beaumont\n\nManager: Syd Millar\n\nAssistant Manager\/ Coach: Noel Murphy\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Bill Beaumont is the first Englishman to lead a Lions tour party for fifty years.\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 3-1; no defeats outside the Tests.\n\n\u2022 First Test series controlled by neutral referees (Francis Palmade and Jean-Pierre Bonnet from France).\n\n\u2022 First shorter tour of the modern era, only 18 games played.\n\n\u2022 Eight tour replacements called out.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nL 22-26\n\nLions show true character coming from 16-6 down to level at 22-all six minutes from the end. Tony Ward sets a new Lions Test record (18 points) for the tourists before Divan Serfontein scores South Africa's winning try in injury time.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Free State Stadium, Bloemfontein)\n\nL 19-26\n\nFine John O'Driscoll try early on cannot prevent Springboks building a 16-6 lead as at Newlands. But Lions again fight back bravely and trail by only a point with 25 minutes left. Two quick strikes by the hosts seal the game before Ray Gravell crosses for a late consolation try.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Boet Erasmus Stadium, Port Elizabeth)\n\nL 10-12\n\nLions lead until Clive Woodward's second-half lapse in concentration proves costly. He turns his back on a line-out, South Africa take a quick throw-in and score a try that Naas Botha converts from the touchline to win the Test and with it the series.\n\n4th v South Africa\n\n(Loftus Versfeld, Pretoria)\n\nW 17-13\n\nBest Lions performance of the tour with Gravell playing heroically in mid-field. The side comes from behind with second-half tries from Andy Irvine and John O'Driscoll to achieve a deserved Test win.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 British\/Irish rugby's concentration on the set-piece, ruck and maul appears to have devalued traditional Lions back-play.\n\n\u2022 The lack of strength in depth behind the scrum comes sharply into focus when five of the eight replacements called for are backs.\n\n\u2022 Shorter tour itinerary (complicated by unlucky run of injuries) limits selection processes for the early Tests.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 John O'Driscoll, ever-present on the blind-side in the Test series where he relished the physical challenge of the Springbok pack. Scored the winning try of the fourth Test with a surging run to the posts.\n\n\u2022 Peter Wheeler, the English hooker in an unchanged Lions Test front-row that provided a solid platform for the back division.\n1983\n\nNew Zealand\n\nCaptain: Ciaran Fitzgerald\n\nManager: Willie-John McBride\n\nAssistant Manager\/ Coach: Jim Telfer\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 4-0, only the second Lions whitewash in history. Defeats also suffered against Auckland and Canterbury.\n\n\u2022 First slim-line tour of NZ of the modern era (18 games).\n\n\u2022 Dreadful injury toll again haunts the tourists, the Lions needing six replacements (including two scrum-halves).\n\nTests\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Lancaster Park, Christchurch)\n\nL 12-16\n\nTerry Holmes's tour ends in the 25th minute, forced off with damaged knee ligaments. Ollie Campbell's goals give the Lions a 9-6 interval lead before goals from Allan Hewson and a try by Mark Shaw bring New Zealand victory by 16-12.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington)\n\nL 0-9\n\nWindy Wellington lives up to its reputation. The All Blacks are restricted to nine points playing with the elements in the first-half. But the Lions are denied possession after the break and never look like scoring.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Carisbrook, Dunedin)\n\nL 8-15\n\nRoger Baird skims over the waterlogged surface to give the Lions an early lead and John Rutherford scores early in the second half for the Lions to overhaul a 6-4 interval deficit. But goals from Hewson and a Stu Wilson try bring New Zealand the victory that settles the series.\n\n4th v New Zealand\n\n(Eden Park, Auckland)\n\nL 6-38\n\nThe Lions, comprehensively beaten up front and torn apart in defence, crash to their then heaviest-ever Test defeat.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 The shorter tour seen as a mixed blessing: shorter time away from families and jobs, but precious little preparation time to adjust to the demands of an intense itinerary.\n\n\u2022 Four-Test series brings too much pressure. Three Tests seen as better suited to shorter tours.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 John Rutherford, the Scottish fly-half, adapted admirably into a Test-class centre when the Lions' original selections seemed unable to offer any attacking edge.\n\n\u2022 Peter Winterbottom, the young England flanker whose high tackle-rate and aggression in the broken play were among the few plusses to the Lions' credit.\n1989\n\nAustralia\n\nCaptain: Finlay Calder\n\nManager: Clive Rowlands\n\nCoaches: Ian McGeechan & Roger Uttley\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 First tour exclusively to Australia since 1899.\n\n\u2022 Test series won 2-1. The first Test defeat is the only reverse of the visit.\n\n\u2022 Shortest Lions tour (12 matches) before the game went professional.\n\n\u2022 Ian McGeechan's first tour as Lions coach.\n\nTests\n\n1st v Australia\n\n(Sydney Football Stadium)\n\nL 12-30\n\nMichael Lynagh gives the Lions the run-around with a tactical kicking master-class. Australia run-in four tries to none with Gavin Hastings and Craig Chalmers kicking the Lions' points.\n\n2nd v Australia\n\n(Ballymore, Brisbane)\n\nW 19-12\n\nLions get their retaliation in first, stamping their authority on the game in a brawl early on. Last-quarter tries by Scott Hastings and Jeremy Guscott (from a delicate grubber kick) enable the Lions to come from 9-12 behind to level the series.\n\n3rd v Australia\n\n(Sydney Football Stadium)\n\nW 19-18\n\nThe Lions pack force the pace with England's Paul Ackford, Brian Moore, Dean Richards and Mike Teague dominating their areas of the game. Australia surrender a 12-9 lead in the second half when Ieuan Evans pounces on a wild pass by David Campese to score the try that turns the game.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 For once it is rough play by the Lions that dominates the headlines, the Australian Rugby Union sending a protest letter to the Four Home Unions Committee.\n\n\u2022 For Aussie coach Bob Dwyer there is the realisation that his team needs new personnel and greater adaptability in its tactics to pose a threat at the upcoming (1991) Rugby World Cup (which the Wallabies win).\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Mike Teague, the English flanker who made such an impact with his forceful style on the blind-side that he was named \"Player of the Series.\"\n\n\u2022 Donal Lenihan, the experienced Irish lock, lost his international place after the first Test defeat, but set a shining example to the party with his positive captaincy of the dirt-trackers. His commitment percolated through the entire party.\n1993\n\nNew Zealand\n\nCaptain: Gavin Hastings\n\nManager: Geoff Cooke\n\nHead Coach: Ian McGeechan\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 2-1. Defeats also suffered against Otago, Auckland, Hawke's Bay and Waikato.\n\n\u2022 Seven wins from 13 games makes the 1993 tour statistically the least successful of all-time to NZ. Lions come back from 0-20 down to beat the Maoris in Wellington.\n\n\u2022 16 Englishmen in the original 30-strong party.\n\nTests\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Lancaster Park, Christchurch)\n\nL 18-20\n\nSkipper Gavin Hastings kicks six penalties to give the Lions an 18-17 lead. But referee Brian Kinsey penalises Dean Richards for a tackle offence in the dying minutes and Grant Fox lands the winning goal for the All Blacks.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Athletic Park, Wellington)\n\nW 20-7\n\nRory Underwood's flying run for a try down the left-wing in the second half is the highlight of the match. The Lions register their highest score and biggest winning margin for a Test against New Zealand and there are 11 England international players in the side \u2013 a Lions Test record.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Eden Park, Auckland)\n\nL 13-30\n\nThe Lions go 10-0 ahead after 18 minutes through a Scott Gibbs try and two successful goal-kicks from Gavin Hastings. But the All Blacks' back-row are rampant in the last hour and New Zealand lead 14-10 at the break before pulling away to take the series in the second half.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Omission of Jeff Probyn, the strongest tight-head prop in the Home Unions, is seen as a huge oversight when the tourists are unable to establish a decent forward platform in the Tests.\n\n\u2022 Those claiming Lions tours are an anachronism are silenced. The closeness of the series and the Lions' own enthusiasm for their off-field tour duties shows that support for such visits is high \u2013 especially among the players.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Gavin Hastings, the Scottish full-back and Lions captain was an excellent ambassador for British\/Irish rugby off the field and proved an inspiring leader with his all-round play in the Tests.\n\n\u2022 Ben Clarke, the England flanker whose performances covering all three positions in the back-row bore the stamp of world-class.\n1997\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Martin Johnson\n\nManager: Fran Cotton\n\nHead Coach: Ian McGeechan\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 First Lions to visit SA for 17 years and the first tour of the professional era.\n\n\u2022 Eleven wins in 13 games.\n\n\u2022 Test series won 2-1; only defeat outside the Tests is against Northern Transvaal.\n\n\u2022 \"Doddie\" Weir brutally stamped on in the Mpumulanga game putting him out of the tour.\n\n\u2022 Original squad comprises 34 players - the first time a Lions tour party exceeds 30.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(Newlands, Cape Town)\n\nW 25-16\n\nThe Springboks, despite dominating early on, are unable to subdue the Lions for whom Neil Jenkins plays an important role kicking five penalties. Two late tries by Alan Tait and Matthew Dawson bring the Lions victory.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(King's Park, Durban)\n\nW 18-15\n\nAnother five Jenkins penalties for the patient Lions keeps them in touch with a rampant Springboks' pack that creates three tries for its back division. Cool late dropped goal by Jeremy Guscott wins the match and with it the series.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Ellis Park, Johannesburg)\n\nL 16-35\n\nJenkins again gives the Lions hope, his three first-half penalties restricting the Springboks to a four-point interval lead. The Lions tire in the second half, however, and South Africa score late tries to win comfortably.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 The management team avoid dividing the squad into Test probables and dirt-trackers. The upshot is a competitive squad that goes down as the most committed and close-knit of recent times.\n\n\u2022 Brave selection fully rewarded. Paul Wallace, Tom Smith and Jeremy Davidson - all seen as surprise choices at the outset - form the nucleus of Martin Johnson's successful Test pack.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Neil Jenkins, Welsh fly-half who was engaged as full-back for the Tests. His 41 points were a significant factor in the Lions' success and set a new record for a Lions Test series.\n\n\u2022 Neil Back, the English flanker re-launched his international rugby career with his deadly tackling and unselfish support play.\n2001\n\nAustralia\n\nCaptain: Martin Johnson\n\nManager: Donal Lenihan\n\nCoaches: Graham Henry\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Martin Johnson becomes first player to lead successive Lions tour parties.\n\n\u2022 Shortest Lions tour (10 matches as in 2009).\n\n\u2022 Test series lost 2-1, the first time Lions lose a series against Australia. They also lose to Australia A.\n\n\u2022 Graham Henry becomes the first coach from overseas to oversee the Lions.\n\nTests\n\n1st v Australia\n\n(The Gabba, Brisbane)\n\nW 29-13\n\nThe Lions throw the ball wide early on for Jason Robinson to score, but it is Brian O'Driscoll's run to cross from half-way for a 19-3 lead soon after the interval that is the pick of the tourists' four tries.\n\n2nd v Australia\n\n(Colonial Stadium, Melbourne)\n\nL 14-35\n\nThe Lions lead 11-6 at half-time, but a Joe Roff intercept early in the second-half changes the course of the match and series. His try sparks off a 29-point blitz that leaves the tourists shell-shocked.\n\n3rd v Australia\n\n(Stadium Australia, Sydney)\n\nL 23-29\n\nTries by Jason Robinson and Jonny Wilkinson, who contributes 18 points, keep the Lions in contention until the last line-out. Then, at their own throw barely 15 metres from Australia's goal-line, the Lions are out-jumped by Justin Harrison. Chance missed; series lost.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Lions writing provocative and ultimately counterproductive newspaper bylines. Matt Dawson issues a scathing criticism of the coaching regime on the day of the Lions' first Test victory and Austin Healey lampoons Harrison, the Aussie line-out ace, on the eve of the last Test.\n\n\u2022 For Graham Henry, Wales's national coach, there is a loss of trust from Welsh tourists who nurse grievances at their omission from the Lions Test side.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Brian O'Driscoll, the Irish centre who was the Lions' playmaker and outstanding performer behind the scrum.\n\n\u2022 Keith Wood, the Irish hooker, set a high example with his strength and commitment in the tight and his dynamic bursts in the loose.\n2005\n\nNew Zealand\n\nCaptain: Brian O'Driscoll\n\nManager: Bill Beaumont\n\nHead Coach: Sir Clive Woodward\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 For the first time an official Lions tour party undertakes a game in Britain, drawing a match (subsequently given Test status by the IRB) against Argentina.\n\n\u2022 Eleven matches in New Zealand \u2013 the shortest tour there to date. Lions lose the Test series 3-0 and also lose to the Maori.\n\n\u2022 Cast of thousands \u2013 the 45 players, four tour replacements and a 30-strong management entourage is the biggest-ever tour party.\n\n\u2022 Around 30,000 fans travel from the Home Unions in support of the Lions.\n\n\u2022 At nearly 36\u00bd, Neil Back becomes the oldest Test Lion when he plays at Christchurch.\n\nTests\n\nOnly Test v Argentina\n\n(Millennium Stadium, Cardiff)\n\nD 25-25\n\nMatch is seen as a warm-up game by the Lions management but subsequently awarded Test status by the IRB. Jonny Wilkinson, in his first international since the 2003 RWC Final, scores 20 of the Lions' points to establish a new individual record for a Lions Test.\n\n1st v New Zealand\n\n(Jade Stadium, Christchurch)\n\nL 3-21\n\nSkipper Brian O'Driscoll is spear-tackled out of the tour in the second minute and the Lions never recover from his loss. Paul O'Connell yellow-carded early on and Danny Grewcock subsequently cited and suspended for biting. The only Lions points are from a Wilkinson penalty that concludes the scoring.\n\n2nd v New Zealand\n\n(Westpac Stadium, Wellington)\n\nL 18-48\n\nStand-in captain Gareth Thomas gives the Lions a dream start with a try converted by Wilkinson after only two minutes. But his team has no forward platform and its hopes are soon dashed. New Zealand lead 21-13 at the break and go on to register the highest-ever Test score against the Lions.\n\n3rd v New Zealand\n\n(Eden Park, Auckland)\n\nL 19-38\n\nThe Lions go 6-0 ahead after seven minutes through two successful goal-kicks from Stephen Jones. But the All Blacks lead 24-12 at half-time and the only consolation for the tourists in the second half is a Lewis Moody try that Jones converts.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Over the hill? One-third of the players over thirty, including the entire back-row in the first Test.\n\n\u2022 Urgent need for the IRB to re-define and legislate against the dangerous tackle in the wake of the serious injury to Brian O'Driscoll.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Ryan Jones, the Welsh No 8 called in to replace Simon Taylor. He went straight into the Test squad after an eye-catching cameo appearance off the bench against Otago and appeared in each match of the series.\n\n\u2022 Paul O'Connell, the Irish lock who played with characteristic strength and courage to stand his ground against the All Black forwards in the Tests.\n2009\n\nSouth Africa\n\nCaptain: Paul O'Connell\n\nManager: Gerald Davies\n\nHead Coach: Ian McGeechan\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Shortest Lions tour to South Africa (ten matches).\n\n\u2022 Lions lose Test series 2-1 and draw with the Emerging Springboks.\n\n\u2022 Sir Ian McGeechan's fifth Lions tour as a coach and fourth as head coach.\n\n\u2022 Smaller tour party with fewer management back-up members than in 2005.\n\nTests\n\n1st v South Africa\n\n(ABSA Stadium, Durban)\n\nL 21-26\n\nLions front-row surprisingly beasted by the Springboks who run up a 26-7 lead. Ugo Monye butchers a couple of scoring chances but the tourists fight back to finish within a score of the world champions.\n\n2nd v South Africa\n\n(Loftus Versfeld, Pretoria)\n\nL 25-28\n\nThe Lions start where they left off in Durban, going 10-0 up, but the sheer physical commitment to contain the 'Boks takes its toll up front. The Lions lose both props yet still lead 19-8 going into the last quarter. Ronan O'Gara's disastrous six minutes at the end surrender ten points and the series is South Africa's.\n\n3rd v South Africa\n\n(Ellis Park, Johannesburg)\n\nW 28-9\n\nPride is restored as the tourists win their first Test for eight years. Shane Williams crosses twice early on to launch a record-equalling highest score and biggest margin by the Lions against South Africa.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Coaching team ensures every player has a fair crack of the whip, selecting Test team on merit and developing mutual respect among squad members.\n\n\u2022 Traditional values of the management make the tourists popular visitors and good ambassadors. The smaller tour party helps engender the 'all for one' ethos. The Lions brand is intact.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 Jamie Roberts, Welsh centre whose midfield partnership with Brian O'Driscoll is the Lions biggest threat to the Springboks in the narrow Test defeats at Durban and Pretoria.\n\n\u2022 Simon Shaw, the English veteran who was the man the Lions turned to after the Durban reverse. He animated the pack with his forceful play in the tight and loose and was the stand-out figure in the opening half of the winning Test in Johannesburg.\n2013\n\nHong Kong & Australia\n\nCaptain: Sam Warburton\n\nManager: Andy Irvine\n\nHead Coach: Warren Gatland\n\nTour Notes\n\n\u2022 Sam Warburton becomes the youngest Lions captain in history\n\n\u2022 Warren Gatland becomes only the second foreigner to be head coach\n\n\u2022 The Lions win their first series in 16 years\n\nTests\n\n1st v Australia\n\n(Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane)\n\nW 23-21\n\nIn a game in which the Lions forwards dominated possession the scoreline could and should have been more in favour of the tourists and they could have lost with the last kick of the game. George North scored a first-half wonder-try after returning a loose Wallaby clearance kick and ripped through their defence to score in the corner. He could have collected a second a few minutes later, but was just pushed into touch. In the second-half, and with the Australian backline in tatters after a sequence of injuries \u2013 which led to flanker Michael Hooper playing in the centre \u2013 Alex Cuthbert scorched through a gap created by Brian O'Driscoll to score. The difference between the sides was Leigh Halfpenny metronymic kicking, while his Wallaby counterparts, James O'Connor and Kurtley Beale, missed several opportunities in front of goal \u2013 including two late penalty attempts by Beale that could have stolen the result for the home team.\n\n2nd v Australia\n\n(Etihad Stadium, Melbourne)\n\nL 15-16\n\nIn a stuffy and largely uninspiring performance from both teams, the result was again decided by the boot \u2013 this time Leigh Halfpenny missing the late match-winner for the Lions. Christian Leali'ifano, who had been injured out of the game in the opening minutes at the Suncorp Stadium a week earlier, showed Wallaby fans what they had been missing as he kicked four out of four kicks at goal to boot his side to a series equalling victory at a passion packed Etihad Stadium in Melbourne. Adam Ashley-Cooper crossed for the only try of the game, while the Lions stuttered in attack \u2013 perhaps feeling the weight of history too heavily on their shoulders as they looked to tie up the series before the Third Test.\n\n3rd v Australia\n\n(ANZ Stadium, Sydney)\n\nW 41-16\n\nYou had to go back to Martin Johnson's side of 1997 in South Africa for the last Lions team to win a Test series, but Warren Gatland's class of 2013 ensured the Lions were able to celebrate their 125th anniversary in style with a convincing 2-1 series victory over the third best team in world rugby. Leigh Halfpenny was voted the Man of the Series for his magnificent performances and helped himself to 21 points and paved the way for two of the four tries. His series total of 49 points gave him the record for a Lions series and his 21 points in the match was another Lions individual record, overtaking Jonny Wilkinson and Stephen Jones' 20.\n\nTalking Points\n\n\u2022 Brian O'Driscoll was expected in many quarters to be named as injured Sam Warburton's replacement as captain for the decisive Third Test, but did not even make the match-squad as Gatland and his fellow coaches opted to partner Wales centres Jamie Roberts and Jonathan Davies, and chose England's Manu Tualagi as the impact midfield sub.\n\n\u2022 The 41 points scored in the Third Test added 10 to the Lions' previous best against the Wallabies. In the end it was the biggest rout the Wallabies had ever suffered since fixtures began in 1899.\n\nOutstanding Tourists\n\n\u2022 George North showed power, pace and balance whenever he had the ball.\n\n\u2022 Jonathan Davies developed as a clever footballer throughout the tour and swapped easily between the inside and outside centre positions throughout the series\n\n\u2022 Leigh Halfpenny was the points machine throughout the series and steady as a rock at fullback\n\n## MATCH ARCHIVE\n\nTHE LIONS' SCORE APPEARS FIRST,  \nHOME TEAM SCORE SECOND\n\n1888\n\nNew Zealand and Australia\n\nP35 W27 D6 L2 F300 A101\n\n1891\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP20 W20 D0 L0 F226 A1\n\n1896\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP21 W19 D1 L1 F320 A45\n\n1899\n\nAustralia\n\nP21 W18 D0 L3 F333 A90\n\n1903\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP22 W11 D3 L8 F229 A138\n\n1904\n\nAustralia and New Zealand\n\nP19 W16 D1 L2 F287 A84\n\n1908\n\nNew Zealand and Australia\n\nP26 W16 D1 L9 F323 A201\n\n1910\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP24 W13 D3 L8 F290 A236\n\n1924\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP21 W9 D3 L9 F175 A155\n\n1930\n\nNew Zealand and Australia\n\nP28 W20 D0 L8 F624 A318\n\n1938\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP24 W17 D0 L7 F414 A284\n\n1950\n\nAustralia, New Zealand & Ceylon\n\nP30 W23 D1 L6 F614 A220\n\n1955\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP25 W19 D1 L5 F457 A283\n\n1959\n\nAustralia, New Zealand & Canada\n\nP33 W27 D0 L6 F842 A353\n\n1962\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP25 W16 D4 L5 F401 A208\n\n1966\n\nAustralia, New Zealand and Canada\n\nP35 W23 D3 L9 F524 A345\n\n1968\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP20 W15 D1 L4 F377 A181\n\n1971\n\nNew Zealand\n\nP26 W23 D1 L2 F580 A231\n\n1974\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP22 W21 D1 L0 F729 A207\n\n1977\n\nNew Zealand\n\nP26 W21 D0 L5 F607 A320\n\n1980\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP18 W15 D0 L3 F401 A244\n\n1983\n\nNew Zealand\n\nP18 W12 D0 L6 F478 A276\n\n1989\n\nAustralia\n\nP12 W11 D0 L1 F360 A182\n\n1993\n\nNew Zealand\n\nP13 W7 D0 L6 F314 A285\n\n1997\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP13 W11 D0 L2 F480 A278\n\n2001\n\nAustralia\n\nP10 W7 D0 L3 F449 A184\n\n2005\n\nNew Zealand\n\nP12 W7 D1 L4 F353 A245\n\n2009\n\nSouth Africa\n\nP10 W7 D1 L2 F309 A169\n\n2013\n\nHong Kong & Australia\n\nP10 W8 D0 L2 F387 A121\n\n## LIONS CAPTAINS\n\n## ROLL OF HONOUR\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2018 by Michiko Kakutani\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nPublished in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.\n\ncrownpublishing.com\n\nTIM DUGGAN BOOKS and the Crown colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.\n\nISBN 9780525574828\n\nEbook ISBN 9780525574842\n\nCover design by Christopher Brand\n\nFrontispiece: \"Truth Has Died,\" by Francisco de Goya, from the series _The Disasters of War,_ \u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum\/Art Resource, NY\n\nv5.3.1\n\nep\nFor journalists everywhere working to report the news\n\n# CONTENTS\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\n1.THE DECLINE AND FALL OF REASON\n\n2.THE NEW CULTURE WARS\n\n3.\"MOI\" AND THE RISE OF SUBJECTIVITY\n\n4.THE VANISHING OF REALITY\n\n5.THE CO-OPTING OF LANGUAGE\n\n6.FILTERS, SILOS, AND TRIBES\n\n7.ATTENTION DEFICIT\n\n8.\"THE FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD\": PROPAGANDA AND FAKE NEWS\n\n9.THE SCHADENFREUDE OF THE TROLLS\n\nEPILOGUE\n\nNOTES\n\n# INTRODUCTION\n\nTwo of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the twentieth century, and both were predicated upon the violation and despoiling of truth, upon the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book, _The Origins of Totalitarianism,_ \"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.\"\n\nWhat's alarming to the contemporary reader is that Arendt's words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling mirror of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today\u2014a world in which fake news and lies are pumped out in industrial volume by Russian troll factories, emitted in an endless stream from the mouth and Twitter feed of the president of the United States, and sent flying across the world through social media accounts at lightning speed. Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fears of social change, and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.\n\nThis is not to draw a direct analogy between today's circumstances and the overwhelming horrors of the World War II era but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes\u2014what Margaret Atwood has called the \"danger flags\" in Orwell's _1984_ and _Animal Farm_ \u2014that make a people susceptible to demagoguery and political manipulation, and nations easy prey for would-be autocrats. To examine how a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the very value of truth, and what that means for America and the world.\n\n\"The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life,\" Arendt wrote in a 1971 essay, \"Lying in Politics\"; \"it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.\"\n\nThe term \"truth decay\" (used by the Rand Corporation to describe the \"diminishing role of facts and analysis\" in American public life) has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes such now familiar phrases as \"fake news\" and \"alternative facts.\" And it's not just fake news either: it's also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls), and fake followers and \"likes\" on social media (generated by bots).\n\nTrump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, lies so prolifically and with such velocity that _The Washington Post_ calculated that he'd made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office\u2014an average of nearly 5.9 a day. His lies\u2014about everything from the investigations into Russian interference in the election, to his popularity and achievements, to how much TV he watches\u2014are only the brightest blinking red light of many warnings of his assault on democratic institutions and norms. He routinely assails the press, the justice system, the intelligence agencies, the electoral system, and the civil servants who make our government tick.\n\nNor is the assault on truth confined to the United States. Around the world, waves of populism and fundamentalism are elevating appeals to fear and anger over reasoned debate, eroding democratic institutions, and replacing expertise with the wisdom of the crowd. False claims about the U.K.'s financial relationship with the EU (emblazoned on a Vote Leave campaign bus) helped swing the vote in favor of Brexit, and Russia ramped up its sowing of _dezinformatsiya_ in the run-up to elections in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries in concerted propaganda efforts to discredit and destabilize democracies.\n\nPope Francis reminded us, \"There is no such thing as harmless disinformation; trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.\" Former president Barack Obama observed that \"one of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we do not share a common baseline of facts\"; people today are \"operating in completely different information universes.\" And the Republican senator Jeff Flake gave a speech in which he warned that \"2017 was a year which saw the truth\u2014objective, empirical, evidence-based truth\u2014more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government.\"\n\nHow did this happen? What are the roots of falsehood in the Trump era? How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does their impending demise portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance? That is the subject of this book.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt's easy enough to see Trump\u2014a candidate who launched his political career on the original sin of birtherism\u2014as a black swan who ascended to office because of a perfect storm of factors: a frustrated electorate still hurting from the backwash of the 2008 financial crash; Russian interference in the election and a deluge of pro-Trump fake news stories on social media; a highly polarizing opponent who came to symbolize the Washington elite that populists decried; and an estimated five billion dollars in free campaign coverage from media outlets obsessed with the views and clicks that the former reality-TV star generated.\n\nIf a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump\u2014a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day)\u2014she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility. In fact, the president of the United States often seems less like a persuasive character than some manic cartoon artist's mashup of Ubu Roi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Moli\u00e8re.\n\nBut the more clownish aspects of Trump the personality should not blind us to the monumentally serious consequences of his assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions and digital communications. It is unlikely that a candidate who had already been exposed during the campaign for his history of lying and deceptive business practices would have gained such popular support were portions of the public not somehow blas\u00e9 about truth telling and were there not more systemic problems with how people get their information and how they've come to think in increasingly partisan terms.\n\nWith Trump, the personal is political, and in many respects he is less a comic-book anomaly than an extreme, bizarro-world apotheosis of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarization that's overtaken American politics, to the growing populist contempt for expertise.\n\nThese attitudes, in turn, are emblematic of dynamics that have been churning beneath the surface of daily life for years, creating the perfect ecosystem in which Veritas, the goddess of truth (as she was depicted by Goya in a famous print titled \"Truth Has Died\"), could fall mortally ill.\n\nFor decades now, objectivity\u2014or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best available truth\u2014has been falling out of favor. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's well-known observation\u2014\"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts\"\u2014is more timely than ever: polarization has grown so extreme that voters in Red State America and Blue State America have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts. This has been going on since a solar system of right-wing news sites orbiting around Fox News and Breitbart News consolidated its gravitational hold over the Republican base, and it's been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies them with customized news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in ever narrower, windowless silos.\n\nFor that matter, relativism has been ascendant since the culture wars began in the 1960s. Back then, it was embraced by the New Left, eager to expose the biases of Western, bourgeois, male-dominated thinking; and by academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism, which argued that there are no universal truths, only smaller personal truths\u2014perceptions shaped by the cultural and social forces of one's day. Since then, relativistic arguments have been hijacked by the populist Right, including creationists and climate change deniers who insist that their views be taught alongside \"science-based\" theories.\n\nRelativism, of course, synced perfectly with the narcissism and subjectivity that had been on the rise, from Tom Wolfe's \"Me Decade,\" on through the selfie age of self-esteem. No surprise then that the Rashomon effect\u2014the point of view that everything depends on your point of view\u2014has permeated our culture, from popular novels like _Fates and Furies,_ to the television series _The Affair,_ which hinge upon the idea of competing realities or unreliable narrators.\n\nI've been reading and writing about many of these issues for nearly four decades, going back to the rise of deconstruction and battles over the literary canon on college campuses; debates over the fictionalized retelling of history in movies like Oliver Stone's _JFK_ and Kathryn Bigelow's _Zero Dark Thirty;_ efforts made by both the Clinton and Bush administrations to avoid transparency and define reality on their own terms; Donald Trump's war on language and efforts to normalize the abnormal; and the consequences that technology has had on how we process and share information. In these pages, I hope to draw upon my readings of books and current events to connect some of the dots about the assault on truth and situate them in context with broader social and political dynamics that have been percolating through our culture for years. I also hope to highlight some of the prescient books and writings from the past that shed light on our current predicament.\n\nTruth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: \"We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications.\n\n\"Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can't control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.\"\n\n# 1\n\n# THE DECLINE AND FALL OF REASON\n\n> This is an apple.\n> \n> Some people might try to tell you that it's a banana.\n> \n> They might scream \"Banana, banana, banana\" over and over and over again.\n> \n> They might put BANANA in all caps.\n> \n> You might even start to believe that this is a banana.\n> \n> But it's not.\n> \n> This is an apple.\n> \n> \u2014CNN COMMERCIAL, SHOWING A PHOTOGRAPH OF AN APPLE\n\nIn his 1838 Lyceum address, a young Abraham Lincoln spoke to his concern that as memories of the Revolution receded into the past, the nation's liberty was threatened by a disregard for the government's institutions, which protect the civil and religious liberties bequeathed by the founders. To preserve the rule of law and prevent the rise of a would-be tyrant who might \"spring up amongst us,\" sober reason\u2014\"cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason\"\u2014would be required. To remain \"free to the last,\" he exhorted his audience, reason must be embraced by the American people, along with \"sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.\"\n\nAs Lincoln well knew, the founders of America established the young republic on the Enlightenment principles of reason, liberty, progress, and religious tolerance. And the constitutional architecture they crafted was based on a rational system of checks and balances to guard against the possibility, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, of \"a man unprincipled in private life\" and \"bold in his temper\" one day arising who might \"mount the hobby horse of popularity\" and \"flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day\" in order to embarrass the government and \"throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.' \"\n\nThe system was far from perfect, but it has endured for more than two centuries thanks to its resilience and capacity to accommodate essential change. Leaders like Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama viewed America as a work in progress\u2014a country in the process of perfecting itself. And they tried to speed that work, mindful, in the words of Dr. King, that \"progress is neither automatic nor inevitable\" but requiring of continuous dedication and struggle. What had been achieved since the Civil War and the civil rights movement was a reminder of all the work yet to be done, but also a testament to President Obama's faith that Americans \"can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams,\" and the Enlightenment faith in what George Washington called the great \"experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.\"\n\nAlongside this optimistic vision of America as a nation that could become a shining \"city upon a hill,\" there's also been a dark, irrational counter-theme in U.S. history, which has now reasserted itself with a vengeance\u2014to the point where reason not only is being undermined but seems to have been tossed out the window, along with facts, informed debate, and deliberative policy making. Science is under attack, and so is expertise of every sort\u2014be it expertise in foreign policy, national security, economics, or education.\n\nPhilip Roth called this counternarrative \"the indigenous American berserk,\" and the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described it as \"the paranoid style\"\u2014an outlook animated by \"heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy\" and focused on perceived threats to \"a nation, a culture, a way of life.\" Hofstadter's 1964 essay was spurred by Barry Goldwater's campaign and the right-wing movement around it, just as his 1963 book, _Anti-intellectualism in American Life,_ was conceived in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious witch hunts and the larger political and social backdrop of the 1950s.\n\nGoldwater lost his presidential bid, and McCarthyism burned itself out after a lawyer for the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, had the courage to stand up to McCarthy. \"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?\" Welch asked. \"Have you left no sense of decency?\"\n\nThe venomous McCarthy, who hurled accusations of disloyalty throughout Washington (\"the State Department harbors a nest of Communists and Communist sympathizers,\" he warned President Truman in 1950), was rebuked by the Senate in 1954, and with the Soviets' launch of Sputnik in 1957 the menacing antirationalism of the day began to recede, giving way to the space race and a concerted effort to improve the nation's science programs.\n\nHofstadter observed that the paranoid style tends to occur in \"episodic waves.\" The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party reached its height in 1855, with forty-three members of Congress openly avowing their allegiance. Its power quickly began to dissipate the following year, after the party split along sectional lines, though the intolerance it embodied would remain, like a virus, in the political system, waiting to reemerge.\n\nIn the case of the modern right wing, Hofstadter argued that it tended to be mobilized by a sense of grievance and dispossession. \"America has been largely taken away from them,\" he wrote, and they may feel that \"they have no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions.\"\n\nIn the case of millennial-era America (and much of western Europe, too), these were grievances exacerbated by changing demographics and changing social mores that had made some members of the white working class feel increasingly marginalized; by growing income inequalities accelerated by the financial crisis of 2008; and by forces like globalization and technology that were stealing manufacturing jobs and injecting daily life with a new uncertainty and angst.\n\nTrump and nationalist, anti-immigrant leaders on the right in Europe like Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Matteo Salvini in Italy would inflame these feelings of fear and anger and disenfranchisement, offering scapegoats instead of solutions; while liberals and conservatives, worried about the rise of nativism and the politics of prejudice, warned that democratic institutions were coming under growing threat. Yeats's poem \"The Second Coming,\" written in 1919, amid the wreckage of World War I, experienced a huge revival in 2016\u2014quoted, in news articles, more in the first half of that year than it had been in three decades as commentators of all political persuasions invoked its famous lines: \"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; \/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.\"\n\nThe assault on truth and reason that reached fever pitch in America during the first year of the Trump presidency had been incubating for years on the fringe right. Clinton haters who were manufacturing nutty accusations about the death of Vince Foster in the 1990s and Tea Party paranoids who claimed that environmentalists wanted to control the temperature of your home and the color of cars you can buy hooked up, during the 2016 campaign, with Breitbart bloggers and alt-right trolls. And with Trump's winning of the Republican nomination and the presidency, the extremist views of his most radical supporters\u2014their racial and religious intolerance, their detestation of government, and their embrace of conspiracy thinking and misinformation\u2014went mainstream.\n\nAccording to a 2017 survey by _The Washington Post,_ 47 percent of Republicans erroneously believe that Trump won the popular vote, 68 percent believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2016, and more than half of Republicans say they would be okay with postponing the 2020 presidential election until such problems with illegal voting can be fixed. Another study conducted by political scientists at the University of Chicago showed that 25 percent of Americans believe that the 2008 crash was secretly orchestrated by a small cabal of bankers, 19 percent believe that the U.S. government had a hand in the 9\/11 terrorist attacks, and 11 percent even believe a theory made up by the researchers\u2014that compact fluorescent lightbulbs were part of a government plot to make people more passive and easy to control.\n\nTrump, who launched his political career by shamelessly promoting birtherism and who has spoken approvingly of the conspiracy theorist and shock jock Alex Jones, presided over an administration that became, in its first year, the very embodiment of anti-Enlightenment principles, repudiating the values of rationalism, tolerance, and empiricism in both its policies and its modus operandi\u2014a reflection of the commander in chief's erratic, impulsive decision-making style based not on knowledge but on instinct, whim, and preconceived (and often delusional) notions of how the world operates.\n\nTrump made no effort to rectify his ignorance of domestic and foreign policy when he moved into the White House. His former chief strategist Stephen Bannon has said that Trump only \"reads to reinforce\"; and the president has remained determined to deny, diminish, or downplay intelligence concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. Because such mentions tend to draw his ire and can disrupt his intelligence briefings, officials told _The Washington Post_ that they sometimes included this material only in written versions of the president's daily brief, which he reportedly rarely if ever reads.\n\nInstead, the president seems to prefer getting his information from Fox News\u2014in particular, the sycophantic morning show _Fox & Friends_\u2014and from sources like Breitbart News and the _National Enquirer_. He reportedly spends as much as eight hours a day watching television\u2014a habit that could not help but remind many readers of Chauncey Gardiner, the TV-addicted gardener who becomes a celebrity and rising political star in Jerzy Kosinski's 1970 novel, _Being There_. Vice News also reported that Trump received a folder, twice a day, filled with flattering clips including \"admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.\"\n\nSuch absurd details are unnerving rather than merely comical because this is not simply a _Twilight Zone_ case of one fantasist living in a big white house in Washington, D.C. Trump's proclivity for chaos has not been contained by those around him but has instead infected his entire administration. He asserts that \"I'm the only one that matters\" when it comes to policy making, and given his disdain for institutional knowledge he frequently ignores the advice of cabinet members and agencies, when he isn't cutting them out of the loop entirely.\n\nIronically, the dysfunction that these habits fuel tends to ratify his supporters' mistrust of Washington (one of the main reasons they voted for Trump in the first place), creating a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, which, in turn, breeds further cynicism and a reluctance to participate in the political process. A growing number of voters feel there is a gross disconnect between their views and government policies. Commonsense policies like mandatory background checks for gun purchases, supported by more than nine out of ten Americans, have been stymied by Congress, which is filled with members who rely on donations from the NRA. Eighty-seven percent of Americans said in a 2018 poll that they believe Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the States, and yet DACA has remained a political football. And 83 percent of Americans (including 75 percent of Republicans) say they support net neutrality, which was overturned by Trump's FCC.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe declining role of rational discourse\u2014and the diminished role of common sense and fact-based policy\u2014hardly started with Donald J. Trump. Rather, he represents the culmination of trends diagnosed in prescient books by Al Gore, Farhad Manjoo, and Susan Jacoby, published nearly a decade before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Among the causes of this decline, Jacoby ( _The Age of American Unreason_ ) cited an \"addiction to infotainment,\" the continuing strength of religious fundamentalism, \"the popular equation of intellectualism with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values,\" and an education system that \"does a poor job of teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.\"\n\nAs for Gore ( _The Assault on Reason_ ), he underscored the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy (low voter turnout, an ill-informed electorate, campaigns dominated by money, and media manipulation) and \"the persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary.\"\n\nAt the forefront of Gore's thinking was the Bush administration's disastrous decision to invade Iraq and its cynical selling of that war to the public, distorting \"America's political reality by creating a new fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger\" posed by a country that did not attack the United States on 9\/11 and lacked the terrifying weapons of mass destruction that administration hawks scared Americans into thinking it possessed.\n\nIndeed, the Iraq war remains a lesson in the calamities that can result when momentous decisions that affect the entire world are not made through a rational policy-making process and the judicious weighing of information and expert analysis, but are instead fueled by ideological certainty and the cherry picking of intelligence to support preconceived id\u00e9es fixes.\n\nFrom the start, administration hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pressed for \"forward-leaning\" intelligence that would help make the case for war. A shadowy operation called the Office of Special Plans was even set up at the Defense Department; its mission, according to a Pentagon adviser quoted by Seymour M. Hersh in _The New Yorker,_ was to find evidence of what Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz already believed to be true\u2014that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda and that Iraq possessed a huge arsenal of biological, chemical, and possibly nuclear weapons.\n\nMeanwhile, planning for the war on the ground ignored sober warnings from experts, like the army chief of staff, Eric K. Shinseki, who testified that postwar Iraq would require \"something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.\" His recommendation was quickly shot down, as were reports from the Rand Corporation and the Army War College, both of which also warned that postwar security and reconstruction in Iraq would require a large number of troops for an extended period of time. These assessments went unheeded\u2014with fateful consequences\u2014because they did not mesh with the administration's willfully optimistic promises that the Iraqi people would welcome American troops as liberators and that resistance on the ground would be limited. \"A cakewalk,\" as one Rumsfeld ally put it.\n\nThe failure to send enough troops to secure the country and restore law and order; the sidelining of the State Department's Future of Iraq Project (because of tensions with the Pentagon); the ad hoc decisions to dissolve the Iraqi army and to ban all senior members of the Baath Party: such disastrous and avoidable screwups resulted in a bungled American occupation that one soldier, assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority, memorably described as \"pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.\" In fact, the Iraq war would prove to be one of the young century's most catastrophic events, exploding the geopolitics of the region and giving birth to ISIS and a still unspooling set of disasters for the people of Iraq, the region, and the world.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAlthough Trump frequently criticized the decision to invade Iraq during the 2016 campaign, his White House has learned nothing from the Bush administration's handling of that unnecessary and tragic war. Instead, it has doubled down on reverse-engineered policy making and the repudiation of experts.\n\nFor instance, the State Department has been hollowed out as a result of Steve Bannon's vow to fight for the \"deconstruction of the administrative state\" and the White House's suspicion of \"deep state\" professionals. The president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a thirty-six-year-old real-estate developer with no government experience, was handed the Middle East portfolio, while the shrinking State Department was increasingly sidelined. Many important positions stood unfilled at the end of Trump's first year in office. This was partly because of downsizing and dereliction of duty, partly because of a reluctance to appoint diplomats who expressed reservations about the president's policies (as in the case of the crucial role of ambassador to South Korea), and partly because of the exodus of foreign service talent from an agency that, under new management, no longer valued their skills at diplomacy, policy knowledge, or experience in far-flung regions of the world. Combined with Trump's subversion of longtime alliances and trade accords and his steady undermining of democratic ideals, the carelessness with which his administration treated foreign policy led to world confidence in U.S. leadership plummeting in 2017 to a new low of 30 percent (below China and just above Russia), according to a Gallup poll.\n\nIn some respects, the Trump White House's disdain for expertise and experience reflected larger attitudes percolating through American society. In his 2007 book, _The Cult of the Amateur,_ the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratized information beyond people's wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with \"the wisdom of the crowd,\" dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation.\n\nA decade later, the scholar Tom Nichols wrote in _The Death of Expertise_ that a willful hostility toward established knowledge had emerged on both the right and the left, with people aggressively arguing that \"every opinion on any matter is as good as every other.\" Ignorance now was fashionable.\n\n\"If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,\" Nichols wrote, \"they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe Trump White House's preference for loyalty and ideological lockstep over knowledge is on display throughout the administration. Unqualified judges and agency heads were appointed because of cronyism, political connections, or a determination to undercut agencies that stood in the way of Trump's massive deregulatory plans benefiting the fossil fuel industry and wealthy corporate donors. Rick Perry, who was famous for wanting to abolish the Department of Energy, was named to head it, presiding over cutbacks to renewable energy programs; and the new EPA head, Scott Pruitt, who had repeatedly sued the Environmental Protection Agency over the years, swiftly began dismantling and slow walking legislation designed to protect the environment.\n\nThe public\u2014which opposed the GOP tax bill and worried that its health care would be taken away\u2014was high-handedly ignored when its views failed to accord with Trump administration objectives or those of the Republican Congress. And when experts in a given field\u2014like climate change, fiscal policy, or national security\u2014raised inconvenient questions, they were sidelined, or worse. This, for instance, is what happened to the Congressional Budget Office (created decades ago as an independent, nonpartisan provider of cost estimates for legislation) when it reported that a proposed GOP health-care bill would leave millions more uninsured. Republicans began attacking the agency\u2014not just its report, but its very existence. Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, asked whether the CBO's time had \"come and gone,\" and other Republicans proposed slashing its budget and cutting its staff of 235 by 89 employees.\n\nFor that matter, the normal machinery of policy making\u2014and the normal process of analysis and review\u2014were routinely circumvented by the Trump administration, which violated such norms with knee-jerk predictability. Many moves were the irrational result of a kind of reverse engineering: deciding on an outcome the White House or the Republican Congress wanted, then trying to come up with rationales or selling points afterward. This was the very opposite of the scientific method, whereby data is systematically gathered and assessed to formulate and test hypotheses\u2014a method the administration clearly had contempt for, given its orders to CDC analysts to avoid using the terms \"science-based\" and \"evidence-based.\" And it was a reminder that in Orwell's dystopia in _1984_ there is no word for \"science,\" because \"the empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded,\" represents an objective reality that threatens the power of Big Brother to determine what truth is.\n\nIn addition to announcing that it was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord (after Syria signed on, the United States was left as the lone country repudiating the global agreement), the Trump administration vowed to terminate President Obama's Clean Power Plan and reverse a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling. Scientists were dismissed from government advisory boards, and plans were made to cut funding for an array of research programs in such fields as biomedicine, environmental science, engineering, and data analysis. The EPA alone was facing proposed cuts from the White House of $2.5 billion from its annual budget\u2014a reduction of more than 23 percent.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIn April 2017, the March for Science, organized in Washington to protest the Trump administration's antiscience policies, grew into more than four hundred marches in more than thirty-five nations, participants marching out of solidarity with colleagues in the United States and also out of concern for the status of science and reason in their own countries. Decisions made by the U.S. government about climate change and other global problems, after all, have a domino effect around the world\u2014affecting joint enterprises and collaborative research, as well as efforts to find international solutions to crises affecting the planet.\n\nBritish scientists worry about how Brexit will affect universities and research institutions in the U.K. and the ability of British students to study in Europe. Scientists in countries from Australia to Germany to Mexico worry about the spread of attitudes devaluing science, evidence, and peer review. And doctors in Latin America and Africa worry that fake news about Zika and Ebola are spreading misinformation and fear.\n\nMike MacFerrin, a graduate student in glaciology working in Kangerlussuaq, a town of five hundred in Greenland, told _Science_ magazine that the residents there had practical reasons to worry about climate change because runoff from the ice sheet had partially washed out a local bridge. \"I liken the attacks on science to turning off the headlights,\" he said. \"We're driving fast and people don't want to see what's coming up. Scientists\u2014we're the headlights.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOne of the most harrowing accounts of just how quickly \"the rule of _raison_ \"\u2014faith in science, humanism, progress, and liberty\u2014can give way to \"its very opposite, terror and mass emotion,\" was laid out by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in his 1942 memoir, _The World of Yesterday_. Zweig witnessed two globe-shaking calamities in his life\u2014World War I, followed by a brief respite, and then the cataclysmic rise of Hitler and descent into World War II. His memoir is an act of bearing witness to how Europe tore itself apart suicidally twice within decades\u2014the story of the terrible \"defeat of reason\" and \"the wildest triumph of brutality,\" and a lesson, he hoped, for future generations.\n\nZweig wrote about growing up in a place and time when the miracles of science\u2014the conquest of diseases, \"the transmission of the human word in a second around the globe\"\u2014made progress seem inevitable, and even dire problems like poverty \"no longer seemed insurmountable.\" An optimism (which may remind some readers of the hopes that surged through the Western world after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) informed his father's generation, Zweig recalled: \"They honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity and that peace and security, the highest of treasures, would be shared by all mankind.\"\n\nWhen he was young, Zweig and his friends spent hours hanging out at coffeehouses, talking about art and personal concerns: \"We had a passion to be the first to discover the latest, the newest, the most extravagant, the unusual.\" There was a sense of security in those years for the upper and middle classes: \"One's house was insured against fire and theft, one's field against hail and storm, one's person against accident and sickness.\"\n\nPeople were slow to recognize the danger Hitler represented. \"The few among writers who had taken the trouble to read Hitler's book,\" Zweig writes, \"ridiculed the bombast of his stilted prose instead of occupying themselves with his program.\" Newspapers reassured readers that the Nazi movement would \"collapse in no time.\" And many assumed that if \"an anti-semitic agitator\" actually did become chancellor, he \"would as a matter of course throw off such vulgarities.\"\n\nOminous signs were piling up. Groups of menacing young men near the German border \"preached their gospel to the accompaniment of threats that whoever did not join promptly, would have to pay for it later.\" And \"the underground cracks and crevices between the classes and races, which the age of conciliation had so laboriously patched up,\" were breaking open again and soon \"widened into abysses and chasms.\"\n\nBut the Nazis were careful, Zweig remembers, not to disclose the full extent of their aims right away. \"They practiced their method carefully: only a small dose to begin with, then a brief pause. Only a single pill at a time and then a moment of waiting to observe the effect of its strength\"\u2014to see whether the public and the \"world conscience would still digest this dose.\"\n\nAnd because they were reluctant to abandon their accustomed lives, their daily routines and habits, Zweig wrote, people did not want to believe how rapidly their freedoms were being stolen. People asked what Germany's new leader could possibly \"put through by force in a State where law was securely anchored, where the majority in parliament was against him, and where every citizen believed his liberty and equal rights secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution\"\u2014this eruption of madness, they told themselves, \"could not last in the twentieth century.\"\n\n# 2\n\n# THE NEW CULTURE WARS\n\n> The death of objectivity \"relieves me of the obligation to be right.\" It \"demands only that I be interesting.\"\n> \n> \u2014STANLEY FISH\n\nIn a prescient 2005 article, David Foster Wallace wrote that the proliferation of news outlets\u2014in print, on TV, and online\u2014had created \"a kaleidoscope of information options.\" Wallace observed that one of the ironies of this strange media landscape that had given birth to a proliferation of ideological news outlets (including so many on the right, like Fox News and _The Rush Limbaugh Show_ ) was that it created \"precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which 'the truth' is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda.\"\n\nThose words were written more than a decade before the election of 2016, and they uncannily predict the post-Trump cultural landscape, where truth increasingly seems to be in the eye of the beholder, facts are fungible and socially constructed, and we often feel as if we've been transported to an upside-down world where assumptions and alignments in place for decades have suddenly been turned inside out.\n\nThe Republican Party, once a bastion of Cold War warriors, and Trump, who ran on a law-and-order platform, shrug off the dangers of Russia's meddling in American elections, and GOP members of Congress talk about secret cabals within the FBI and the Department of Justice. Like some members of the 1960s counterculture, many of these new Republicans reject rationality and science. During the first round of the culture wars, many on the new left rejected Enlightenment ideals as vestiges of old patriarchal and imperialist thinking. Today, such ideals of reason and progress are assailed on the right as part of a liberal plot to undercut traditional values or suspicious signs of egghead, eastern-corridor elitism. For that matter, paranoia about the government has increasingly migrated from the Left\u2014which blamed the military-industrial complex for Vietnam\u2014to the Right, with alt-right trolls and Republican members of Congress now blaming the so-called deep state for plotting against the president.\n\nThe Trump campaign depicted itself as an insurgent, revolutionary force, battling on behalf of its marginalized constituency and disingenuously using language which strangely echoed that used by radicals in the 1960s. \"We're trying to disrupt the collusion between the wealthy donors, the large corporations, and the media executives,\" Trump declared at one rally. And in another he called for replacing this \"failed and corrupt political establishment.\"\n\nMore ironic still is the populist Right's appropriation of postmodernist arguments and its embrace of the philosophical repudiation of objectivity\u2014schools of thought affiliated for decades with the Left and with the very elite academic circles that Trump and company scorn. Why should we care about these often arcane-sounding arguments from academia? It's safe to say that Trump has never plowed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard (if he's even heard of them), and postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land. But some dumbed-down corollaries of their thinking have seeped into popular culture and been hijacked by the president's defenders, who want to use its relativistic arguments to excuse his lies, and by right-wingers who want to question evolution or deny the reality of climate change or promote alternative facts. Even Mike Cernovich, the notorious alt-right troll and conspiracy theorist, invoked postmodernism in a 2016 interview with _The New Yorker_. \"Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative,\" he said, adding, \"I don't seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSince the 1960s, there has been a snowballing loss of faith in institutions and official narratives. Some of this skepticism has been a necessary corrective\u2014a rational response to the calamities of Vietnam and Iraq, to Watergate and the financial crisis of 2008, and to the cultural biases that had long infected everything from the teaching of history in elementary schools to the injustices of the justice system. But the liberating democratization of information made possible by the internet not only spurred breathtaking innovation and entrepreneurship; it also led to a cascade of misinformation and relativism, as evidenced by today's fake news epidemic.\n\nCentral to the breakdown of official narratives in academia was the constellation of ideas falling under the broad umbrella of postmodernism, which arrived at American universities in the second half of the twentieth century via such French theorists as Foucault and Derrida (whose ideas, in turn, were indebted to the German philosophers Heidegger and Nietzsche). In literature, film, architecture, music, and painting, postmodernist concepts (exploding storytelling traditions and breaking down boundaries between genres, and between popular culture and high art) would prove emancipating and in some cases transformative, resulting in a wide range of innovative works from artists like Thomas Pynchon, David Bowie, the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Frank Gehry. When postmodernist theories were applied to the social sciences and history, however, all sorts of philosophical implications, both intended and unintended, would result and eventually pinball through our culture.\n\nThere are many different strands of postmodernism and many different interpretations, but very broadly speaking, postmodernist arguments deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception, contending that knowledge is filtered through the prisms of class, race, gender, and other variables. In rejecting the possibility of an objective reality and substituting the notions of perspective and positioning for the idea of truth, postmodernism enshrined the principle of subjectivity. Language is seen as unreliable and unstable (part of the unbridgeable gap between what is said and what is meant), and even the notion of people acting as fully rational, autonomous individuals is discounted, as each of us is shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by a particular time and culture.\n\nOut with the idea of consensus. Out with the view of history as a linear narrative. Out with big universal or transcendent meta-narratives. The Enlightenment, for instance, is dismissed by many postmodernists on the left as a hegemonic or Eurocentric reading of history, aimed at promoting colonialist or capitalistic notions of reason and progress. The Christian narrative of redemption is rejected, too, as is the Marxist road to a Communist utopia. To some postmodernists, the scholar Christopher Butler observes, even the arguments of scientists can be \"seen as no more than quasi narratives which compete with all the others for acceptance. They have no unique or reliable fit to the world, no certain correspondence with reality. They are just another form of fiction.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe migration of postmodern ideas from academia to the political mainstream is a reminder of how the culture wars\u2014as the vociferous debates over race, religion, gender, and school curricula were called during the 1980s and 1990s\u2014have mutated in unexpected ways. The terrorist attacks of 9\/11 and the financial crisis of 2008, it was thought, had marginalized those debates, and there was hope, during the second term of President Barack Obama, that the culture wars in their most virulent form might be winding down. Health-care legislation, the Paris climate accord, a stabilizing economy after the crash of 2008, same-sex marriage, efforts to address the inequities of the criminal justice system\u2014although a lot of essential reforms remained to be done, many Americans believed that the country was at least set on a progressive path.\n\nIn his 2015 book, _A War for the Soul of America,_ the historian Andrew Hartman wrote that the traditionalists who \"resisted the cultural changes set into motion during the sixties\" and \"identified with the normative Americanism of the 1950s\" seemed to have lost the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. By the twenty-first century, Hartman wrote, \"a growing majority of Americans now accept and even embrace what at the time seemed like a new nation. In this light, the late-twentieth-century culture wars should be understood as an adjustment period. The nation struggled over cultural change in order to adjust to it. The culture wars compelled Americans, even conservatives, to acknowledge transformations to American life. And although acknowledgment often came in the form of rejection, it was also the first step to resignation, if not outright acceptance.\"\n\nAs it turns out, this optimistic assessment was radically premature, much the way that Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay \"The End of History?\" (arguing that with the implosion of Soviet Communism liberal democracy had triumphed and would become \"the final form of human government\") was premature. A Freedom House report concluded that \"with populist and nationalist forces making significant gains in democratic states, 2016 marked the eleventh consecutive year of decline in global freedom.\" And in 2017, Fukuyama said he was concerned about \"a slow erosion of institutions\" and democratic norms under President Trump; twenty-five years earlier, he said, he \"didn't have a sense or a theory about how democracies can go backward\" but now realized \"they clearly can.\"\n\nAs for the culture wars, they quickly came roaring back. Hard-core segments of the Republican base\u2014the Tea Party, birthers, right-wing evangelicals, white nationalists\u2014had mobilized against President Obama and his policies. And Trump, as both candidate and president, would pour gasoline on these social and political fractures\u2014as a way to both gin up his base and distract attention from his policy failures and many scandals. He exploited the partisan divides in American society, appealing to the fears of white working-class voters worried about a changing world, while giving them scapegoats he selected\u2014immigrants, African Americans, women, Muslims\u2014as targets for their anger. It's no coincidence that Russian trolls\u2014working to get Trump elected while trying to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic system\u2014were, at the same time, using fake social media accounts in efforts to further amplify divisions among Americans. For instance, it turned out that Russian trolls used an impostor Facebook account called \"Heart of Texas\" to organize a protest called \"Stop the Islamization of Texas\" in May 2016 and another impostor Facebook account called \"United Muslims of America\" to organize a counterprotest at the same time and place.\n\nSome of the most eloquent critics of Trump's politics of fear and division have been conservatives like Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Joe Scarborough, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Michael Gerson, and the Republican senators John McCain and Jeff Flake. But most of the GOP rallied behind Trump, rationalizing his lies, his disdain for expertise, his contempt for many of the very ideals America was founded upon. For such Trump enablers, party trumped everything\u2014morality, national security, fiscal responsibility, common sense, and common decency. In the wake of stories about Trump's alleged affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels, evangelicals came to his defense: Jerry Falwell Jr. said \"all these things were years ago,\" and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said he and his supporters were willing to give Trump a pass for his personal behavior.\n\nIt's an ironic development, given where conservatives stood during the first wave of the culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, it was conservatives who promoted themselves as guardians of tradition, expertise, and the rule of law, standing in opposition to what they saw as the decline of reason and a repudiation of Western values. In his 1987 book, _The Closing of the American Mind,_ the political philosophy professor Allan Bloom railed against relativism and condemned 1960s campus protests in which, he said, \"commitment was understood to be profounder than science, passion than reason.\" And the scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that the writing and teaching of history had been politicized by a new generation of postmodernists: in viewing the past through the lenses of variables like gender and race, she argued, postmodernists were implying not just that all truths are contingent but that \"it is not only futile but positively baneful to aspire to them.\"\n\nSome critics unfairly tried to lump the pluralistic impulses of multiculturalism together with the arguments of radical postmodernists who mocked the very possibility of teaching (or writing) history fairly. The former offered a crucial antidote to traditional narratives of American exceptionalism and Western triumphalism by opening the once narrow gates of history to the voices of women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and other heretofore marginalized points of view. Multiculturalism underscored the incompleteness of much history writing, as Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob argued in their incisive and common-sense-filled book, _Telling the Truth About History,_ and offered the possibility of a more inclusive, more choral perspective. But they also warned that extreme views could lead to the dangerously reductive belief that \"knowledge about the past is simply an ideological construction intended to serve particular interests, making history a series of myths establishing or reinforcing group identities.\"\n\nScience, too, came under attack by radical postmodernists, who argued that scientific theories are socially constructed: they are informed by the identity of the person positing the theory and the values of the culture in which they are formed; therefore, science cannot possibly make claims to neutrality or universal truths.\n\n\"The postmodern view fit well with the ambivalence toward science that developed after the bomb and during the Cold War,\" Shawn Otto wrote in _The War on Science_. Among left-leaning academics in the humanities departments of universities, he went on, \"science came to be seen as the province of a hawkish, pro-business, right-wing power structure\u2014polluting, uncaring, greedy, mechanistic, sexist, racist, imperialist, homophobic, oppressive, intolerant. A heartless ideology that cared little for the spiritual or holistic wellness of our souls, our bodies, or our Mother Earth.\"\n\nIt was ridiculous, of course, to argue that a researcher's cultural background could affect verifiable scientific facts; as Otto succinctly put it, \"Atmospheric CO2 is the same whether the scientist measuring it is a Somali woman or an Argentine man.\" But such postmodernist arguments would clear the way for today's anti-vaxxers and global warming deniers, who refuse to accept the consensus opinion of the overwhelming majority of scientists.\n\nAs on so many other subjects, Orwell saw the perils of this sort of thinking decades ago. In a 1943 essay, he wrote, \"What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history _could_ be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less discoverable.\"\n\n\"It is just this common basis of agreement,\" he went on, \"with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'Science.' There is only 'German Science,' 'Jewish Science,' etc.\" When truth is so fragmented, so relative, Orwell noted, a path is opened for some \"Leader, or some ruling clique\" to dictate what is to be believed: \"If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened'\u2014well, it never happened.\"\n\nPeople trying to win respectability for clearly discredited theories\u2014or, in the case of Holocaust revisionists, trying to whitewash entire chapters of history\u2014exploited the postmodernist argument that all truths are partial. Deconstructionist history, the scholar Deborah E. Lipstadt observed in _Denying the Holocaust,_ has \"the potential to alter dramatically the way established truth is transmitted from generation to generation.\" And it can foster an intellectual climate in which \"no fact, no event, and no aspect of history has any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be recast. There is no ultimate historical reality.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nPostmodernism not only rejected all meta-narratives but also emphasized the instability of language. One of postmodernism's founding fathers, Jacques Derrida\u2014who would achieve celebrity status on American campuses in the 1970s and 1980s thanks in large part to such disciples as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller\u2014used the word \"deconstruction\" to describe the sort of textual analysis he pioneered that would be applied not just to literature but to history, architecture, and the social sciences as well.\n\nDeconstruction posited that all texts are unstable and irreducibly complex and that ever variable meanings are imputed by readers and observers. In focusing on the possible contradictions and ambiguities of a text (and articulating such arguments in deliberately tangled and pretentious prose), it promulgated an extreme relativism that was ultimately nihilistic in its implications: anything could mean anything; an author's intent did not matter, could not in fact be discerned; there was no such thing as an obvious or commonsense reading, because everything had an infinitude of meanings. In short, there was no such thing as truth.\n\nAs David Lehman recounted in his astute book _Signs of the Times,_ the worst suspicions of critics of deconstruction were confirmed when the Paul de Man scandal exploded in 1987 and deconstructionist rationales were advanced to defend the indefensible.\n\nDe Man, a professor at Yale and one of deconstruction's brightest stars, had achieved an almost cultlike following in academic circles. Students and colleagues described him as a brilliant, charismatic, and charming scholar who had fled Nazi Europe, where, he implied, he had been a member of the Belgian Resistance. A very different portrait would emerge from Evelyn Barish's biography _The Double Life of Paul de Man_ : an unrepentant con man\u2014an opportunist, bigamist, and toxic narcissist who'd been convicted in Belgium of fraud, forgery, and falsifying records.\n\nThe most shocking news had been revealed in 1987, four years after his death: a young Belgian researcher discovered that de Man had written at least one hundred articles for a pro-Nazi Belgian publication, _Le Soir,_ during World War II\u2014a publication that espoused a virulent anti-Semitism, declaring in one editorial that \"we are determined to forbid ourselves any cross-breeding with them and to liberate ourselves spiritually from their demoralizing influence in the realm of thought, literature, and the arts.\"\n\nIn the most notorious of his _Le Soir_ articles, de Man argued that \"Jewish writers have always remained in the second rank\" and had therefore failed to exercise \"a preponderant influence\" on the evolution of contemporary European civilization. \"One can thus see,\" he wrote, \"that a solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences. It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its higher laws of evolution.\"\n\nAs news of de Man's alarming collaborationist writings swept through academia, some scholars wondered if de Man's shameful and secret past had informed his theories about deconstruction\u2014for instance, his contention that \"considerations of the actual and historical existence of writers are a waste of time.\"\n\nMore disturbing still were efforts by some of de Man's defenders, like Derrida, to use the principles of deconstruction to try to explain away de Man's anti-Semitic writings, suggesting that his words actually subverted what they appeared to say or that there was too much ambiguity inherent in his words to assign moral responsibility.\n\nOne de Man admirer, cited by Lehman, tried to argue that de Man's remarks about Jewish writers were a case of \"irony\" misfiring, contending that the essay's tone was \"one of detached mockery throughout the sections dealing with the Jews, and the object of the mockery is clearly not the Jews but rather the anti-Semites.\" In other words, the writer was suggesting that de Man had meant the very opposite of what his _Le Soir_ columns stated.\n\nThough deconstructionists are fond of employing jargon-filled prose and perversely acrobatic syntax, some of the terms they use\u2014like the \"indeterminacy of texts,\" \"alternative ways of knowing,\" and the \"linguistic instability\" of language\u2014feel like pretentious versions of phrases recently used by Trump aides to explain away his lies, flip-flops, and bad-faith promises. For instance: a Trump representative telling an adviser to the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, that they didn't \"have to take each word that Mr. Trump said publicly literally\"; and a former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, asserting that the problem with the media is \"You guys took everything Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn't.\"\n\n# 3\n\n# \"MOI\" AND THE RISE OF SUBJECTIVITY\n\n> Our subjectivity is so completely our own.\n> \n> \u2014SPIKE JONZE\n\nParallel with academia's embrace of postmodernism was the blossoming in the 1970s of what Christopher Lasch called \"the culture of narcissism\" and what Tom Wolfe memorably termed the \"Me Decade\"\u2014a tidal wave of navel-gazing, self-gratification, and attention craving that these two authors attributed to very different causes.\n\nLasch saw narcissism as a defensive reaction to social change and instability\u2014looking out for number one in a hostile, threatening world. In his 1979 book, _The Culture of Narcissism,_ he argued that a cynical \"ethic of self-preservation and psychic survival\" had come to afflict America\u2014a symptom of a country grappling with defeat in Vietnam, a growing mood of pessimism, a mass media culture centered on celebrity and fame, and centrifugal forces that were shrinking the role families played in the transmission of culture.\n\nThe narcissistic patient who had become increasingly emblematic of this self-absorbed age, Lasch wrote, often experienced \"intense feelings of rage,\" \"a sense of inner emptiness,\" \"fantasies of omnipotence and a strong belief in [his] right to exploit others\"; such a patient may be \"chaotic and impulse-ridden,\" \"ravenous for admiration but contemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it,\" and inclined to conform \"to social rules more out of fear of punishment than from a sense of guilt.\"\n\nIn contrast to Lasch, Tom Wolfe saw the explosion of \"Me...Me...Me\" in the 1970s as an altogether happier, more hedonistic development\u2014an act of class liberation, powered by the postwar economic boom, which had left the working and middle classes with the leisure time and disposable income to pursue the sorts of vain activities once confined to aristocrats\u2014the \"remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing\" of one's own glorious self.\n\nEconomic times would grow considerably darker in the twenty-first century, but the self-absorption that Wolfe and Lasch described would remain a lasting feature of Western life, from the \"Me Decade\" of the 1970s on through the \"selfie\" age of Kim and Kanye. Social media would further accelerate the ascendance of what the Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu described as \"the preening self\" and the urge to \"capture the attention of others with the spectacle of one's self.\"\n\nWith this embrace of subjectivity came the diminution of objective truth: the celebration of opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts\u2014a development that both reflected and helped foster the rise of Trump.\n\nThree examples. Number 1: Trump, who has been accused of greatly inflating his wealth, was asked about his net worth in a 2007 court deposition. His answer, it depends: \"My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.\" He added that it varied depending on his \"general attitude at the time that the question may be asked.\"\n\nNumber 2: Asked whether he'd questioned Vladimir Putin about Russian interference in the election, Trump replied, \"I believe that he feels that he and Russia did not meddle in the election.\"\n\nNumber 3: During the Republican National Convention in 2016, the CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota asked Newt Gingrich about Trump's dark, nativist law-and-order speech, which inaccurately depicted America as a country beset by violence and crime, and she was sharply rebutted by the former Speaker of the House. \"I understand your view,\" Gingrich said. \"The current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics which theoretically may be right, but it's not where human beings are. People are frightened. People feel that their government has abandoned them.\"\n\nCamerota pointed out that the crime statistics weren't liberal numbers; they came from the FBI.\n\nThe following exchange took place:\n\nGINGRICH: No, but what I said is equally true. People feel it.\n\nCAMEROTA: They feel it, yes, but the facts don't support it.\n\nGINGRICH: As a political candidate, I'll go with how people feel and I'll let you go with the theoreticians.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe tendency of Americans to focus, myopically, on their self-pursuits\u2014sometimes to the neglect of their civic responsibilities\u2014is not exactly new. In _Democracy in America,_ written more than a century and a half before people started using Facebook and Instagram to post selfies and the internet was sorting us into silos of like-minded souls, Alexis de Tocqueville noted Americans' tendency to withdraw into \"small private societies, united together by similitude of conditions, habits, and customs,\" in order \"to indulge themselves in the enjoyments of private life.\" He worried that this self-absorption would diminish a sense of duty to the larger community, opening the way for a kind of soft despotism on the part of the nation's rulers\u2014power that does not tyrannize, but \"compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people\" to the point where they are \"reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.\" This was one possible cost of a materialistic society, he predicted, where people become so focused on procuring \"the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives\" that they neglect their responsibilities as citizens; it was difficult to conceive, he wrote, how such people who \"have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed.\"\n\nIn the mid-twentieth century, the pursuit of self-fulfillment exploded within both the counterculture and the establishment. Predating Esalen and EST and the encounter groups that attracted hippies and New Age seekers intent on expanding their consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s were two influential figures whose doctrines of self-realization were more materialistic and more attractive to politicians and suburban Rotarians. Norman Vincent Peale, the author of the 1952 self-help bestseller _The Power of Positive Thinking_ \u2014known as \"God's salesman\" for his hawking of the prosperity gospel\u2014was admired by Trump's father, Fred, and the younger Trump would internalize the celebrity pastor's teachings on self-fulfillment and the power of the mind to create its own reality. \"Any fact facing us, however difficult, even seemingly hopeless, is not so important as our attitude toward that fact,\" Peale wrote, seeming to promote the doctrine of denial along with the doctrine of success. \"A confident and optimistic thought pattern can modify or overcome the fact altogether.\"\n\nAyn Rand, also admired by Trump (over the years, _The Fountainhead_ is one of the few novels he's cited as a favorite), won the fealty of several generations of politicians (including Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, and Clarence Thomas) with her transactional view of the world, her equation of success and virtue, and her proud embrace of unfettered capitalism. Her argument that selfishness is a moral imperative, that man's \"highest moral purpose\" is \"the pursuit of his own happiness,\" would resonate with Trump's own zero-sum view of the world and his untrammeled narcissism.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAs the West lurched through the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and their aftermath, artists struggled with how to depict this fragmenting reality. Some writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass created self-conscious, postmodernist fictions that put more emphasis on form and language than on conventional storytelling. Others adopted a minimalistic approach, writing pared-down, narrowly focused stories emulating the fierce concision of Raymond Carver. And as the pursuit of broader truths became more and more unfashionable in academia, and as daily life came to feel increasingly unmoored, some writers chose to focus on the smallest, most personal truths: they wrote about themselves.\n\nAmerican reality had become so confounding, Philip Roth wrote in a 1961 essay (1961!), that it felt like \"a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination.\" This had resulted, he wrote, in the \"voluntary withdrawal of interest by the writer of fiction from some of the grander social and political phenomena of our times,\" and the retreat, in his own case, to the more knowable world of the self.\n\nIn a controversial 1989 essay, Tom Wolfe lamented these developments, mourning what he saw as the demise of old-fashioned realism in American fiction, and he urged novelists to \"head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.\" He tried this himself in novels like _The Bonfire of the Vanities_ and _A Man in Full,_ using his skills as a reporter to help flesh out a spectrum of subcultures with Balzacian detail. But while Wolfe had been an influential advocate in the 1970s of the New Journalism (which put a new emphasis on the voice and point of view of the reporter), his new manifesto didn't win that many converts in the literary world. Instead, writers as disparate as Louise Erdrich, David Mitchell, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Chuck Palahniuk, Gillian Flynn, and Lauren Groff would play with devices (like multiple points of view, unreliable narrators, and intertwining story lines) pioneered decades ago by innovators like Faulkner, Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and Nabokov to try to capture the new Rashomon-like reality in which subjectivity rules and, in the infamous words of former president Bill Clinton, truth \"depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.\"\n\nBut what Roth called \"the sheer fact of self, the vision of self as inviolable, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment,\" would remain more comfortable territory for many writers. In fact, it would lead, at the turn of the millennium, to a remarkable flowering of memoir writing, including such classics as Mary Karr's _The Liars' Club_ and Dave Eggers's _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_ \u2014works that established their authors as among the foremost voices of their generation.\n\nThe memoir boom and the popularity of blogging at the turn of the millennium would eventually culminate in Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volume autobiographical novel\u2014filled with minutely detailed descriptions, drawn from the author's own daily life. Along the way, there were also a lot of self-indulgent, self-dramatizing works by other authors that would have been better left in writers' private journals or social media accounts. The reductio ad absurdum of this navel-gazing was James Frey's bestselling book _A Million Little Pieces,_ which was sold as a memoir but which the Smoking Gun website reported in January 2006 contained \"wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms and status as an outlaw 'wanted in three states.' \" Frey, who seems to have engaged in this act of self-dramatization to make himself out to be a more notorious figure than he actually was (presumably so his subsequent \"redemption\" would be all the more impressive as an archetypal tale of recovery), later conceded that \"most of what\" the Smoking Gun site reported \"was pretty accurate.\" For some readers, angry that they had been sold a false bill of goods, Frey's book was a con job, a repudiation of the very qualities\u2014honesty, authenticity, candor\u2014that memoirs are supposed to embody, but other readers shrugged off the differentiation between fact and fiction: their response a symptom of just how comfortable people had become with the blurred lines of truth.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nPersonal testimony also became fashionable on college campuses, as the concept of objective truth fell out of favor and empirical evidence gathered by traditional research came to be regarded with suspicion. Academic writers began prefacing scholarly papers with disquisitions on their own \"positioning\"\u2014their race, religion, gender, background, personal experiences that might inform or skew or ratify their analysis. Some proponents of the new \"moi criticism\" began writing full-fledged academic autobiographies, Adam Begley reported in _Lingua Franca_ in 1994, noting that the trend toward autobiography traced back to the 1960s, to early feminist consciousness-raising groups, and that it often \"spread in tandem with multiculturalism: News about minority experience often comes packaged in the first person singular. Ditto for gay studies and queer theory.\"\n\nIn her 1996 book, _Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture,_ the scholar Leslie Heywood used events from her own life (like her own anorexia and a humiliating relationship with a married man) to draw analogies between anorexia and modernism, an approach that had the effect of reducing great masterpieces like T. S. Eliot's _The Waste Land_ into case studies in an anti-women, anti-fat aesthetic.\n\nPersonal stories or agendas started turning up in biographies, too. No longer were biographies simple chronicles of other people's lives. Instead, they became platforms for philosophical manifestos (Norman Mailer's _Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man_ ), feminist polemics (Francine du Plessix Gray's _Rage and Fire,_ a portrait of Flaubert's mistress Louise Colet), and deconstructionist exercises (S. Paige Baty's _American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic_ ).\n\nArguably the most preposterous exercise in biographical writing was _Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan,_ a 1999 book by Reagan's official biographer, Edmund Morris, which turned out to be a perplexing _Ragtime_ -esque mashup of fact and fantasy, featuring a fictional narrator who is twenty-eight years older than the real Morris and who was supposedly saved from drowning in his youth by the future president. Instead of using his extraordinary access to a sitting president and his personal papers to create a detailed portrait of the fortieth president (or to grapple with important issues like Iran-Contra or the end of the Cold War), Morris gave readers cheesy descriptions of his fictional narrator and his fictional family and his fictional or semi-fictional hopes and dreams. Morris took this approach, he explained, because he realized he didn't \"understand the first thing\" about his subject\u2014an abdication of the biographer's most basic duty\u2014and because of his own artistic aspirations. \"I want to make literature out of Ronald Reagan,\" he declared. He also described his use of a fictionalized narrator as \"an advance in biographical honesty,\" a reminder to the reader of the subjective element involved in all writing.\n\nThis was an argument that echoed the self-serving reasoning of Janet Malcolm, who suggested in _The Silent Woman,_ her highly partisan 1994 book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, that all biographers share her own disdain for fairness and objectivity\u2014a disingenuous assertion, given that she made no effort to carefully weigh or evaluate material in her book but instead wrote a kind of long fan letter to Hughes, extolling his literary gifts, his physical attractiveness, his \"helpless honesty.\" She wrote about her \"feeling of tenderness toward Hughes,\" and how reading one of his letters, she felt her \"identification with its typing swell into a feeling of intense sympathy and affection for the writer.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one's perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disenfranchised to be heard. But it's also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated. Creationists, for instance, called for teaching \"intelligent design\" alongside evolution in schools. \"Teach both,\" some argued. Others said, \"Teach the controversy.\"\n\nA variation on this \"both sides\" argument was employed by President Trump when he tried to equate people demonstrating against white supremacy with the neo-Nazis who had converged in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate statues. There were \"some very fine people on both sides,\" Trump declared. He also said, \"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.\"\n\nClimate deniers, anti-vaxxers, and other groups who don't have science on their side bandy about phrases that wouldn't be out of place in a college class on deconstruction\u2014phrases like \"many sides,\" \"different perspectives,\" \"uncertainties,\" \"multiple ways of knowing.\" As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway demonstrated in their 2010 book, _Merchants of Doubt,_ right-wing think tanks, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporate interests that are intent on discrediting science (be it the reality of climate change or the hazards of asbestos or secondhand smoke or acid rain) have employed a strategy that was first used by the tobacco industry to try to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking. \"Doubt is our product,\" read an infamous memo written by a tobacco industry executive in 1969, \"since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public.\"\n\nThe strategy, essentially, was this: dig up a handful of so-called professionals to refute established science or argue that more research is needed; turn these false arguments into talking points and repeat them over and over; and assail the reputations of the genuine scientists on the other side. If this sounds familiar, that's because it's a tactic that's been used by Trump and his Republican allies to defend policies (on matters ranging from gun control to building a border wall) that run counter to both expert evaluation and national polls.\n\nWhat Oreskes and Conway call the \"Tobacco Strategy\" got an assist, they argued, from elements in the mainstream media that tended \"to give minority views more credence than they deserve.\" This false equivalence was the result of journalists confusing balance with truth telling, willful neutrality with accuracy; caving to pressure from right-wing interest groups to present \"both sides\"; and the format of television news shows that feature debates between opposing viewpoints\u2014even when one side represents an overwhelming consensus and the other is an almost complete outlier in the scientific community. For instance, a 2011 BBC Trust report found that the broadcast network's science coverage paid \"undue attention to marginal opinion\" on the subject of man-made climate change. Or, as a headline in _The Telegraph_ put it, \"BBC Staff Told to Stop Inviting Cranks on to Science Programmes.\"\n\nIn a speech on press freedom, Christiane Amanpour addressed this issue in the context of media coverage of the 2016 presidential race, saying,\n\n> Like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate. It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.\n> \n> We cannot continue the old paradigm\u2014let's say like over global warming, where 99.9 percent of the empirical scientific evidence is given equal play with the tiny minority of deniers.\n> \n> I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.\n> \n> I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.\n\n# 4\n\n# THE VANISHING OF REALITY\n\n> Do I want to interfere with the reality tape? And if so, why?\n> \n> Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality.\n> \n> \u2014PHILIP K. DICK, \"THE ELECTRIC ANT\"\n\n\"Surreal\" and \"chaos\" have become two of those words invoked hourly by journalists trying to describe daily reality in America in the second decade of the new millennium, at a time when nineteen kids are shot every day in the United States, when the president of the United States plays a game of nuclear chicken with North Korea's Kim Jong-un, when artificial intelligence engines are writing poetry and novellas, when it's getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from _The Onion_ and headlines from CNN.\n\nTrump's unhinged presidency represents some sort of climax in the warping of reality, but the burgeoning disorientation people have been feeling over the disjuncture between what they know to be true and what they are told by politicians, between common sense and the workings of the world, traces back to the 1960s, when society began fragmenting and official narratives\u2014purveyed by the government, by the establishment, by elites\u2014started to break down and the news cycle started to speed up. In 1961, Philip Roth wrote of American reality, \"It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.\" The daily newspapers, he complained, \"fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise...\"\n\nRoth's sense that actuality was exceeding fiction writers' imagination (and throwing up real-life figures like Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn who were the envy of any novelist) would be echoed more than half a century later by writers of satire and spy thrillers in the Trump era. And his observation that novelists were having difficulty dealing imaginatively with a world they felt to be confounding helps explain why journalism\u2014particularly what Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism\u2014began eclipsing fiction in capturing what life was like in the 1960s, as the _Esquire_ anthology aptly titled _Smiling Through the Apocalypse_ (featuring classic magazine pieces by such writers as Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, and Gay Talese) attested.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nPoliticians had always spun reality, but television\u2014and later the internet\u2014gave them new platforms on which to prevaricate. When the Republican strategist Lee Atwater observed in the 1980s that \"perception is reality,\" he was bluntly articulating an insight about human psychology that Homer well knew when he immortalized Odysseus as a wily trickster, adept at deception and disguise. But Atwater's cold-blooded use of that precept in using wedge issues to advance the GOP's southern strategy\u2014and to create the infamous Willie Horton ad in the 1988 presidential campaign\u2014injected mainstream American politics with an alarming strain of win-at-all-costs Machiavellianism using mass media as a delivery system.\n\nNearly three decades later, Trump would cast immigrants in the role of Willie Horton, and turning the clock back further, he would exchange dog-whistle racism for the more overt racism and rhetoric of George Wallace. At the same time, he instinctively grasped that the new internet-driven landscape and voters' growing ignorance about issues made it easier than ever to play to voters' fears and resentments by promoting sticky, viral narratives that served up alternate realities. He also amped up efforts to discredit journalism as \"fake news,\" attacking reporters as \"enemies of the people\"\u2014a chilling term once used by Lenin and Stalin.\n\nIt wasn't just that Trump lied reflexively and shamelessly, but that those hundreds upon hundreds of lies came together to create equally false story lines that appealed to people's fears. Depicting America as a country reeling from crime (when, in fact, the crime rate was experiencing historic lows\u2014less than half what it was at its peak in 1991). A country beset by waves of violent immigrants (when, in fact, studies show that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than U.S.-born citizens). Immigrants who are a burden to the country and who should be vetted more carefully (when, in fact, thirty-one of seventy-eight American Nobel Prizes since 2000 were won by immigrants, and immigrants and their kids have helped found an estimated 60 percent of the top U.S. tech companies, worth nearly four trillion dollars). In short, Trump argued, a nation in deep trouble and in need of a savior.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nLong before he entered politics, Trump was using lies as a business tool. He claimed that his flagship building, Trump Tower, is sixty-eight floors high, when, in fact, it's only fifty-eight floors high. He also pretended to be a PR man named John Barron or John Miller to create a sock puppet who could boast about his\u2014Trump's\u2014achievements. He lied to puff himself up, to generate business under false pretenses, and to play to people's expectations. Everything was purely transactional; all that mattered was making the sale.\n\nHe spent years as a real-estate developer and reality-TV star, promiscuously branding himself (Trump Hotels, Trump Menswear, Trump Natural Spring Water, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Home Collection), and like most successful advertisers\u2014and successful propagandists\u2014he understood that the frequent repetition of easy-to-remember and simplistic taglines worked to embed merchandise (and his name) in potential customers' minds. Decades before handing out \"MAGA\" hats at his rallies, he'd become an expert at staging what the historian Daniel Boorstin called \"pseudo-events\"\u2014that is, events \"planned, planted, or incited\" primarily \"for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced.\"\n\nBoorstin's 1962 book, _The Image_ \u2014which would inform the work of myriad writers from French theorists like Baudrillard and Guy Debord, to social critics like Neil Postman and Douglas Rushkoff\u2014uncannily foresaw reality TV decades before the Kardashians or the Osbournes or any number of desperate housewives actually showed up in our living rooms. For that matter, he anticipated the rise of someone very much like Donald J. Trump: a celebrity known, in Boorstin's words, for his \"well-knownness\" (and who would even host a show called _The Celebrity Apprentice_ ).\n\nBoorstin's descriptions of the nineteenth-century impresario and circus showman P. T. Barnum\u2014who ran a New York City museum of curiosities filled with hoaxes like a mermaid (which turned out to be the remains of a monkey stitched together with the tail of a fish)\u2014will sound uncannily familiar to contemporary readers: a self-proclaimed \"prince of humbugs\" whose \"great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived\" as long as it was being entertained.\n\nMuch the way images were replacing ideals, Boorstin wrote in _The Image,_ the idea of \"credibility\" was replacing the idea of truth. People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was \"convenient that it should be believed.\" And as verisimilitude replaced truth as a measurement, \"the socially rewarded art\" became \"that of making things seem true\"; no wonder that the new masters of the universe in the early 1960s were the Mad Men of Madison Avenue.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBaudrillard would take such observations further, suggesting that in today's media-centric culture people have come to prefer the \"hyperreal\"\u2014that is, simulated or fabricated realities like Disneyland\u2014to the boring, everyday \"desert of the real.\"\n\nArtists like Jorge Luis Borges, William Gibson, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, and Federico Fellini grappled with similar themes, creating stories in which the borders between the real and the virtual, the actual and the imagined, the human and the post-human blur, overlap, even collapse. In the story \"Tl\u00f6n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,\" Borges describes \"a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, mathematicians, moralists, painters and geometricians\" who invent an unknown planet named Tl\u00f6n: they conjure its geography, its architecture, its systems of thinking. Bits and pieces of Tl\u00f6n start surfacing in the real world: an artifact here, a description there, and things speed up around 1942; eventually, the narrator notes, the teachings of Tl\u00f6n have spread so widely that the history he learned as a child has been obliterated and replaced by \"a fictitious past.\"\n\nBorges drew direct parallels between the power of fictions about Tl\u00f6n to insinuate themselves into human consciousness and the power of deadly political ideologies based on lies to infect entire nations; both, he suggested, provide internally consistent narratives that appeal to people hungering to make sense of the world. \"Reality gave ground on more than one point,\" Borges wrote. \"The truth is that it hankered to give ground. Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order\u2014dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism\u2014was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tl\u00f6n and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws\u2014I translate: inhuman laws\u2014which we will never completely perceive. Tl\u00f6n may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth plotted by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.\"\n\nThomas Pynchon's novels explore similar themes\u2014more relevant than ever in a world suffering from information overload. Reeling from a kind of spiritual vertigo, his characters wonder whether the paranoiacs have it right\u2014that there are malign conspiracies and hidden agendas connecting all the dots. Or whether the nihilists are onto something\u2014that there is no signal in the noise, only chaos and randomness. \"If there is something comforting\u2014religious, if you want\u2014about paranoia,\" he wrote in _Gravity's Rainbow,_ \"there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIn a 2016 documentary titled _HyperNormalisation,_ the British filmmaker Adam Curtis created an expressionistic, montage-driven meditation on life in the post-truth era; the title (which also seems to allude to Baudrillard) was taken from a term coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe life in the final years of the Soviet Union, when people both understood the absurdity of the propaganda the government had been selling them for decades and had difficulty envisioning any alternative. In _HyperNormalisation,_ which was released shortly before the 2016 U.S. election on the BBC's iPlayer platform, Curtis says in voice-over narration that people in the West had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realized that \"in the face of that, you could play with reality\" and in the process \"further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.\"\n\nSome Trump allies on the far right also seek to redefine reality on their own terms. Invoking the iconography of the movie _The Matrix_ \u2014in which the hero is given a choice between two pills, a red one (representing knowledge and the harsh truths of reality) and a blue one (representing soporific illusion and denial)\u2014members of the alt-right and some aggrieved men's rights groups talk about \"red-pilling the normies,\" which means converting people to their cause. In other words, selling their inside-out alternative reality, in which white people are suffering from persecution, multiculturalism poses a grave threat, and men have been oppressed by women.\n\nAlice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, the authors of a study on online disinformation, argue that \"once groups have been red-pilled on one issue, they're likely to be open to other extremist ideas. Online cultures that used to be relatively nonpolitical are beginning to seethe with racially charged anger. Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities\u2014having accepted run-of-the-mill anti-feminism\u2014are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas. 'Ironic' Nazi iconography and hateful epithets are becoming serious expressions of anti-Semitism.\"\n\nOne of the tactics used by the alt-right to spread its ideas online, Marwick and Lewis argue, is to initially dilute more extreme views as gateway ideas to court a wider audience; among some groups of young men, they write, \"it's a surprisingly short leap from rejecting political correctness to blaming women, immigrants, or Muslims for their problems.\"\n\nMany misogynist and white supremacist memes, in addition to a lot of fake news like Pizzagate, originate or gain initial momentum on sites like 4chan and Reddit\u2014before accumulating enough buzz to make the leap to Facebook and Twitter, where they can attract more mainstream attention. Renee DiResta, who studies conspiracy theories on the web, argues that Reddit can be a useful testing ground for bad actors\u2014including foreign governments like Russia\u2014to try out memes or fake stories to see how much traction they get.\n\nDiResta warned in the spring of 2016 that the algorithms of social networks\u2014which give people news that's popular and trending, rather than accurate or important\u2014are helping to promote conspiracy theories. This sort of fringe content can both affect how people think and seep into public policy debates on matters like vaccines, zoning laws, and water fluoridation. Part of the problem is an \"asymmetry of passion\" on social media: while most people won't devote hours to writing posts that reinforce the obvious, DiResta says, \"passionate truthers and extremists produce copious amounts of content in their commitment to 'wake up the sheeple.' \"\n\nRecommendation engines, she adds, help connect conspiracy theorists with one another to the point that \"we are long past merely partisan filter bubbles and well into the realm of siloed communities that experience their own reality and operate with their own facts.\" At this point, she concludes, \"the Internet doesn't just reflect reality anymore; it shapes it.\"\n\n# 5\n\n# THE CO-OPTING OF LANGUAGE\n\n> Without clear language, there is no standard of truth.\n> \n> \u2014JOHN LE CARR\u00c9\n\nLanguage is to humans, the writer James Carroll once observed, what water is to fish: \"We swim in language. We think in language. We live in language.\" This is why Orwell wrote that \"political chaos is connected with the decay of language,\" divorcing words from meaning and opening up a chasm between a leader's real and declared aims. This is why America and the world feel so disoriented by the stream of lies issued by the Trump White House and the president's use of language as a tool to disseminate distrust and discord. And this is why authoritarian regimes throughout history have co-opted everyday language in an effort to control not just how people communicate but also how they think\u2014exactly the way the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's _1984_ aims to deny the existence of external reality and safeguard Big Brother's infallibility.\n\nOrwell's \"Newspeak\" is a fictional language, but it often mirrors and satirizes the \"wooden language\" imposed by Communist authorities in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Among the characteristics of \"wooden language\" that the French scholar Fran\u00e7oise Thom identified in a 1987 thesis ( _La langue de bois_ ) were abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete; tautologies (\"the theories of Marx are true because they are correct\"); bad metaphors (\"the fascist octopus has sung its swan song\"); and Manichaeanism that divides the world into things good and things evil (and nothing in between).\n\nMao's Communist Party also adopted a plan of linguistic engineering soon after taking power in China in 1949, creating a new political vocabulary: some words were suppressed; others were injected with new meanings; and party slogans were drummed into people's brains through constant repetition. People were made to understand that there were \"correct\" and \"incorrect\" ways to speak, whether it was delivering a work report or engaging in a required round of self-criticism.\n\nOne of history's most detailed accounts of how totalitarianism affects everyday language was written by Victor Klemperer, a German-Jewish linguist who survived World War II in Dresden. Klemperer kept a remarkable set of diaries chronicling life under Nazi rule in Germany ( _I Will Bear Witness_ ), and he also wrote a study ( _The Language of the Third Reich_ ) about how the Nazis used words as \"tiny doses of arsenic\" to poison and subvert the German culture from within. The book is a harrowing case study in how the Reich \"permeated the flesh and blood of the people\" through idioms and sentence structures that were \"imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.\" It's also a cautionary tale, every bit as unnerving as Orwell's _1984,_ to other countries and future generations about how swiftly and insidiously an autocrat can weaponize language to suppress critical thinking, inflame bigotry, and hijack a democracy.\n\nKlemperer didn't think Hitler compared with Mussolini as a speaker, and he was surprised that the Nazi leader\u2014whom he saw as an angry, insecure man with an annoying voice and a propensity to bellow\u2014amassed such a following. He attributed Hitler's success less to his heinous ideology than to his skills at going around other politicians to reach out directly to the people\u2014the word _Volk_ was regularly invoked, and Hitler portrayed himself as their voice, their messiah. The big spectacles (effectively pseudo-events) that he and Goebbels staged were a help. \"The splendour of the banners, parades, garlands, fanfares and choruses\" that surrounded Hitler's speeches, Klemperer notes, served as an effective \"advertising ploy\" that conflated the f\u00fchrer with the grandeur of the state.\n\nAs in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, words underwent a sinister metamorphosis in Nazi Germany. The word _fanatisch_ (fanatical), Klemperer wrote, went from denoting \"a threatening and repulsive quality\" associated with bloodlust and cruelty to being an \"inordinately complimentary epithet,\" evoking the qualities of devotion and courage needed to fuel the Reich. The word _k\u00e4mpferisch_ (aggressive, belligerent) also became a word of praise, meaning admirable \"self-assertion through defense or attack.\" Meanwhile, the word \"system\" was scorned, because it was associated with the Weimar Republic, which the Nazis despised in much the same way that right-wing Republicans today despise what they call the deep state.\n\nHitler's _Mein Kampf_ was published in 1925, and Klemperer notes that the book \"literally fixed the essential features\" of Nazi oratory and prose. In 1933, this \"language of a clique became the language of the people.\" It would be as if, say, the argot of the alt-right\u2014its coded use of language to identify fellow travelers; its racial and misogynist slurs\u2014were to be completely mainstreamed and made a part of routine political and social discourse.\n\nKlemperer devoted an entire chapter to the Nazis' obsession with numbers and superlatives; everything had to be the best or the most. If a German from the Third Reich went on an elephant hunt, Klemperer wrote, he would have to boast that he'd \"finished off the biggest elephants in the world, in unimaginable numbers, with the best weapon on earth.\" Many of the Nazis' own numbers (regarding enemy soldiers killed, prisoners taken, audience numbers for a radio broadcast of a rally) were so exaggerated that they took on what Klemperer calls a \"fairy-tale quality.\" In 1942, he writes, \"Hitler says in the Reichstag that Napoleon fought in Russia in temperatures of minus 25 degrees, but that he, Commanding Officer Hitler, had fought at minus 45, even at minus 52.\" All the lying and hyperbole eventually reached the point, Klemperer continues, that it became \"meaningless and utterly ineffective, finally bringing about a belief in the very opposite of what it intended.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nTrump's mendacity is so extreme that news organizations have resorted to assembling lengthy lists of lies he's told, insults he's delivered, norms he's violated, in addition to hiring squads of fact-checkers. And his shamelessness has emboldened politicians around him to lie with even more effrontery than ever. Republicans in Congress, for instance, blatantly lied about the effects their tax bill would have on the deficit and social safety net provisions, just as they lied about how much it would help the middle class, when in fact it was all about giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich.\n\nTrump's assault on language is not confined to his torrent of lies, but extends to his taking of words and principles intrinsic to the rule of law and contaminating them with personal agendas and political partisanship. In doing so, he's exchanged the language of democracy and its ideals for the language of autocracy. He demands allegiance not to the U.S. Constitution but to himself, and he expects members of Congress and the judiciary to applaud his policies and wishes, regardless of what they think best serves the interests of the American people.\n\nWith other phrases, Trump has performed the disturbing Orwellian trick (\"WAR IS PEACE,\" \"FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,\" \"IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH\") of using words to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean. It's not just his taking the term \"fake news,\" turning it inside out, and using it to try to discredit journalism that he finds threatening or unflattering. He's also called the investigation into Russian election interference \"the single greatest witch hunt in American political history,\" when he is the one who has repeatedly attacked the press, the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, any institution he regards as hostile.\n\nIn fact, Trump has the perverse habit of accusing opponents of the very sins he is guilty of himself: \"Lyin' Ted,\" \"Crooked Hillary,\" \"Crazy Bernie.\" He accused Clinton of being \"a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,\" and he has asserted that \"there was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats.\"\n\nIn Orwell's language of Newspeak in _1984,_ a word like \"blackwhite\" has \"two mutually contradictory meanings\": \"Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.\"\n\nThis, too, has an unnerving echo in the behavior of Trump White House officials and Republican members of Congress who lie on the president's behalf and routinely make pronouncements that flout the evidence in front of people's eyes. The administration, in fact, debuted with the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, insisting that Trump's inaugural crowds were the \"largest audience\" ever\u2014an assertion that defied photographic evidence and was rated by PolitiFact a \"Pants on Fire\" lie.\n\nThese sorts of lies, the journalist Masha Gessen has pointed out, are told for the same reason that Vladimir Putin lies: \"to assert power over truth itself.\" In the case of Ukraine, Gessen wrote in late 2016, \"Putin insisted on lying in the face of clear and convincing evidence to the contrary, and in each case his subsequent shift to truthful statements were not admissions given under duress: they were proud, even boastful affirmatives made at his convenience. Together, they communicated a single message: Putin's power lies in being able to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIn _1984_ , another way the party and Big Brother exert control over reality is by adjusting the past to conform with their worldview: \"It is not merely that speeches, statistics and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness. If, for example, Eurasia or Eastasia (whichever it may be) is the enemy today, then that country must always have been the enemy. And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten.\"\n\nConsider this: within days of Trump's inauguration, changes were being made to the climate change pages on the White House website. Meanwhile, environmentalists were frantically trying to download and archive government climate data\u2014worried that it might be destroyed or lost or hidden by a hostile administration. Some of their fears were realized later in 2017, when the EPA announced that its website was \"undergoing changes that reflect the agency's new direction,\" including this Orwellian phrase: \"updating language to reflect the approach of new leadership.\"\n\nOn educational pages controlled by the Department of Energy, phrases about renewable energy were switched to ones advocating the use of fossil fuels, and links to the Obama administration's 2013 climate report and references to UN meetings on climate change vanished from State Department pages.\n\nUSDA employees were informed that their social media posts should be reviewed by administrators \"to remove references to policy priorities and initiatives of the previous Administration.\" And after the National Park Service retweeted a post showing aerial photographs that compared the size of Trump's inaugural crowds with those of President Obama's, the agency's digital team was told to temporarily suspend its use of Twitter. That retweet was soon deleted.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAt the same time, Trump continued his personal assault on the English language. Trump's incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith, and his inflammatory bombast) is both emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on as well as an essential instrument in his liar's tool kit. His interviews, off-teleprompter speeches, and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations, and innuendos\u2014a bully's efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarize, and scapegoat.\n\nPrecise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest. Chuck Todd, the anchor of NBC's _Meet the Press,_ observed that after several of his appearances as a candidate Trump would lean back in his chair and ask the control booth to replay his segment on a monitor\u2014without sound: \"He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute.\"\n\nHe is equally nonchalant about spelling. There was the famous \"covfefe\" tweet: \"Despite the constant negative press covfefe.\" And his description of the Chinese seizure of a U.S. Navy drone as an \"unpresidented act.\" He also tweeted that he was \"honered to serve you, the great American People, as your 45th President of the United States!\" Twitter typos are common, of course, and they are hardly the most alarming aspect of Trump's compulsion to tweet. But they are indicative of his impulsive, live-in-the-moment, can't-think-about-the-fallout posture. And his typos are contagious. The White House released a statement about a presidential trip to Israel, saying that one of his goals was to \"promote the possibility of lasting peach.\" Other White House releases misspelled the name of Jon Huntsman Jr., Trump's nominee to be ambassador to Russia, and misspelled the name of the British prime minister, Theresa May. The official inauguration poster read, \"No dream is too big, no challenge is to great.\" And tickets for his first State of the Union address (which had to be reprinted) read, \"Address to Congress on the State of the Uniom.\" Harmless enough glitches, perhaps, but indicative of the administration's larger carelessness and dysfunction\u2014its cavalier disregard for accuracy, details, and precision.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nTrump's tweets have been deemed official pronouncements of the president of the United States and will no doubt one day be printed out, finely bound, and shelved by someone wearing white gloves in a gold-shellacked presidential library. Whether they are distractions meant to divert attention from the Russia investigations, the stream-of-consciousness rants of an attention-craving narcissist, or part of a more deliberate strategy to acclimate people to the aberrant, the tweets have immediate consequences around the planet, escalating nuclear tensions with North Korea, alienating whole countries and continents, and sending tremors through the post\u2013World War II order. Trump's retweeting of anti-Muslim videos from the far-right group Britain First earned a sharp rebuke from the U.K.'s Theresa May and helped mainstream a heretofore marginal hate group.\n\nHis rants against journalism as \"fake news\" have enabled further crackdowns on press freedom in countries like Russia, China, Turkey, and Hungary where reporters already work under duress. And they have been taken as license by leaders of authoritarian regimes to dismiss reports of human rights abuses and war crimes in their own countries. After Amnesty International reported that up to thirteen thousand prisoners were killed at a military prison outside Damascus between 2011 and 2015, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, said, \"You can forge anything these days\"\u2014\"We are living in a fake news era.\" And in Myanmar, where the military is carrying out a horrifying campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority, an officer in the state security ministry declared, \"There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news.\"\n\nThe scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University who has drawn parallels between Trump's rise and that of Mussolini, argues that authoritarians typically test \"the limits of what the public, press, and political class will tolerate\" and that Trump's incendiary tweets and remarks are efforts \"to see how much Americans and the GOP will let him get away with\u2014and when, if ever, they will say 'enough.' \"\n\nA 1995 essay about Mussolini and \"ur-fascism\" by the Italian scholar Umberto Eco also sheds light, when read retrospectively, on Trump's language and use of authoritarian tropes. Many of the features Eco described as being intrinsic to fascism will ominously remind the reader of Trump's demagoguery: an appeal to nationalism and people's \"fear of difference\"; a rejection of science and rational discourse; an invocation of tradition and the past; and a proclivity for equating disagreement with treason.\n\nMore specifically, Eco wrote that \"Mussolini did not have any philosophy; he had only rhetoric\": it was \"a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.\" Ur-fascism employs \"an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax,\" Eco added, \"in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.\" And it regards \"the People\" not as citizens or individuals but as \"a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will,\" which the leader pretends to interpret; the leader puts himself forth\u2014instead of, say, a parliament or legislature\u2014as \"the Voice of the People.\" If that sounds oddly familiar, it's because Trump, in his Republican National Convention address, said to the audience, \"I'm with you\u2014the American people. I am your voice.\"\n\n# 6\n\n# FILTERS, SILOS, AND TRIBES\n\n> We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.\n> \n> \u2014RUDYARD KIPLING, 1890\n\nShortly before the 2004 election, Arthur Miller\u2014the playwright and a dedicated liberal\u2014wondered, \"How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't know one Bush supporter?\"\n\nSince then, of course, the walls of our political silos have only grown taller; the insulation of our echo chambers, that much thicker. Even before we were being sealed in impermeable filter bubbles by Facebook news feeds and Google search data, we were living in communities that had become increasingly segregated in terms of politics, culture, geography, and lifestyle. Add to that partisan news sources like Fox News, Breitbart, and Drudge, and it's no surprise that the Rashomon effect has taken hold: common ground between citizens from opposing political parties is rapidly shrinking, and the whole idea of consensus is becoming a thing of the past.\n\nA 2016 Pew survey showed that 45 percent of Republicans view Democratic policies as a threat to the nation's well-being, and 41 percent of Democrats say the same about GOP policies. And the animosity goes well beyond policy disagreements; it's personal. Seventy percent of Democrats in that Pew survey said that Republicans are more close-minded than other Americans; meanwhile, 47 percent of Republicans said Democrats are more immoral than other Americans, and 46 percent said they are lazier.\n\nSuch partisanship is being inflated further by Russian trolls seeking to undermine democracy in America by amplifying social divisions through fake news and fake social media accounts and by President Trump's use of inflammatory remarks to pander to his base and bait his adversaries. It's telling that the old national motto _E pluribus unum_ (Out of many, one) has been removed from Trump's commemorative presidential coins and replaced with his own slogan \"Make America Great Again.\"\n\nThese growing divides in America are only a couple of decades old, according to Bill Bishop's book, _The Big Sort_. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Bishop wrote, communities seemed to be growing more politically integrated, and \"there was an economic convergence, too,\" as Sunbelt prosperity spread in the South. But around 1980 or so something happened, says Bishop: people had begun reordering their lives around \"their values, their tastes, and their beliefs\"\u2014in part, as a response to the social and cultural dislocations that followed in the wake of the 1960s. People with college degrees were gravitating toward cities, while rural areas slipped behind economically.\n\n\"As we've lost trust in traditional institutions,\" Bishop wrote, \"the tenuous bonds of the workplace have proven insufficient to satisfy people's need for belonging.\" In response, people found a sense of community by seeking out like-minded neighborhoods, churches, social clubs, and other organizations. It's a dynamic that would be amplified at light speed by the internet\u2014by news sites catering to particular ideological points of view, by special interest bulletin boards, and by social media that's helped people further sort themselves into silos of shared interests. By the turn of the millennium, Bishop wrote, the divisions were less about ideology than about tastes and values, but \"as the parties have come to represent lifestyle\u2014and as lifestyle has defined communities\u2014everything seems divisible, Republican or Democratic.\" Everything meaning not just your views on health care or voting rights or global warming but where you shop, what you eat, what sorts of movies you watch. A 2017 Pew survey showed that Americans don't even agree about the value of a college education: while 72 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country, a majority of Republicans and Republican leaners (58 percent) have a negative view of those institutions of higher learning.\n\nMeanwhile, the number of people in the middle\u2014independents or swing voters\u2014dwindled in clout, or at least in the attention they received from many politicians. In his book _The Second Civil War,_ the veteran political reporter Ronald Brownstein described how George W. Bush's political advisers reviewed the data from the 2000 campaign and decided to focus in 2004 on energizing the base and encouraging turnout among Republicans\u2014a harbinger of the play-to-the-base strategy Trump would later pursue so relentlessly. As one Bush adviser told Brownstein, \"This is not designed to be a 55 percent presidency. This is designed to be a presidency that moves as much as possible of what we believe into law while holding fifty plus one of the country and the Congress.\" In 2016, Hillary Clinton's campaign basically wrote off the white working-class vote (the vote her husband, Bill, had owned) and focused, instead, on turning out her base.\n\nIdeological consistency grew over the years: a 2014 Pew survey found that in the two decades after 1994 more Democrats gave \"uniformly liberal responses\" to policy questions (about matters like immigration, the environment, the role of government), while more Republicans gave \"uniformly conservative responses.\" Those members of both parties with the most consistent views, the Pew study noted, had a \"disproportionate influence on the political process\"; they were more likely to vote, more likely to donate money, more likely to contact elected officials. And then there is gerrymandering, which has favored Republicans since they launched a concerted effort after Obama's election in 2008 to gain control of state governments, which are in charge of drawing (or redrawing) congressional districts. The new, often highly misshapen districts, drawn with the help of computer software, gave Republicans a substantial advantage in capturing and holding on to the House of Representatives, and they also tended to tilt districts further to the right, which made many elected officials reluctant to compromise with Democrats when they got to Washington, out of fear of being primaried on their right.\n\nFor many of these committed partisans, supporting their party was like being a rabid, die-hard fan of a favorite NBA, MLB, or NFL team; it was part of their own identity, and their team could do no wrong. They might hate a particular policy or a particular candidate\u2014much the way they might blame their team's coach for a bad play, or loathe an overpaid, underperforming player received in a trade\u2014but short of the apocalypse they were going to remain loyal fans while wishing pain and humiliation upon their opponents.\n\nPolarized voting in Congress mirrored these developments: by 2014, a Pew report noted, Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill were \"further apart from one another than at any point in modern history\"; it also highlighted that rising polarization among elected officials was \"asymmetrical, with much of the widening gap between the two parties attributable to a rightward shift among Republicans.\"\n\nThe chief reason for this asymmetry was the explosion of right-wing media. Back in the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh proved that incendiary invective and showmanship\u2014two things Donald Trump would learn from him\u2014could win him a lucrative national audience, and for decades his faithful dittoheads loyally repeated whatever he said, even when what he said was ridiculous. In one diatribe, Limbaugh asserted that \"the Four Corners of Deceit are government, academia, science, and the media.\" He also declared that \"scientists wear white lab coats and they look really official\" but \"they're frauds. They're bought and paid for by the left.\"\n\nIn the three decades since the FCC revoked the Fairness Doctrine (which required TV and radio stations to devote some of their programming to important issues of the day and air opposing views on those issues) and the two decades since Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News, right-wing media has grown into a sprawling, solipsistic network that relentlessly repeats its own tropes (the dangers of immigration, the untrustworthiness of mainstream media, the evils of big government, and so on), and it's succeeded in framing many debates in the national conversation through its sheer shamelessness and decibel level. Breitbart News, which Steve Bannon described as a \"platform for the alt-right,\" and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which reaches an estimated 38 percent of American households through local news broadcasts, have expanded the right-wing media universe, along with countless online sites, YouTube channels, and radio broadcasts. In an Orwellian move, Sinclair has even forced local news anchors to read a scripted message about \"false news\" that echoes President Trump's own rhetoric undermining real reporting.\n\nMany of these outlets don't even go through the motions of trying to provide verifiable facts and information, but instead attempt to spin what one talk show host calls \"truth-based content\" into self-serving, precooked narratives that ratify audiences' existing beliefs or gin up their worst fears.\n\nIn recent years, the conservative radio host Charlie Sykes observed, conservative media created an \"alternate reality bubble\" that \"destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless on the right.\"\n\nA 2017 Harvard study of more than 1.25 million stories (published online between April 1, 2015, and Election Day in November 2016) concluded that pro-Trump audiences relied heavily on this \"insulated knowledge community,\" which uses \"social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world\" and reinforces users' shared worldview while poisoning them against mainstream journalism that might challenge their preconceptions. The result: an environment in which the president can allude to a terrorist event in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential adviser can reference a nonexistent \"Bowling Green massacre.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWith tribal politics increasingly dominating Republican and Democratic politics, candidates scramble to lock down their party's base during the primary process. Much of the Republican base now reacts instantly with knee-jerk denial when it comes to issues like gun violence, Obamacare, or global warming. Never mind statistics, expert analyses, carefully researched university or government studies, in some cases even their own self-interest\u2014a lot of hard-core Trump supporters dismiss such evidence as never-to-be-trusted liberal or deep state politics. For these partisans, party loyalty and tribal politics matter more than facts, more than morality and decency: witness the Republicans who supported Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was accused of sexual misconduct against teenage girls, and the Trump supporters who booed John McCain, a genuine war hero, and viciously said God had punished him with cancer for standing up to Trump.\n\nAs the journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote, \"The enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous\": not simple political polarization, but the fracture of the country into \"two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.\"\n\nAssorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias\u2014why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there's a primitive instinct to defend one's turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence.\n\nGroup dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book _Going to Extremes_ : insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group's leader \"does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion.\"\n\nOnce the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, \"the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.\" In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. \"Terrorists are made, not born,\" Sunstein observed, \"and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.\"\n\nCharlie Sykes decided to step down from his popular radio show at the end of 2016. Politics had become a \"binary tribal world,\" he pointed out, in which voters \"tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other side is always worse.\" What his listeners wouldn't tolerate was his criticism of Trump or his objections that crazy conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were demonstrably false. His listeners had become accustomed to rejecting mainstream sources of news and, for that matter, simple facts.\n\n\"In the new Right media culture,\" he wrote in his 2017 book, _How the Right Lost Its Mind,_ \"negative information simply no longer penetrates; gaffes and scandals can be snuffed out, ignored, or spun; counternarratives can be launched. Trump has proven that a candidate can be immune to the narratives, criticism, and fact-checking of the mainstream media.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nLong gone are the pre-cable days when many people got their news from one of three TV networks and watched many of the same television shows like _All in the Family_ and _The Mary Tyler Moore Show_. New _Star Wars_ movies and the Super Bowl remain some of the few communal events that capture an audience cutting across demographic lines.\n\nAs for news, an increasingly fragmented media environment offers sites and publications targeted at niche audiences from the reddest red to the bluest blue. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other sites use algorithms to personalize the information you see\u2014information customized on the basis of earlier data they've collected about you.\n\n\"With Google personalized for everyone,\" the internet activist Eli Pariser wrote in his book, _The Filter Bubble,_ \"the query 'stem cells' might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem cell research and activists who oppose it. 'Proof of climate change' might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil company executive. In polls, a huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they're increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.\"\n\nBecause social media sites give us information that tends to confirm our view of the world\u2014what Pariser calls \"an endless you-loop\"\u2014people live in increasingly narrow content silos and correspondingly smaller walled gardens of thought. It's a big reason why liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, find it harder and harder to agree on facts and why a shared sense of reality is becoming elusive. It also helps explain why elites in New York and Washington\u2014including the Clinton campaign and much of the press\u2014were so shocked by Trump's win in the 2016 election.\n\n\"If algorithms are going to curate the world for us,\" Pariser warned in a 2011 TED talk, \"if they're going to decide what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just keyed to relevance but that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important, other points of view.\"\n\n# 7\n\n# ATTENTION DEFICIT\n\n> When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.\n> \n> \u2014WILLIAM GIBSON, _Z ERO HISTORY_\n\nWhen it comes to spreading fake news and undermining belief in objectivity, technology has proven a highly flammable accelerant. Increasingly we have become aware of the dark side of what was imagined as a transformative catalyst for innovation.\n\nTim Berners-Lee, who drew up a proposal in 1989 for what would become the World Wide Web, envisioned a universal information system, connecting people across boundaries of language and location and sharing information that would lead to unprecedented creativity and problem solving. A sort of benevolent version of Borges's infinite library, where everything existed but, in this case, could also be retrieved and put to practical and imaginative use.\n\n\"The rise of the web was a rare instance when we learned new, positive information about human potential,\" Jaron Lanier wrote in his book _You Are Not a Gadget_. \"Who would have guessed (at least at first) that millions of people would put so much effort into a project without the presence of advertising, commercial motive, threat of punishment, charismatic figures, identity politics, exploitation of the fear of death, or any of the other classic motivators of mankind. In vast numbers, people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful.\"\n\nAt the heart of the collective enterprise in those early days, Lanier recalled, was \"a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result. The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse.\"\n\nThe same web that's democratized information, forced (some) governments to be more transparent, and enabled everyone from political dissidents to scientists and doctors to connect with one another\u2014that same web, people are learning, can be exploited by bad actors to spread misinformation and disinformation, cruelty and prejudice. The possibility of anonymity on the web has promoted a toxic lack of accountability and enabled harassers and trolls. Giant Silicon Valley companies have collected user data on a scale rivaling that of the NSA. And the explosion of internet use has also amplified many of the dynamics already at play in contemporary culture: from the self-absorption of the \"Me\" and \"selfie\" generations, to the isolation of people in ideological silos and the relativization of truth.\n\nThe sheer volume of data on the web allows people to cherry-pick facts or factoids or nonfacts that support their own point of view, encouraging academics and amateurs alike to find material to support their theories rather than examining empirical evidence to come to rational conclusions. As Nicholas Carr, the former executive editor of the _Harvard Business Review,_ wrote in _The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,_ \"We don't see the forest when we search the Web. We don't even see the trees. We see twigs and leaves.\"\n\nOn the web, where clicks are everything, and entertainment and news are increasingly blurred, material that is sensational, bizarre, or outrageous rises to the top, along with posts that cynically appeal to the reptilian part of our brains\u2014to primitive emotions like fear and hate and anger.\n\nIn this era of nervous distraction and information overload, attention is the most precious commodity on the internet. And as the law professor Tim Wu observed in his book _The Attention Merchants,_ sites gradually learned in the early 2010s how to make content consistently go viral: often the \"urge to share was activated by a spectrum of 'high-arousal' emotions, like awe, outrage, and anxiety.\"\n\nBy 2015, Wu wrote, the web\u2014once \"a commons that fostered the amateur eccentric in every area of interest\"\u2014was overrun by \"commercial junk, much of it directed at the very basest human impulses of voyeurism and titillation.\" There were \"vast areas of darkness\" now\u2014like \"the lands of the cajoling listicles and the celebrity nonstories\"\u2014that were \"engineered for no purpose but to keep a public mindlessly clicking and sharing away, spreading the accompanying ads like a bad cold.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWhile public trust in the media declined in the new millennium (part of a growing mistrust of institutions and gatekeepers, as well as a concerted effort by the right wing to discredit the mainstream press), more and more people started getting their news through Facebook, Twitter, and other online sources: by 2017, two-thirds of Americans said they got at least some of their news through social media. This reliance on family and friends and Facebook and Twitter for news, however, would feed the ravenous monster of fake news.\n\nFake news is nothing new, of course: sensationalized press coverage helped drum up public support for the Spanish-American War, and Julius Caesar spun his conquest of Gaul as a preventive action. But the internet and social media allow rumors, speculation, and lies to flash around the world in a matter of seconds: like the preposterous Pizzagate stories and the baseless stories claiming that the man behind the massacre of fifty-eight people in Las Vegas in October 2017 was an anti-Trump liberal who followed MoveOn.org and had recently become a Muslim.\n\nDuring the last three months of the 2016 presidential campaign, _BuzzFeed News_ reported, \"top-performing\" fake election news stories on Facebook generated more reader engagement than top stories from major news organizations like _The New York Times,_ _The Washington Post,_ NBC News, and _The Huffington Post_. Of the twenty fake stories, all but three were pro-Trump or anti\u2013Hillary Clinton, including one which claimed that Clinton had sold weapons to ISIS and another which claimed that the pope had endorsed Trump. A study from Oxford University's Internet Institute found that, on Twitter, a network of Trump supporters circulated more junk news than any other political group in the sample. And a 2018 _Politico_ analysis found that voters in so-called news deserts\u2014places with low numbers of news subscribers\u2014went for Trump in greater numbers than voters in places where independent media could check his assertions.\n\nAs the role that social media had played in spreading fake news and enabling Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election became increasingly clear, some Silicon Valley insiders experienced a kind of existential crisis. They worried that the magical tools they had helped create were becoming Frankensteinian monsters. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, wrote that \"the monetization and manipulation of information is swiftly tearing us apart,\" and commissioned a white paper on the effect that social media was having on accountability and trust and our democracy.\n\n\"The system is failing,\" Tim Berners-Lee declared. He was still an optimist, he said, \"but an optimist standing at the top of the hill with a nasty storm blowing in my face, hanging on to a fence.\"\n\nIn an impassioned essay, Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, argued that the Russians' manipulation of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other platforms to try to shift the outcomes of the 2016 U.S. election and the Brexit referendum was just the tip of a huge iceberg: unless fundamental changes were made, he warned, those platforms were going to be manipulated again, and \"the level of political discourse, already in the gutter, was going to get even worse.\"\n\nThe problems were inherent, McNamee argued, in the algorithms used by platforms like Facebook to maximize user engagement. The more time members spend on a platform, the more ads a company sells and the more profits it makes, and the way to maximize engagement is by \"sucking up and analyzing your data, using it to predict what will cause you to react most strongly, and then giving you more of that.\" This not only creates the filter bubbles that seal people off in partisan silos but also favors simplistic, provocative messages. Conspiracy theories easily go viral on social media. And so do dumbed-down, inflammatory political messages\u2014like those retailed by the Trump campaign and the Vote Leave party in Britain, appealing to raw emotions like the fear of immigrants or anger over disappearing jobs. Such populist messages, historians attest, tend to gain traction during times of economic uncertainty (as in the lingering aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and snowballing income inequality) and cultural and social change (as with globalization and seismic technological innovation).\n\nTrump's hate-fueled message was almost tailor-made for social media algorithms. Steve Bannon told the journalist Michael Lewis that Trump not only was an angry man but also had a unique ability to tap into the anger of others: \"We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.\"\n\nAt the same time, the Trump campaign made shrewd and Machiavellian use of social media and big-data tools, employing information from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (a data science firm partially owned by the Trump backer and Breitbart investor Robert Mercer that boasts of its ability to psychologically profile millions of potential voters) to target its advertising and plan Trump's campaign stops.\n\nFacebook revealed that the data of as many as 87 million people may have been shared improperly with Cambridge Analytica, which used the information to help create tools designed to predict and influence voter behavior. A former employee of Cambridge Analytica said that Steve Bannon oversaw a 2014 voter persuasion effort in which anti-establishment messages\u2014like \"drain the swamp\" and \"deep state\"\u2014were identified and tested.\n\nThe Trump campaign's digital director, Brad Parscale, recounted how they used Facebook's advertising tools to micro-target potential supporters with customized ads, making some fifty to sixty thousand ads a day, continually tweaking language, graphics, even colors, to try to elicit a favorable response.\n\nThe campaign also used so-called dark posts (visible only to the recipient) and launched three voter-suppression operations, according to a senior campaign official quoted in _Bloomberg Businessweek_ : one was targeted at Bernie Sanders supporters; one at young women (who, the campaign thought, might be offended by reminders of Bill Clinton's philandering\u2014odd, given Trump's own scandals with women); and one at African Americans (who the campaign thought might not vote for Clinton if reminded of her use of the term \"super predators\" in 1996, referring to her husband's anticrime initiative).\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe master manipulators of social media in the 2016 election, of course, were the Russians whose long-term goal\u2014to erode voters' faith in democracy and the electoral system\u2014dovetailed with their short-term goal of tipping the outcome toward Trump. U.S. intelligence agencies also concluded that Russian hackers stole emails from the Democratic National Committee, which were later provided to WikiLeaks. These plots were all part of a concerted effort by the Kremlin, stepped up since Putin's reelection in 2012, to use asymmetrical, nonmilitary means to achieve its goals of weakening the European Union and NATO and undermining faith in globalism and Western democratic liberalism. Toward such ends, Russia has been supporting populist parties in Europe, like Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front party in France, and has interfered in the elections of at least nineteen European countries in recent years. It also continues to wage disinformation campaigns through state media outlets like Sputnik and RT.\n\nIn the case of the American election, Facebook told Congress that Russian operatives published some eighty thousand posts on Facebook between June 2015 and August 2017 that might have been seen by 126 million Americans; that's more than half the number of people registered to vote in the country. Some of the Russian posts actively tried to promote Trump or damage Clinton; others were simply meant to widen existing divisions in American society over issues like race, immigration, and gun rights. For instance, there was a post from a phony group named South United, showing a Confederate flag and \"a call for the South to rise again.\" Another from a phony group called Blacktivist, memorializing the Black Panthers. And a Facebook ad called \"Secured Borders,\" showing a sign saying, \"No Invaders Allowed.\"\n\n\"The strategy is to take a crack in our society and turn it into a chasm,\" said Senator Angus King of Maine during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Russian interference in the election.\n\nReporting from several publications found that YouTube's recommendation engine seemed to be steering viewers toward divisive, sensationalistic, and conspiracy-minded content. And Twitter found that more than fifty thousand Russia-linked accounts on its platform were posting material about the 2016 election. A report from Oxford University found that in the run-up to the election the number of links on Twitter to \"Russian news stories, unverified or irrelevant links to WikiLeaks pages, or junk news\" exceeded the number of links to professionally researched and published news. The report also found that \"average levels of misinformation were higher in swing states\"\u2014like Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia\u2014than in uncontested states.\n\nRussians had become very adept not only at generating fake news but also at inventing fake Americans who commented on that fake news and joined fake American groups. A Russian troll factory employee named Vitaly Bespalov, who worked at a St. Petersburg propaganda factory called the Internet Research Agency, told NBC News that the job was \"a merry-go-round of lies.\" Workers on the first floor wrote fake news stories referencing blog posts written by workers on the third floor, while colleagues posted comments on those stories under fake names and coordinated other social media posts. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the IRA's accounts had been producing pro-Russian propaganda about Ukraine but switched over to pro-Trump messages as early as December 2015.\n\nWhen the _Access Hollywood_ tape of Trump talking about groping women came out before the election, Russian Twitter agents rushed to his rescue, trashing the mainstream media and trying to refocus attention on damaging emails hacked from Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. This sort of support for Trump continued after he took up residence in the White House, with pro-Kremlin Twitter accounts trying to stir up trouble over matters like the controversy of NFL players taking a knee. By the end of 2017, however, these Russian accounts seemed to be increasingly focused on undermining special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into Russian interference in the election.\n\nRussia also appears to have jumped into the U.S. debate over the Trump administration's determination to repeal net neutrality\u2014a move that was opposed by 83 percent of Americans in a poll taken shortly before the FCC voted to do away with the Obama-era rules that required internet providers to treat all web traffic equally. Before announcing its decision, the FCC had said it welcomed public comment on the issue, but it appears that many of the comments it received were fakes or duplicates. One study found that 444,938 comments came from Russian email addresses and that more than 7.75 million comments came from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com and contained virtually identical wording.\n\nTroll factories and bot armies are used by political parties and governments of countries like Russia, Turkey, and Iran to spread propaganda, harass dissenters, flood social networks with misinformation, and create the illusion of popularity or momentum through likes, retweets, or shares. An Oxford University study noted, \"Sometimes, when political parties or candidates use social media manipulation as part of their campaign strategy, these tactics are continued when they assume power. For example, in the Philippines, many of the so-called 'keyboard trolls' hired to spread propaganda for presidential candidate Duterte during the election continue to spread and amplify messages in support of his policies now that he's in power.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe use of bots in manipulating public opinion is just one of the factors examined in the Omidyar Group report on social media's effect on public discourse. In addition to amplifying polarization, the report concluded, social media tends to undermine trust in institutions and makes it more difficult to have the sorts of fact-based debates and discussions that are essential to democracy. The micro-targeted ads on social media and the algorithms designed to customize people's news feeds blur the distinctions between what is popular and what is verifiable, and diminish the ability of people to take part in a shared conversation.\n\nThings are only likely to get worse, particularly if the Trump White House remains in denial about Russian interference in the election and fails to take action against what Michael Hayden, a former director of the NSA and the CIA, has called the \"most successful covert-influence operation in history.\" The head of the Cyber Division at the Department of Homeland Security revealed that the Russians attempted to break into the election systems in twenty-one states during the 2016 election and successfully penetrated a few. And a computer security firm reported that the same Russian hackers who stole DNC emails in 2016 were targeting Senate accounts in the run-up to the 2018 midterms.\n\nRussia already tried to meddle in elections in Germany, France, and the Netherlands, as well as the Brexit referendum in the U.K., and the ease with which it interfered in the 2016 U.S. election (and the lack of penalties it suffered in year one of the Trump administration) have surely emboldened it. Politicians in Mexico and other countries now fear they might be next on Putin's hit list and are bracing for destabilizing waves of fake news and propaganda.\n\nTechnological developments are likely to complicate matters further. Advances in virtual reality and machine-learning systems will soon result in fabricated images and videos so convincing that they may be difficult to distinguish from the real thing. Voices can already be re-created from audio samples, and facial expressions can be manipulated by AI programs. In the future, we could be exposed to realistic videos of politicians saying things they never said: Baudrillard's simulacrum come to life. These are _Black Mirror_ \u2013like developments that will complicate our ability to distinguish between the imitation and the real, the fake and the true.\n\n# 8\n\n# \"THE FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD\"\n\n## PROPAGANDA AND FAKE NEWS\n\n> You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.\n> \n> \u2014ROBERT A. HEINLEIN\n\nRussia is at the center of political conversations in America and Europe because of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and a host of other elections around the world. The methods used by Russia in these operations are reminders of the sophisticated propaganda machine that the Kremlin has built over the decades, going back to the Cold War, and its new mastery of cyber warfare, including hacking, fake news, and the weaponized use of social media. At the same time, not so coincidentally, the thinking of two Russian figures\u2014Vladimir Lenin and the much lesser known Vladislav Surkov, a former postmodernist theater director who's been described as \"Putin's Rasputin\" and the Kremlin's propaganda puppet master\u2014informs many of the troubling political and social dynamics at work in the post-truth era.\n\nAlmost a century after his death, Lenin's model of revolution has proven frighteningly durable. His goal\u2014not to improve the state machine, but to smash it and all its institutions\u2014has been embraced by many twenty-first-century populists. And so have many of his tactics, from his use of confusion and chaos as tools to rally the masses, to his simplistic (and always broken) utopian promises, to his violent rhetoric attacking anything that could possibly be tarred as part of the status quo.\n\nHis incendiary language, Lenin once explained, was \"calculated to evoke hatred, aversion and contempt\"; such wording was \"calculated not to convince, but to break up the ranks of the opponent, not to correct the mistake of the opponent, but to destroy him, to wipe his organization off the face of the earth. This wording is indeed of such a nature as to evoke the worst thoughts, the worst suspicions about the opponent.\" All of which sounds a lot like a template for the sort of language employed by Trump and his supporters in attacking Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign (\"Lock her up!\"), the sort of language employed by radical supporters of the Vote Leave campaign in Britain, the sort of language increasingly employed by right-wing populist movements on both sides of the Atlantic.\n\nThe journalist Anne Applebaum identified an entire group of \"neo-Bolsheviks\"\u2014including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jaros\u0142aw Kaczy\u0144ski in Poland, and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2014who, like Lenin and Trotsky, started out on the political fringes and rode a wave of populism to prominent positions. In 2017, she wrote that \"to an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin's refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his 'illegitimate' opponents.\"\n\nMany of the more successful neo-Bolsheviks, Applebaum points out, have created their own \"alternative media\" that specializes in disinformation, hatemongering, and the trolling of adversaries. Lying is both reflexive and a matter of conviction: they believe, she writes, \"that ordinary morality does not apply to them....In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of 'the People,' or as a means of targeting 'Enemies of the People.' In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.\"\n\nIn fact, the historian Victor Sebestyen writes in a biography of Lenin that the Bolshevik leader was \"the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call 'post-truth politics,' \" and he stands, in many respects, as a \"thoroughly modern political phenomenon\u2014the kind of demagogue familiar to us in Western democracies, as well as in dictatorships.\" Anyone, Sebestyen adds, \"who has lived through recent elections in the supposedly sophisticated political cultures of the West might recognize him.\"\n\nSteve Bannon, Trump's now estranged adviser and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, once described himself to a journalist as \"a Leninist.\" Writing in _The Daily Beast_ in 2013, Ronald Radosh recounted that Bannon declared, \"Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment.\" The conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, who helped finance Cambridge Analytica, thinks the less government the better. A former high-level employee of Mercer's hedge fund told _The New Yorker'_ s Jane Mayer: \"He wants it to all fall down.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nNot surprisingly, the two countries to master the black arts of propaganda in the twentieth century were the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Their techniques of manipulating the public and promoting their hateful ideologies have trickled down to several generations of autocrats and demagogues around the world. Lenin specialized in promises he would never keep. \"He offered simple solutions to complex problems,\" Sebestyen wrote in his biography of the Bolshevik leader. \"He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label 'enemies of the people.' He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything: the ends justified the means.\"\n\nHitler devoted whole chapters of _Mein Kampf_ to the subject of propaganda, and his pronouncements, along with those of his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would constitute a kind of playbook for aspiring autocrats: appeal to people's emotions, not their intellects; use \"stereotyped formulas,\" repeated over and over again; continuously assail opponents and label them with distinctive phrases or slogans that will elicit visceral reactions from the audience. Described by biographers as a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization, Hitler possessed an instinctive sense of how to capture public attention from the start. \"Who cares whether they laugh at us or insult us, treating us as fools or criminals?\" he wrote about his early efforts to make a name for himself. \"The point is that they talk about us and constantly think about us.\" Like Lenin, he also underscored the need \"to disrupt the existing order of things\" and \"thus make room for the penetration\" of new doctrines.\n\nIn _The Origins of Totalitarianism,_ Hannah Arendt looked at the essential role that propaganda played in gaslighting the populations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, writing that \"in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.\"\n\n\"Mass propaganda,\" she wrote, \"discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.\"\n\nRussia still uses propaganda to achieve these very same ends: to distract and exhaust its own people (and increasingly, citizens of foreign countries), to wear them down through such a profusion of lies that they cease to resist and retreat back into their private lives. A Rand Corporation report called this Putin model of propaganda \"the firehose of falsehood\"\u2014an unremitting, high-intensity stream of lies, partial truths, and complete fictions spewed forth with tireless aggression to obfuscate the truth and overwhelm and confuse anyone trying to pay attention.\n\n\"Russian propaganda makes no commitment to objective reality,\" the report observes: manufactured sources are sometimes used, and so is manufactured evidence (faked photographs, faked on-scene news reporting, staged footage with actors playing victims of manufactured atrocities or crimes). \"Russian news channels, such as RT and Sputnik News,\" the report goes on, \"are more like a blend of infotainment and disinformation than fact-checked journalism, though their formats intentionally take the appearance of proper news programs.\"\n\nRussian propaganda, which was extensively exported in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election and elections in Europe, is cranked out quickly in response to breaking news, and it's endlessly recycled, in high volume at high spin rates, through various media channels to feed the perception of multiple sources. Because Russian trolls are unconcerned with veracity or inconsistencies, they can often get their fictional version of events out before legitimate news organizations can post accurate accounts, taking advantage of the psychological tendency of people to accept the first information received on a topic (and, as the Rand report observes, then \"favor this information when faced with conflicting messages\").\n\nThe sheer volume of _dezinformatsiya_ unleashed by the Russian firehose system\u2014much like the more improvised but equally voluminous stream of lies, scandals, and shocks emitted by Trump, his GOP enablers, and media apparatchiks\u2014tends to overwhelm and numb people while simultaneously defining deviancy down and normalizing the unacceptable. Outrage gives way to outrage fatigue, which gives way to the sort of cynicism and weariness that empowers those disseminating the lies. As the former world chess champion and Russian pro-democracy leader Garry Kasparov tweeted in December 2016, \"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.\"\n\nChoose your metaphor: muddying the waters, throwing chum to the sharks, cranking up the fog machine, flinging gorilla dust in the public's eyes: it's a tactic designed to create adrenal fatigue and news exhaustion, a strategy perfectly designed for our ADD, information-overloaded age, \"this twittering world,\" in T. S. Eliot's words, where people can be \"distracted from distraction by distraction.\"\n\nIn the digital era, sowing confusion online through a barrage of misinformation and disinformation is actually becoming the go-to tactic of propagandists around the world, says the scholar Zeynep Tufekci in her insightful book _Twitter and Tear Gas_.\n\n\"In the networked public sphere,\" Tufekci writes, \"the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is increasingly difficult), but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people.\" This can be done, she notes, in a variety of ways: inundating audiences with information; producing distractions to dilute their attention and focus; delegitimizing media that provides accurate information; deliberately sowing confusion, fear, and doubt; creating or claiming hoaxes; and \"generating harassment campaigns designed to make it harder for credible conduits of information to operate.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe contemporary Russian master of propaganda Vladislav Surkov, who's been called \"the real genius of the Putin era,\" has employed all these techniques and more in helping to engineer Putin's rise to\u2014and consolidation of\u2014power. In fact, the tradecraft of the Russian agents who carried out a sophisticated campaign of disinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign bears many of the hallmarks of Surkov's stage management.\n\nThe journalist Peter Pomerantsev, the author of the book _Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,_ has described Surkov as the impresario who turned Russian politics into a reality show in which \"democratic institutions are maintained without any democratic freedoms.\"\n\n\"He helped invent a new strain of authoritarianism based not on crushing opposition from above,\" Pomerantsev wrote in 2014, \"but on climbing into different interest groups and manipulating them from inside.\" For instance: \"Nationalist leaders like Vladimir Zhirinovsky would play the right-wing buffoon to make Mr. Putin look moderate by contrast.\"\n\n\"With one hand,\" Pomerantsev went on, \"Mr. Surkov supported human rights groups made up of former dissidents; with the other he organized pro-Kremlin youth groups like Nashi, which accused human rights leaders of being tools of the West.\" Playing all sides against one another to create chaos was a way to ensure that the Kremlin held all the puppets' strings while using disinformation to remake reality.\n\nThis same sort of Surkovian manipulation informed Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 U.S. election by impersonating Americans and grassroots political groups on social media. As described in a thirty-seven-page indictment brought by the special counsel Robert Mueller, the scheme was a sophisticated one involving hundreds of operatives working for the Internet Research Agency (the Russian troll farm based in St. Petersburg). These agents\u2014some of whom visited the United States under false pretenses\u2014set up hundreds of fake social media accounts, posing as (and sometimes stealing the identities of) real Americans and using an American server to mask their location in Russia. Using these fictional personas, the Russians posted material on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube and built up substantial followings. Their mission: to spread derogatory information about Hillary Clinton (and during the primaries Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio) and distrust about the political system in general. In addition to trying to widen schisms among voters over issues like immigration, religion, and race, the Russians spread fake news aimed at boosting Trump's popularity and hurting Clinton's. They also helped organize and promote pro-Trump rallies, spread rumors of voter fraud by the Democratic Party, and began \"to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote\" in the election, or to vote for a third-party candidate.\n\nSome of the Russian operatives' moves seemed like cynical pieces of Surkovian stagecraft: recruiting a real American to hold a sign depicting Clinton and a phony quotation attributed to her, \"I think Sharia Law will be a powerful new direction of freedom\"; hiring one American to build a large cage on a flatbed truck and a second American to wear a costume portraying Clinton in a prison uniform.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nSurkov's goal in Russia was always the same, Pomerantsev argued in _Politico_ : \"to keep the great, 140-million-strong population reeling with oohs and aahs about gays and God, Satan, fascists, the CIA, and far-fetched geopolitical nightmares.\" Ensuring that the country was always off balance and a little paranoid was a way to keep people preoccupied while encouraging them \"to look to the 'strong hand' of the Kremlin for protection.\"\n\nIn addition to his background in both theater and public relations, Surkov was also a self-styled bohemian who liked to allude to avant-garde artists and postmodernist thinkers. He helped turn Russian television, in Pomerantsev's words, into \"a kitsch Putin-worshipping propaganda machine\"\u2014not dull and ham-handed like old Soviet TV, but superficially glitzy in a way that weaponized Western entertainment for Russian ends.\n\nSurkov's orchestration of Kremlin propaganda has been described as having a performance-art quality to it\u2014stage-managed spectacle meant less to convey an old-school Soviet message than to create multiple, often conflicting story lines that promote confusion and blur reality and fiction. There is no Communist ideology in Putin and Surkov's Russia, just what Pomerantsev called \"power for power's sake and the accumulation of vast wealth.\"\n\nIn the service of this nihilistic vision, Surkov has invoked arguments repudiating the existence of objective truth. He has written that \"hypocrisy in the rationalistic paradigm of Western civilization is inevitable\" because \"speech is too linear, too formal to fully reflect the so-called reality,\" and because \"pretending to be what you are not, to hide your intentions is the most important technology of biological survival.\" In Homer's classics, he notes, the earnest Achilles is less compelling than the \"cunning\" Odysseus\u2014a kind of trickster hero, adept at lies and deceit\u2014who is the one who survives. All narratives are contingent, Surkov suggests, and all politicians are liars; therefore, the alternative facts put out by the Kremlin (and by Donald Trump) are just as valid as anyone else's.\n\nIn November 2017, the Russian site RT published an essay by Surkov that invoked Derrida-inspired arguments about the unreliability of language\u2014and the gap between words and meaning\u2014to suggest that Western notions of truthfulness and transparency are naive and unsophisticated. At once arch and convoluted, the piece embodied Surkov's transactional view of the world, privileging irony over sincerity, trickery over earnestness, while name-dropping pop allusions\u2014like the heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch (Surkov approvingly quoted the lyrics to \"Wash It All Away\").\n\nSurkov's essay ends with a portentous account about how the Roman Empire replaced the Roman Republic, suggesting that the republic failed because it became entangled in its \"sophisticated system of checks and balances\" and needed \"the help of a simple imperial vertical.\" He ominously suggests that America, too, is waiting to be pulled from growing chaos by \"a strong hand.\" An argument that echoes the thinking of a right-wing, antidemocratic philosophy known as \"neoreaction\" or \"NRx,\" which is gathering followers in the United States and envisions the elevation of a leader who would run the country as a kind of unshackled CEO.\n\n\"The king of the West,\" Surkov wrote in his RT essay, \"the founder of the digital dictatorship, the leader with semi-artificial intelligence has already been predicted by comic books. Why do not these comic books come true?\"\n\n# 9\n\n# THE SCHADENFREUDE OF THE TROLLS\n\n> Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos.\n> \n> \u2014THE JOKER IN _T HE DARK KNIGHT_\n\nWhile Surkov seems intent on exporting Russian nihilism to the West, along with antidemocratic principles and a disdain for truth, America has been grappling with a growing cynicism of its own. And fueled by mistrust and some goading from the Far Right, that cynicism was beginning to calcify, in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, into a kind of homegrown nihilism. It was partly a by-product of disillusion with a grossly dysfunctional political system that runs on partisan warfare; partly a sense of dislocation in a world reeling from technological change, globalization, and data overload; and partly a reflection of dwindling hopes among the middle class that the basic promises of the American dream\u2014an affordable house, a decent education, and a brighter future for their kids\u2014were achievable in a post-2008-crash United States. While the too-big-to-fail banks paid little price for the crash of 2008, many working people were still trying to make up lost ground. Income inequality was rising, the cost of a college education had exploded, and affordable housing was slipping out of reach.\n\nIt's a mind-set that made a lot of voters susceptible to Trump's attacks on the status quo and that made some try to churlishly rationalize his transactional politics and shamelessness: Why get upset by his lies, when all politicians lie? Why get upset by his venality, when the law of the jungle rules? In this respect, Donald Trump is as much a symptom of the times as he is a dangerous catalyst. That he broke most of his promises with astonishing alacrity only served to increase many people's cynicism: a mood that is not conducive to civic engagement and that, ironically, fuels Trump's attacks on our ideals and our institutions.\n\nAs his own books make clear, Trump is completely lacking in empathy and has always had a dog-eat-dog view of the world: kill or be killed, and always get even. It's a relentlessly dark view, shaped by his domineering father, Fred, who gave him a zero-sum perspective, and by his early mentor Roy Cohn, who gave him the advice, when in trouble, \"Attack, attack, attack.\"\n\n\"The world is a horrible place,\" Trump declared in his book _Think Big_. \"Lions kill for food, but people kill for sport.\" And: \"The same burning greed that makes people loot, kill, and steal in emergencies like fires and floods, operates daily in normal everyday people. It lurks right beneath the surface, and when you least expect it, it rears its nasty head and bites you. Accept it. The world is a brutal place. People will annihilate you just for the fun of it or to show off to their friends.\"\n\nTrump defines himself largely through the people and institutions he attacks (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, James Comey, the press, the intelligence agencies, the FBI, the judiciary, anyone he perceives as a rival or a threat), and he always seems on the lookout for an enemy or a scapegoat, insulting immigrants, Muslims, women, and African Americans. Much of his agenda, for that matter, is driven by negativity\u2014by an urge to undo President Obama's legacy, including health care and environmental protection, and also to dismantle the broader safety net and civil liberties protections implemented since Lyndon B. Johnson launched the Great Society back in the mid-1960s. \"Make America Great Again\" translates into turning the clock back to the 1950s, before the civil rights movement, before the women's movement, before LGBT rights, before Black Lives Matter.\n\nBut Trump is hardly alone in his negativity and nihilism. Many Republicans in Congress have also abandoned reason, common sense, and the deliberative process of policy making. Some freely acknowledged that they voted for the tax bill because of their big-money donors. Representative Chris Collins said, \"My donors are basically saying, 'Get it done or don't ever call me again.' \" Congress has failed to act on immigration reform again and again, and it's refused to act on gun control year after year, tragedy after tragedy.\n\nWhen it comes to dealing with President Trump, many of these same Republicans simply ignore his multiplying lies; his appointment of woefully unqualified nominees to important government posts; his haphazard and cavalier scuttling of decades of domestic and foreign policy; his reckless decision making (which often seems to emerge, to use Pynchon's words in _Gravity's Rainbow,_ from \"a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery\"). They might confide their worries about Trump's competence or stability to reporters\u2014off the record, of course\u2014but they won't say so in public for fear of jeopardizing their standing with Trump's base. This sort of cynical partisanship only serves to turn voters' disgust with the government into a self-fulfilling prophecy.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe nihilism in Washington is both an echo and a cause of more widespread feelings: a reflection of a growing loss of faith in institutions and a loss of respect for both the rule of law and everyday norms and traditions; a symptom of our loss of civility, our growing inability to have respectful debates with people who have opinions different from our own; and our growing unwillingness to give others the benefit of the doubt, room for an honest mistake, the courtesy of a hearing.\n\nIt's a sense that life is random and devoid of meaning, combined with a carelessness about consequences. Think of the Buchanans in _The Great Gatsby_ : \"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy\u2014they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.\" And it's reflected in the cult popularity of _Fight Club_ and Michel Houellebecq's willfully repellent novels and the mainstream appreciation of bleakly brilliant works like Cormac McCarthy's _No Country for Old Men_ and Nic Pizzolatto's HBO series _True Detective_.\n\nThe new nihilism is WikiLeaks failing to scrub the names of Afghan civilians who might have had contact with American troops from classified U.S. documents it released\u2014a move that human rights groups like Amnesty International warned could have \"deadly ramifications\" for the people named.\n\nThe new nihilism is people making money by creating fake news stories\u2014by one estimate upward of ten thousand dollars a month, earned through online ads. NPR reported that one entirely fictional story with this headline\u2014\"FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide\"\u2014was shared on Facebook more than half a million times and was created by a California-based company named Disinfomedia that oversees several fake news sites. The founder of Disinfomedia, identified by NPR as one Jestin Coler, claimed that he started the company to show how easily fake news spreads and that he enjoys \"the game.\" He said that he and his writers \"tried to do similar things to liberals\" but those efforts didn't go viral the way stories aimed at Trump supporters do.\n\nThe new nihilism is Michael Anton\u2014who became a senior national security official in the Trump administration\u2014writing an article (under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus) titled \"The Flight 93 Election,\" in which he compared the plight of voters in 2016 to that of the passengers on the doomed airplane that went down on 9\/11 and compared voting for Trump to charging the cockpit. \"Charge the cockpit or you die,\" he wrote. \"You may die anyway. You\u2014or the leader of your party\u2014may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don't try, death is certain.\"\n\nThe new nihilism manifests itself in grotesque acts of cruelty like trolling the grieving parents of children murdered in Sandy Hook and accusing them of perpetrating a hoax, and similar attacks on the students who survived the Parkland school massacre. Given such events, it's not surprising that one of the most popular words in the Trump era is \"weaponize\"\u2014as in weaponizing irony, weaponizing fear, weaponizing memes, weaponizing lies, weaponizing the tax code.\n\nThe most appalling racist, sexist, and perversely cruel remarks are served up on social media, often with a wink or a sneer, and when called out, practitioners frequently respond that they were simply joking\u2014much the way that White House aides say Trump is simply joking or misunderstood when he makes offensive remarks. At a November 2016 alt-right conference, the white supremacist Richard Spencer ended his speech, shouting, \"Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!\" When asked about the Nazi salutes that greeted his exclamation, Spencer replied that they were \"clearly done in a spirit of irony and exuberance.\"\n\nAs the researchers Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis suggest in their _Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online_ study, ironic fascism can become a kind of gateway drug, leading to the unironic version: \"A 4chan troll may be more receptive to serious white supremacist claims after using ethnic slurs 'ironically' for two or three months.\"\n\nIn fact, _The Huffington Post_ reported that the neo-Nazi site _The Daily Stormer_ (which aims \"to spread the message of nationalism and anti-Semitism to the masses\") has a style guide for writers. It provides suggestions like \"Always blame the Jews for everything,\" approved lists of racial slurs, and this chilling tip on using humor: \"The tone of the site should be light.\"\n\n\"The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,\" the author of the style guide advised. \"There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor\u2014I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists, because I don't take myself super-seriously.\n\n\"This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that's neither here nor there.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nTrump, of course, is a troll\u2014both by temperament and by habit. His tweets and offhand taunts are the very essence of trolling\u2014the lies, the scorn, the invective, the trash talk, and the rabid non sequiturs of an angry, aggrieved, isolated, and deeply self-absorbed adolescent who lives in a self-constructed bubble and gets the attention he craves from bashing his enemies and trailing clouds of outrage and dismay in his path. Even as president, he continues to troll individuals and institutions, tweeting and retweeting insults, fake news, and treacherous innuendo. On Christmas Eve of 2017, he retweeted an image showing a splotch of blood, labeled CNN, on the sole of his shoe, once again denigrating the press. When another Twitter user called him \"the most superior troll on the whole of twitter\" in 2013, Trump replied, \"A great compliment!\"\n\nIn his revealing 2017 book, _Devil's Bargain,_ the journalist Joshua Green reported that in the wake of Gamergate, Steve Bannon recruited a lot of gamers\u2014young, alienated, mostly white men\u2014to Breitbart. Although many were not particularly ideologically inclined to begin with, they were eager to throw bombs at the establishment and saw Trump as a kind of kindred soul. \"Trump himself,\" Green writes, \"would help cement this alt-right alliance by retweeting images of Pepe the Frog and occasional missives\u2014always inadvertently, his staff insisted\u2014from white nationalist Twitter accounts.\"\n\nSome trolls have employed relativistic arguments to insist that their promotion of alternative facts is simply adding a voice to the conversation, that there are no more objective truths anymore\u2014only different perceptions and different story lines. They are clearly using postmodernist arguments in bad faith, but their assertions are no more disingenuous, really, than the efforts of Paul de Man's defenders to explain away his anti-Semitism by using deconstruction to argue that the articles he wrote for a pro-Nazi publication in the 1940s didn't really mean what they appear to mean.\n\nDeconstruction, in fact, is deeply nihilistic, implying that the efforts of journalists and historians\u2014to ascertain the best available truths through the careful gathering and weighing of evidence\u2014are futile. It suggests that reason is an outdated value, that language is not a tool for communication but an unstable and deceptive interface that is constantly subverting itself. Proponents of deconstruction don't believe that the intent of an author confers meaning on a text (they think that's up to the reader\/viewer\/recipient), and many postmodernists go so far as to suggest that the idea of individual responsibility is overrated, as the scholar Christopher Butler puts it, for promoting \"a far too novelistic and bourgeois belief in the importance of individual human agency in preference to an attribution to underlying economic structures.\"\n\nIn the 1960s, when postmodernism took off in Europe and the United States, it was an anti-authoritarian doctrine, proposing an overthrow of old humanistic traditions, and as its tenets of irony, self-consciousness, and sarcasm leaked into popular culture, it could be seen, as David Foster Wallace observed in the early 1990s, as an antidote to the hypocrisy and smugness of the 1950s world of _Leave It to Beaver;_ it was a \"bad-boy\" means of exploding old pieties and conventions at a time when the world seemed increasingly absurd. It also led to some genuinely innovative and daring art like Wallace's own _Infinite Jest_.\n\nIn a long essay about contemporary culture, Wallace argued that while postmodern irony could be a potent instrument for blowing things up, it was essentially a \"critical and destructive\" theory\u2014good at ground clearing, yet singularly \"unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.\" Its promulgation of cynicism made writers wary of sincerity and \"retrovalues like originality, depth, and integrity,\" he wrote; it shielded \"the heaper of scorn from scorn\" while congratulating \"the patron of scorn for rising above the mass of people who still fall for outmoded pretensions.\" The attitude of \"I don't really mean what I say\" would be adopted by those alt-right trolls who wanted to pretend that they weren't really bigots\u2014they were just joking.\n\nTwo of the celebrities Wallace held up in 1993 as symbols of the poisonousness of postmodernist irony can now be seen, in retrospect, as harbingers of Trump. The first was Joe Isuzu, the star of jokey 1980s Isuzu car commercials\u2014\"an oily, Satanic-looking salesman,\" in Wallace's words, who \"told whoppers about Isuzus' genuine llama-skin upholstery and ability to run on tap water\"\u2014a parody of a dishonest salesman who invited viewers \"to congratulate themselves for getting the joke.\" Joe Isuzu liked to say \"You have my word on it!\" while a silent disclaimer ran over the footage of his boasts: \"He's lying.\" A second celebrity Wallace held up as a tower of 1990s postmodern irony was Rush Limbaugh, whom he described as embodying \"a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just kidding.\"\n\nThe trickle-down legacy of postmodernism, Wallace argued, was \"sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You've got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It's become our language\"\u2014\"Postmodern irony's become our environment.\" The water in which we swim.\n\n# EPILOGUE\n\nIn his clear-eyed 1985 book, _Amusing Ourselves to Death,_ Neil Postman argued that \"the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug\" were indelibly altering our cultural discourse, making it more trivial, more inconsequential, and rendering the information it conveyed \"simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical, and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.\"\n\n\"Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters,\" Postman wrote, \"need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.\"\n\nBy \"electric plug,\" Postman meant television, but his observations apply even more fittingly to the age of the internet, in which data overload ensures that it's the shiniest object\u2014the loudest voice, the most outrageous opinion\u2014that captures our attention and receives the most clicks and buzz.\n\nIn _Amusing Ourselves to Death,_ Postman compared the dystopian vision that Aldous Huxley mapped out in _Brave New World_ (in which people lead soporific lives, deadened by drugs and frivolous entertainments) with the one Orwell created in _1984_ (in which people live under the crushing autocratic rule of Big Brother).\n\n\"Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information,\" Postman wrote. \"Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.\"\n\nAs Postman saw it, Huxley's dystopia was already coming to fruition in the late twentieth century. While Orwell's fears of a totalitarian state applied to the Soviet Union, Postman argued, the threat to the liberal democracies of the West\u2014this was in 1985, remember\u2014was better represented by Huxley's nightmare of a population too narcotized by \"undisguised trivialities\" to engage as responsible citizens.\n\nThese observations of Postman's were ahead of their time, and they would be echoed by George Saunders, who in an essay titled \"The Braindead Megaphone\" (2007) argued that our national discourse had been dangerously degraded by years of coverage of O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky. Our national language, he wrote, had become so dumbed down\u2014at once \"aggressive, anxiety-provoking, maudlin, polarizing\"\u2014that \"we were sitting ducks\" when it came time to try to have a serious debate about whether to invade Iraq, and all we had in our hands was \"the set of crude, hyperbolic tools we'd been using to discuss O.J., et al.\": the shouted babblings of a loud know-it-all, know-nothing figure he called Megaphone Guy, bellowing into a bullhorn, its intelligence level set to \"Stupid,\" its volume stuck on \"Drown Out All Others.\"\n\nBut prescient as Postman's observations about Huxley are (and as prescient as Huxley was about our new age of distraction), it's clear that he also underestimated the relevance of Orwell's dystopia. Or perhaps it's the case that Trump and the assaults he and his administration have committed against the very idea of truth have made _1984_ timely again\u2014something readers recognized, propelling it and Hannah Arendt's _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ up the bestseller lists in the month that Trump took the oath of office.\n\nTrump's lies, his efforts to redefine reality, his violation of norms and rules and traditions, his mainstreaming of hate speech, his attacks on the press, the judiciary, the electoral system\u2014all are reasons that the democracy watchdog group Freedom House warned that year one of the Trump administration had brought \"further, faster erosion of America's own democratic standards than at any other time in memory,\" and all are reasons that Orwell's portrait of an authoritarian state, in which Big Brother tries to control all narratives and define the present and the past, is newly relevant.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nTrump often seems like a one-man set of Aesop-like fables\u2014with easy-to-decipher morals like \"those who lie down with dogs will get up with fleas\" or \"when someone tells you who he is, believe him\"\u2014but because he is president of the United States, his actions do not simply end in a tagline moral; rather, they ripple outward like a toxic tsunami, creating havoc in the lives of millions. Once he has left office, the damage he has done to American institutions and the country's foreign policy will take years to repair. And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society\u2014from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles\u2014his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away.\n\nPhilip Roth said he could never have imagined that \"the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters,\" would appear in \"the ominously ridiculous commedia dell'arte figure of the boastful buffoon.\" Trump's ridiculousness, his narcissistic ability to make everything about himself, the outrageousness of his lies, and the profundity of his ignorance can easily distract attention from the more lasting implications of his story: how easily Republicans in Congress enabled him, undermining the whole concept of checks and balances set in place by the founders; how a third of the country passively accepted his assaults on the Constitution; how easily Russian disinformation took root in a culture where the teaching of history and civics had seriously atrophied.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nGeorge Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 was eerily clairvoyant about the dangers America now faces. In order to protect its future, he said, the young country must guard its Constitution and remain vigilant about efforts to sabotage the separation and balance of powers within the government that he and the other founders had so carefully crafted.\n\nWashington warned about the rise of \"cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men\" who might try \"to subvert the power of the people\" and \"usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.\"\n\nHe warned about \"the insidious wiles of foreign influence\" and the dangers of \"ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens\" who might devote themselves to a favorite foreign nation in order \"to betray or sacrifice the interests\" of America.\n\nAnd, finally, Washington warned of the \"continual mischiefs of the spirit of party,\" which are given to creating strife through \"ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,\" and the perils that factionalism (East versus West, North versus South, state versus federal) posed to the unity of the country. Citizens, he said, must indignantly frown \"upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.\"\n\nAmerica's founding generation spoke frequently of the \"common good.\" Washington reminded citizens of their \"common concerns\" and \"common interests\" and the \"common cause\" they had all fought for in the Revolution. And Thomas Jefferson spoke in his inaugural address of the young country uniting \"in common efforts for the common good.\" A common purpose and a shared sense of reality mattered because they bound the disparate states and regions together, and they remain essential for conducting a national conversation. Especially today in a country where President Trump and Russian and alt-right trolls are working to incite the very factionalism Washington warned us about, trying to inflame divisions between people over racial, ethnic, and religious lines, between red states and blue states, between small towns and big cities.\n\nThere are no easy remedies, but it's essential that citizens defy the cynicism and resignation that autocrats and power-hungry politicians depend upon to subvert resistance. The inspiring students who survived the Parkland, Florida, massacre have done just that, rejecting the fatalism of many of their elders; by turning their grief into action, they are changing the national dialogue and leading the charge to get real gun control measures enacted that could help prevent others from suffering the terror and loss they experienced.\n\nAt the same time, citizens must look to\u2014and protect\u2014the institutions the founders created as pillars to uphold the roof of democracy: the three branches of government\u2014executive, legislative, and judicial\u2014meant to serve as \"reciprocal checks,\" in Washington's words, on one another; and the other two foundation stones of democracy that the founders agreed were crucial for creating an informed public that could wisely choose its leaders: education and a free and independent press.\n\nJefferson wrote that because the young republic was predicated on the proposition \"that man may be governed by reason and truth,\" our \"first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.\"\n\n\"I hold it, therefore, certain,\" Jefferson went on, \"that to open the doors of truth, and to fortify the habit of testing everything by reason, are the most effectual manacles we can rivet on the hands of our successors to prevent their manacling the people with their own consent.\"\n\nMadison, somewhat more succinctly, put it like this: \"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.\" Without commonly agreed-upon facts\u2014not Republican facts and Democratic facts; not the alternative facts of today's silo-world\u2014there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office, and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people. Without truth, democracy is hobbled. The founders recognized this, and those seeking democracy's survival must recognize it today.\n\n# NOTES\n\n# INTRODUCTION\n\n\"The ideal subject\": Hannah Arendt, _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 474.\n\nthe \"danger flags\": Margaret Atwood, \"My Hero: George Orwell,\" _Guardian,_ Jan. 18, 2013.\n\n\"The historian knows how\": Hannah Arendt, \"Lying in Politics,\" in _Crises of the Republic_ (New York: Harcourt, 1972), 6.\n\n\"diminishing role of facts\": Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, _Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life_ (Rand Corporation, 2018).\n\n2,140 false or misleading claims: Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly, \"President Trump Made 2,140 False or Misleading Claims in His First Year,\" _Washington Post,_ Jan. 10, 2018.\n\nFalse claims about the U.K.'s: Anoosh Chakelian, \"Boris Johnson Resurrects the Leave Campaign's \u00a3350M for NHS Fantasy,\" _New Statesman,_ Sept. 16, 2017.\n\n\"There is no such thing\": Pope Francis, \"Message of His Holiness Pope Francis for World Communications Day,\" Jan. 24, 2018, http:\/\/w2.vatican.va\/\u200bcontent\/\u200bfrancesco\/\u200ben\/messages\/communications\/documents\/papa-francesco_20180124_messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html.\n\n\"one of the biggest challenges\": Jessica Estepa and Gregory Korte, \"Obama Tells David Letterman: People No Longer Agree on What Facts Are,\" _USA Today,_ Jan. 12, 2018.\n\n\"2017 was a year\": \"Read Sen. Jeff Flake's Speech Criticizing Trump,\" _CNN Politics,_ Jan. 17, 2018.\n\nfive billion dollars in free campaign coverage: Philip Bump, \"Assessing a Clinton Argument That the Media Helped to Elect Trump,\" _Washington Post,_ Sept. 12, 2017.\n\na dozen Diet Cokes a day: Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker, \"Inside Trump's Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation,\" _New York Times,_ Dec. 9, 2017.\n\nIt is unlikely that a candidate: David Barstow, \"Donald Trump's Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth,\" _New York Times,_ July 16, 2016.\n\n\"Everyone is entitled\": \"An American Original,\" _Vanity Fair,_ Nov. 2010.\n\n\"We can debate policies\": Sally Yates, \"Who Are We as a Country? Time to Decide,\" _USA Today,_ Dec. 19, 2017.\n\n# 1. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF REASON\n\n\"This is an apple\": youtube.com\/\u200bwatch?v=IxuuIPcQ9_I.\n\n\"spring up amongst us\": Abraham Lincoln, \"The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,\" Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., Jan. 27, 1838, abrahamlincolnonline.org.\n\n\"a man unprincipled\": Alexander Hamilton, \"Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration of the Government,\" Aug. 18, 1792, founders.archives.gov.\n\n\"progress is neither automatic\": Martin Luther King Jr., _Stride Toward Freedom,_ in _A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.,_ ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 472.\n\n\"can constantly remake ourselves\": Barack Obama, \"What I See in Lincoln's Eyes,\" CNN, June 28, 2005.\n\n\"experiment entrusted to the hands\": George Washington, Inaugural Address, Apr. 30, 1789.\n\n\"the indigenous American berserk\": Philip Roth, _American Pastoral_ (New York: Vintage, 1988), 86.\n\n\"heated exaggeration\": Richard Hofstadter, _The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays_ (1965; New York: Vintage, 2008), 3.\n\n\"a nation, a culture\": Ibid., 4.\n\n\"Have you no sense\": \"McCarthy-Welch Exchange,\" June 9, 1954, americanrhetoric.com.\n\n\"the State Department harbors\": McCarthy to Truman, Feb. 11, 1950, telegram, archives.gov.\n\n\"episodic waves\": Hofstadter, _Paranoid Style in American Politics,_ 39.\n\nThe anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant: _Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ s.v. \"Know-Nothing Party.\"\n\n\"America has been largely taken\": Hofstadter, _Paranoid Style in American Politics,_ 39.\n\nnationalist, anti-immigrant leaders: Ishaan Tharoor, \"Geert Wilders and the Mainstreaming of White Nationalism,\" _Washington Post,_ Mar. 14, 2017; Elisabeth Zerofsky, \"Europe's Populists Prepare for a Nationalist Spring,\" _New Yorker,_ Jan. 25, 2017; Jason Horowitz, \"Italy's Populists Turn Up the Heat as Anti-Migrant Anger Boils,\" _New York Times,_ Feb. 5, 2018.\n\nquoted, in news articles: Ed Ballard, \"Terror, Brexit, and U.S. Election Have Made 2016 the Year of Yeats,\" _Wall Street Journal,_ Aug. 23, 2016.\n\n\"Things fall apart\": William Butler Yeats, \"The Second Coming,\" poetryfoundation.org.\n\nTea Party paranoids who claimed: \"Tea Party Movement Is Full of Conspiracy Theories,\" _Newsweek,_ Feb. 8, 2010.\n\nAccording to a 2017 survey: Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, \"In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,\" _Washington Post,_ Aug. 10, 2017.\n\nAnother study conducted: Melissa Healy, \"It's More Than the 'Rigged' Election: Voters Across the Political Spectrum Believe in Conspiracy Theories,\" _Los Angeles Times,_ Nov. 3, 2016; Shankar Vedantam, \"More Americans Than You Might Think Believe in Conspiracy Theories,\" NPR, June 4, 2014.\n\nTrump, who launched his political: Eric Bradner, \"Trump Praises 9\/11 Truther's 'Amazing' Reputation,\" _CNN Politics,_ Dec. 2, 2015.\n\nHis former chief strategist: Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, and Glenn Thrush, \"Stephen Bannon Out at the White House After Turbulent Run,\" _New York Times,_ Aug. 18, 2017.\n\n\"reads to reinforce\": Haberman, Thrush, and Baker, \"Inside Trump's Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation.\"\n\nBecause such mentions tend: Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe, and Philip Rucker, \"Doubting the Intelligence, Trump Pursues Putin and Leaves a Russian Threat Unchecked,\" _Washington Post,_ Dec. 14, 2017; Carol D. Leonnig, Shane Harris, and Greg Jaffe, \"Breaking with Tradition, Trump Skips President's Written Intelligence Report and Relies on Oral Briefings,\" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 9, 2018.\n\nsources like Breitbart News: Charlie Warzel and Lam Thuy Vo, \"Here's Where Donald Trump Gets His News,\" _BuzzFeed,_ Dec. 3, 2016; Dean Obeidallah, \"Trump Talks Judgment, Then Cites National Enquirer,\" CNN, May 4, 2016.\n\neight hours a day watching: Haberman, Thrush, and Baker, \"Inside Trump's Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation.\"\n\n\"admiring tweets, transcripts\": Alex Thompson, \"Trump Gets a Folder Full of Positive News About Himself Twice a Day,\" _Vice News,_ Aug. 9, 2017.\n\n\"I'm the only one\": Benjamin Hart, \"Trump on Unfilled State Department Jobs: 'I Am the Only One That Matters,' \" _New York,_ Nov. 3, 2017; Bill Chappell, \" 'I'm the Only One That Matters,' Trump Says of State Dept. Job Vacancies,\" _The Two-Way,_ NPR, Nov. 3, 2017.\n\nCommonsense policies like: Lydia Saad, \"Americans Widely Support Tighter Regulations on Gun Sales,\" Gallup, Oct. 17, 2017.\n\nEighty-seven percent of Americans: Max Greenwood, \"Poll: Nearly 9 in 10 Want DACA Recipients to Stay in US,\" _Hill,_ Jan. 18, 2018.\n\nAnd 83 percent of Americans: Harper Neidig, \"Poll: 83 Percent of Voters Support Keeping FCC's Net Neutrality Rules,\" _Hill,_ Dec. 12, 2017; Cecilia Kang, \"F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules,\" _New York Times,_ Dec. 14, 2017.\n\n\"addiction to infotainment\": Susan Jacoby, _The Age of American Unreason_ (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 307; Farhad Manjoo, _True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society_ (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008); Andrew Keen, _The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture_ (New York: Doubleday, 2007).\n\n\"the popular equation of intellectualism\": Jacoby, _Age of American Unreason,_ xviii.\n\n\"does a poor job of teaching\": Ibid., 307.\n\n\"the persistent and sustained reliance\": Al Gore, _The Assault on Reason_ (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 1.\n\n\"America's political reality\": Ibid., 38\u201339.\n\nIndeed, the Iraq war remains: Michiko Kakutani, \"How Feuds and Failures Affected American Intelligence,\" _New York Times,_ June 18, 2004; Michiko Kakutani, \"All the President's Books (Minding History's Whys and Wherefores),\" _New York Times,_ May 11, 2006; Julian Borger, \"The Spies Who Pushed for War,\" _Guardian,_ July 17, 2003; Jason Vest and Robert Dreyfuss, \"The Lie Factory,\" _Mother Jones,_ Jan.\/Feb. 2004; Seymour M. Hersh, \"Selective Intelligence,\" _New Yorker,_ May 12, 2003; Michiko Kakutani, \"Controversial Reports Become Accepted Wisdom,\" _New York Times,_ Sept. 28, 2004; Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane, \"Hussein Link to 9\/11 Lingers in Many Minds,\" _Washington Post,_ Sept. 6, 2003.\n\n\"something on the order of several\": Kakutani, \"All the President's Books.\"\n\n\"A cakewalk\": Ken Adelman, \"Cakewalk in Iraq,\" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 13, 2002.\n\n\"pasting feathers together\": Michiko Kakutani, \"From Planning to Warfare to Occupation, How Iraq Went Wrong,\" _New York Times,_ July 25, 2006.\n\nAlthough Trump frequently criticized: Eugene Kiely, \"Donald Trump and the Iraq War,\" FactCheck.org, Feb. 19, 2016.\n\n\"deconstruction of the administrative state\": Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, \"Bannon Vows a Daily Fight for 'Deconstruction of the Administrative State,' \" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 23, 2017.\n\ncrucial role of ambassador: Victor Cha, \"Giving North Korea a 'Bloody Nose' Carries a Huge Risk to Americans,\" _Washington Post,_ Jan. 30, 2018.\n\nworld confidence in U.S. leadership: Bill Chappell, \"World's Regard for U.S. Leadership Hits Record Low in Gallup Poll,\" NPR, Jan. 19, 2018; Laura Smith-Spark, \"US Slumps in Global Leadership Poll After Trump's 1st Year,\" CNN, Jan. 18, 2018.\n\n\"the wisdom of the crowd\": Michiko Kakutani, \"The Cult of the Amateur,\" _New York Times,_ June 29, 2007.\n\n\"every opinion on any matter\": Tom Nichols, _The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 20.\n\n\"If citizens do not bother\": Ibid., 11.\n\nUnqualified judges and agency heads: Carlos Ballesteros, \"Trump Is Nominating Unqualified Judges at an Unprecedented Rate,\" _Newsweek,_ Nov. 17, 2017; Paul Waldman, \"Donald Trump Has Assembled the Worst Cabinet in American History,\" _The Plum Line_ (blog), _Washington Post,_ Jan. 19, 2017; Travis Waldron and Daniel Marans, \"Donald Trump's Cabinet Is on Track to Be the Least Experienced in Modern History,\" _Huffington Post,_ Nov. 24, 2016.\n\nRick Perry, who was famous: Tom DiChristopher, \"Trump Once Again Seeks to Slash Funding for Clean Energy in 2019 Budget,\" CNBC, Jan. 31, 2018.\n\nthe new EPA head, Scott Pruitt: Brady Dennis, \"Scott Pruitt, Longtime Adversary of EPA, Confirmed to Lead the Agency,\" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 17, 2017; Umair Irfan, \"Scott Pruitt Is Slowly Strangling the EPA,\" _Vox,_ Jan. 30, 2018.\n\nCongressional Budget Office: Alan Rappeport, \"C.B.O. Head, Who Prizes Nonpartisanship, Finds Work Under G.O.P. Attack,\" _New York Times,_ June 19, 2017; Steven Rattner, \"The Boring Little Budget Office That Trump Hates,\" _New York Times,_ Aug. 22, 2017.\n\n\"science-based\" and \"evidence-based\": Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin, \"CDC Gets List of Forbidden Words: Fetus, Transgender, Diversity,\" _Washington Post,_ Dec. 15, 2017.\n\n\"the empirical method of thought\": George Orwell, _1984_ (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 193.\n\nIn addition to announcing: Lisa Friedman, \"Syria Joins Paris Climate Accord, Leaving Only U.S. Opposed,\" _New York Times,_ Nov. 7, 2017.\n\nthe Trump administration vowed: Lisa Friedman, \"Expect Environmental Battles to Be 'Even More Significant' in 2018,\" _New York Times,_ Jan. 5, 2018.\n\nScientists were dismissed: \"President Trump's War on Science,\" _New York Times,_ Sept. 9, 2017; \"Attacks on Science,\" Union of Concerned Scientists, ucsusa.org; Tanya Lewis, \"A Year of Trump: Science Is a Major Casualty in the New Politics of Disruption,\" _Scientific American,_ Dec. 14, 2017; Joel Achenbach and Lena H. Sun, \"Trump Budget Seeks Huge Cuts to Science and Medical Research, Disease Prevention,\" _Washington Post,_ May 23, 2017; Julia Belluz, \"The GOP Tax Plan Would Blow a Hole in American Science,\" _Vox,_ Dec. 11, 2017.\n\nThe EPA alone was facing: Brady Dennis, \"Trump Budget Seeks 23 Percent Cut at EPA, Eliminating Dozens of Programs,\" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 12, 2018.\n\nIn April 2017, the March for Science: \"Marchers Around the World Tell Us Why They're Taking to the Streets for Science,\" _Science,_ Apr. 13, 2017.\n\nBritish scientists worry about: \"How Will Leaving the EU Affect Universities and Research?,\" _Brexit Means..._ (podcast), _Guardian,_ Sept. 13, 2017.\n\n\"I liken the attacks on science\": \"Marchers Around the World Tell Us Why They're Taking to the Streets for Science.\"\n\n\"its very opposite, terror\": Stefan Zweig, _The World of Yesterday_ (New York: Viking Press, 1943), loc. 5297, 346, Kindle.\n\n\"the transmission of the human word\": Ibid., 419, 425, 924.\n\n\"We had a passion\": Ibid., 403, 5352.\n\n\"The few among writers\": Ibid., 5378, 5586.\n\n\"preached their gospel\": Ibid., 1269, 5400.\n\n\"They practiced their method\": Ibid., 2939.\n\n\"put through by force\": Ibid., 5378.\n\n# 2. THE NEW CULTURE WARS\n\nThe death of objectivity: David Lehman, _Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man_ (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 75. See also Michiko Kakutani, \"Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways,\" _New York Times,_ Jan. 17, 2006.\n\n\"a kaleidoscope of information\": David Foster Wallace, \"Host: Deep into the Mercenary World of Take-No-Prisoners Political Talk Radio,\" _Atlantic,_ Apr. 2005.\n\nThe Republican Party: Stephen Collinson and Jeremy Diamond, \"Trump Again at War with 'Deep State' Justice Department,\" _CNN Politics,_ Jan. 2, 2018.\n\n\"We're trying to disrupt\": Donald J. Trump, \"Remarks at a Rally at Waukesha County Expo Center in Waukesha, Wisconsin,\" Sept. 28, 2016. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, _The American Presidency Project,_ presidency.ucsb.edu\/\u200bws\/\u200bindex.php?pid=119201.\n\n\"failed and corrupt political establishment\": Ben Illing, \"Trump Ran as a Populist. He's Governing as an Elitist. He's Not the First,\" _Vox,_ June 23, 2017.\n\n\"Look, I read postmodernist\": Andrew Marantz, \"Trolls for Trump,\" _New Yorker,_ Oct. 31, 2016.\n\n\"seen as no more than\": Christopher Butler, _Postmodernism_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 15.\n\n\"resisted the cultural changes\": Andrew Hartman, _A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 285.\n\n\"the final form of human government\": Ishaan Tharoor, \"Fukuyama's 'Future of History': Is Liberal Democracy Doomed?,\" _Time,_ Feb. 8, 2012.\n\n\"with populist and nationalist forces\": Freedom House, _Freedom in the World 2017,_ freedomhouse.org.\n\n\"a slow erosion\": Ishaan Tharoor, \"The Man Who Declared the 'End of History' Fears for Democracy's Future,\" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 9, 2017.\n\nAnd Trump, as both candidate: Jasmine C. Lee and Kevin Quealy, \"The 425 People, Places, and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List,\" _New York Times,_ Jan. 3, 2018.\n\nRussian trolls used an impostor Facebook account: Donie O'Sullivan, \"Russian Trolls Created Facebook Events Seen by More Than 300,000 Users,\" CNN, Jan. 26, 2018.\n\n\"all these things\": William J. Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, \"Evangelicals Defend Trump's Alleged Marital Infidelity. But His Infidelity to America Is Worse,\" NBC News, Jan. 30, 2018.\n\nTony Perkins, president: Jennifer Hansler, \"Conservative Evangelical Leader: Trump Gets a 'Mulligan' on His Behavior,\" CNN, Jan. 23, 2018.\n\n\"commitment was understood\": Allan Bloom, _The Closing of the American Mind_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 314.\n\n\"it is not only futile\": Gertrude Himmelfarb, _On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society_ (New York: Knopf, 1994), 135.\n\n\"knowledge about the past\": Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, _Telling the Truth About History_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 8.\n\n\"The postmodern view fit well\": Shawn Otto, _The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It_ (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2016), 180\u201381.\n\n\"Atmospheric CO **** is the same\": Ibid., 177.\n\n\"What is peculiar to our own age\": George Orwell, \"Looking Back on the Spanish War,\" _A Collection of Essays_ (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), 199.\n\n\"the potential to alter\": Deborah E. Lipstadt, _Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory_ (New York: Free Press, 1993), loc. 19, Kindle. See also Michiko Kakutani, \"When History Is a Casualty,\" _New York Times,_ Apr. 30, 1993.\n\nAs David Lehman: Michiko Kakutani, \"The Pro-Nazi Past of a Leading Literary Critic,\" _New York Times,_ Feb. 19, 1991.\n\nDe Man, a professor at Yale: Jon Wiener, \"Deconstructing de Man,\" _Nation,_ Jan. 9, 1988; Robert Alter, \"Paul de Man Was a Total Fraud,\" _New Republic,_ Apr. 5, 2014; Evelyn Barish, _The Double Life of Paul de Man_ (New York: Liveright, 2014).\n\nA very different portrait: Barish, _Double Life of Paul de Man;_ Jennifer Schuessler, \"Revisiting a Scholar Unmasked by Scandal,\" _New York Times,_ Mar. 9, 2014; Louis Menand, \"The de Man Case,\" _New Yorker,_ Mar. 24, 2014.\n\nThe most shocking news: Lehman, _Signs of the Times,_ 163\u201364.\n\n\"we are determined to forbid\": Ibid., 180.\n\n\"Jewish writers have always\": Kakutani, \"Pro-Nazi Past of a Leading Literary Critic\"; Paul de Man, \"The Jews in Contemporary Literature,\" _Le Soir,_ Mar. 4, 1941, reprinted in Martin McQuillan, _Paul de Man_ (New York: Routledge, 2001).\n\n\"considerations of the actual\": Kakutani, \"Pro-Nazi Past of a Leading Literary Critic.\"\n\nMore disturbing still: Lehman, _Signs of the Times,_ 137, 158, 234.\n\n\"one of detached mockery\": Ibid., 238, 239, 243, 267.\n\n\"have to take each word\": David Brunnstrom, \"Ahead of Trump Meeting, Abe Told Not to Take Campaign Rhetoric Literally,\" Reuters, Nov. 15, 2016.\n\n\"You guys took everything\": Jonah Goldberg, \"Take Trump Seriously but Not Literally? How, Exactly?,\" _Los Angeles Times,_ Dec. 6, 2016.\n\n# 3. \"MOI\" AND THE RISE OF SUBJECTIVITY\n\n\"Our subjectivity is so completely\": James Mottram, \"Spike Jonze Interview: _Her_ Is My 'Boy Meets Computer' Movie,\" _Independent,_ Jan. 31, 2014.\n\n\"ethic of self-preservation\": Christopher Lasch, _The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 51, xiii, 239.\n\n\"intense feelings of rage\": Ibid., 36\u201338.\n\n\"remaking, remodeling, elevating\": Tom Wolfe, \"The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening,\" _New York,_ Aug. 23, 1976.\n\n\"the preening self\": Tim Wu, _The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 315.\n\n\"My net worth fluctuates\": David A. Fahrenthold and Robert O'Harrow Jr., \"Trump: A True Story,\" _Washington Post,_ Aug. 10, 2016; Kiran Khalid, \"Trump: I'm Worth Whatever I Feel,\" CNNMoney.com, Apr. 21, 2011.\n\n\"I believe that he feels\": Scott Horsley, \"Trump: Putin Again Denied Interfering in Election and 'I Really Believe' He Means It,\" _The Two-Way,_ NPR, Nov. 11, 2017.\n\n\"I understand your view\": Transcripts, CNN, July 22, 2016, transcripts.cnn.com\/\u200bTRANSCRIPTS\/\u200b1607\/\u200b22\/\u200bnday.06.html.\n\n\"small private societies\": Alexis de Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ (New York: Vintage, 1990), 215, 319, 318, 321.\n\nNorman Vincent Peale: James Barron, \"Overlooked Influences on Donald Trump: A Famous Minister and His Church,\" _New York Times,_ Sept. 5, 2016; Tom Gjelten, \"How Positive Thinking, Prosperity Gospel Define Donald Trump's Faith Outlook,\" NPR, Aug. 3, 2016.\n\n\"Any fact facing us\": Tamara Keith, \"Trump Crowd Size Estimate May Involve 'the Power of Positive Thinking,' \" NPR, Jan. 22, 2017.\n\nAyn Rand, also admired: Mackenzie Weinger, \"7 Pols Who Praised Ayn Rand,\" _Politico,_ Apr. 26, 2012.\n\nover the years, _The Fountainhead_ : Kirsten Powers, \"Donald Trump's 'Kinder, Gentler' Version,\" _USA Today,_ Apr. 11, 2016.\n\n\"highest moral purpose\": Jonathan Freedland, \"The New Age of Ayn Rand: How She Won Over Trump and Silicon Valley,\" _Guardian,_ Apr. 10, 2017.\n\n\"a kind of embarrassment\": Philip Roth, \"Writing American Fiction,\" _Commentary,_ Mar. 1, 1961.\n\n\"head out into this wild\": Tom Wolfe, \"Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel,\" _Harper's,_ Nov. 1989.\n\n\"depends on what the meaning\": \"From the Starr Referral: Clinton's Grand Jury Testimony, Part 4,\" _Washington Post,_ washingtonpost.com\/\u200bwp-srv\/\u200bpolitics\/\u200bspecial\/\u200bclinton\/stories\/bctest092198_4.htm.\n\n\"the sheer fact of self\": Roth, \"Writing American Fiction.\"\n\n\"wholly fabricated or wildly embellished\": Kakutani, \"Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways.\"\n\n\"most of what\": Laura Barton, \"The Man Who Rewrote His Life,\" _Guardian,_ Sept. 15, 2006.\n\n\"spread in tandem\": Adam Begley, \"The I's Have It: Duke's ' _Moi_ ' Critics Expose Themselves,\" _Lingua Franca,_ Mar.\/Apr. 1994.\n\nIn her 1996 book: Michiko Kakutani, \"Opinion vs. Reality in an Age of Pundits,\" _New York Times,_ Jan. 28, 1994; Michiko Kakutani, \"Fear of Fat as the Bane of Modernism,\" _New York Times,_ Mar. 12, 1996.\n\nPersonal stories or agendas: Michiko Kakutani, \"A Biographer Who Claims a License to Blur Reality,\" _New York Times,_ Oct. 2, 1999.\n\n\"understand the first thing\": Ibid.\n\n\"feeling of tenderness\": Michiko Kakutani, \"Taking Sides in Polemics over Plath,\" _New York Times,_ Apr. 5, 1994; Janet Malcolm, _The Silent Woman_ (New York: Knopf, 1994), loc. 67, 32, Kindle.\n\n\"Teach both,\" some argued: Sam Boyd, \"Sarah Palin on Teaching Intelligent Design in Schools,\" _American Prospect,_ Aug. 29, 2008; Massimo Pigliucci, \"Is Sarah Palin a Creationist?,\" _LiveScience,_ Sept. 1, 2008.\n\n\"Teach the controversy\": John Timmer, \"Ohio School District Has 'Teach the Controversy' Evolution Lesson Plan,\" _Ars Technica,_ May 18, 2016.\n\n\"some very fine people\": Rosie Gray, \"Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: 'Some Very Fine People on Both Sides,' \" _Atlantic,_ Aug. 15, 2017; Mark Landler, \"Trump Resurrects His Claim That Both Sides Share Blame in Charlottesville Violence,\" _New York Times,_ Sept. 14, 2017; Sonam Sheth, \"Trump Equates Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson with George Washington in Bizarre Press Conference,\" _Business Insider,_ Aug. 15, 2017; Dan Merica, \"Trump Condemns 'Hatred, Bigotry, and Violence on Many Sides' in Charlottesville,\" _CNN Politics,_ Aug. 13, 2017.\n\nAs Naomi Oreskes: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, _Merchants of Doubt_ (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 6.\n\n\"Doubt is our product\": Ibid., 34.\n\nThe strategy, essentially, was this: Ibid., 6\u20137, 217.\n\nthe \"Tobacco Strategy\": Ibid., 6, 215.\n\nThis false equivalence: Alister Doyle, \"Scientists Say United on Global Warming, at Odds with Public View,\" Reuters, May 15, 2013; NASA, \"Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate Is Warming,\" climate.nasa.gov\/\u200bscientific-consensus\/\u200b; Justin Fox, \"97 Percent Consensus on Climate Change? It's Complicated,\" _Bloomberg,_ June 15, 2017.\n\n\"undue attention to marginal\": David Robert Grimes, \"Impartial Journalism Is Laudable. But False Balance Is Dangerous,\" _Guardian,_ Nov. 8, 2016.\n\nOr, as a headline: Sarah Knapton, \"BBC Staff Told to Stop Inviting Cranks on to Science Programmes,\" _Telegraph,_ July 4, 2014.\n\n\"Like many people watching\": Christiane Amanpour, speech on receiving the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award, Nov. 22, 2016, cpj.org.\n\n# 4. THE VANISHING OF REALITY\n\n\"Do I want to interfere\": Philip K. Dick, \"The Electric Ant,\" in _Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick_ (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), Kindle, p. 384 of 467.\n\nat a time when nineteen kids: Christopher Ingraham, \"19 Kids Are Shot Every Day in the United States,\" _Washington Post,_ June 20, 2017.\n\n\"It stupefies, it sickens\": Roth, \"Writing American Fiction.\"\n\n\"perception is reality\": Simon Kelner, \"Perception Is Reality: The Facts Won't Matter in Next Year's General Election,\" _Independent,_ Oct. 30, 2014; Roxie Salamon-Abrams, \"Echoes of History? A Lesson Plan About the Recent Rise of Europe's Far-Right Parties,\" _New York Times,_ Apr. 19, 2017.\n\nBut Atwater's cold-blooded use: Lawrence Freedman, \"Reagan's Southern Strategy Gave Rise to the Tea Party,\" _Salon,_ Oct. 27, 2013.\n\nDepicting America as a country: Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, and Robert Farley, \"President Trump's Inaugural Address,\" FactCheck.org, Jan. 20, 2017; Chris Nichols, \"Mostly True: Undocumented Immigrants Less Likely to Commit Crimes Than U.S. Citizens,\" PolitiFact California, Aug. 3, 2017; Akhila Satish, \"The Nobel Laureate Exclusion Act: No Future Geniuses Need Apply,\" _Wall Street Journal,_ Sept. 14, 2017; Rani Molla, \"The Top U.S. Tech Companies Founded by Immigrants Are Now Worth Nearly $4 Trillion,\" _Recode,_ Jan. 12, 2018; \"Fact Check: Donald Trump's Republican Convention Speech, Annotated,\" NPR, July 21, 2016.\n\nLong before he entered politics: Vivian Yee, \"Donald Trump's Math Takes His Towers to Greater Heights,\" _New York Times,_ Nov. 1, 2016; Marc Fisher and Will Hobson, \"Donald Trump Masqueraded as Publicist to Brag About Himself,\" _Washington Post,_ May 13, 2016; David Barstow, \"Donald Trump's Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth,\" _New York Times,_ July 16, 2016; Fahrenthold and O'Harrow, \"Trump: A True Story.\"\n\nHe spent years as a real-estate developer: Aaron Williams and Anu Narayanswamy, \"How Trump Has Made Millions by Selling His Name,\" _Washington Post,_ Jan. 25, 2017; \"10 Donald Trump Business Failures,\" _Time,_ Oct. 11, 2016.\n\n\"planned, planted, or incited\": Daniel J. Boorstin, _The Image_ (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 11.\n\nfor his \"well-knownness\": Ibid., 65.\n\nwould even host a show: Laura Bradley, \"Trump Bashes Schwarzenegger's _Celebrity Apprentice,_ Forgets He Still Produces It,\" _Vanity Fair,_ Jan. 6, 2017.\n\n\"prince of humbugs\": Boorstin, _Image,_ 209\u201311.\n\nMuch the way images: Ibid., 241, 212.\n\n\"desert of the real\": https:\/\/en.wikiquote.org\/\u200bwiki\/\u200bJean_Baudrillard; _Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,_ s.v. \"Jean Baudrillard\"; Jean Baudrillard, _Simulacra and Simulation_ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).\n\n\"a secret society of astronomers\": Jorge Luis Borges, _Ficciones_ (New York: Grove Press, 1962), loc. 21\u201322, 34, Kindle.\n\n\"Reality gave ground\": Ibid., 33.\n\n\"If there is something comforting\": Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_ (New York: Viking Press, 1973), loc. 434, Kindle.\n\nIn a 2016 documentary: Brandon Harris, \"Adam Curtis's Essential Counterhistories,\" _New Yorker,_ Nov. 3, 2016.\n\n\"red-pilling the normies\": Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, \"The Online Radicalization We're Not Talking About,\" _Select All,_ May 18, 2017.\n\nstudy on online disinformation: Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, _Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,_ Data and Society Research Institute, May 15, 2017.\n\n\"once groups have been red-pilled\": Marwick and Lewis, \"Online Radicalization We're Not Talking About.\"\n\n\"it's a surprisingly short leap\": Ibid.\n\na lot of fake news: BBC Trending, \"The Saga of 'Pizzagate': The Fake Story That Shows How Conspiracy Theories Spread,\" BBC News, Dec. 2, 2016.\n\nReddit can be a useful testing ground: Ali Breland, \"Warner Sees Reddit as Potential Target for Russian Influence,\" _Hill,_ Sept. 27, 2017; Roger McNamee, \"How to Fix Facebook\u2014Before It Fixes Us,\" _Washington Monthly,_ Jan.\/Feb.\/Mar. 2018.\n\n\"asymmetry of passion\": Renee DiResta, \"Social Network Algorithms Are Distorting Reality by Boosting Conspiracy Theories,\" _Fast Company,_ May 11, 2016.\n\n# 5. THE CO-OPTING OF LANGUAGE\n\n\"Without clear language\": John le Carr\u00e9, \"Why We Should Learn German,\" _Guardian,_ July 1, 2017.\n\n\"We swim in language\": James Carroll, _Practicing Catholic_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 302.\n\n\"political chaos is connected\": George Orwell, \"Politics and the English Language,\" in _A Collection of Essays by George Orwell_ (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1954), 177.\n\nMinistry of Truth: Orwell, _1984,_ Kindle.\n\ncharacteristics of \"wooden language\": Roger Scruton, \"Newspeak,\" in _The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought,_ 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); \"The Wooden Language,\" Radio Romania International, old.rri.ro\/\u200barh-art.shtml?lang=1&sec=9&art=4166.\n\nThom identified in a 1987 thesis: Fran\u00e7oise Thom, _La langue de bois_ (Paris: Julliard, 1987).\n\nMao's Communist Party also adopted: Ji Fengyuan, _Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao's China_ (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003); Perry Link, \"Mao's China: The Language Game,\" _NYR Daily,_ May 15, 2015.\n\nOne of history's most detailed: Timothy Snyder, \"A New Look at Civilian Life in Europe Under Hitler,\" review of _An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler,_ by Peter Fritzsche, _New York Times,_ Nov. 22, 2016.\n\n\"tiny doses of arsenic\": Victor Klemperer, _The Language of the Third Reich_ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 12, 15.\n\nKlemperer didn't think Hitler: Ibid., 54\u201355, 30, 118, 44\u201345.\n\n\"a threatening and repulsive\": Ibid., 60\u201362, 5, 101\u20133.\n\n\"literally fixed the essential features\": Ibid., 19.\n\n\"finished off the biggest elephants\": Ibid., 222, 227, 223, 224, 228.\n\n\"WAR IS PEACE\": Orwell, _1984_ (New York: Signet Classics, 1950), 16.\n\n\"the single greatest witch hunt\": Rebecca Savransky, \"Trump: 'You Are Witnessing the Single Greatest WITCH HUNT in American Political History,' \" _Hill,_ June 15, 2017; Michael Finnegan, \"Trump Attacks on Russia Investigation Threaten U.S. Democracy, Authors Say,\" _Los Angeles Times,_ Feb. 6, 2018; Anne Gearan, \"Trump's Attacks on Justice and FBI Echo Election Claims of a 'Rigged System,' \" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 2, 2018.\n\nTrump has the perverse habit: Jessica Estepa, \"It's Not Just 'Rocket Man.' Trump Has Long History of Nicknaming His Foes,\" _USA Today,_ Sept. 21, 2017; Theodore Schleifer and Jeremy Diamond, \"Clinton Says Trump Leading 'Hate Movement'; He Calls Her a 'Bigot,' \" _CNN Politics,_ Aug. 25, 2016; \"Excerpts from Trump's Interview with the Times,\" _New York Times,_ Dec. 28, 2017.\n\n\"two mutually contradictory meanings\": Orwell, _1984,_ 212.\n\nthe \"largest audience\": Linda Qiu, \"Donald Trump Had Biggest Inaugural Crowd Ever? Metrics Don't Show It,\" PolitiFact, Jan. 21, 2017.\n\n\"to assert power over truth\": Masha Gessen, \"The Putin Paradigm,\" _NYR Daily,_ Dec. 13, 2016.\n\n\"It is not merely that speeches\": Orwell, _1984,_ 213.\n\nwithin days of Trump's inauguration: Oliver Milman and Sam Morris, \"Trump Is Deleting Climate Change, One Site at a Time,\" _Guardian,_ May 14, 2017; Brian Kahn, \"The EPA Has Started to Remove Obama-Era Information,\" _Climate Central,_ Feb. 2, 2017; Leila Miller, \"As 'Climate Change' Fades from Government Sites, a Struggle to Archive Data,\" _Frontline,_ Dec. 8, 2017.\n\nSome of their fears were realized: Megan Cerullo, \"EPA Removes Climate Change Page from Website to Reflect New 'Priorities' Under President Trump,\" _New York Daily News,_ Apr. 29, 2017; Bill McKibben, \"The Trump Administration's Solution to Climate Change: Ban the Term,\" _Guardian,_ Aug. 8, 2017; Oliver Milman, \"US Federal Department Is Censoring Use of Term 'Climate Change,' Emails Reveal,\" _Guardian,_ Aug. 7, 2017; Lydia Smith, \"Trump Administration Deletes Mention of 'Climate Change' from Environmental Protection Agency's Website,\" _Independent,_ Oct. 21, 2017; Michael Collins, \"EPA Removes Climate Change Data, Other Scientific Information from Website,\" _USA Today,_ Apr. 29, 2017; Oliver Milman and Sam Morris, \"Trump Is Deleting Climate Change, One Site at a Time,\" _Guardian,_ May 14, 2017.\n\nUSDA employees were informed: Valerie Volcovici and P. J. Huffstutter, \"Trump Administration Seeks to Muzzle U.S. Agency Employees,\" Reuters, Jan. 24, 2017; Lisa Friedman, \"E.P.A. Cancels Talk on Climate Change by Agency Scientists,\" _New York Times,_ Oct. 22, 2017; Dan Merica and Dana Bash, \"Trump Admin Tells National Park Service to Halt Tweets,\" _CNN Politics,_ Jan. 23, 2017.\n\n\"He wants to see\": Michiko Kakutani, \"Donald Trump's Chilling Language, and the Fearsome Power of Words,\" _Vanity Fair,_ Jan. 21, 2017.\n\nHe is equally nonchalant about spelling: Aidan Quigley, \"Make America Spell Again? 25 of Donald Trump's Twitter Spelling Errors,\" _Newsweek,_ June 25, 2017; Jennifer Calfas, \"Trump's Official Inauguration Poster Has Glaring Typo,\" _Hill,_ Feb. 12, 2017; Eli Rosenberg, \" 'State of the Uniom': Misspelled Tickets to President Trump's First Address Require a Reprint,\" _Washington Post,_ Jan. 29, 2018.\n\nTrump's tweets have been deemed official: Elizabeth Landers, \"White House: Trump's Tweets Are 'Official Statements,' \" _CNN Politics,_ June 6, 2017; Matthew Weaver, Robert Booth, and Ben Jacobs, \"Theresa May Condemns Trump's Retweets of UK Far-Right Leader's Anti-Muslim Videos,\" _Guardian,_ Nov. 29, 2017.\n\nHis rants against journalism: Steven Erlanger, \" 'Fake News,' Trump's Obsession, Is Now a Cudgel for Strongmen,\" _New York Times,_ Dec. 12, 2017; Anne Applebaum, \"The 'Trump Effect' Will Help Authoritarians Around the World,\" _Washington Post,_ May 4, 2016; \"Record Number of Journalists Jailed as Turkey, China, Egypt Pay Scant Price for Repression,\" Committee to Protect Journalists, Dec. 13, 2017.\n\n\"the limits of what the public\": Ruth Ben-Ghiat, \"An American Authoritarian,\" _Atlantic,_ Aug. 10, 2016.\n\n\"Mussolini did not have any philosophy\": Umberto Eco, \"Ur-fascism,\" _New York Review of Books,_ June 22, 1995.\n\n\"I'm with you\": \"Full Text: Donald Trump 2016 RNC Draft Speech Transcript,\" _Politico,_ July 21, 2016.\n\n# 6. FILTERS, SILOS, AND TRIBES\n\n\"We're all islands\": Rudyard Kipling, _The Light That Failed,_ in _Selected Works of Rudyard Kipling_ (New York: Collier & Son, 1900), 2:61.\n\n\"How can the polls\": Deborah Solomon, \"Goodbye (Again), Norma Jean,\" _New York Times,_ Sept. 19, 2004.\n\nA 2016 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, _Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016,_ June 22, 2016.\n\nIt's telling that the old national motto: David Nakamura and Lisa Rein, \"It's 'Very Gold': The Presidential Coin Undergoes a Trumpian Makeover,\" _Washington Post,_ Dec. 22, 2017.\n\nThese growing divides in America: Bill Bishop, _The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart_ (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 130\u201332, 12.\n\n\"As we've lost trust\": Ibid., 216.\n\n\"as the parties have come to represent lifestyle\": Ibid., 232.\n\nA 2017 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, \"Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions,\" July 10, 2017.\n\n\"This is not designed\": Ronald Brownstein, _The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America_ (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), loc. 4247, Kindle.\n\nHillary Clinton's campaign: Molly Ball, \"Why Hillary Clinton Lost,\" _Atlantic,_ Nov. 15, 2016.\n\na 2014 Pew survey: Pew Research Center, \"Political Polarization in the American Public,\" June 12, 2014; Pew Research Center, _Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016_.\n\nAnd then there is gerrymandering: Julian E. Zelizer, \"The Power That Gerrymandering Has Brought to Republicans,\" _Washington Post,_ June 17, 2016; Ronald Brownstein, \"America, a Year Later,\" _State: The Digital Magazine from CNN Politics,_ Nov. 2017.\n\n\"further apart from one another\": Pew Research Center, \"Political Polarization in the American Public\"; Pew Research Center, _Partisanship and Political Animosity in 2016_.\n\n\"the Four Corners of Deceit\": \"The Four Corners of Deceit: Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up,\" _Rush Limbaugh Show,_ Apr. 29, 2013.\n\nIn the three decades since the FCC: Dylan Matthews, \"Everything You Need to Know About the Fairness Doctrine in One Post,\" _Washington Post,_ Aug. 23, 2011; Yochai Benkler et al., \"Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,\" _Columbia Journalism Review,_ Mar. 3, 2017; Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, \"Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist's Ouster,\" _New York Times,_ Aug. 14, 2017; Michael J. de la Merced and Nicholas Fandos, \"Fox's Unfamiliar but Powerful Television Rival: Sinclair,\" _New York Times,_ May 3, 2017.\n\n\"truth-based content\": John Ziegler, \"How Donald Trump's Election Has Helped Me Decide to End My National Radio Show,\" _Mediaite,_ Dec. 18, 2016.\n\nCharlie Sykes observed: Charles Sykes, \"How the Right Lost Its Mind and Embraced Donald Trump,\" _Newsweek,_ Sept. 21, 2017; Charles Sykes, \"Charlie Sykes on Where the Right Went Wrong,\" _New York Times,_ Dec. 15, 2016.\n\nA 2017 Harvard study: Benkler et al., \"Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda\"; Alexandra Topping, \" 'Sweden, Who Would Believe This?' Trump Cites Non-existent Terror Attack,\" _Guardian,_ Feb. 19, 2017; Samantha Schmidt and Lindsey Bever, \"Kellyanne Conway Cites 'Bowling Green Massacre' That Never Happened to Defend Travel Ban,\" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 3, 2017.\n\nTrump supporters who booed: Alexander Nazaryan, \"John McCain Cancer Is 'Godly Justice' for Challenging Trump, Alt-Right Claims,\" _Newsweek,_ July 20, 2017.\n\n\"The enduring, complicated divides\": Andrew Sullivan, \"America Wasn't Built for Humans,\" _New York,_ Sept. 19, 2017.\n\nconfirmation bias: Elizabeth Kolbert, \"Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds,\" _New Yorker,_ Feb. 27, 2017.\n\n\"does not encourage dissent\": Cass Sunstein, _Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 87.\n\n\"the information and views\": Ibid., 4.\n\n\"binary tribal world\": Sykes, \"How the Right Lost Its Mind and Embraced Donald Trump\"; Sykes, \"Charlie Sykes on Where the Right Went Wrong.\"\n\n\"In the new Right media culture\": Charles Sykes, _How the Right Lost Its Mind_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017), 180.\n\n\"With Google personalized\": Eli Pariser, _The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You_ (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 3.\n\n\"an endless you-loop\": Ibid., 16.\n\n\"If algorithms are going to curate\": Eli Pariser, \"Beware Online 'Filter Bubbles,' \" TED2011, ted.com.\n\n# 7. ATTENTION DEFICIT\n\n\"When you want to know\": William Gibson, _Zero History_ (New York: Putnam, 2010), 212.\n\nTim Berners-Lee: \"History of the Web: Sir Tim Berners-Lee,\" World Wide Web Foundation.\n\n\"The rise of the web\": Jaron Lanier, _You Are Not a Gadget_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), loc. 332\u201333, Kindle.\n\n\"We don't see the forest\": Nicholas Carr, _The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 91.\n\n\"urge to share was activated\": Wu, _Attention Merchants,_ 320.\n\n\"a commons that fostered\": Ibid., 322.\n\ntwo-thirds of Americans: \" 'Who Shared It?' How Americans Decide What News to Trust on Social Media,\" American Press Institute, Mar. 20, 2017; Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried, \"News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017,\" Pew Research Center, Sept. 7, 2017.\n\nFake news is nothing new: \"Yellow Journalism,\" in _Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War,_ PBS, pbs.org; Jacob Soll, \"The Long and Brutal History of Fake News,\" _Politico,_ Dec. 18, 2016; \"Gaius Julius Caesar: The Conquest of Gaul,\" Livius.org.\n\nman behind the massacre: Kevin Roose, \"After Las Vegas Shooting, Fake News Regains Its Megaphone,\" _New York Times,_ Oct. 2, 2017; Jennifer Medina, \"A New Report on the Las Vegas Gunman Was Released. Here Are Some Takeaways,\" _New York Times,_ Jan. 19, 2018.\n\nDuring the last three months: Craig Silverman, \"This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook,\" _BuzzFeed,_ Nov. 16, 2016.\n\nA study from Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, \"Trump Supporters and Extreme Right 'Share Widest Range of Junk News,' \" Feb. 6, 2018; Ishaan Tharoor, \" 'Fake News' and the Trumpian Threat to Democracy,\" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 7, 2018; Shawn Musgrave and Matthew Nussbaum, \"Trump Thrives in Areas That Lack Traditional News Outlets,\" _Politico,_ Apr. 8, 2018.\n\n\"the monetization and manipulation\": Pierre Omidyar, \"6 Ways Social Media Has Become a Direct Threat to Democracy,\" _Washington Post,_ Oct. 9, 2017; Omidyar Group, _Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?,_ Oct. 1, 2017.\n\n\"The system is failing\": Olivia Solon, \"Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web: 'The System Is Failing,' \" _Guardian,_ Nov. 15, 2017.\n\n\"the level of political discourse\": McNamee, \"How to Fix Facebook\u2014Before It Fixes Us\"; Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, \"Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook\u2014and the World,\" _Wired,_ Feb. 12, 2018.\n\n\"We got elected\": Michael Lewis, \"Has Anyone Seen the President?,\" _Bloomberg View,_ Feb. 9, 2018.\n\nTrump campaign made shrewd: Matea Gold and Frances Stead Sellers, \"After Working for Trump's Campaign, British Data Firm Eyes New U.S. Government Contracts,\" _Washington Post,_ Feb. 17, 2017; Nicholas Confessore and Danny Hakim, \"Data Firm Says 'Secret Sauce' Aided Trump; Many Scoff,\" _New York Times,_ Mar. 6, 2017; Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, \"Inside the Trump Bunker, with Days to Go,\" _Bloomberg,_ Oct. 27, 2016.\n\nFacebook revealed: Matthew Rosenberg and Gabriel J.X. Dance, \" 'You Are the Product': Targeted by Cambridge Analytica on Facebook,\" _New York Times,_ Apr. 8, 2018; Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison, \"Revealed: 50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach,\" _Guardian,_ Mar. 17, 2018; Olivia Solon, \"Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica May Have Gained 37m More Users' Data,\" _Guardian,_ Apr. 4, 2018.\n\nvoter persuasion effort: Craig Timberg, Karla Adam, and Michael Kranish, \"Bannon Oversaw Cambridge Analytica's Collection of Facebook Data, According to Former Employee,\" _Washington Post,_ Mar. 20, 2018; Isobel Thompson, \"The Secret History of Steve Bannon and Alexander Nix, Explained,\" _Vanity Fair,_ Mar. 21, 2018.\n\nThe Trump campaign's digital director: Lesley Stahl, \"Facebook 'Embeds,' Russia, and the Trump Campaign's Secret Weapon,\" _60 Minutes,_ Oct. 8, 2017.\n\nThe campaign also used: Green and Issenberg, \"Inside the Trump Bunker, with Days to Go\"; David A. Graham, \"Trump's 'Voter Suppression Operation' Targets Black Voters,\" _Atlantic,_ Oct. 27, 2016.\n\nThe master manipulators of social media: Shane Harris, \"Russian Hackers Who Compromised DNC Are Targeting the Senate, Company Says,\" _Washington Post,_ Jan. 12, 2018; Raphael Satter, \"Inside Story: How Russians Hacked the Democrats' Emails,\" Associated Press, Nov. 4, 2017; Priyanka Boghani, \"How Russia Looks to Gain Through Political Interference,\" _Frontline,_ Dec. 23, 2016; Rick Noack, \"Everything We Know So Far About Russian Election Meddling in Europe,\" _Washington Post,_ Jan. 10, 2018; U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, _Putin's Asymmetric Assault on Democracy in Russia and Europe: Implications for U.S. National Security,_ 115th Cong., 2nd sess., Jan. 10, 2018.\n\nIn the case of the American election: David Ingram, \"Facebook Says 126 Million Americans May Have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts,\" Reuters, Oct. 30, 2017; Shane Goldmacher, \"America Hits New Landmark: 200 Million Registered Voters,\" _Politico,_ Oct. 19, 2016; Scott Shane, \"These Are the Ads Russia Bought on Facebook in 2016,\" _New York Times,_ Nov. 1, 2017; Leslie Shapiro, \"Anatomy of a Russian Facebook Ad,\" _Washington Post,_ Nov. 1, 2017.\n\n\"The strategy is to take a crack\": Craig Timberg et al., \"Russian Ads, Now Publicly Released, Show Sophistication of Influence Campaign,\" _Washington Post,_ Nov. 1, 2017.\n\nReporting from several publications: Jack Nicas, \"How YouTube Drives People to the Internet's Darkest Corners,\" _Wall Street Journal,_ Feb. 7, 2018; Paul Lewis, \" 'Fiction Is Outperforming Reality': How YouTube's Algorithm Distorts Truth,\" _Guardian,_ Feb. 2, 2018; Jon Swaine, \"Twitter Admits Far More Russian Bots Posted on Election Than It Had Disclosed,\" _Guardian,_ Jan. 19, 2018; Philip N. Howard et al., \"Social Media, News, and Political Information During the US Election: Was Polarizing Content Concentrated in Swing States?,\" Computational Propaganda Research Project, Sept. 28, 2017.\n\nRussians had become very adept: Ben Popken and Kelly Cobiella, \"Russian Troll Describes Work in the Infamous Misinformation Factory,\" NBC News, Nov. 16, 2017; Scott Shane, \"The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the Election,\" _New York Times,_ Sept. 7, 2017.\n\nWhen the _Access Hollywood_ tape: Ryan Nakashima and Barbara Ortutay, \"Russia Twitter Trolls Deflected Trump Bad News,\" _USA Today,_ Nov. 10, 2017; Issie Lapowsky, \"Pro-Kremlin Twitter Trolls Take Aim at Robert Mueller,\" _Wired,_ Jan. 5, 2018.\n\nrepeal net neutrality: Neidig, \"Poll: 83 Percent of Voters Support Keeping FCC's Net Neutrality Rules\"; Todd Shields, \"FCC Got 444,938 Net-Neutrality Comments from Russian Email Addresses,\" _Bloomberg,_ Nov. 29, 2017; \"Over Half of Public Comments to FCC on Net Neutrality Appear Fake: Study,\" Reuters, Nov. 29, 2017; Susan Decker, \"FCC Rules Out Delaying Net Neutrality Repeal over Fake Comments,\" _Bloomberg,_ Jan. 5, 2018; Jon Brodkin, \"FCC Stonewalled Investigation of Net Neutrality Comment Fraud, NY AG Says,\" _Ars Technica,_ Nov. 22, 2017; Brian Fung, \"FCC Net Neutrality Process 'Corrupted' by Fake Comments and Vanishing Consumer Complaints, Officials Say,\" _Washington Post,_ Nov. 24, 2017; James V. Grimaldi and Paul Overberg, \"Millions of People Post Comments on Federal Regulations. Many Are Fake,\" _Wall Street Journal,_ Dec. 12, 2017; James V. Grimaldi and Paul Overberg, \"Many Comments Critical of 'Fiduciary' Rule Are Fake,\" _Wall Street Journal,_ Dec. 27, 2017.\n\n\"Sometimes, when political parties\": Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard, \"Troops, Trolls, and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation,\" Computational Propaganda Research Project, working paper no. 2017.12.\n\nThe use of bots: Omidyar, \"6 Ways Social Media Has Become a Direct Threat to Democracy\"; Omidyar Group, _Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?_\n\nThings are only likely to get worse: Julia Munslow, \"Ex-CIA Director Hayden: Russia Election Meddling Was 'Most Successful Covert Operation in History,' \" _Yahoo News,_ July 21, 2017; Cynthia McFadden, William M. Arkin, and Kevin Monahan, \"Russians Penetrated U.S. Voter Systems, Top U.S. Official Says,\" NBC News, Feb. 8, 2018; Harris, \"Russian Hackers Who Compromised DNC Are Targeting the Senate.\"\n\nRussia already tried to meddle: Shannon O'Neil, \"Don't Let Mexico's Elections Become Putin's Next Target,\" _Bloomberg View,_ Nov. 9, 2017; Jason Horowitz, \"Italy, Bracing for Electoral Season of Fake News, Demands Facebook's Help,\" _New York Times,_ Nov. 24, 2017; Yasmeen Serhan, \"Italy Scrambles to Fight Misinformation Ahead of Its Elections,\" _Atlantic,_ Feb. 24, 2018; \"Italy Warns of Election Threat as Rival Parties Court Russia,\" ABC News, Feb. 21, 2018.\n\nTechnological developments are likely: Olivia Solon, \"The Future of Fake News: Don't Believe Everything You Read, See, or Hear,\" _Guardian,_ July 26, 2017; Cade Metz and Keith Collins, \"How an A.I. 'Cat-and-Mouse Game' Generates Believable Fake Photos,\" _New York Times,_ Jan. 2, 2018; James Vincent, \"New AI Research Makes It Easier to Create Fake Footage of Someone Speaking,\" _Verge,_ July 12, 2017; David Gershgorn, \"AI Researchers Are Trying to Combat How AI Can Be Used to Lie and Deceive,\" _Quartz,_ Dec. 8, 2017; _Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,_ s.v. \"Jean Baudrillard.\"\n\n# 8. \"THE FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD\": PROPAGANDA AND FAKE NEWS\n\n\"You can sway a thousand men\": Robert A. Heinlein, \"If This Goes On\u2014,\" in _Revolt in 2100_ (New York: Spectrum, 2013), Kindle.\n\nthe much lesser known Vladislav Surkov: Peter Pomerantsev, \"Putin's Rasputin,\" _London Review of Books,_ Oct. 20, 2011.\n\n\"calculated to evoke hatred\": V. I. Lenin, \"Report to the Fifth Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. on the St. Petersburg Split and the Institution of the Party Tribunal Ensuing Therefrom,\" in _Lenin Collected Works,_ vol. 12 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962).\n\n\"to an extraordinary degree\": Anne Applebaum, \"100 Years Later, Bolshevism Is Back. And We Should Be Worried,\" _Washington Post,_ Nov. 6, 2017.\n\n\"the godfather of what commentators\": Victor Sebestyen, _Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror_ (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017), 3.\n\nSteve Bannon, Trump's now estranged: Ryan Lizza, \"Steve Bannon Will Lead Trump's White House,\" _New Yorker,_ Nov. 14, 2016.\n\nThe conservative billionaire: Jane Mayer, \"The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency,\" _New Yorker,_ Mar. 27, 2017.\n\n\"He offered simple solutions\": Sebestyen, _Lenin,_ 3.\n\nHitler devoted whole chapters: \"Propaganda: Goebbels' Principles,\" physics.smu.edu\/\u200bpseudo\/\u200bPropaganda\/\u200bgoebbels.html; Michiko Kakutani, \"In 'Hitler,' an Ascent from 'Dunderhead' to Demagogue,\" _New York Times,_ Sept. 27, 2016; Michiko Kakutani, \" 'How Propaganda Works' Is a Timely Reminder for a Post-Truth Age,\" _New York Times,_ Dec. 26, 2016.\n\n\"Who cares whether they laugh\": Volker Ullrich, _Hitler: Ascent, 1889\u20131939_ (New York: Knopf, 2016), 94. See also Kakutani, \"In 'Hitler,' an Ascent from 'Dunderhead' to Demagogue.\"\n\n\"to disrupt the existing order\": Adolf Hitler, _Mein Kampf_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), vol. 2, loc. 10605, Kindle.\n\n\"in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world\": Arendt, _Origins of Totalitarianism,_ 382.\n\n\"the firehose of falsehood\": Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, \"The Russian 'Firehose of Falsehood' Propaganda Model\" (Rand Corporation, 2016), 1.\n\n\"Russian propaganda makes no commitment\": Ibid., 5.\n\nRussian propaganda, which was extensively: Ibid., 3, 4.\n\n\"The point of modern propaganda\": twitter.com\/Kasparov63\/status\/808750564284702720.\n\n\"this twittering world\": T. S. Eliot, _Four Quartets_ (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 17.\n\n\"In the networked public sphere\": Zeynep Tufekci, _Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest_ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017), 228\u201332.\n\n\"the real genius\": Pomerantsev, \"Putin's Rasputin.\"\n\n\"He helped invent\": Peter Pomerantsev, \"Russia's Ideology: There Is No Truth,\" _New York Times,_ Dec. 11, 2014.\n\nThis same sort of Surkovian manipulation: Priscilla Alvarez and Taylor Hosking, \"The Full Text of Mueller's Indictment of 13 Russians,\" _Atlantic,_ Feb. 16, 2018; Adrian Chen, \"The Agency,\" _New York Times Magazine,_ June 2, 2015.\n\n\"to keep the great\": Peter Pomerantsev, \"Inside Putin's Information War,\" _Politico,_ Jan. 4, 2015.\n\n\"a kitsch Putin-worshipping\": Pomerantsev, \"Putin's Rasputin.\"\n\nRT published an essay: Vladislav Surkov, \"Crisis of Hypocrisy. 'I Hear America Singing,' \" RT, Nov. 7, 2017.\n\nAn argument that echoes: Andrew Sullivan, \"The Reactionary Temptation,\" _New York,_ Apr. 30, 2017; Rosie Gray, \"Behind the Internet's Anti-Democracy Movement,\" _Atlantic,_ Feb. 10, 2017; Kelefa Sanneh, \"Intellectuals for Trump,\" _New Yorker,_ Jan. 9, 2017.\n\n# 9. THE SCHADENFREUDE OF THE TROLLS\n\n\"Attack, attack, attack\": Marie Brenner, \"How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn's Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America,\" _Vanity Fair,_ Aug. 2017.\n\n\"The world is a horrible place\": Donald Trump and Bill Zanker, _Think Big_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 174\u201375.\n\n\"My donors are basically saying\": Rebecca Savransky, \"Graham: 'Financial Contributions Will Stop' if GOP Doesn't Pass Tax Reform,\" _Hill,_ Nov. 9, 2017; Cristina Marcos, \"GOP Lawmaker: Donors Are Pushing Me to Get Tax Reform Done,\" _Hill,_ Nov. 7, 2017.\n\n\"a chaos of peeves\": Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow,_ 676.\n\n\"They were careless people\": F. Scott Fitzgerald, _The Great Gatsby_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 142.\n\nThe new nihilism is WikiLeaks: Sue Halpern, \"The Nihilism of Julian Assange,\" _New York Review of Books,_ July 13, 2017; Haroon Siddique, \"Press Freedom Group Joins Condemnation of WikiLeaks' War Logs,\" _Guardian,_ Aug. 13, 2010; Matthew Weaver, \"Afghanistan War Logs: WikiLeaks Urged to Remove Thousands of Names,\" _Guardian,_ Aug. 10, 2010.\n\nupward of ten thousand dollars a month: Laura Sydell, \"We Tracked Down a Fake-News Creator in the Suburbs. Here's What We Learned,\" _All Tech Considered,_ NPR, Nov. 23, 2016.\n\n\"Charge the cockpit\": Publius Decius Mus, \"The Flight 93 Election,\" _Claremont Review of Books,_ Sept. 5, 2016; Rosie Gray, \"The Populist Nationalist on Trump's National Security Council,\" _Atlantic,_ Mar. 24, 2017; Michael Warren, \"The Anonymous Pro-Trump 'Decius' Now Works Inside the White House,\" _Weekly Standard,_ Feb. 2, 2017; Gray, \"Behind the Internet's Anti-Democracy Movement.\"\n\nThe new nihilism manifests itself: Hadley Freeman, \"Sandy Hook Father Leonard Pozner on Death Threats: 'I Never Imagined I'd Have to Fight for My Child's Legacy,' \" _Guardian,_ May 2, 2017; Charles Rabin, \"Parkland Students Face New Attack, This Time from the Political Right on Social Media,\" _Miami Herald,_ Feb. 20, 2018.\n\n\"Hail Trump! Hail our people!\": Joseph Goldstein, \"Alt-Right Gathering Exults in Trump Election with Nazi-Era Salute,\" _New York Times,_ Nov. 20, 2016.\n\n\"A 4chan troll\": Marwick and Lewis, _Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online_.\n\n_The Huffington Post_ reported: Ashley Feinberg, \"This Is the Daily Stormer's Playbook,\" _Huffington Post,_ Dec. 13, 2017.\n\nTrump, of course, is a troll: Amy B Wang, \"Trump Retweets Image Depicting 'CNN' Squashed Beneath His Shoe,\" _Washington Post,_ Dec. 24, 2017; twitter.com\/\u200brealDonaldTrump\/status\/326970029461614594.\n\nIn his revealing 2017 book: Joshua Green, _Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency_ (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 139, 147\u201348.\n\n\"a far too novelistic and bourgeois belief\": Butler, _Postmodernism,_ 35.\n\nas David Foster Wallace observed: \"A Conversation with David Foster Wallace by Larry McCaffery,\" _Review of Contemporary Fiction_ 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993); David Foster Wallace, \"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,\" _Review of Contemporary Fiction_ 13, no. 2 (1993): 151\u201394.\n\n\"You have my word\": Roger Wolmuth, \"David Leisure\u2014a.k.a. Joe Isuzu\u2014Finds That the Road to Success Is Paved with Lies, Lies, Lies!,\" _People,_ Nov. 10, 1986.\n\n# EPILOGUE\n\n\"the technological distractions\": Neil Postman, _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ (New York: Penguin, 2006), 156, 141.\n\n\"Our priests and presidents\": Ibid., 98.\n\n\"Orwell feared those\": Ibid., xix.\n\ntoo narcotized by \"undisguised trivialities\": Ibid., 16.\n\n\"aggressive, anxiety-provoking, maudlin\": George Saunders, _The Braindead Megaphone: Essays_ (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007), 12, 6, 18.\n\nhave made _1984_ timely again: Michiko Kakutani, \"Why '1984' Is a 2017 Must-Read,\" _New York Times,_ Jan. 26, 2017.\n\n\"further, faster erosion\": Freedom House, \"Freedom in the World 2018,\" freedomhouse.org.\n\n\"the 21st-century catastrophe\": Charles McGrath, \"No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say,\" _New York Times,_ Jan. 16, 2018.\n\n\"cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men\": George Washington, \"Washington's Farewell Address 1796,\" avalon.law.yale.edu.\n\n\"in common efforts for the common good\": Thomas Jefferson, \"First Inaugural Address,\" Mar. 4, 1801, avalon.law.yale.edu.\n\nserve as \"reciprocal checks\": Washington, \"Washington's Farewell Address 1796.\"\n\n\"that man may be governed\": Jefferson to John Tyler, June 28, 1804, in _The Papers of Thomas Jefferson,_ ed. James P. McClure, vol. 43 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), loc. 18630, Kindle. See also Scott Horton, \"Jefferson\u2014Pursuit of the Avenues of Truth,\" _Browsings_ (blog), _Harper's,_ Aug. 15, 2009.\n\n\"A popular Government\": James Madison to W. T. Barry, Aug. 4, 1822, in _The Writings of James Madison,_ ed. Gaillard Hunt, 9 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1900\u20131910), vol. 9.\n\n# ADDITIONAL SOURCES\n\nArendt, Hannah, _The Human Condition_ (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).\n\nAvlon, John, _Washington's Farewell: The Founding Father's Warning to Future Generations_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).\n\nCampbell, Jeremy, _The Liar's Tale_ (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).\n\nChernow, Ron, _Washington: A Life_ (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).\n\nClark, Christopher, _The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914_ (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014).\n\nConfessore, Nicholas, \"Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far,\" _New York Times,_ Apr. 4, 2018.\n\nD'Antonio, Michael, _The Truth About Trump_ (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016).\n\nDiepenbrock, George, \"Most Partisans Treat Politics Like Sports Rivalries, Study Shows,\" _Kansas University Today,_ Apr. 15, 2015.\n\nEllis, Joseph J., _Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation_ (New York: Vintage, 2002).\n\nEllis, Joseph J., _The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783\u20131789_ (New York: Vintage, 2016).\n\nFrum, David, \"How to Build an Autocracy,\" _Atlantic_ , March 2017.\n\nGray, Rosie, \"How 2015 Fueled the Rise of the Freewheeling White Nationalist Alt-Movement,\" _BuzzFeed,_ Dec. 27, 2015.\n\nHalpern, Sue, \"How He Used Facebook to Win,\" _New York Review of Books,_ June 8, 2017.\n\nHamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay, _The Federalist Papers_ (Dublin, Ohio: Coventry House Publishing, 2015).\n\nHofstadter, Richard, _Anti-intellectualism in American Life_ (New York: Vintage, 1963).\n\nHughes, Robert, _Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).\n\nHuxley, Aldous, _Brave New World_ (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).\n\nIoffe, Julia, \"Why Trump's Attack on the Time Warner Merger Is Dangerous for the Press,\" _Atlantic,_ Nov. 28, 2017.\n\nJohnston, David Cay, _The Making of Donald Trump_ (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2017).\n\nKahneman, Daniel, _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).\n\nKaplan, Fred, _Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer_ (New York: Harper, 2008).\n\nKasparov, Garry, _Winter Is Coming_ (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015).\n\nLevi, Primo, _The Drowned and the Saved_ (New York: Vintage International, 1989).\n\nLuce, Edward, _The Retreat of Western Liberalism_ (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017).\n\nMcCullough, David, _1776_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).\n\nMurphy, Tim, \"How Donald Trump Became Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,\" _Mother Jones,_ Nov.\/Dec. 2016.\n\nO'Brien, Timothy L., _TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald_ (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007).\n\nPluckrose, Helen, \"How French 'Intellectuals' Ruined the West,\" _Areo,_ Mar. 27, 2017.\n\nPomerantsev, Peter, _Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible_ (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015).\n\nRemnick, David, \"A Hundred Days of Trump,\" _New Yorker,_ May 1, 2017.\n\nRicks, Thomas E., _Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq_ (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).\n\nRosenberg, Matthew, and Gabriel J.X. Dance, \" 'You Are the Product': Targeted by Cambridge Analytica on Facebook,\" _New York Times,_ Apr. 8, 2018.\n\nSnyder, Timothy, _On Tyranny_ (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017).\n\nStanley, Jason, _How Propaganda Works_ (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).\n\nTimberg, Carl, Karla Adam and Michael Kranish, \"Bannon Oversaw Cambridge Analytica's Collection of Facebook Data, According to Former Employee,\" _Washington Post,_ Mar. 20, 2018.\n\nWolfe, Tom, ed., _The New Journalism_ (New York: Picador Books, 1975).\n\nWolff, Michael, _Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House_ (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2018).\n\nWood, Gordon S., _The Radicalism of the American Revolution_ (New York: Vintage, 1993).\n\nWylie, Christopher, \"Why I Broke the Facebook Data Story\u2014and What Should Happen Now,\" _Guardian,_ Apr. 7, 2018.\n\nYglesias, Matthew, \"American Democracy Is Doomed,\" _Vox,_ Oct. 8, 2015.\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http:\/\/links.penguinrandomhouse.com\/type\/prhebooklanding\/isbn\/9780525574842\/display\/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. Copyright\n  4. Dedication\n  5. Contents\n  6. Introduction\n  7. Chapter 1: The Decline and Fall of Reason\n  8. Chapter 2: The New Culture Wars\n  9. Chapter 3: \"Moi\" and the Rise of Subjectivity\n  10. Chapter 4: The Vanishing of Reality\n  11. Chapter 5: The Co-Opting of Language\n  12. Chapter 6: Filters, Silos, and Tribes\n  13. Chapter 7: Attention Deficit\n  14. Chapter 8: \"The Firehose of Falsehood\": Propaganda and Fake News\n  15. Chapter 9: The Schadenfreude of the Trolls\n  16. Epilogue\n  17. Notes\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Cover\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Contents\n  5. 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+{"text":"\n\n_To Paul,  \nwhose idea it was_\n\nContents\n\nPREFACE\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nChapter 1: A Tradition with a Reason\n\n_Why textiles were traditionally women's work_\n\nChapter 2: The String Revolution\n\n_Life in the Palaeolithic_\n\nChapter 3: Courtyard Sisterhood\n\n_Horticultural society in the Neolithic_\n\nChapter 4: Island Fever\n\n_Bronze Age horticultural survivals: Minoans and others_\n\nChapter 5: More than Hearts on Our Sleeves\n\n_The functions of cloth and clothing in society_\n\nChapter 6: Elements of the Code\n\n_Symbolism in cloth and clothing_\n\nChapter 7: Cloth for the Caravans\n\n_Early urban manufacture in the Bronze Age Near East_\n\nChapter 8: Land of Linen\n\n_Middle Kingdom Egypt_\n\nChapter 9: The Golden Spindle\n\n_Outworker industries for the elite: The Mycenaeans_\n\nChapter 10: Behind the Myths\n\n_Women's work as reflected in textile myths_\n\nChapter 11: Plain or Fancy, New or Tried and True\n\n_Late Bronze and Iron Age urban industries_\n\nChapter 12: Postscript: Finding the Invisible\n\n_Methods of research_\n\nILLUSTRATION AND CREDIT LIST\n\nSOURCES\n\nINDEX\n\nPreface\n\nMy mother liked to weave and sew, so I grew up with interesting textiles all around, learning to sew and weave for myself at an early age. I was constantly being made aware of the form, color, and texture of cloth. Textiles have a particular crossing structure that dictates what sorts of patterns will be easy and obvious to weave or, conversely, hard to weave. Thus later, when I began to study Classical and Bronze Age Mediterranean archaeology at college, I soon noticed decorations on durable things like pottery and walls that looked as if they had been copied from typical weaving patterns. But when I suggested this idea to archaeologists, they responded that nobody could have known how to weave such complicated textiles so early. The answer was hard to refute, on the face of it, because very few textiles have come down to us from before medieval times, outside of Egypt, where people generally wore plain white linen.\n\nUnconvinced, I decided to spend two weeks hunting for data on the degree of sophistication of the weaving technology, to see at least whether people _could_ have made ornate textiles back then. I expected to write my findings into a small article, maybe ten pages, suggesting that scholars ought to consider at least the possibility of early textile industries.\n\nBut when I began to look, data for ancient textiles lay everywhere, waiting to be picked up. By the end of the two weeks I realized that it would take me at least a summer or two to chase down and organize the leads I had turned up and that I could be writing a 60-page monograph. By the end of two more summers I knew I was headed for a 200-page book. That \"little book\" turned into a research project that consumed seventeen years and yielded a 450-page tome covering many times the planned geographical area and time span. It finally appeared in 1991 as _Prehistoric Textiles_ , from Princeton University Press.\n\nFor that book I had restricted myself to the history and development of the craft: a big enough topic, as it turned out. Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women\u2014virtually always women\u2014who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers. When I talked about my work, people seemed especially eager for these vignettes, stories that told of women's lives thousands of years ago. They urged me to write a second book on the economic and social history of ancient textiles, in effect on the women who made the cloth and clothing.\n\nThen a friend asked me to read her unfinished translation of the memoirs of Nadezhda Durova, a woman who had spent ten years disguised as a man serving in the czar's cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars. Far from giving a catalog of campaigns, battle arrays, and tactics, Durova spent the entire war recording how people lived from day to day: how she and her fellow soldiers interacted with horses, geese, each other, the weather, and the local folk with whom they were billeted. I am not normally fond of reading history, but this was different. I could hardly wait for each new installment. As I realized that the source of my fascination was the glimpses into real people's lives, I began to understand in a new way what my early material contained. (This book has now appeared as _The Cavalry Maiden_ , translated by Mary Fleming Zirin [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988].)\n\nThus I have tried to explore and pull together what real facts we can deduce about early women, their lives, their work, and their values, chiefly from the technological record of the one major product of women that has been well studied as yet\u2014textiles. I have also paid some attention to what language can tell us. Messages perish as they are uttered, but language itself is remarkably durable. Sometimes it preserves useful clues to a more abstract and thought-oriented part of the human past than material artifacts do.\n\nPerhaps the most important thing that has been omitted from this book, however, is fiction. Romantics may enjoy Hollywood tales of Ooga and Oona grunting around the fire of a squat and hairy, stoop-shouldered Palaeolithic ruffian, after he has dragged them in by the hair from the next cave. Idealists may savor the rosy utopian visions of \"life before war\" in a Neolithic age ruled by women totally connected to the pulse of Mother Earth. These stories are fun. But what, I ask, was life _really_ like? What hard _evidence_ do we have for what we might want to know about women's lives? No evidence means no real knowledge.\n\nStacked against our endless questions, what we know remains small, and no matter how clever we become at tracking down evidence, if we want reality, we are stuck with what fragmentary facts we happen to have. I have not invented answers just to fill in, the way a screenwriter must. But we know much more than has gotten into the general literature about women's history. The reader will find in these pages glimpses of real women of all sorts\u2014peasants, entrepreneurs, queens, slaves, honest souls, and crooks\u2014good and bad, high and low. For all the strangeness of their cultures, they seem refreshingly like us.\n**WOMEN'S WORK:**\n\nTHE FIRST 20,000 YEARS\n\nIntroduction\n\n\"Four, three, two, one\u2014good. One more bunch to go; then we've got to get dinner on.\"\n\nI yanked the loose knot out of the last bundle of pea green warp threads and began passing the ends through the rows of tiny loops in the middle of the loom to my sister to tie up on the far side. The threads of the warp are those lying lengthwise in the finished cloth, and the most tedious part of making a new cloth comes in stringing these onto the loom, one at a time. Once you begin to weave in the cross-threads\u2014the weft\u2014you can see the new cloth forming inch by inch under your fingers, and you feel a sense of accomplishment. But the warp just looks like thread, thread, and more thread. At this moment I was balancing the pattern diagram on my knee, counting out which little loop each thread had to pass through on its way from my side of the loom to hers.\n\nFor nearly eight hours we had been working on the warp, between and around the interruptions. In the morning we had wound off the requisite number of green and chocolate brown threads of fine worsted wool, stripe by color stripe, onto the great frame of warping pegs\u2014pegs that hold the threads in order while measuring them all to the same length. By lunchtime we were ready to transfer the warp to the loom, tying one end of the long, thick bundle of yarn to the beam on one side. Then began the tedious task of threading the ends through the control loops (heddles) in the middle on their way to the far beam. It would have been simpler if we had intended to use the plainest sort of weave. But because we were setting up to weave a pattern\u2014the fine diagonal pattern called twill that is used typically today in men's suit material (see fig. 0.2)\u2014it was taking far longer.\n\n\"Why am I doing this?\" I thought ruefully, glancing at the time. \"We've spent the entire day and aren't even ready to start weaving yet! If I spent this much time every day writing, my book would be finished in no time.\" One forgets that laying in the weft\u2014the actual \"weaving\"\u2014is only half the job of making a cloth, the second half. First comes the equally lengthy task of making, organizing, and mounting onto the loom the foundation set of threads, the warp. And that is where a helper really speeds the work: a friend to receive and fasten the other end of each long warp thread, saving all the time and energy of walking back and forth, back and forth, from one end of the loom to the other. It is also much more entertaining to have a friend to chat with while the handwork proceeds.\n\nIn fact, my sister and I were actors in a scene that, with only minor differences, has been repeated for millennia: two women helping each other set up a weaving project. The looms, the fibers, the patterns may differ, but the relation of the women to their work and to each other is much the same.\n\nUnlike women of past ages, however, we were not making cloth for our households. (When our mother entered a weaving school in Denmark fifty years ago, she was told to begin with a dozen plain dish towels\u2014a useful way to gain skill on the loom and start one's trousseau all at once.) Nor were we weaving for sale, for piety, or for artistry\u2014the other common reasons. We were weaving a thread-for-thread replica of a piece of plaid cloth lost in a salt mine in the Austrian Alps some three thousand years ago (figs. 0.1 and 0.2).\n\n_Figure 0.1_. Plaid woolen cloth and fur \"tam-o'-shanters\" from ca. 800 B.C., found in the salt mines at Hallstatt, Austria (see map, fig. 3.1) and displayed in the Natural History Museum, Vienna. The makers of these objects were the ancestors of the Celts, now living in such places as Scotland and still famous for plaid twills and tams. (The original scrap of cloth is lying at lower left on a replica.)\n\n_Figure 0.2_. Detail of author's replica of the Hallstatt twill in fig. 0.1, showing the offset pairing of threads typical of twill pattern. The original warp ran vertically, constructed in groups of four threads of green and brown. The weft ran horizontally, and the weaver judged the width of those stripes by eye as she wove.\n\nIt was the salt that had preserved the handsome green and brown colors as well as the cloth itself, and it was the color that caught my eye in the Natural History Museum in Vienna\u2014that and the particular objects surrounding the piece (fig. 0.1). The torn fragment of cloth, about the size of one's hand laid flat, nestled on a newly rewoven strip of identical cloth in such a way that the plaid stripes matched. Thus the visitor's eye could follow the pattern outward in both directions and comprehend what this ancient cloth must have looked like when it was new. And it looked for all the world like a simple plaid twill from some Scottish kilt. Furthermore, above and beside it were hung two furry leather caps, also from prehistoric shafts in the Hallstatt salt mines, of the exact same shape as a Scottish tam-o'-shanter or a beret from Brittany in western France, another outpost of Celtic culture.\n\nBetween 1200 and 600 B.C., the era when this cloth was apparently woven, the ancestors of the Celts were living in what is now Austria, Hungary, and southern Germany. Many of these people were miners, digging out of the mountains both metal ores and salt. (Salt was very precious for preserving food before the days of refrigerators. Those who could supply it grew rich.) By 400 B.C. the early Celts were beginning to fan out westward across Europe into France, Britain, and Spain, where they live today, carrying a culture directly descended from that of the Hallstatt miners. In a very real sense I _was_ looking at the original tam and at the ancestor of the Scottish plaid tweed or twill, all produced by the immediate ancestors of the Celts. ( _Twill_ , like _tweed_ , comes from the word _two_ and refers to a distinctive method of pattern weaving in which the threads are paired [fig. 0.2].) These habits of cloth and clothing that we associate today with Celts began in prehistoric times and traveled with them through space and time. I had been studying the scant remains of ancient cloth for almost a decade, and if one thing had become clear, it was that the traditions of cloth and clothing in most parts of the world were remarkably ancient. This display case eloquently said it all.\n\n\"I'd love to have a scarf like that,\" I announced on the spot. So here I was, two months later, sitting at home, trying to reproduce it from the diagrams in the scholarly publication. It had taken much hunting through weaver supply catalogs to find wool yarn of precisely the right colors and thickness, yarn that had also been combed and not carded. (Combing the unspun fibers to lie parallel results in a strong, hard thread. Carding, on the other hand, makes the fiber lie all which way\u2014just like teasing one's hair\u2014and gives a soft, fluffy thread like our knitting yarn. Most wool yarn now available is of this latter sort, but the process wasn't invented till the Middle Ages.) If I was going to go to all this trouble, I wanted the replica to be as near exact as I could make it. Of course, if I had begun by raising and shearing a sheep, cleaning and dyeing the wool, then combing, spinning, and plying it, the long day spent warping would seem quite a small expenditure!\n\nAfter dinner I began to weave, while my family sat nearby chatting. It took me half an hour to weave the wide swatch of plain green that preceded the first brown stripe. Having put all the intricacies of the twill patterning into the warp, by the way in which we had tied it onto the loom, the weaving was now straightforward, and it went fast. I reached the first color stripes and added a shuttle of brown thread: four brown rows, four green, four brown, four green . . . I was eager to see what the plaid would look like, and I cursed gently as first one shuttle, then the other fell to the floor while I worked. The stripes were so narrow that it didn't seem worth tying off the finished color each time, so I put up with the nuisance. Another four brown, four green\u2014another shuttle hit the floor.\n\nSuddenly light dawned on me.\n\nIt had taken us so long to put the warp through the tiny control loops on the loom because the pattern, simple as it looked, had actually been quite complicated. That was because both the color stripes and woven pattern stripes were so uneven in width: sixteen, nineteen, twenty, eighteen. No two stripes that direction had exactly the same number of threads, and getting them all exactly correct had required great care. Now I was cursing at the stripes running crosswise\u2014the weft stripes\u2014because they were in little tiny sets of four, an even number.\n\nI had done the replica backward! If my weft had been warp, its sets of four threads would correspond to what I knew to be the structure of the warp on the ancient loom, as well as to the twill pattern. Thus the cloth would have been _easy_ to warp up. Conversely, if my warp had been weft, the slight differences in the number of threads per stripe would make perfect sense; the weaver had not been counting but judging by eye how far to weave before changing to the next stripe.\n\nFar from being unhappy at my mistake, I was delighted. Most fragments of prehistoric cloth from the Hallstatt salt mines\u2014and there are more than a hundred extant\u2014are torn on all four edges, so it is not possible to tell which direction they were woven the way one usually does, simply by looking for the type of closed edges found only at the sides. But by trying to imitate the product, I discovered not only which way _this_ shred was woven and some criteria for analyzing other pieces but also several interesting details about how Hallstatt weavers worked. The cloth ends up looking much the same either way, and the time had been doubly well spent. It was another lesson to me that the process of recreating ancient artifacts step by step can shed light on the lives and habits of the original craftworkers that no amount of armchair theorizing can give.\n\nIt is no longer possible to know most of the details of prehistoric women's lives. Far too much has been lost with the passage of time. Even in early historical times\u2014in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece\u2014very little of the ancient literary record was devoted to women, so we have few sources to consult. Indeed, the lack of clear sources has led to a good deal of guessing, even wishful thinking, in books about how women lived in early times (when the topic has not been omitted altogether). Here among the textiles, on the other hand, we can find some of the hard evidence we need, since textiles were one of women's primary concerns. We know, for example, that women sometimes helped each other with their weaving projects, exactly as in the modern scene above, because we sometimes find the wefts in ancient cloth crossed in the middle of the textile. This can only have been caused by two people handing spools of weft back and forth to each other as they wove simultaneously on different parts of the same cloth. It is a tiny detail, but interesting precisely because of its realness. We also know, now, that prehistoric women sometimes wove their patterns by eye rather than strictly counting.\n\nOf course, being perishable, the textiles themselves are not easy to learn about\u2014just like most of the rest of women's products (such as food and the recipes for preparing it). Therefore, to recover the reality of women's history, we must develop excellent techniques (see Chapter 12), using not just the obvious data but learning to ferret out every helpful detail. Practical experiments like reweaving some of the surviving ancient cloths are a case in point. Among the thousands of archaeologists who have written about pottery or architecture, how many have actually tried to make a pot or build a building? Precious few; but with so much data available for study in these fields, scholars felt flooded with information already, and such radical steps hardly seemed necessary. Our case is different; we must use every discoverable clue.\n\nThe available material is most revealing when treated chronologically, starting with the Stone Age and moving through the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. We can watch how the craft of clothmaking develops and how women's roles change with the change of technology and its relation to society. But when I say \"chronologically,\" I mean in a conceptual way rather than strictly in terms of years. It could hardly be otherwise. At 3400 B.C., as the Near East was edging into the Bronze Age, central Europe remained at a Neolithic stage of economy, while the Arctic north was Mesolithic and many other parts of the world still lay deep in the Palaeolithic (fig. 0.3). To chart technological stages so heavily skewed from place to place against a scale of absolute time is difficult. Understanding the basis of the categorization is perhaps of greater help to a reader not acquainted with the system.\n\n_Figure 0.3_. Chart of the main chronological periods covered in this book. The scale is logarithmic.\n\nWhen systematic archaeology began to emerge in the nineteenth century, long before modern methods of absolute dating were available, Danish scholars suggested dividing the pre-Roman artifacts into three successive groups, based on the dominant material for tools: stone only (oldest), bronze (in the middle), and iron (youngest). This system worked pretty well, but it soon became clear that the Stone Age was enormously long and needed a further division based on whether the stone tools were always chipped _(Old Stone Age_ , or _Palaeolithic)_ or sometimes ground down to a smooth finish _(New Stone Age_ , or _Neolithic)_. As methods of recovering ancient remains became more refined, scholars noticed that polished stone tools correlated with the advent of agriculture. The grinding of tools was not unrelated to the grinding of grain. And gradually, as more and more material accrued, finer divisions were installed as needed. The simplest system was to divide into Early, Middle, and Late; Late into I, II, and III; Late III into A, B, and C; and so on. (A pot might thus be assigned to Early Bronze IIA.) But sometimes other terms fell to hand.\n\nThus the last levels of the Palaeolithic era are those uppermost at Palaeolithic sites (which themselves go back over a million years), and these uppermost layers correspond to a sudden blossoming of all sorts of arts and crafts in Europe after about 40,000 B.C. The era thus represented came to be known as the _Upper Palaeolithic_ and was found to extend to at least 10,000 B.C.\u2014later in some places. Its cutoff point is taken to be the advent of domestic plants and animals, which mark the beginning of the _Neolithic._ In Europe the domesticated stocks were imported from the Near East in an ever-widening circle. Because the far northern climate was too harsh for easy agriculture, however, people there continued to live a Palaeolithic life-style for millennia, augmented with a few handy Neolithic ideas borrowed from the south (such as actively herding the wild reindeer, rather than just hunting them). This intermediate type of culture soon got nicknamed the _Mesolithic_. I have chosen to treat the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic together (in Chapter 2), followed by the Neolithic (Chapter 3). The development of metalworking and of efficient metal tools marks the start of the _Bronze Age_ (although again in the seminal areas there are transitional phases with various names: Copper Age, Chalcolithic, Aeneolithic). In the Near East the beginning of the Bronze Age shortly before 3000 B.C. is accompanied (or triggered) by radical changes in living conditions: Cities spring up everywhere and writing is invented. Again, the innovations are not unrelated to each other.\n\nBronze Age technology and urbanization quickly spread to southeastern Europe, but some aspects of life there continued with one foot in the Neolithic, an interesting hybridization that allowed textiles to flourish (Chapter 4). The mainstream of Bronze Age life developed full speed ahead in Mesopotamia (Chapter 7) and Egypt (Chapter 8), eventually reaching Greece in its full form in the Late Bronze Age, midway through the second millennium B.C. (Chapter 9), only to be cut off around 1200 B.C. by waves of destructive migrations emanating ultimately from the steppes of central Asia. After the dust settles and the smoke clears away, we find the Mediterranean countries in possession of some new ways of living and of a new and much harder metal, iron\u2014in an era suitably called the _Iron Age_ (Chapter 12). It takes another two to four hundred years, however, for the complex technology of ironworking to make its way all the way across Europe, during which time \"Bronze Age\" labels in some parts of Europe correspond in absolute years to \"Iron Age\" labels in other parts.\n\nBy the mid-first millennium B.C., when iron was reaching the far west and when this book ends, southern Europe and the Near East had already experienced vast cultural developments and redevelopments, whereas most other areas had not yet gotten on their feet (China, northern India, and Central America excepted). The chapters that follow concentrate on this geographical area of early development and for the most part omit the rest. Of course, the same methods developed here can be applied to those other times and places to recover more of their histories.\n\nA Tradition with a Reason\n\nFor millennia women have sat together spinning, weaving, and sewing. Why should textiles have become _their_ craft par excellence, rather than the work of men? Was it always thus, and if so, why?\n\nTwenty years ago Judith Brown wrote a little five-page \"Note on the Division of Labor by Sex\" that holds a simple key to these questions. She was interested in how much women contributed to obtaining the food for a preindustrial community. But in answering that question, she came upon a model of much wider applicability. She found that the issue of whether or not the community _relies_ upon women as the chief providers of a given type of labor depends upon \"the compatibility of this pursuit with the demands of child care.\" If only because of the exigencies of breast feeding (which until recently was typically continued for two or three years per child), \"nowhere in the world is the rearing of children primarily the responsibility of men. . . .\" Thus, if the productive labor of women is not to be lost to the society during the childbearing years, the jobs regularly assigned to women must be carefully chosen to be \"compatible with simultaneous child watching.\" From empirical observation Brown gleans that \"such activities have the following characteristics: they do not require rapt concentration and are relatively dull and repetitive; they are easily interruptible [I see a rueful smile on every care giver's face!] and easily resumed once interrupted; they do not place the child in potential danger; and they do not require the participant to range very far from home.\"1\n\nJust such are the crafts of spinning, weaving, and sewing: repetitive, easy to pick up at any point, reasonably child-safe, and easily done at home. (Contrast the idea of swinging a pick in a dark, cramped, and dusty mine shaft with a baby on one's back or being interrupted by a child's crisis while trying to pour molten metal into a set of molds.) The only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food. Food and clothing: These are what societies worldwide have come to see as the core of women's work (although other tasks may be added to the load, depending upon the circumstances of the particular society).\n\nReaders of this book live in a different world. The Industrial Revolution has moved basic textile work out of the home and into large (inherently dangerous) factories; we buy our clothing readymade. It is a rare person in our cities who has ever spun thread or woven cloth, although a quick look into a fabric store will show that many women still sew. As a result, most of us are unaware of how time-consuming the task of making the cloth for a family used to be.\n\nIn Denmark fifty years ago young women bought their yarns ready-made but still expected to weave the basic cloth for their households. If they went to a weaving school rather than being taught at home, they began with a dozen plain cotton dish towels. My mother, being a foreigner not in need of a trousseau, and with less than a year at her disposal to study Danish weaving, consented to weave half of _one_ towel to get started. The next assignment was to weave three waffle-weave bath mats. (Indeed, the three were nicely gauged to last a lifetime. The second wore out when I was in college, and we still have the third.) Next came the weaving of woolen scarves and blankets, linen tablecloths, and so forth. Most complicated were the elaborate aprons for Sunday best.\n\nThirty years ago in rural Greece, much had changed but not all. People wore store-bought, factory-made clothing of cotton for daily wear, at least in summer. But traditional festive outfits and all the household woolens were still made from scratch. It takes several hours to spin with a hand spindle the amount of yarn one can weave up in an hour, so women spun as they watched the children, girls spun as they watched the sheep, both spun as they trudged or rode muleback from one village to another on errands (fig. 1.1). The tools and materials were light and portable, and the double use of the time made both the spinning and the trudging or watching more interesting. In fact, if we reckon up the cleaning, spinning, dyeing, weaving, and embroidering of the wool, the villagers appeared to spend at least as many labor hours on making cloth as on producing the food to be eaten\u2014and these people bought half their clothing ready-made!\n\n_Figure 1.1_. Seventeenth century woodcut of women in the Balkans spinning while traveling. Spinning was such a time-consuming yet simple and necessary job that women frequently spun thread while doing other things.\n\nRecords show that, before the invention of the steam engine and the great factory machines that it could run, this sort of distribution of time and labor was quite normal. Most of the hours of the woman's day, and occasionally of the man's, were spent on textile-related activities. (In Europe men typically helped tend and shear the sheep, plant and harvest the flax, and market any extra textiles available for cash income.)\n\n\"So why is it, if women were so enslaved by textile work for all those centuries, that the spinning jenny and power loom were invented by a man and not a woman?\" A young woman accosted me with this question after a lecture recently.\n\n\"Th[e] reason,\" to quote George Foster, writing about problems in pottery making, \"lies in the nature of the productive process itself which places a premium on strict adherence to tried and proven ways as a means of avoiding economic catastrophe.\" Put another way, women of all but the top social and economic classes were so busy just trying to get through what had to be done each day that they didn't have excess time or materials to experiment with new ways of doing things. (My husband bought and learned to use a new word-processing program two years before I began to use it, for exactly these reasons. I was in the middle of writing a book using the old system and couldn't afford to take the time out both to learn the new one and to convert everything. I was already too deep into \"production.\") Elise Boulding elaborates: \"[T]he general situation of little margin for error leading to conservatism might apply to the whole range of activities carried out by women. Because they had so much to do, slight variations in care of farm or dairy products or pottery could lead to food spoilage, production failure, and a consequent increase in already heavy burdens.\" The rich women, on the other hand, didn't have the incentive to invent laborsaving machinery since the work was done for them.\n\nAnd so for millennia women devoted their lives to making the cloth and clothing while they tended the children and the cooking pot. Or at least that was the case in the broad zone of temperate climates, where cloth was spun and woven (rather than made of skins, as in the Arctic) and where the weather was too cold for part or all of the year to go without a warming wrap (as one could in the tropics). Consequently it was in the temperate zone that the Industrial Revolution eventually began.\n\nThe Industrial Revolution was a time of steam engines. Along with the locomotive to solve transportation problems, the first major applications of the new engines were mechanizations of the making of cloth: the power loom, the spinning jenny, the cotton gin. The consequences of yanking women and children out of the home to tend these huge, dangerous, and implacable machines in the mills caused the devastating social problems which writers like Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront\u00eb, and Elizabeth Gaskell (all of whom knew each other) portrayed so vividly. Such a factory is the antithesis of being \"compatible with child rearing\" on every point in Judith Brown's list.\n\nWestern industrial society has evolved so far that most of us don't recognize Dickens's picture now (although it still does exist in some parts of the world). We are looking forward into a new age, when women who so desire can rear their children quietly at home while they pursue a career on their child-safe, relatively interruptible-and-resumable home computers, linked to the world not by muleback or the steam locomotive, or even a car, but by the telephone and the modem. For their part, the handloom, the needle, and the other fiber crafts can still form satisfying hobbies, as they, too, remain compatible with child watching.\n\nSpinning and weaving were such common household activities for millennia that everyone undoubtedly knew how they worked, whether ever performing the actions or not. But now that factory machines have taken over these jobs, most Americans have engaged in weaving only as a childhood game\u2014such as weaving little potholders out of the stretchy loops in a kit\u2014and have never encountered spinning. A brief description of these basic processes is thus in order.\n\nWeaving cloth requires thread of some sort, and thread is made from fibers, so we must begin with the fibers.\n\nImagine yourself with a handful of coarse fibers, or better yet, go get some. Not cotton: cotton hairs are extremely short and fine so you can't see how they behave. (They are also not easy to spin for these reasons.) Imagine instead a hank of wool just as it comes off the back of a sheep or goat; you may have seen it stuck to the fence of a cage at the zoo. Or take the long, coarse fibers from a rotted plant stem or from a piece of old frayed rope or twine. (Rope used to be made chiefly from hemp, the species to which marijuana belongs, but now it is usually made from synthetics, which are slippery and therefore hard to work with.)\n\nTo make thread out of these fibers, you must twist them together longways a few at a time. Although each individual fiber is weak, twisting a number of them together can make a thread that is quite strong. An easy way to do this is to take a small bunch of fibers and roll one end down your thigh with the flat of your hand while holding the other end tight (fig. 1.2). Thus one end gets twisted with respect to the other end, locking the fibers together in the process.\n\n_Figure 1.2_. Fibers will lock into a strong thread when twisted tightly together. A simple way to make a short thread is to hold the ends of some fibers in the left hand and roll the other end of the bundle down one's thigh with the flat of the right hand.\n\nIf the fibers you begin with are also very long, that may be all you have to do. Hemp, for instance, grows twelve feet high, so you can make a twelve-foot string by doing nothing more than adding twist to the natural fibers. Flax, which gives the fine material we call _linen_ when it is processed, grows to four feet, while silk fibers, which are unwound from the cocoon of a special species of moth, may be as much as a thousand yards long (and incredibly thin). But most fibers are not that long. Wool is at best only a few inches in length and usually much shorter; cotton is shorter still. So we need some way to make thread longer than any one single fiber, extending it as long as we please.\n\nTo accomplish that, imagine overlapping the end of one bundle of fibers over the ends of the previous group before adding the twist that locks them together. But you can see that we will get lumpy spots at the overlap and thin spots in between. (Some ancient thread is actually made that way.) What we really need is a way to keep a constant trickle of overlapping fibers flowing into the thread as we make it, instead of adding them in discrete bunches. To do this, we need some preparation and a simple tool, the spindle.\n\nFirst, the fibers you draw from must be loose and not tangled together so you can get the exact amount you need at all times. Otherwise you will suddenly find you have pulled a big clot of them all at once\u2014or worse, gotten too few somewhere, so the thread gets too thin and breaks.\n\nThere are two basic ways of arranging the fibers for spinning, as you loosen them: laying them parallel to each other or encouraging them to lie every which way in a fluffy mass (this is practical only with fairly short fibers). You can make them sit parallel by combing them, much the way you comb your hair to get the tangles out. Then you get a very strong thread (called _worsted_ ) that is also very hard to the touch, because it has no fluffiness. The fibers all are packed in close, lying right next to one another as they twist. Men's wool suits today are usually made of worsted thread, for long wear.\n\nIf you want softness, however, you can use _carding_ paddles to loosen the tangles in the fibers without actually combing them. These flat boards with handles have lots of little bent teeth to pull the fibers apart so they lie in all directions. (The name comes from the Latin word for a thistle, _carduus_ , because in ancient times the teeth of thistles were set into boards for fluffing fiber.) The process of carding is much like teasing your hair to make it fluffy. The problem with yarn from carded fiber, however, is that it is rather weak and breaks easily. Modern knitting yarns are almost invariably carded, and they can afford to be because the knitted loops make the cloth stretchy enough to offset the relative weakness of the yarn. Sweaters knitted from these carded yarns feel soft and even spongy.\n\nOnce you have your fibers prepared, you are ready to spin. The crudest way, and probably the oldest, is the one we have mentioned: taking a small bunch of fibers and rolling one end down your thigh with the flat of your hand while holding on to the other end. But to get a constant stream of fibers flowing into the thread as you make it, you need one hand to hold the prepared fibers, another to add them to the thread, a third to keep twisting (the core operation), and a fourth to hold the finished thread\u2014because if you let go of the new yarn at this stage, it will instantly ball up in a snarl like an angry rubber band and then start coming apart. Time for some tools: We don't _have_ four hands.\n\nA _spindle_ is basically just a stick, usually about a foot long.\n\nWhen the end of the new thread has been attached to the tip of the stick, turning the stick will force the end of the thread to turn, too, adding twist to the fibers to make the thread. But when some thread has been finished, it can be wound around the stick to keep it from tangling while still more is being spun. Thus the tool that twists is at the same time the tool that holds. That reduces the needed hands to three.\n\nHow to get it down to two? One hand must always be used for the crucial job of adding the fibers at a controlled rate into the new thread, while somehow the spindle must be kept turning and the fiber supply must be held near.\n\nOne solution is to lay the fiber supply down on the ground, turn the spindle with one hand, and use the other to flick the fibers a few at a time into the growing thread. This is how ancient Mesopotamian women did it, as well as rural women today in the Sudan. (It is practical if and only if the fibers are quite short\u2014less than a couple of inches long.)\n\nThe other solution is to hold the fibers and drop the spindle\u2014after giving it a quick flick to start it spinning like a top (fig. 1.3). It hangs in the air like a yo-yo, whirling merrily on its thread, while the spinner uses one hand to hold the unspun fiber and the other to control the feeding of the fibers into the twist. When the new thread gets so long that the spindle reaches the ground, you have to stop and wind everything up on the spindle shaft and then start the spindle twirling again in the air. This is the way European peasants spin, and apparently always have. It has the advantage of being entirely portable since nothing has to be laid down. In fact, I have seen Greek village women spinning quite handily while riding sidesaddle on muleback. In order to be able to carry a big supply of raw material, one can bind the prepared fiber to a long stick or board, called a _distaff_ (from an old word _dis_ -, meaning \"fuzz, fiber,\" plus _staff_ , a fuzz-stick).\n\n_Figure 1.3_. Woman spinning with a drop spindle, depicted on a Greek vase of ca. 490 B.C.\n\nBack in the Neolithic era people discovered that to reduce wobble as the spindle turns and to prolong the spin it is helpful to add a little flywheel\u2014a small disk called a _spindle whorl_. Spindles are usually wooden; whorls are most often of clay. But one can use an apple, a potato, or a rock for the whorl if nothing else is available. Contrary to popular assumption, it doesn't have to be perfectly round as long as the spindle shaft goes through the very middle of it.\n\nSpinning this way is slow, but far faster than rolling the thread on the thigh with no spindle. Early in the Middle Ages, however, a new invention appeared: the spinning wheel. Just who invented it is still unknown, although an old Chinese device for winding thread may have been the inspiration. The foot-powered spinning wheel allowed people to spin about four times faster than with the dropped spindle, so it was much in demand. But the principle is exactly the same as with a hand spindle: Pull fibers, twist them, and wind up the thread. Finally in the late eighteenth century, early in the Industrial Revolution, a man named James Hargreaves invented a mechanical spinning machine (later nicknamed the spinning jenny) because he was distressed at how hard his wife and daughters had to work to spin their increasingly large quotas of thread for the new power looms. The women in his family were delighted, but his neighbors became fiercely jealous of the \"unfair\" competition and ran him out of town after wrecking his first machine.\n\nTo keep the thread from untwisting when it is taken off the filled spindle, the most efficient remedy is to _ply_ the thread. The word comes from French _plier_ , meaning \"to bend,\" because if you take a spun thread, bend it in half, and let go, the two halves will briefly twist around _each other_ and leave you with a nice thread of twice the thickness that will no longer try to come undone. Try it. (The same can be accomplished by twisting two separate threads together in the opposite direction from that in which they were spun. This is the normal way to do it.)\n\nSpinning, incidentally, is a very restful activity. That is a good thing, because it takes an enormous amount of time to make thread by hand. Like knitting, it is pleasantly rhythmic and can be done sitting down, with no physical exertion, just patience.\n\nOnce enough thread has been made, weaving the cloth can begin. Weaving consists of interlacing two sets of threads at right angles to each other. But because thread is very floppy, like spaghetti (unlike the materials that mats and baskets are made of), it is almost impossible to weave the one set of threads through the other without one group's being held down tight\u2014that is, putting tension on one set of threads. The set that is pulled tight is called the _warp_ , and the frame that holds the warp fast is known as the _loom_. The second set of threads, which needs to be interlaced into the first, is called the _weft_ (an old past tense of the verb _weave_ \u2014that is, \"what has been woven in\"). The enterprising reader can take a few short lengths of string, lay half of them out parallel on a table, and try weaving the other half into them at right angles. The problems will become clear immediately.\n\nIn the simplest weave, called _plain weave_ , each thread of either set goes over one and then under one thread of the opposite set (fig. 1.4). You can see cloth of this sort in any household; simple items like sheets, pillowcases, and handkerchiefs are still made this way. (If you have never thought before about the structure of cloth, take a close look at a sheet or handkerchief right now.) It is also possible to weave various patterns into the cloth by having the weft go over and under different numbers of warp.\n\n_Figure 1.4_. In the simplest weave (plain weave or tabby), each thread passes alternately over one and then under one thread of the threads at right angles to it.\n\nTo make these structures\u2014to weave\u2014somehow one has to push the weft under some of the warp threads but over others on the loom. One can do this the tedious way, using a needle to take the weft over or under one little thread at a time, row after row. (This technique is known as _darning_ and is still used as a way to mend socks by those who don't just throw holey socks away.) Or one can try to lift at one swoop all the warp threads that have to be gone under, leaving in place all the ones that the weft must go over (fig. 1.5). This massive lifting forms a little passageway called a _shed_ (in a vertical loom it looks like the double-pitched roof of a toolshed slanting off to either side), and through this passage the weaver can insert a whole line of weft at once.\n\nHow to raise the selected warp threads so nothing gets tangled up? That is not an easy problem. The normal way is to pass each thread through a separate little loop, a _heddle_ (fig. 1.5), in the middle of the loom, and the heddles in turn are tied to bars above the warp (the _heddle bars_ ). The warp threads can then be controlled by raising the loops in large groups by means of the bars, much the way the sustain pedal on a grand piano raises a whole row of dampers at once, although the dampers (like heddles) can also be raised one at a time.\n\n_Figure 1.5_. Diagram of how the warp threads, stretched between two beams (hollow circles), are separated into two alternating sheds (openings) to allow the weft to be inserted. Top: The weft (arrow) is passed through the shed formed by using a shed bar (hatched oblong) to depress every second thread\u2014i.e., half the warp. Bottom: The weft (arrow) goes through the opposite shed formed by raising the same half of the warp with heddle loops attached to a heddle bar (hatched circle). To orient this diagram for a vertical loom, rotate it ninety degrees (clockwise for a warp-weighted loom, counterclockwise for a tapestry loom).\n\nIn fact, it seems to have taken several millennia of darning the weft in at a snail's pace before some genius figured out the principle of the heddle\u2014apparently in the Neolithic (about 6000 B.C.?), somewhere in northern Iraq or Turkey. From there the idea must have spread slowly to Europe, to the Orient, and eventually by boat to South America. It is such a difficult concept that it may have been invented only once. But it is what made weaving an efficient process.\n\nWhat, then, is the history of this relationship between women and textiles? When did women begin to take up and develop the fiber crafts? How did women and their special work affect society, and how did the societies affect them? These interactions will form the story of this book.\n\n1Notice Brown's stipulation that this particular division of labor revolves around _reliance_ , not around _ability_ (other than the ability to breast-feed), within a community in which specialization is desirable. Thus females are quite able to hunt, and often do (as she points out); males are quite able to cook and sew, and often do, among the cultures of the world. The question is whether the society can afford to _rely_ on the women as a group for all of the hunting or all of the sewing. The answer to \"hunting\" (and smithing, and deep-sea fishing) is no. The answer to \"sewing\" (and cooking, and weaving) is yes.\n\nThe String Revolution\n\n. . . a threefold cord is not quickly broken.\n\n\u2014Ecclesiastes 4:12\n\nSome forty thousand years ago, at the beginning of the last phase of the Old Stone Age (called the Upper Palaeolithic), human beings began to act very differently from the way they ever had before. For some two million years they had fashioned simple stone tools, and for half a million they had controlled fire and hunted cooperatively in groups. But forty thousand years ago, as the great ice sheets that had covered the northern continents retreated by fits and starts, humans started to invent and make new things at a tremendous rate, like a slow-ascending firecracker that suddenly explodes into a thousand sparks of varied color, shooting in a thousand directions.\n\nThese newly creative hunter-gatherers produced novel tools\u2014such as awls, pins, and various chisellike burins\u2014but they also began to sculpt animals, people, and other information (possibly calendrical) on pieces of ivory and bone and to make quantities of beads for adornment. People of the Upper Palaeolithic painted pictures of animals and drew around their own hands on cave walls; this is the period of the famous Stone Age paintings from Lascaux, Altamira, and other caves in France and Spain. Just as important, and more to our purpose here, these ancestors invented string and sewing and thus provided the first chapter in the story of women's long association with the fiber crafts.\n\nAs near as we can place it, the event occurred twenty to thirty thousand years ago, right in the middle of the Upper Palaeolithic. While others were painting caves or knapping fancy flints, some genius hit upon the principle of twisting handfuls of little weak fibers together into long, strong thread.\n\nHow do we know this? Nothing so perishable has survived those twenty-five to thirty-five thousand years, although by some miracle one bit of neatly spun and plied cordage has made it through from about 15,000 B.C. (see below). Our earliest evidence is indirect. We infer this humble yet crucial invention from significant changes in other objects of a sturdier nature.\n\nThe Upper Palaeolithic culture known to palaeontologists as the Gravettian (from the name of the French site where it was first recognized: La Gravette, on the Dordogne River) seems to have sprung up in central and eastern Europe, spreading gradually westward along the south edge of the great ice sheet to southern France and Spain. Radiocarbon dates suggest that the Gravettian culture lasted roughly six thousand years, from 26,000 to 20,000 B.C. During this vast time needles become common, and beads of shell, tooth, and bone turn up with increasingly small holes. The smaller beads, moreover, begin to occur arranged in neat rows across the bones (sometimes the skulls) of the deceased. Clearly these beads had been sewn onto garments, made probably of hide. In a cave near the Mediterranean border between modern France and Italy, an adolescent young man was found carefully interred wearing a cap or hairnet sewn or strung with four tidy rows of tiny shell beads. His body lay protectively around that of a smaller and much older woman\u2014his mother?\u2014who wore a bracelet of similar beads.\n\nFrom such artifacts alone one can deduce a knowledge of sewing. But there is proof that at least some of the thread in use had been twisted together from small natural fibers, rather than cut from long, stringy body parts like gut or sinew. It comes from a bone sculpture of a woman wearing a skirt made of string (fig. 2.1).\n\n_Figure 2.1_. Small Palaeolithic Venus figure found at Lespugue, France, carved of bone ca. 20,000 B.C. (Gravettian culture). The woman wears a skirt made of twisted strings suspended from a hip band. Such skirts seem to have been associated with childbearing.\n\nThis small, plump \"Venus figure\" (a nickname for all the little bone, stone, and ivory figurines of women from the Palaeolithic) comes from Lespugue, in southern France, and is probably of late Gravettian manufacture. Her skirt consists of long strings hanging down the back from a hip band, and the ancient sculptor has troubled to engrave the twists in each string. Furthermore\u2014a detail I did not notice until I began to make my own drawing from a large, clear photograph obtained from the Mus\u00e9e de l'Homme in Paris\u2014the sculptor has shown the strings fraying out at the bottom into a mass of untwisted fibers. These cannot be thongs of sinew or hide; they can only be true twisted-fiber thread.\n\nWe don't know how early to date this great discovery\u2014of making string as long and as strong as needed by twisting short filaments together. But whenever it happened, it opened the door to an enormous array of new ways to save labor and improve the odds of survival, much as the harnessing of steam did for the Industrial Revolution. Soft, flexible thread of this sort is a necessary prerequisite to making woven cloth. On a far more basic level, string can be used simply to tie things up\u2014to catch, to hold, to carry. From these notions come snares and fishlines, tethers and leashes, carrying nets, handles, and packages, not to mention a way of binding objects together to form more complex tools. (Nets, for example, work so efficiently that nowadays they are mostly illegal for catching fish in fresh water. Sportsmen don't consider netting sufficiently \"sporting,\" and furthermore, in no time there would be no fish left to spawn more.) So powerful, in fact, is simple string in taming the world to human will and ingenuity that I suspect it to be the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth, that enabled us to move out into every econiche on the globe during the Upper Palaeolithic. We could call it the String Revolution.\n\nWhat was it like to live in this busy new world, so different from ages past, yet a world still without houses, stoves, and refrigerators, with nothing but rocks and wild plants and animals to supply all one's needs? The stones and bones of archaeology yield but a dry and lifeless picture, and a very incomplete one at that.\n\nWe can recognize an ancient campsite (if we are lucky enough to find one) by small deposits of ashes and carbon in places where a controlled fire burned. Stone tools of the Palaeolithic may well have survived, too, known by their deliberately chipped edges and regular shapes. But stone is a hard medium to work. Ancient people undoubtedly used softer materials like wood, leather, and bark wherever these would do the job, but these softer things almost never survive even two thousand years, let alone twenty thousand. So we must recognize that we have lost most of the tools and trappings of that time. Furthermore, material remains tell us little about the intangible parts of culture: about marriage and dinner recipes and how the world was categorized. (Anyone who has ever learned a second language knows that different cultures look at the world differently, from what colors and how many of them form the rainbow to who is counted as kin.)\n\nUsing the excavated finds as a firm pedestal, however, we can now turn a backward-looking spyglass built from the linguistic reconstruction of early languages to catch some lively glimpses of that archaic world. Words, as it happens, sometimes survive the millennia better than material objects, and they do so best in areas in which the culture changed only very slowly\u2014as in the far north, where the intense winter cold discouraged immigrants.1\n\nAll across Europe to the north of the linguistically numerous Indo-Europeans2 live speakers of the Uralic language family (fig. 2.2). Their modern tongues include Finnish, Estonian, and Lappish in the northwest, plus Mordvin and a great many others in Russia, all the way into Siberia just east of the Ural Mountains. Hungarian, too, belongs to this group, its speakers having moved into central Europe from the Urals only a thousand years ago. But as near as we can tell, the Uralic speakers of the far north are the \"original\" inhabitants of that area, at least since the late Ice Age. That is, they followed the retreating ice sheets\u2014and the great herds of tundra animals\u2014into the newly emerging land toward the end of the Palaeolithic. While the inhabitants of the Near East and southeastern Europe began to settle down and develop new ideas of exploiting plants and animals through domestication and farming (the stage we call the Neolithic: see fig. 0.3 and Chapter 3), the people north of this busy center continued for thousands of years in much the old way, adopting only a few new ideas from the Neolithic south. This short transitional phase we call the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age. It lasted there from roughly 10,000 to 4000 B.C. or later.\n\n_Figure 2.2_. Tree chart showing the relationship among some of the languages in the Uralic family, which extends across much of northern Eurasia. Over many millennia the modern Uralic languages (at the bottom) have slowly diverged in form from a common parent (at the top).\n\nThe Swedish scholar Bj\u00f6rn Collinder spent much of his life collecting and comparing the vocabulary of the various Uralic languages. Using the words that appeared in several Uralic branches, he divided his material into those terms which were clearly loans (mostly from Indo-European sources) and those which were not\u2014terms already part of the language when the speakers of early Uralic, like those of early Indo-European, began to spread. Reading through the \"native\" part of Collinder's comparative dictionary is like going on a visual walk through the Mesolithic or the late Palaeolithic. With the possible exception of terms that may already refer to herding reindeer (semidomestication), and a single term referring to metal, the native expressions common to these languages suffice to account only for a Mesolithic economy, whereas words for agriculture and the specific metals are later borrowings.3 (The italicized expressions in what follows represent the English meanings of words in the vocabulary common to Uralic speakers.)\n\nWe see, through the terms, that this land was little different from the tundra zone of the far north today. For example, their words tell us that they lived among _rivers_ , _lakes_ , _swamps_ , and _forests_. They encountered _snowstorms_ and _snowdrifts_ and _trampled snow_ , but they also had a verb for _keeping warm_ , as well as words for _fire_ and _coals_. Summer was, understandably, called _thaw-time._\n\nWhat might life have been like on a bright _morning_ in thawtime? The prime objective, of course, was to get food for the day\u2014and more if possible, to preserve for the winter ahead. As in other preagricultural societies, with no crops to provide a regular food source, the women and children undoubtedly spent much of the day gathering wild plant food close to camp (a fairly safe task), while the men wandered farther afield hunting animal food. To deal with the youngest children while they gathered, the women had _portable cradles_ , probably made from short poles and soft hides. To help in their collecting, they fashioned containers such as _baskets_ and _birchbark pails_ , by _peeling the bark_ from _birch_ , _willow_ , and _linden_ trees.\n\nAmong the tastiest things to collect were the various sorts of wild _berries_ and _seeds_ that ripened through the summer, as well as _eggs_ from the _nests_ of the many _birds_ that roosted there. (As for species, we hear of _grouse_ , _sparrows_ , and _crows_.) But these people also knew of _intoxicating mushrooms_ , which they almost certainly collected from time to time for ritual purposes. Narcotics of all sorts seem always to have been in demand for hallucinogenic rituals. By their means the participants could quickly come to see the inhabitants of the spirit world\u2014dead ancestors and the like\u2014of whom they could inquire about the future, cures for illness, lost objects, or other mysteries.\n\nCollecting had its little hazards. A variety of _sticker bushes_ like nettle, thistle, and wild rose grew in the area, for which the inhabitants had a single name. After all, what you needed to know about them was not their botanical classification but the practical fact that those plants were the kind that hurt! The foragers also encountered _snakes_ , _lizards_ , _worms_ , _ants_ , and\u2014scourge of the tundra\u2014hungry little _flies_ and _midges_. It is with relief that we catch sight of _butterflies_ among the flying swarms.\n\nThe things collected may have included more than food\u2014for example, the soft local _mosses_ , usable as stuffing for cushions and sleeping pads. For although these early people did not have permanent houses, they built seasonal shelters of _wood_ and perhaps hides, to shelter themselves as comfortably as possible from the elements while they moved around at intervals to follow the changing sources of food. In fact, they had a special word for _tent poles_ , which they could have fashioned from _aspen or poplar, spruce, fir_ , or any of the other abundant trees.\n\nThey also built _raised wooden storage frames_ for _hoards_ of food to be preserved for leaner seasons. The seeds kept well just as they were, while berries, fish, and thin strips of meat could be dried for later use. But to keep these precious stores safe from the prowling _wolves_ and other predators, they had to build protective _fences._\n\nWhile the women gathered plants and eggs, the men presumably searched out moving prey; interestingly, they designated _hunting and fishing_ with the same word. As weapons they could use _nets, lines, traps, arrows_ , and _knives_. To stalk their prey, they had regular _paths_ , and they knew how _to ford_ streams. The quarry must have included animals like _reindeer_ and _hares_ , as well as _fish_ of all sorts\u2014especially types of _salmon_ and _pike_. The _snares_ we hear of may have been used to catch birds as well as fish. If the kill or the catch was big enough, _sledges_ made with _runners_ could serve to _drag_ or _carry_ it home.\n\nBack at camp, when the food was brought in, there was much to do. The meat could be cut up with knives, some to be dried and preserved for winter, some to be eaten on the spot. We don't know who did the cooking, but we can deduce that _soup or porridge_ often graced the menu. To make it, they _boiled_ the ingredients in _water_ and _fished them out_ of the _cooking pot_ with a _ladle_. They also knew how to _roast_ food on a _spit_. _Fat_ and _oil_ were so important to this cold-climate diet that they merited several terms.\n\nThere were other jobs besides preparing the food. The warm furs of hares, reindeer, and _foxes_ needed to be prepared and preserved for winter wraps by carefully _scraping the hides_. The baskets and birchbark pails, as well as the hunting and fishing nets, lines, and snares, needed making and later mending. To manufacture the latter and to sew the hides, _string_ was prepared from _fiber plants_ (which, like the sticker bushes, got a single catchall function-based name) or from _stringy body parts_ \u2014indiscriminately gut, sinew, veins, or tendon. These people also knew how to _twist_ various _fibers_ into _rope_ to _tie_ things up and into thinner thread to _stitch_ on _patches_ and _fasteners_ with the help of a _needle._\n\nIn their _bags_ of tools, besides knives, needles, and string, they had _picks, flints, combs, scoops_ , and _glue_ , along with _borers_ for _boring holes_. They tell us they also knew how to _carve_. Of some of these early activities we have the physical remains, but we wouldn't have known about gluing, for instance, if they hadn't left the words behind.\n\nDuring at least some _months (moon-ths)_ of the _year_ , the camps must have included more than just a _mother_ and _father_ with their _children_ because terms for both the older and younger male and female _relations_ of both _husband_ and _wife_ have come down to us. So we can imagine them sitting around the campfire of an _evening_ in larger groups, making and mending tools and wraps while they swapped interesting stories of their adventures, of their _friends or comrades_ and of the women's _suitors_. Sometimes people would _wrangle_ , _admonish_ , or _curse_ and sometimes _get high_. But they also knew how to _give presents_ and _distribute goods_. It is noteworthy that the word for _language_ also sometimes meant \"the news,\" \"a report,\" or \"a legend.\" Despite the friends and relatives we noticed, there just weren't very many humans around yet, and news of anything at all, even a new technique or tool, must have seemed very interesting. (To get a sense of this, imagine how hungry for news you would feel upon being released from a snowbound hut in Alaska after six months of winter.)\n\nIt would have been people living in a world much like this one, around 15,000 B.C., who produced our oldest preserved fiber artifact (fig. 2.3), a neatly made specimen found accidentally by the abbot A. Glory as he and other archaeologists were working in the famous painted caves of Lascaux, in southern France. He recounts the incident:\n\nAbout two in the morning, exhausted with the work of copying the engravings on the ceiling of the apse, my helpers . . . and I were going to relax by hunting for new drawings and by exploring new galleries. I picked up a compact lump of clay which sealed this fissure [running between two galleries]; the clod broke into several pieces, which I took into my hands with the intention of pulverizing them to verify their makeup. As I examined the profile of the first bit, . . . I noticed a fine black line which crossed the surface from one end to the other. . . .\n\nMechanically with the tip of the blade of my pocket knife I tapped at the unexpected black line . . . The little lump of clay split open into two slabs like the leaves of a book. I saw immediately the carbonaceous imprint of a sort of fillet with twisted lines stretching the entire length of the lump. I interpreted this as the remains of a plaited vine, or some such thing.\n\nThe second piece opened the same way, but the positive and negative traces appeared to me to represent a more complicated interlace. The third lump broke both lengthwise and crosswise, and the fourth was not touched, to serve as witness . . .\n\nIntrigued by these unexpected finds, we dissected square by square the rest of the clay covering, but to our great disappointment we could disclose nothing further, except for numerous particles of soot as everywhere in this layer, resulting probably from the debris of the torches . . . which had once served for light. . . . Seen [later] in the crisp light of day, there was no doubt possible: the fresh imprints, both concave and convex, in the first piece presented the very clear characteristics of a twisted cord formed of several strands on which one could distinguish even the puffiness of their twists.\"\n\n_Figure 2.3_. Earliest preserved string, reconstructed: a heavy cord twisted from three two-ply fiber strings, found fossilized in the painted caves of Lascaux, France, ca. 15,000 B.C.\n\nLaboratory analysis showed the piece to have been made from vegetable fiber\u2014too far disintegrated, alas, for tests to determine the plant species\u2014and twisted from three two-ply cords (fig. 2.3). The plied cords, moreover, had each been formed by twisting their component strands in the other direction from that in which they had originally been spun. Such opposite twisting keeps the cord from coming apart once finished (see Chapter 1)\u2014an important principle that craftworkers had discovered even at this early date. Abbot Glory concluded that the threefold cord had probably served to guide these early people down the dark and treacherous passage from one gallery of the cave to the other. Nor, as the proverb says, was it quickly broken.\n\nWe know for a fact, then, that twisted fiber string and thread were available in the Palaeolithic and that by 15,000 B.C. people possessed as much skill as anyone could wish for making cordage. After all, they had probably been practicing for five to ten thousand years already. Contrary to what one often reads in the literature, Palaeolithic peoples did not need to wait for the domestic plants and animals of the next great era, the New Stone Age, or Neolithic, to have fibers to use. For the relatively short lengths of string necessary for Palaeolithic tasks, an abundance of raw material lay for the taking in the wild.\n\nEven today people unaccustomed to buying everything they want ready-made will manufacture bits of string and rope on the spot, using whatever is at hand. A Swedish archaeologist exploring central Asia in the 1930s described Chinese camel pullers in Mongolia who would \"simply snatch a tuft from a camel shedding its hair and in a moment turn it into a piece of string for repairing a pack-saddle or the like, by twining it against the thigh. . . .\" In the absence of tame animals, however, wild plants will do quite as well. Flax, hemp, nettle, ramie, jute, sisal, esparto, maguey, yucca, elm, linden, willow\u2014the list of usable plants goes on and on, in both the New World and the Old. Indeed, all the earliest string and thread that we possess consist of plant fiber, starting with the cord from Lascaux, from 15,000 B.C. and continuing with the finds of string and cloth preserved from early Neolithic sites in the Near East, between 7000 and 5500 B.C., and the earliest-known artifacts of cord, netting, and basketry in the New World, dating to 8500 to 6500 B.C.\n\nNor must one go through the long and laborious process of freeing the fibers from the woody matrix within which they grow, as we do with our crops of fiber plants. The winter weather does that quite well, if not so efficiently, to lone plants, slowly rotting away the plant material around the fibers. I have only to walk out into my yard and collect off the back fence the long, dew-retted fibers of the passion fruit vine that volunteered to grow there last year. Singly the filaments will readily snap if I tug at them, but collected in a bundle and given a few twists around each other, they form a yard-long hank of string as good as any from the store.\n\nThe transient life-style of the Palaeolithic hunters and gatherers would have required such an at-need and on-the-spot approach to making string. If you have no settled home, you must carry all your possessions, so you tend not to acquire much\u2014no more than absolutely necessary. It is thus still with the !Kung of southwestern Africa, who continue to pursue a hunter-gatherer way of life. Acquisitiveness is a Neolithic invention. String nets to catch a meal and carry it home for the family, plus wraps to keep warm and a few small tools and light containers to hold and prepare the food, for thousands of years were possessions enough. The heavier crafts like pottery awaited the advent of permanent houses to store things in.\n\nHence the first craft other than chipping stone blades and carving wooden implements (another perished product) and the first important craft not dangerous to the children must have been the fashioning of objects of and with string and fibers. We have no direct record of who did what chores in that distant time, but we will not be far off in surmising that the women were already involved in this innocuous task while they tended their toddlers around camp.\n\nIt is also on a carving of a woman that we found our first clear evidence for fiber string. Let's return to look at this woman again (fig. 2.1). Her skirt is fashioned of cords suspended from a twisted hip band and hanging only in the rear. Almost all the Venus figures are completely naked, but a few others wear clothing. All these come from Ukraine and European Russia, which lie as far toward the eastern end of the Gravettian culture as Lespugue lies toward the western (see map, fig. 2.4). A few of the Venuses from the site of Kostienki wear simple bands or sashes, but the Venus of Gagarino (fig. 2.5 a) sports a string skirt: a shorter, tidier skirt than her French sister, and this time hanging only in the front, but covering just as little, which is to say, nothing at all of what modern Western culture demands that a woman keep covered.\n\n_Figure 2.4_. Map of the area of Europe in which Palaeolithic artifacts of the Gravettian culture are found, showing regions and some of the sites in which ancient or modern evidence occurs for string skirts (see fig. 2.1 and 2.5\u20132.9). The dashed line indicates the approximate southward extent of the northern ice sheet at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic.\n\nA skirt so skimpy, made of loose strings, can't have been very warm, and it certainly doesn't answer to _our_ notions of modesty. So what was it for? Why did people who owned so little go to all the trouble of making and wearing a garment that was so nonfunctional? And what's more, why did women choose to wear such a thing for so many thousands of years? We have representations of women in little string skirts, here and there in this same broad geographical area through the next twenty thousand years, and even, around 1300 B.C., some actual string skirts preserved or partially preserved for us in the archaeological record.\n\n_Figure 2.5_. Stone Age figurines of women wearing string skirts: from (a) Gagarino, Russia (ca. 20,000 B.C.); (b) \u0160ipintsi, western Ukraine (ca. 3500 B.C.); (c) Vin\u010da, Serbia (4500 B.C.); (d) Crnokala\u010dka Bara, Yugoslav Macedonia (ca. 3000 B.C.). Compare figs. 2.6\u20132.8. The bindings on the feet of (d) look very much like the crude bast shoes with cloth leg bindings used by Russian and Ukrainian peasants into this century.\n\nDuring the Neolithic, as people settled down in one place to practice the new art of farming (making it much easier for us to locate where they lived), we find an increasing array of clay figurines of women in string skirts, from sites in central and eastern Europe\u2014the old heartland of the Gravettian culture. (In this area the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, lasts from shortly after 6000 B.C. to the introduction of metal, around 3000 B.C.) We have such statuettes from various parts of Ukraine and the Balkans (fig. 2.5 b\u2013d).\n\nIn Denmark and northern Germany, moreover, in addition to figurines, we have the remains of string skirts on the bodies of young women buried in log coffins during the Bronze Age, late in the second millennium B.C. One of these skirts (fig. 2.6), made of woolen cords stained a rich brown by the acidic groundwater that preserved it, is complete; we can inspect its mode of manufacture. The thick plied cords that form the skirt were anchored by being woven through a narrow belt band, from which they hung down to a length of about fifteen inches. At the bottom they have been caught together by a twined spacing cord, which serves to keep them in order. Below that, the ends have been looped into an ornamental row of knots, making the bottom edge so heavy that the skirt must have had quite a swing to it, like the long, beaded fringe on a flapper's dance dress. The belt band on which all depends is so long that the skirt was worn wrapped around twice, rather low on the hips, and tied in the center front with the generous ends of the band. Other finds of less well-preserved string skirts show much the same design features, except that some were finished off at the bottom by encasing the ends of the cords in little metal sleeves (fig. 2.7). These, too, would have given the skirt a considerable swish to it, by their weight, as well as caught the ear with the click and the eye with the gleam of the metal.\n\n_Figure 2.6_. String skirt of wool preserved on the body of a young woman found at Egtved, Denmark, and dating to the fourteenth century B.C. (Bronze Age). She wore it wrapped around twice and slung rather low on the hips so it reached to just above the knees. The skirt is now displayed in the National Museum in Copenhagen.\n\n_Figure 2.7_. Remains of a young woman laid to rest in a short string skirt and other finery, from \u00d8lby, Denmark (Bronze Age). The ends of the strings were encased in little tubes of bronze. The rows of tubes (largely fused together now by oxidation) show how short the skirt was: the original miniskirt.\n\nEuropean scholars were horrified, when the complete skirt was dug up at Egtved, that their ancestresses should have worn so indecent an apparel and proclaimed that the lady must have worn a linen shift underneath it, now disintegrated without trace, to hide her nakedness. The figurines indicate otherwise. The Egtved girl at least wore a woolen blouse, but the spry young girls in the bronze images wear nothing at all but a string skirt of the same design, and a rather shorter one at that.\n\nIn no case do the string skirts\u2014whether Palaeolithic, Neolithic, or Bronze Age\u2014provide for either warmth or modesty. In all cases they are worn by women. To solve the mystery of why they were maintained for so long, I think we must follow our eyes. Not only do the skirts hide nothing of importance, but if anything, they attract the eye precisely to the specifically female sexual areas by framing them, presenting them, or playing peekaboo with them. In all the Venus figures the breasts, belly, and pubic area are heavily emphasized; that is how the sculptures came to be called Venuses. Hands, feet, and head are often barely carved at all. To us, with our modern city standard of slim \"fitness,\" these women may seem unattractively fat. But many other cultures view plumpness as the essence of female beauty, as our own culture did in, say, Rubens's day. Of course, fat played a different role then. A woman who becomes too thin will become temporarily infertile (as modern female athletes discover). So a fat woman is in a far better state to survive and to support her child with her own milk during seasonal famine. In short, obesity helps ensure successful reproduction.\n\nOur best guess, then, is that string skirts indicated something about the childbearing ability or readiness of the woman, perhaps simply that she was of childbearing age, having reached menarche but not yet menopause, or perhaps that she had reached puberty but was not yet \"married\" (whatever that might have meant in the particular society: still a virgin, or still without child, or still without a regular mate)\u2014in other words, that she was in some sense \"available\" as a bride. The notion of marriage, as opposed to mere mating, is so important to the human race that the need to negotiate this problem has been seriously suggested as one of the most powerful drives toward the development of language.4 Indeed, clear signals as to the marriage status of women are common around the world, from the tiny gold band around the fourth finger to signs visible from far away, such as the squash blossom hairdo of the unmarried Hopi girl and the glittering coin-covered cap of the newlywed Mordvin wife. Depending upon the society, such a marker might carry with it a considerable sense of honor and specialness, certifying the wearer as possessing the mysterious ability to create new human life.\n\nIf this is the case, then we do well to look at the gently comical tale which Homer tells, in the fourteenth book of the _Iliad_ , of how Hera set about to seduce Zeus.\n\nHoping to divert her all-powerful husband's attention from the battlefield of Troy for a while, Hera goes to her divine apartments to dress herself in a way that her spouse will not ignore. She washes, puts on perfume, braids her hair, and dons a \"divine garment\" and golden jewelry. Then she carefully ties around herself, for this special occasion, her \"girdle fashioned with a hundred tassels.\" Finally she goes to Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love, and asks sweetly if she might borrow Aphrodite's girdle as well. In other words, to make very sure of her quarry, she asks to use the divine archetype of all such girdles, into which, Homer says, \"have been crafted all the bewitchments\u2014in it are Love and Lust and Flirtation\u2014persuasion that has stolen away the mind of even the carefulest thinkers.\" Aphrodite obligingly takes off her special girdle (she wears it constantly, it seems, as a badge of her office) and places it in the hand of the queen of the gods, instructing her to put it on under the fold of her breast. (This is the literal wording and describes exactly how the Venus of Gagarino wears hers. But the modern translators, not understanding the garment, usually tamper with the passage.) Aphrodite tells Hera that with this girdle on, \"what you wish for in your mind will not go unaccomplished!\"\n\nNor does it. Zeus spots Hera coming toward him across the mountaintops, forgets everything else, and demands that she lie with him then and there.\n\nWhat could this be, this \"girdle of a hundred tassels,\" but our string skirt? The form is right, in fact unique, and the signal that Zeus picks up\u2014that it has to do with making love to a woman\u2014is very close to what we have surmised. That the archetypical one is owned by Aphrodite falls closer still; in her hands we might almost call it a mating girdle.\n\nThe string skirt is still alive and well, preserved in many a folk costume in the old heartland of the Gravettian culture of twenty thousand years ago: south-central and eastern Europe (see fig. 2.4). What's more, the symbolic function that we deduced from the ancient examples is preserved right along with the form.\n\nFar to the east lie the Mordvins, just east of Moscow and west of the Volga River and Ural Mountains. They speak a Uralic language related to Finnish and the other northernmost languages on the European continent (see figs. 2.2 and 2.4). Well into this century custom had it that a Mordvin girl would don a long black string apron at the time of her betrothal (fig. 2.8 a). Hanging only in the back, like that of the Venus of Lespugue but wider, it marked her as a wife. Its function, claims a Finnish woman who has researched the local costumes thoroughly, was that of \"the symbol of a married woman,\" and as such it \"belonged to the same category as the woollen and often fringed loin drapings of the Southern Great Russians, the Bulgarians, the Serbs and the Rumanians.\" Women wore very simple ones for every day, but quite elaborate ones for festive occasions.\n\nThe typical peasant costume in most of the central Balkans and Ukraine consists of a white chemise of soft vegetable fiber (linen, hemp, or more recently cotton), over which the woman usually wears a pair of aprons, one in the front, the other in the back. Among the Vlachs of eastern Serbia and in the Banat area of Romania just to the east, as well as among the Walachians of southeastern Romania (fig. 2.8 b), the solid-woven part of the apron is remarkably short, half to seven-eighths of the length being occupied by an enormous fringe predominantly of black (Serbia) or red (Romania). Furthermore, the women decorate the front apron, at least, with a woven pattern of lozenges, generally taken as a powerful fertility symbol. These lozenges, usually with little curly hooks around the edge, rather graphically, if schematically, represent a woman's vulva. In parts of Romania the young, unmarried woman attached to her apron at the waist a chain with rings and keys hanging from it\u2014another unsubtle image of the mechanics of sex. But if she reached the age of thirty without having borne children\u2014woman's most important work in an expanding society\u2014she had to move the chain to the bottom of her costume, to show symbolically (it is said) that she had trampled and wasted her childbearing capacity and duty.\n\n_Figure 2.8_. String skirts among recent folk costumes: (a) Mordvin, back apron (black); (b) Walachian (Romanian), front apron (red, worn with a back apron identical except for not having the lozenge pattern); (C) Yugoslav Macedonian, front apron (red with black; see fig. 2.9 for the accompanying sash); (d) Albanian, front apron (black with red lozenges). (See map, fig. 2.4, for locations of these areas.)\n\nAll these motifs reinforce one another. In medieval Russia the iron lock plates of the storerooms and storage chests were often wrought in the form of a hook-surrounded lozenge, while as far back as the mid-first millennium B.C. keys to women's jewelry boxes were being made in phallic shapes. The image of inserting the key to unlock the bounty of the storehouse needs no further explication, and it links the ring-and-key \"jewelry\" directly to the lozenges on the aprons they adorn. Everything\u2014lozenge, ring and key, and string apron\u2014is clearly there to promote, protect, and celebrate female fertility.\n\nFarther south, in Macedonia, there remain many vestiges of the string skirt, all done in fiery reddish orange. A friend brought me a Macedonian outfit from her costume collection to try on (see figs. 2.8 c and 2.9). The front part consisted of a short woven apron with a piece appliqu\u00e9d onto it that exactly framed the pubic bone underneath. Below this hung a weighty fringe nearly double the length of the solid part. We tied it on to me and began to wrestle with the other half, a girdle perhaps twelve feet long, woven with white and black threads in opposite directions and terminating in a great fiery cascade of red fringe at either end (fig. 2.9). I couldn't help noticing that these fringes were divided and wrapped, redivided and wrapped again in an ever-widening pattern, much the way I knew some of the Bronze Age belt ends to have been worked.\n\n_Figure 2.9_. Red and black woolen fringed sash, used to form back of string skirt on costume from Drenok, in Yugoslav Macedonia (see fig. 2.8 c). Surviving Bronze Age sashes from Europe show a similar method and pattern of dividing and wrapping the threads.\n\n\"OK, we start by holding one end against one side of your rear,\" said my friend, \"then wrapping this whole length of belt band around you about six times . . . and tucking the other end through so it hangs next to the first one. . . . What I really need now is a hook to make them stay together. . . . Oh!\" she exclaimed in surprise. \"There's a little hook right here where I need it; I never noticed it before.\" Proof that we had put it on right, the hook anchored the two ends of the girdle beside each other so they formed a solid mass of apron and fringe in the back. Because the wool of the fringe had been combed before spinning, the fibers lay maximally close together, creating a very dense, almost uncomfortably hard cord, which was so heavy that it swung with a life of its own.\n\nThat was the greatest surprise of all: the independent life of what now enveloped me. I danced around the room from one mirror to the next, fascinated by the way the heavy fringes moved, completely differently from any other garment I had ever worn. I felt exhilarated, powerful; I wanted to make them swish and jump, see what they would do next. My friend laughed and admitted that it made her feel the same way when she wore the costume and that she was always as reluctant as I to take it off. For days afterward I pondered the unexpected strength of the experience.\n\nA sense of powerfulness? Is that a part of the symbolism of the skirt? The ability to create new life must surely have been viewed as a form of ultimate power. Exhilaration in wearing it? Was that, too, part of the reason why this garment lasted for twenty thousand years?\n\nHowever that may be, I also began to realize that the other bright orangy-red Macedonian aprons, which have much larger woven parts than this one but also much heftier fringes than the typical European apron, were \"changed later forms\" of the string skirt, as linguists would say of words evolving through time. (The processes are remarkably similar, as we shall see.) Such aprons exist not only in the Yugoslavian area, but also in the section of Macedonia now ruled by Bulgaria to the east. To the west, Albanian women (fig. 2.8 d) still wear string aprons with long black cords (like the Vlach and Mordvin ones) and with the lozenges across their very narrow woven tops (like Slavic and Romanian ones).\n\nGreece, too, preserves traces of the string skirt\u2014for example, in the Argolid (see map, fig. 2.4). Most women now wear modern Western clothing there, but some of them still possess string skirts for childbearing emergencies. The women's folk costume of older times had included a special girdle known as a _zostra_ , made of red wool in a kind of knotless netting called sprang.5 It was worked to about twelve feet long, with a deep fringe. \"The women of [the town of] Kephalovrisso consider the _zostra_ as sacred,\" the researchers tell us. \"They place it on the abdomen of the woman who has a difficult labour and maintain it does work wonders. . . . Very few old women still know how to make a _zostra_. Young women inherit it from their mothers and usually refuse to part with it, as they like to keep it as a charm.\" I have heard its aid is also sought if the girl is having trouble conceiving. One could describe it as a talisman to help out the forces of modern medicine where the crucial age-old matter of bearing children is at stake.\n\nThe very name for this special girdle is ancient: _zostra_ from Classical Greek _z\u014dst\u0113r_. It comes from the same root as the word _z\u014dn\u0113_ , meaning \"belt,\" which Homer used for the hundred-tasseled girdles of Hera and Aphrodite and from which English _zone_ has been borrowed with a slight shift of meaning (now a belt of land). The ancient Greek word is, in fact, a changed later form of the Indo-European word for a belt\u2014any kind of belt\u2014that is also preserved in Albanian, Slavic, Baltic, and Iranian.\n\nLanguages constantly change, but only slowly and according to some fairly regular principles. As a result, linguists can reconstruct many of the details of earlier forms of language. We have already appealed to language sources and will do so again many times in this book, since the terms for the products of women's work, like food and clothing, generally survive longer than the objects themselves. Unfortunately one of the principles by which languages change is through loss. (For example, the old terms for the trappings of a horse-drawn buggy are dropping out of our language because we now use cars instead.) As a result of such limitations, the farther back in time we go, the less we can reconstruct; we are doing well when we haven't lost sight of our quarry by the time we get back to the start of the Bronze Age.\n\nAnd so we find it with Indo-European words for clothing. I have mentioned the Indo-European family before. This huge group of languages (fig. 2.10) already extended across most of Europe and half the Near East (all the way to the middle of India\u2014hence the name we have given it) before Columbus sailed to the \"New World.\" The numerous tongues had developed from a single language or closely related group of dialects apparently spoken in a fairly small area in the Neolithic, probably in southeastern Europe near the Caucasus. Early in the Bronze Age, however, the speakers of these constantly and gradually changing dialects began to fan out across the continents, losing direct contact with each other. So what had once existed as a single Indo-European language, where people could understand one another (if only imperfectly, thanks to regional differences), slowly became a set of mutually unintelligible\u2014but still closely related\u2014languages (fig. 2.10). Such are Greek, Albanian, and Slavic; such also are the \"Romance\" languages of western Europe (French, Spanish, Italian, etc., all of them changed later forms of the \"Roman\" language, Latin) and the \"Germanic\" group farther north (including English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian). The reconstructed language from which all these modern tongues came is known for convenience as proto-Indo-European, since we don't know what those early people called themselves.\n\n_Figure 2.10_. Tree chart of languages in the Indo-European family, which\u2014before Columbus\u2014extended from northwestern Europe to northern India. It is now the dominant family of the New World as well. Compare fig. 2.2, showing a tree of the Uralic languages. The Anatolian branch, clearly related to the others, may in fact be sister rather than daughter to the Indo-European family.\n\nWhat strikes me so about this word for \"belt\"\u2014 _z\u014dn\u0113_ , _zostra,_ and their cousins\u2014is that it is one of only two terms that we can reconstruct for clothing in proto-Indo-European. The other term, significantly, is the generic word for clothing which Homer uses for the vague other \"garment\" that Hera puts on first as she dresses to visit Zeus. That word is _heanon_ , from the same Indo-European word root as _vest, vestment_ (which we have borrowed into English from Latin) and related also to the Greek _Hestia,_ Latin _Vesta_ , the name of the goddess of the hearth and home. (The semantic connection between \"clothes\" and \"hearth and home\" seems originally to have lain in things that help you keep warm.) Thus, when we reconstruct linguistically back as far as we can in Europe\u2014admittedly, merely to about the Early Bronze Age (third millennium B.C.), when the Indo-European groups began to lose contact with one another\u2014we see only a general word for a warming wrap and a word for a belt. Clothes don't get much simpler.\n\nCan this picture be right? Is this all that these people wore? Yes, in essence it seems so. Slightly later some of these speakers borrowed the notion of the tunic, word and all, from their Semitic-speaking neighbors to the southeast. But three garments\u2014white tunic, belt, and oblong or tubular overwrap\u2014remained the basis of the European peasant woman's costume from then until the present. Even the modern business woman who wears a white blouse, woolen skirt, and belt to work dresses in a barely changed, later form of Bronze Age European clothing. After all, if it works well, why alter it? Fashionable details may come and go, but the fundamentals of how we clothe our bodies are remarkably conservative.\n\nThe \"string skirt\" or \"tasseled girdle\" appears to have been fundamental to women's clothing in that part of the world since long before the Bronze Age, and it has retained one of the old and fundamental names.\n\nThe Palaeolithic is a remote era that ended more than ten thousand years ago, yet it yields some remarkably sharp details. People were already making a diverse array of things from twisted fibers, one of which, the string skirt, was specifically associated with women and with women's ability to bear children. We can guess, therefore, that women were already heavily involved with the making of thread and such clothing as existed, as part of their work. Note, too, that this first type of clothing for which we have good evidence is symbolic rather than purely utilitarian and suggests the relative importance of women and their work.\n\nWithin the Palaeolithic, \"fiber craft\" would have been largely a matter of people making short lengths of string specifically for the job of the moment. Fibers from wild plants would have sufficed, stripped directly from trees or vines, or noticed and gathered after the rain and sun had retted them naturally by disintegrating the rest of the stem and leaving the fibers bare. But it probably didn't take the remaining ten to fifteen thousand years of the Palaeolithic for people to figure out how to speed nature along by helping with the retting process. (The archaic verb _to ret_ means \"to make [something] rot,\" just as _to fell_ a tree means \"to make [the tree] _fall_.\")\n\nFrom the beginning of the next age in the far north, the Mesolithic, we have well-made hunting and fishing nets composed of fiber stripped from the bark of elms and willows, from sites in Finland and Lithuania. This technology fits perfectly with the linguistic data from proto-Uralic and suggests that people had also learned early of the strength and pliability of these materials. Bark fibers are as useful for making baskets, mats, fences, and weirs as for making string.\n\nWe also have the evidence for the fashioning of string skirts. The Gravettian skirts show the simplest of designs; the cords merely hang from a twisted belt band. No doubt the women to whom it was so important an object put some thought and time, over the millennia, into making it sturdier, perhaps also neater and more beautiful. The design of the earliest string skirt that has survived intact (that from Egtved, Denmark) so closely resembles the peculiar way that a warp was traditionally prepared in Europe (up until the introduction of new looms in Roman and medieval times)6 that I have often wondered whether women in Europe had already invented weaving itself during Palaeolithic times, as a way of making a stronger and better string skirt.\n\nString seems such a simple, almost inevitable invention, yet its appearance was a momentous step down the road of technology. Invented early, it was known worldwide. Weaving, on the contrary, is much more complicated and may have been thought up only once, much too late to spread with humankind. Many cultures were still ignorant of it as this century began.\n\n1One doesn't have a term for something one doesn't know yet, so if an ancient term for something exists, what the word signified must have been a known entity. Thus a Palaeolithic hunter could not have had words for rifles and phantom jets but would have had terms for knives and nets once the objects were invented. One of the beauties of language is that it allows us to devise words for whatever we want to talk about.\n\n2The Indo-European language family, which happens to include English, Spanish, French, Russian, and most of the other languages of Europe, is one of the largest in the world today, thanks in part to its expansion across the Western Hemisphere. Farther on in this chapter is a more detailed discussion of the family. See fig. 2.10.\n\n3Even for the metal, there is no linguistic consensus on which metal was meant, and therefore, the term probably referred originally simply to metals in general. Pure, soft metal occurs here and there, and we know that such metal was picked up and used long before people learned to smelt it. (See Chapter 3.)\n\n4The argument is that monogamy is a more successful strategy of reproduction for women than polygamy because, by obtaining the services of a single male, a woman can better protect and feed her children. For the male, however, the best strategy for representation in the ongoing gene pool is polygamy\u2014as long as the children survive. But if the children seriously require his help, then monogamy may be necessary. In that case he and his family may want recompense for what he is giving up, while the woman and her family may want assurances that he will not let down his end of the bargain. It is these intricacies of negotiation that language can make plain.\n\n5The method of manufacture plus the color make me wonder whether we perhaps possess a girdle of just this sort from the Bronze Age. Two woolen textiles were found at Roswinkel, in the northern Netherlands, one being a fragment of red knotless netting, like the Greek _zostra_ , and the other a belt woven with alternating groups of threads in a way that suggests number magic (see Chapter 6). Sprang itself dates back in Europe to the Neolithic at least.\n\n6Both were made by weaving a narrow ribbed band and pulling the weft of that band out a great distance to one side to form the fringe or the warp threads, as the case might be.\n\nCourtyard Sisterhood\n\nMen may work from sun to sun,  \nBut women's work is never done.\n\n**Welsh rabbit** : oddments of cheese melted with leftover ale and served over toast for supper when the hunters fail to come home with a rabbit.\n\nToward the end of the Palaeolithic era, some ten thousand years ago, the way women in particular lived their lives began to change dramatically, as the result of a seemingly small but new idea. Heretofore families had always been on the move, shifting from one temporary abode to another as sources of ready food came and went with the seasons. Now, as the great ice sheets and the vast herds of tundra animals retreated northward across Europe, some humans in the rapidly warming south stopped following the animals and began to settle down, obtaining their food locally. The era that followed, with its multitude of cultural changes, we call the Neolithic, or New Stone Age.\n\nThese settlers didn't know it\u2014they would not have possessed such a concept yet\u2014but this life of permanent abodes started the greatest pyramid scheme of all time. A pyramid scheme starts small and gets bigger and bigger, leaving the last people to pay for all. (Chain letters are often of this sort.) When you settle down, you begin to acquire things to make your survival and that of your children easier; soon you need more tools and helpers\u2014offspring\u2014to care for the ever-increasing number of things and surviving children. At the end of the Palaeolithic, around 8000 B.C., the entire continent of Europe contained scarcely five hundred thousand people\u2014roughly today's population of Florence, Italy, or Denver, Colorado. Population experts estimate that Earth as a whole had five million humans then, less than half of what greater Los Angeles alone has today. It took the next fifteen hundred years for that number to double to ten million. Today, by contrast, we are doubling our billions of world inhabitants in a mere twenty-five years and have nearly reached what will be the ultimate layer of this pyramid, one way or another, as we run out of fresh water and breathable oxygen, not to mention wood and metals. We find ourselves stuck with the final bill for some five hundred generations of uncontrolled acquisition and child producing begun in the Neolithic.\n\nIn sum, settling down changed radically the relationship of people to one another and to the environment, as it altered how people now came to behave. To understand the relations between women and their new work in a sedentary world, we must therefore first understand what made settled life such a novel project.\n\nWhy did people stop being nomadic? Archaeologists used to debate the question in chicken-or-egg form: whether people first discovered how to domesticate plants and animals, then settled down to tend the fields they had planted, or whether they settled first, then began taming what they found in the vicinity. It was even argued for a while that people stopped moving around because they had invented pottery, a commodity too heavy and breakable to carry about. But we now know that true pottery was invented several thousand years after permanent settlements began.\n\nEvidence from recent excavations in Turkey, Syria, and Israel shows that at least in some cases people settled first, then domesticated their food supply. Huge stands of wild grain began to flourish in that area, as a result of the warming postglacial climate, from about 10,000 B.C. on, and people apparently began to find it possible to live off this wild grain and the animals it supported. Thus early settlement sites like Ain Mallaha in Syria and Suberde in Turkey (fig. 3.1) give evidence of permanent dwellings and storage pits, but only wild food. Furthermore, the first sign of domestication that we have, present at some of the earliest settlements, is not something that was eaten: It is the dog. This creature, which willingly chooses a human as the leader of its lifelong pack, was humankind's first friend, it seems, as well as its best.\n\n_Figure 3.1_. Map of Neolithic and other sites important to the early history of textiles.\n\nThe very act of stockpiling ripe grain for winter in the new village could well have led people to the idea of helping nature out by planting seed themselves. A woman going to the family storage bin during the early spring rains might find that the last of the winter store was already sprouting into new plants. Or perhaps some grain, dropped on the way home from the harvest, had sprung up just outside the doorstep. A little water during dry spells and a little weeding during wet ones ensures the crop\u2014in a most convenient place.\n\nBut soon an interesting symbiosis develops between the humans and their favorite plants. When it ripens, wild grain breaks off very easily from the stalk it grew on (as anyone knows who has gotten a sock full of seeds just by walking through a field of tall, dry grass). That is how the plant spreads its seeds to propagate. In the wild a seed that does not fall off the stalk easily is less likely than its more readily dehiscent neighbors to settle into a good spot to germinate, but conversely it is _more_ likely to be sitting there waiting to be found when the human collector comes by. The varieties of grain thus select rapidly toward kinds that cling firmly to the stem, once people gathering and sowing seed come into the equation. In fact, the plant becomes dependent upon the humans to wrestle its seeds free and plant them. Such changes in seed form constitute some of the clues we have that purposeful planting began between 10,000 and 7000 B.C.\n\nAnimals, too, change under domestic conditions. With the old-style Palaeolithic kills (the only alternative to daily foraging), it tended to be feast or famine: Everyone got together and rounded up a herd of something tasty, slaughtered the lot, gorged, and then went hungry again. Dry-curing a stock of meat could help even things out, but then you had to haul it about, and meat, even dried, is heavy. Once you settle in one place, however, different problems and solutions arise. If you kill a big animal far from your permanent residence, you must somehow convey the meat back home. You can no longer bring home to it. (The remains of animal bones at the early village of Suberde show how the hunters there solved this problem. Instead of carrying the largest and heaviest bones all the way home, the villagers cut them out at the kill site and used the hide as a bag in which to drag home by the shanks the rest of the carcass, now considerably lightened. This causes a peculiarly skewed distribution of bones at the dwelling site that archaeologists have nicknamed the schlepp effect.)\n\nBut what if you rounded up some middle-size animals, not too big to handle and not too small for the bother, walked them home on their own four legs, and stored them _alive_ , in a pen full of fodder, until you needed them one by one for food? Refrigeration on the hoof, as it were. True, the jumpy ones will probably break loose or get killed first for their trouble, but the more docile ones might last till spring and, like the grain, might then be found quietly reproducing. Thus selection in captivity tends toward docility and smaller biting equipment\u2014shorter muzzle, less prominent incisors, weaker neck muscles\u2014and less of a premium on invisibility to predators. (Protection from predators over more than one generation allows variations in hair growth and color that would otherwise make the animal nonviable.) These traits, too, show up in the archaeological record from the early Neolithic on.\n\nTo the hothead, being \"kept\" is exploitation; to the docile, symbiosis. It's partly in how you look at it. Individuals that could not have survived \"in the wild\" can live out their lives under protection. (Ants grow great flocks of aphids by protecting them, then \"milk\" them for their sugar. Exploitation or symbiosis?) Humans themselves, compared with other primates, show the typical signs of domestication in their reduced jaws, claws, neck muscles, and hair\u2014women even more than men. We partially domesticated ourselves first. In any case, many other species thrived under human care, and the humans rearranged their lives to care for the plants and animals that now came to depend on them.\n\nThese new labor arrangements differed from one region to another as a function of just which domestic animals, if any, became critical to the local food supply. Plants in themselves are compatible with child raising, but some animals are not\u2014especially the large draft animals used for plowing. Thus farming societies tend to divide into types depending on whether the plants are grown using a plow ( _agriculture_ , meaning \"field culture\") or by hand-tending alone ( _horticulture_ , \"garden culture\").\n\nBut it was not until some four thousand years after people had begun domesticating animals that they started to harness creatures to pull plows. So our next tale is of horticultural settlements, where the women were usually in charge of the kitchen-gardens and thus of the main food supply, along with the young children and the burgeoning fiber-crafts.\n\nPermanent abodes changed women's lives dramatically. Not least, it allowed women to stop carrying their children around. Women today who belong to hunter-gatherer societies, such as the !Kung in southwestern Africa, space their children three to four years apart. They can't physically handle more than that, and that number of children (considering that they don't all survive) is quite sufficient to keep the population going without overloading the resources of food and water. But once the family settles down, carrying the small children constantly is no longer necessary, so the babies _may_ come oftener, and there is always need for more hands on a farm, so more babies come to be _wanted_. Furthermore, the risk of disease and epidemic is far greater where larger numbers of people live in close quarters and among their own refuse. Cholera, typhoid, plague, and diphtheria all were diseases spread by such conditions, terrifying in their speed, devastating in their toll, and checked only recently by modern sanitation, immunization, and antibiotics. Babies are the most vulnerable to such attacks; thus, under those conditions, babies soon _needed_ to come more often to balance out the higher death toll.\n\nThis new Neolithic ethic of bearing large numbers of children (still practiced by many today, even where modern medicine now keeps most of these children alive) is evident both in the increasingly rapid rise of population during the Neolithic and in the representations of people: almost always women, and usually\u2014unlike the few male figures\u2014fat. These numerous figurines seem to be continuations of the Palaeolithic Venus figures, but with some marked differences.\n\nAt Jarmo, a Neolithic village that flourished around 7000 B.C. in Iraqi Kurdistan, plump women are modeled sitting down instead of standing\u2014perhaps a more characteristic pose in a stationary life. Jarmo is one of the earliest villages we know with firm evidence of both plants and animals being domestic. By 6000 B.C. at \u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck, in south-central Turkey, we see a strong and overt preoccupation with fertility and childbirth. Amid a frightening array of bulls' heads (plaster over actual skulls, with enormous horns), we see a no less scary plaster wall relief of a pregnant woman with her legs spread and her arms raised, concentric circles like a bull's-eye on her stomach (fig. 3.2). In another case a sculpted man and woman lie in close frontal embrace, and still another statuette shows an enormously plump woman sitting as she begins to deliver (fig. 3.3). But this is no ordinary scene of birthing: The lady's hands rest on a pair of formidable felines, perhaps lionesses, suggesting that she is in supernatural control of life.1 Many other figurines of plump women, mostly either sitting or lying, often with children clambering on them, come from the slightly later site of Hacilar nearby. The height of this reverence for obese women, however, comes with the reclining sculptures from early Malta (fig. 3.4). Such females\u2014special priestesses? queens?\u2014may remind the modern observer of nothing so much as a termite queen, whose only job is to lie quietly all her life, eating food and bearing young\u2014plump, pampered, pale and immobile. Or they may remind one of Odysseus' description of his men arriving at the palace of the king of Laistrygonia (possibly in the vicinity of Malta):\n\nAnd when they entered the famed halls, they came upon his wife, who was big as a mountain peak; and they were appalled at her.\n\n_Figure 3.2_. Relief sculpture of a pregnant woman, from the wall of a shrine at the early Neolithic town of \u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck, in Turkey. The hands, feet, and face are mostly gone now, but the preserved parts of the skin are covered with tiny red-painted designs, mostly forms of lozenges but here and there resembling plants. They probably imitate body paint used magically to help a woman through the dangerous and painful ordeal of childbirth.\n\n_Figure 3.3_. Clay statuette of an obese woman giving birth while seated with her hands on a pair of wild animals; found at the early Neolithic town of \u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck, in Turkey, ca. 6000 B.C.\n\n_Figure 3.4_. Neolithic figurine of a reclining woman, from the Mediterranean island of Malta. All the early female sculptures from Malta show great obesity.\n\nSettling down and being able to grow as much of something as one wanted not only changed the patterns of childbearing but also inevitably changed the types of tasks to be parceled out. In the fiber crafts, vast new supplies made it now possible to consider making big pieces of cloth rather than just narrow bands and belts. But to do that, the craftswoman first had to redesign her loom.\n\nOur earliest clear proof of woven cloth comes once again from Jarmo, Iraq, in the form of two little clay balls with textile impressions on them. The cloths are fine and neatly woven in not one but two different weaves, details demonstrating clearly that people had been weaving long enough to have become highly skilled at it. Unfortunately no vestiges of weaving equipment or work spaces turned up at this site, so we can't say whether the Jarmo weavers had solved the problems of large looms yet. A look at all the Neolithic evidence for textiles together yields more data, however.\n\nBy plotting this evidence in both time and space, we can discern traces of at least two large Neolithic looms of quite different design, and we see, furthermore, that the loom types spread in roughly opposite directions across the landscape from the innovative area where Jarmo and \u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck lie. One of these is the horizontal ground loom (fig. 3.5), still used today by Bedouin women in the Near East. This device migrated mainly south and southeast: through Mesopotamia and the Levant, down into Egypt, and apparently eventually all the way to India. Since this loom is made entirely of wooden sticks (seldom preserved and hard to recognize), most of our evidence for it comes from representations of its use. In these depictions, incidentally, wherever one can tell the gender of the weavers, they are women (cf. fig. 7.5).\n\n_Figure 3.5_. Wooden model of a Middle Kingdom Egyptian weaving shop, showing two horizontal ground looms pegged out for use. Two weavers squat beside the warp to help each other with the weaving. This type of loom has been used in the Near East from sometime in the Neolithic until the present day. Other women are shown processing flax, spinning, and measuring warp thread on pegs on the wall. Eleventh Dynasty, ca. 2000 B.C.\n\nThe other type is the warp-weighted loom (fig. 3.6), set nearly vertical, which was still being used twenty-five years ago by women in rural Scandinavia. This loom, by contrast, can be traced spreading largely north and west across Europe from a focal center in Hungary. It is much easier to trace than the ground loom because, although most of this loom, too, was composed of wood, the warp was kept tight by a series of weights, which were generally made of baked clay and hence are much less perishable. Although representations of this loom are far fewer and later, those we have show women once again as the weavers.\n\n_Figure 3.6_. Women weaving together on a warp-weighted loom, as depicted on a Greek vase of about 560 B.C. (See fig. 9.4 for the entire scene.) On this loom the warp hangs down from a beam supported over the weaver's head.\n\nWhat I find most fascinating about these two early looms is that neither is logically derivable from the other, but both are easily derived from the simple band loom. With a band loom, the weaver normally ties the near end of the warp in a single bunch to a post or her own waist and the far end to something else, like a tree or another post or her big toe. If the weaving is tied to the weaver, the tension on the warp that is necessary for weaving is provided by simply leaning back. It couldn't be simpler. As one wishes to make a wider and wider fabric, it is possible to spread out the near end of the warp on a bar, rather than attach it all in a single bunch. But as the spread increases, if the far end is still tied in a single group, the warp threads develop a steep angle that makes the weaving difficult. That end needs to be spread, too. If, then, you take the bar at the weaver's end (called the cloth beam) and hang it up, tying stones on to the bottom of the warp in little bunches to provide the necessary tension, you have the makings of the warp-weighted loom. But if you stake the cloth beam to the ground, and stake an identical bar some yards away to which you can tie the other end of the warp, thread by thread, to keep the tension, you produce the ground loom.\n\nThus the two types of loom appear to have been independent ways of solving the problem of how to make wider cloth. Once invented, they spread outward, meeting and competing with each other in Turkey, it seems, but otherwise creeping slowly for thousands of miles in opposite directions. It is interesting, too, that the seminal zones for these large looms are the areas in which flax first became domesticated, the stretch from northern Iraq to southern Europe. Such deductions strengthen my hunch that the Palaeolithic women of southern Europe had already invented belt weaving (as part of their concern with symbolic belt-based clothing like the string skirt) and that knowledge of this useful craft had spread southeast by early Neolithic times to the areas where domestication was invented.\n\nConsider, too, the geographical areas where each loom came to be used. Egypt and Mesopotamia are hot, dry regions where it seldom rains. A woman can go outdoors and stake out her loom as big as she pleases for days, weeks, or even months without fear of disaster. Not so in Europe, where snow covers the ground half the winter and rain is frequent all summer. Outdoors is no place for a loom, but neither can the family afford to have the weaving all over the floor of the living space. So hang it from the rafters, or prop it on the wall! It takes almost no floor space that way and is protected from the elements.\n\nIn the Tisza Valley in Hungary, excavators have dug up the remains of several Neolithic huts from around 5500 B.C., some equipped with sets of clay loom weights along with the cooking pots and other simple gear. In one cottage (fig. 3.7) the weights sat in a heap beside a pair of stout postholes near one wall. Since these posts have no discoverable function in holding up roof or walls, they almost certainly formed the supports for a vertical warp-weighted loom\u2014a loom measuring 185 centimeters wide and thus accommodating a cloth 4 to 5 feet in width. Furthermore, we see that the woman of the house had cleverly set up her loom so she would get the best light on it during the day, since it faces the doorway, and also set it near the hearth as well, so as to get light from the fire at night and during the long, dark winters. Apparently women already expected to work long hours.\n\n_Figure 3.7_. Cutaway reconstruction (from the floor plan) of a sixth-millennium-B.C. Neolithic house at Tiszajen\u0151, Hungary. In addition to the hearth and a storage jar set into the floor, one can see the reconstruction of a warp-weighted loom, set up at a slight angle to the wall so that it could receive light from the doorway in daytime as well as from the hearth fire at night.\n\nIn Europe conditions in the Neolithic and Early Bronze ages fostered a \"courtyard and outrider\" economy. There were no draft animals, so the women with their children underfoot could take responsibility for the entire basic food supply: cereals, legumes, and such other fruits and nuts as might be available, plus eggs and an occasional lamb or mutton stew. That freed the men to go outside the community (outriders) for other resources entirely, if needed, returning at intervals with their contributions. Since war did not yet constitute significantly more of a problem than it had in the Palaeolithic, the men did not have to stay home all the time simply for defense. (The rarity of warfare had to do with both the sparseness of the population and the lack of great difference between haves and have-nots.) We see families clustering their houses together into little villages for mutual aid and support, but fences, when present, seem to be designed more to keep sheep and children in than enemies\u2014other than wolves\u2014out.\n\nIn such a world the women could bring their smaller crafts out into the communal yard in good weather, to chat together and help one another as they worked and watched the children play. The children, in turn, could play at helping, pretending to do what the big folks do, as children will. Such play can function as a sort of vocational kindergarten, teaching the children the basic steps in processes that they will have to master in earnest later. For textile work alone, in addition to spinning the thread and using it to sew, make nets, and mend, these activities included the many steps of preparing the dried flax or hemp for spinning. First the women place the dried plants in a stream or in the dew long enough to rot the unwanted parts of the stem away from the tough fibers\u2014a process called _retting_. Then they beat and twist loose the woody parts of the stem (called _breaking_ or _braking_ ) and comb the fibers until they are free and clean (called _hackling;_ a dog's hackles, when raised, look like the coarse teeth of a hackling comb). Archaeologists have found tools for breaking and hackling flax in the muddy lake beds that surrounded some of the Neolithic villages in Switzerland, along with hanks of flax in all stages of preparation. Unfortunately they were not found in such a way as to give us further clues to how the inhabitants organized their work.\n\nIn tending their garden plots, once again the women could work together while the children played or slept nearby, as we can see from the many ethnographic studies of horticultural societies. In Europe well into this century the women often sang or chanted ritual songs to set the rhythm of the endless repetitive motions of handwork in the fields. The slow, droning chant also has the interesting cognitive effect of blunting one's awareness of the pain of aching muscles and of the length of time spent. Here, too, the children could learn their future tasks bit by bit, in the process becoming participating members of the social community. I remember how proud I was as a child of four to be sent to the top of the apricot tree to pick the last of the fruit. It was wartime, food was scarce, and I was the best and lightest climber. I could contribute something no one else could.\n\nIf the summers encouraged this sort of sisterhood, European winters invited communal work even more. When the farm is covered in snow and modern electronic entertainments are millennia into the future, how do you while away the time? You carry on what small and useful crafts you can, giving you a sense of bettering your life, and you make it more fun by having a party at the same time. Just as the pioneer women in rural America got together for sewing, quilting, and husking bees, just as Hungarian farm women still have regular \"work parties,\" so the women of prehistoric Europe gathered at one another's houses to spin, sew, weave, and have fellowship. How do we know this? From the cloth itself.\n\nAll over Denmark, preserved by the boggy groundwater, lie treasures of Bronze Age information in the form of wonderfully preserved burials. Bog water is highly acid, and acid preserves skin and leather, hair and wool, horn and fingernails almost perfectly. Many times it has happened that a peasant cutting peat for fuel out in the bogs has come upon a well-preserved dead body and called in the police to see who had recently been murdered. Fingerprinting the perfect swirls on the victim's hands yields nothing in the police files, but archaeological sleuthing soon shows that despite the perfectly preserved face, hairdo, and woolen clothing, the deceased died some two to four thousand years ago.\n\nAt the site of Trindh\u00f8j, straight west of Copenhagen on the Danish mainland of Jutland, a man went to his grave around 1300 B.C. wearing a patchwork tunic, a white fringed shawl, and a huge brown cloak woven of coarse wool. Two Danish archaeologists, Margrethe Hald and H. C. Broholm, analyzed the weave of the cloak and discovered that the weft threads in this enormous cloth often cross each other, shifting from one row to the next right in the middle of the textile. The only possible explanation is that several weft bobbins were in use at once. That is, three women had to have been weaving on this cloth simultaneously, passing the bobbins to each other as they met in the middle somewhere and then changing the shed. Other cloths show similar telltale signs.\n\nWe have more evidence of women working together. A famous Classical Greek representation of the warp-weighted loom (figs. 3.6 and 9.4) shows two women working beside each other at their loom (while others help prepare the wool and fold the finished cloth) in exactly the way that the ethnographer Marta Hoffmann found Norwegian and Finnish women still doing twenty-five years ago (see above). The loom is often so wide that this must have been fairly common practice, although it was not absolutely necessary. Homer, for example, depicts the lady Calypso working alone on her desert island:\n\nAnd she, singing indoors with a beautiful voice,   \nwove at her loom, walking up and down with the golden bobbin.\n\nBeing alone, Calypso had to provide her own entertainment, too.\n\nPrehistoric women in Hungary already provided entertainment for each other. In a charming scene from a Hallstatt urn (fig. 3.8), we see one woman spinning, another weaving at a great warp-weighted loom, two others with their hands above their heads as though they were dancing, and a fifth, shorter figure (male or female?) holding a stringed instrument that is either a lyre or a frame for making the kind of plaiting called _sprang._\n\n_Figure 3.8_. Women spinning, weaving (on a warp-weighted loom), and entertaining one another with music and dance. The scene is incised on a vase of the Hallstatt culture (mid-first millennium B.C.), from Sopron, Hungary. Compare the triangular-looking costumes with modern Hungarian folk costumes (fig. 3.9).\n\nIn this same part of Europe, well into this century, women wearing clothes remarkably similar to the Hallstatt ones (fig. 3.9) still met at one another's houses for working bees. The continuity is remarkable. Perhaps the most common activity before \"modernization\" was spinning, since it took so much longer to spin than to weave a given amount of fiber; estimates put it at seven to ten times as long, using a hand spindle. (How much time it took to spin the yarn for a given area of cloth depended, of course, upon how thick the yarn was, exactly as in knitting. Fine yarn takes longer per unit of weight to work up.) Girls were taught to spin when they were ten or twelve, and they looked forward to that time, since spinning is a pleasant task. It is also an activity easily dropped and easily resumed in the excitement of courting. For the men came to these workplaces, too, whether indoors or out, bringing their small crafts of leather and wood\u2014but they came primarily to entertain the women and keep them company. Tales were told, songs sung, and music and games played, especially those games we would call dances. The same word serves for both \"dance\" and \"game\" in many languages\u2014for example, _igra_ in Serbo-Croatian.\n\n_Figure 3.9_. Hungarian village girls wearing costumes similar in their peculiar shape to those depicted in the area twenty-five hundred years earlier: see fig. 3.8. (From a photograph taken ca. 1950.)\n\nWhen one is having so much fun, it is hard to stop, and that may in part explain a peculiar anomaly in the Neolithic evidence from central Europe. Archaeologists would peg these Stone Age people as living in a subsistence-level economy\u2014forced to work fairly hard just to feed themselves and to stay warm and dry. By this model, little time and energy would remain for fun and frolic. Cloth survives poorly in most of Europe, subject to the destructive effects of alternating wet and dry weather; yet our surviving textiles from the Neolithic are astonishingly ornate. Clearly these Neolithic women were investing large amounts of extra time into their textile work, far beyond pure utility, far beyond our concept of \"subsistence level.\"\n\nLife remains hard in these same parts of rural central Europe today, yet the tradition of making fancy cloth persists there. During the long, boring winters not much useful outdoor work is possible, so the energy overflows into indoor crafts. Furthermore, one finds the attitude that if you have to make a bedspread or a cushion anyway and will have to use it for the rest of your life, you may as well make it pretty and be able to enjoy both the making and the using.\n\nHow do we see this love of embellishment in the Neolithic? Take, for example, the linens of Switzerland, dating from 3000 B.C., from such sites as Robenhausen, Irgenhausen, Schaffis, and Murten, which lie clustered around the lakes in the center of the country. The women who made them lived in a swamp, squashed between forest and lake, far from the centers of European culture downstream on the middle reaches of the Danube. To stay above the lakeshore mud, the inhabitants drove hundreds of wooden pilings into the soft ground to stabilize it before laying their clay hearths and building their wooden houses on top. Little corduroy pathways of logs joined the houses to one another and to the higher ground where the forests began, helping the villagers stay dry-shod as they moved about. The frequency with which they added piling shows the constant urgency of keeping ahead of wet and rot. Whatever fell into the muck below was lost for good\u2014to them, but preserved for us, since the perpetually soggy, airless, alkaline lake mud happens to preserve plant material quite well. (Note that alkali, which destroys animal remains, has exactly the opposite effect from acid bog water, which destroys plants but preserves animal skin and hair.)\n\nThus we find quantities of wooden tools\u2014a rarity on most archaeological sites\u2014from bowls, ladles, pounders, and tilling sticks to the panoply of utensils needed to prepare flax: breaks, hackling boards with little thorns set into them in neat rows, and spindles with clay whorls. We find hanks of spun thread ready for use (all that labor, only to be dropped into the mire!) and clay loom weights\u2014sometimes in a row across the floor, showing that the loom was in use when the particular village was eventually destroyed. The trail of loom weights indicates that the warp-weighted loom and its associated weaving technology had spread here during the fourth millennium B.C., moving up the Danube from its home in central Hungary. We find baskets and bags of all sorts, and textiles\u2014fancy ones.\n\nStripes, checkers, triangles; braided fringes, knotted fringes, beadwork, and fancy edges. Weaving stripes into the cloth with an extra pattern weft was the most common, but sometimes the weavers put in triangles or squares, which is not a simple task like stripes. An especially elaborate piece (fig. 3.10) from the site of Irgenhausen, near Zurich, has triangles within a complicated pattern of checkers-within-checkers-within-checkers, formed by lacing in a whole handful of pattern wefts. Emil Vogt, who painstakingly analyzed all the blackened remains of this large cloth, concluded that there would have been no point in weaving the pattern in that particular way unless the weaver had been using at least three hues so the patterns would stand out. Would that we knew what these colors were! When workers at the National Museum in Zurich wove a replica (fig. 3.10), they used conservative brown and beige on white, but we know that plants and other substances producing reds, blues, and yellows grew in the area, too, and that some of these dyes were already in use elsewhere in Europe.\n\n_Figure 3.10_. Modern replica of a Neolithic linen cloth found in a lake bed at Irgenhausen, Switzerland, dating to 3000 B.C. or a little after. The original fragments are so blackened that we can no longer determine the original colors, but careful analysis of the weave structure (which made it possible to weave this replica) shows that at least three colors must have been employed. (Swiss National Museum, Zurich.)\n\nThe Stone Age clothmakers of the Swiss lakeshores did not stop with adding color, however. The creator of another textile, found at Murten, pierced groups of little fruit pits and sewed them carefully onto the cloth on either side of some woven stripes. Someone also attached this piece to a second cloth by means of half a dozen rows of knotted netting, thus giving elasticity to the join. For clothing?\n\nAbove all else, these weavers loved fancy borders. The ribbed side borders were not difficult, but the unique problems of setting up a warp-weighted loom meant that the cloth had to begin with a special edging at the top to secure the warp threads. Then, having neatly framed the cloth on three sides, these weavers threw all their ingenuity into devising a bottom border. One can imagine the women working together and egging each other on as they finished off the bottom edges of their cloths. The fanciest involved weaving a ravelproof band right across the warp ends with its own decorative pattern of ribs and triangles, while any ends left after all that were braided and knotted into a fringe for good measure.\n\nThe inhabitants of Neolithic Switzerland were not the only Europeans making fancy fabrics. We catch more glimpses in central Germany, where the dead were laid to rest in great ossuaries, their oak rafters apparently draped with patterned textiles. (We see from this that cloth already served other purposes than just clothing people.) Periodic firing of the ossuaries from the outside, probably to keep down the odor and contagion, preserved bits of the fabric where insufficient oxygen made the cloth char rather than burn. Although most of the actual scraps of cloth were lost again during recent wars, we can see stripes, checkers, and lots of little chevron patterns as we peruse the sketches made at the time of discovery in the late nineteenth century.\n\nNeither Germany nor Switzerland stood at the center of this European weaving culture, however, but in its backwaters. Its \"frontwaters\" lay in Hungary and along the lower Danube, where the warp-weighted loom first developed. With the textiles in the backwaters so ornate, what then must they have been like at the center of the tradition? Back in 5000 B.C., along the Tisza River, nearly every house had the weights for a loom already, while later on, the figurines from Hungary sport fancy patterns on their persons, sometimes apparently as body paint (still found in remote parts of the Balkans today) but sometimes also on clothing.\n\nAll over central Europe women were inventing more and more elaborate textiles, regardless of modern economists' models. One of the key issues to understanding this \"extravagance\" is time. Not only were there infinitely fewer entertainments tugging at one's attention in a preindustrial rural setting, but expenditure of time was viewed very differently from the way it is within an industrial economy. To us, time is money\u2014to be \"saved,\" \"spent,\" \"budgeted,\" \"invested,\" or (horrors!) \"squandered.\" For them, money was irrelevant because it hadn't been invented yet, nor would it be for another twenty-five hundred years. So there was nothing to weigh time _against;_ it simply was what it was. Furthermore, it was an _automatic_ resource, unlike food or material goods (including money). Time was thus constantly available for use to promote survival, whether directly (e.g., by preparing food and building shelter) or indirectly\u2014that is, by trying to elicit symbolically what was wanted. The latter is a use that many of us have forgotten. Ethnographic parallels worldwide show that enormous time is often put into \"simply\" decorating people and things with efficacious symbols believed to promote life, prosperity, and safety (cf. fig. 3.2). For example, many a Slavic folk costume is decorated with red embroidery at neck, sleeve, and hem. Both the designs and the bloodred color carry symbolic life powers, while the potent signs are carefully located to ward off sickness demons that are looking for openings through which to attack. Thus \"art\" is at once pleasing and thoroughly functional\u2014a double winner.\n\nWeaving was not the only craft into which artistic time and energy were being poured in the Neolithic. From Hungary on south through the eastern Balkans, all the way to Thessaly in Greece, we find a profusion of astonishingly elegant pottery covered with sophisticated swirling designs. The idea of baking a container molded of clay in order to make it hard and waterproof had developed in the Near East around 6000 B.C. and soon spread to southeastern Europe. There is no direct evidence of whether men or women were making the pottery, even when we see the baking of the clay moving soon from low-temperature firing in the family hearth to much hotter firing in courtyard ovens. But a case has been made that the elaborate painted designs that soon developed in southeastern Europe represented a variety of fertility symbols, core among which are eggs. The painting of the eggs themselves at Easter, the time of renewed growth, is still an important annual ritual in the Balkans and Ukraine, and the designs painted on them are replete with ancient symbolism. In the United States, on the contrary, the meaning is so far weakened that painting Easter eggs is now viewed as a children's pastime while the highly fertile rabbits associated with them have devolved into commercialized cuteness. Once again, female fertility was a dominant theme among the cultures of the Neolithic, and the women may have been in charge of this new craft, too, with its cargo of fertility symbols. To these arguments we can add that vase making was certainly another courtyard art and would combine well with child rearing. The resulting pottery, moreover, was used chiefly for the women's daily chores of storing, cooking, and serving the food.\n\nStrong parallels to many of these archaeological details can be found in another culture overflowing with women's courtyard arts, the Hopi of the American Southwest. There the potting, vase painting, basket making, and weaving all are women's work, and although the weaving of patterned rugs is recent, the elaborate no-two-pieces-alike painting of pots is not. (I have often been struck, in fact, by the similarities between the Hopi-Papago designs and those of Neolithic Anatolia and southeastern Europe.) Certain aspects of the Hopi designs are traditional to the culture, but other features have typically been handed down from mother to daughter within the family, for the women worked together constantly and learned principally from one another. Indeed, a woman lived her whole life in the dwellings owned by her mother and her mother's clan, whereas the man divided his time and allegiance between his wife's household (to which he contributed the food he produced) and that of his own mother, where he had many ritual duties. As for property, the matrilineal clan owned the plots of land in which the main food supplies of corn and squash were grown. The men did some of the crop tending but also spent much of their time out pasturing the flocks, which they passed down from father to son. Thus the women remained permanently settled in a single place while the men spent a great deal of their time moving around. In short, Hopi society was horticultural in much the same way as the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age societies of Europe seem to have been. For that reason the Pueblo Indians have sometimes been used as a model for trying to understand the archaeological record in Neolithic Europe.\n\nThus textiles flourished in the early horticultural economies of southeastern Europe between 6000 and 2000 B.C., when the women could handle the subsistence farming and the crafts while the men could go out of the community to hunt, fish, tend flocks, and barter for luxuries such as shell beads and obsidian blades. Obsidian, or volcanic glass, is much sharper than flint but is found in only a very few places. Settlers wanted it particularly for scything grain, and men had to establish huge trade networks to obtain it, as the planting of domestic grain spread.\n\nIn the Near East, although we have little information on textiles during this period, we have data on food. They suggest that the style of life may have paralleled that in Europe, since at first the fields of grain that provided the central food were hand-tended. If anything, however, life in parts of the Near East must have been harder, for the women spent so many hours of their lives at hard labor over heavy stone grain grinders that the work permanently deformed their bones. Archaeologists have found the toe, knee, and shoulder bones of the women in the early farming villages of northern Mesopotamia to be squashed and deformed in ways caused by pressure from kneeling and pushing heavy objects with the arm and shoulder\u2014clearly the metate-like stone grinders that we find on the sites (cf. fig. 8.7). Nor were the men always out hunting, for their bones often reveal the same deformities.\n\nThe picture conjured up by these and other excavation details is not such a pleasant one. Southern Europe provided a fair number of \"orchard crops,\" such as nuts, olives, and edible fruits (fig. 4.1), which require relatively little work for a fair return of food. The forests, moreover, although making the clearing of fields for grain difficult, abounded in game. In Syria and Iraq, on the other hand, we find an abundance of sickles and stone grinders for cutting and grinding cereals but much less evidence for most other types of food, although people herded sheep and goats where suitable grazing existed. Wheat and barley grew copiously in wet years and stored well, but converting them into the major food supply was punishingly hard work. The second most common food came from the legume family, including peas, lentils, and chickpeas, which we associate with Near Eastern cuisine even today. Eaten regularly together, the cereals and legumes provide the body with complete proteins and thus with a viable diet, even without the addition of meat.\n\nDeveloping a diet not dependent upon meat was fortunate, because around 4000 B.C. came a meat-related discovery that soon brought the Neolithic to a close. People in Mesopotamia began to realize that their primary domestic animals\u2014sheep, goats, and cattle\u2014could be exploited in a far more efficient way than by killing them for their meat and hides (the sole use for which they had been domesticated). Kept alive and used efficiently, they could provide a constant supply of \"secondary\" products: of milk foods, wool, and muscle power. The old strategy allowed only one chance at food and clothing from each animal\u2014one feast, one hide\u2014and you got the maximum of meat for the minimum of care by slaughtering when the creature had barely reached adulthood. But now people saw that if you kept at least the females alive, you could milk them for years and could eat the meat in the end anyway, although it wouldn't be so tender.\n\nIf cattle were central to this change, so were sheep. The inbreeding of domestic sheep over thousands of years had led to some varieties that had a fair amount of wool, which molted every year in the spring. Wild sheep, and thus the early domestic sheep, had coats that were predominantly hairy\u2014technically, kempy\u2014with some underwool. The coarse kemps are rather stiff and simply shatter like dry crackers if you try to twist them, whereas the underwool is so short and downy fine that it wads up and doesn't spin either. So sheep had to change a lot before they had usable wool. It seems to have been about 4000 B.C. that people realized they could get a steady supply of clothing from the live sheep. Around that time we see a shift to killing the animals at a ripe old age. Older ewes alone might mean purely a milk flock, but old males, and castrated at that, can only be exploited for wool. These _wethers_ , in fact, produce the best fleeces of all. Wool, for its part, is a wonderful fiber: warmer and more resilient than linen (although scratchier), and far easier to dye. A new phase in textiles and the work associated with them was about to begin.\n\nThe third benefit of keeping the animals alive was to exploit them for their strength, in particular to help with the heavy jobs of plowing the fields, threshing the grain, and transporting seed, harvest, and equipment. (The wheel, too, was invented about this time.) By using a team of oxen to pull the weight, the farmer could use a heavier plow to dig a much deeper furrow and produce a better crop.\n\nThis above all\u2014the use of huge draft animals in large fields to grow the basic food\u2014permanently removed the food-producing portion of the economy from the women's domain. Why? Because such activity was no longer compatible with child raising. Thus the allotment of tasks shifted once again, first in Mesopotamia and gradually in a widening circle beyond.\n\nAnother radical change in the organization of human life began soon after, marking the start of the Bronze Age. People living in metal-rich regions had long known the usefulness of metals, starting with the soft ones that happen to occur in pure form, like copper and gold.2 But such soft metals are more suitable for ornaments than for tools. It took the discovery that metals can be alloyed into new and harder materials by mixing them while molten to open a way finally to vastly improved tools: metal axes, cauldrons, chisels, knives, and\u2014a metal-dependent invention\u2014the sword. The problem for most people at that time was that, although copper is rather commonly found in Europe and the Near East, the hardening metals aren't.\n\nThe most widely useful alloy of soft metals is copper mixed with tin, giving the alloy we know as bronze. Tin, however, occurs mostly only in a few places far away from the early centers of civilization, like eastern Iran, Spain, and Cornwall (in Britain). Another effective hardener is arsenic, and it was used briefly in the steppes north of the Caucasus at the beginning of the Bronze Age, but arsenic bronze soon died out\u2014perhaps because people noticed that families using cookware of arsenic bronze soon died out. Unfortunately the arsenic will dissolve out of the bronze into the acid of the food. Probably the smiths working with the arsenic died, too. Obtaining tin, even if it required great trouble, was worth the effort.\n\nThis need for tin steadily increased trade in goods and ideas, for people all over the Near East and soon Europe began to want these newfangled tools. But bronze won't grow in gardens. That was a new problem. Somebody had to go out and find the ores from which it could be made\u2014or find someone else who had ore and was willing to trade. So the great metal search began, and it became men's work, if only because the distances were far too great for the toddlers to travel. Mines, too, once you find them, are no place to have little children under foot, nor is the smithy\u2014too many hammers and hot sparks flying about. Thus metalworking became men's work as well.\n\nSo much trade and exploration, so much movement of people and new ideas began to alter society dramatically. At the same time, the ever more efficient production of food supported ever larger congregations of people, until the once-tiny villages and towns had become immense cities. For it was about this same time, toward the end of the fourth millennium B.C., that truly urban civilization sprang up in Mesopotamia, a civilization that included writing, laws, contracts, tax records, and much else that literacy enables. It took almost a millennium for the principal changes to reach southeastern Europe, but by 2500 B.C. the sedentary vase painters and weavers were gone, abruptly swept away by warlike swarms of new people hunting for ores from the Caucasus to the Carpathians to the Alps. The old days of simple Neolithic courtyards were gone. Ahead lay the heady chemistry of new and far-ranging human contacts, catalysts for yet other developments in women's contribution to society through their textile arts.\n\n1A not unsimilar cult of the dread goddess Kybele and her wild animals persisted in western Turkey in Classical times.\n\n2At (\u00c7ay\u00f6n\u00fc Tepesi, in eastern Turkey, not far from a rare source of pure copper, excavators found little copper tools, such as hooks, made by hammering and abrading. The site is an early farming village of about 7000 B.C. It was in just such ore-rich areas as eastern Turkey and the Caucasus that metalworking gradually developed during the course of the Neolithic.\n\nIsland Fever\n\nBy how much the men are expert above all other men in\n\npropelling a swift ship on the sea, by thus much the women\n\nare skilled at the loom, for Athena has given to them beyond all others\n\na knowledge of beautiful craftwork, and noble minds.\n\n\u2014Homer, _Odyssey_ , 7.108\u201311\n\nIn at least one area of the Mediterranean world, a basically horticultural system survived more or less intact until late in the Bronze Age\u2014namely, on Crete. Heir to millennia of textile innovations in cloth-crazy Europe and fed by a new and richer source of colored fiber\u2014namely, wool\u2014the art of weaving flourished in Minoan Crete as never before. The era, which ran from about 3000 to 1400 B.C. is recent enough that a much fuller set of artifacts has survived, allowing us a considerably more detailed view of the lifestyle. As usual, wherever we catch glimpses of the clothmakers themselves, they are invariably women.\n\nCrete is an island, and the immigrants who reached Crete obviously arrived by sea\u2014at first a few stragglers but already carrying early stocks of domestic grain and animals, and then, at the very end of the Neolithic, around 3000 B.C., a great influx of settlers. Many sailed from southwestern Turkey, but some perhaps from the facing shore of Africa: from Libya and the Nile Delta. Technology was accruing rapidly, and soon after the start of the Bronze Age we begin to see pictures of increasingly sophisticated boats in the Aegean, with banks of oars to propel them through the sea and presently with muscle-saving sails as well. Other people could stay land lovers, but it behooved the populace of a seagirt land to perfect the use of wind power.\n\nIsland Fever: That's what some archaeologists call the enormous amount of effort that isolated cultures invest in unusual activities. Products of this effect include Stonehenge in England, the Easter Island avenues of stone faces, the multiroomed halls made of enormous boulders on tiny Malta, and the pyramids of Egypt (an \"island\" in a nearly impenetrable sea of desert sand). The mechanism seems to be that such cultures, living in the first flush of new technology but before travel to their land was easy, could afford to expend on communal works all the energy that other cultures needed just to defend themselves from the people around them. Sudden expansion and proliferation in a new and protected environment are well known in the biological world as well\u2014for example, in the Hawaiian Islands, where the small number of species that reached the islands alive (such as honeycreepers and caterpillars) evolved with explosive rapidity into the many new ecological niches.\n\nThe great unfortified palaces of Crete\u2014so huge and rambling that they gave us (through the Greek language) the word _labyrinth_ \u2014and, indeed, the whole amazing Minoan civilization, including its textiles, must to some extent have been powered by Island Fever. There are no walled towns or garrisons on Crete, villas sprawl unprotected about the countryside, and the lines of watchtowers seem set for signaling information with flares rather than for defense. Secure in their island stronghold, the women could continue to tend their gardens and their looms while the men launched forth on the dangerous sea, to catch fish, to trade in faraway places, and to explore for resources not found on the island.\n\nThis does not mean that men never helped with the food at home. Indeed, oxen existed on Crete (along with fearsome wild bulls), as did some sort of plow eventually, but for all the thousands of pictures of their life that they left us on wall paintings and carved gems, the Minoans never portrayed scenes of plowing or of draft animals in action. Apparently these were not a pivotal part of that life. Farmable land both fertile and flat is scarce on Crete, while the steep, sunbaked slopes more readily support orchard crops of olives and grapes, nuts and pomegranates\u2014crops that provide more food for less labor than cereals do (fig. 4.1). The steepest slopes of all offer pasture to sheep and goats, which in turn yield milk for cheeses, wool and hair for weaving, and finally meat for the stewpot. All these foods, together with flavor-intense wild honey and local herbs like thyme and coriander, have been part of Aegean cuisine from then until now. Men might assist, but land and crops could be managed by the women alone for long periods.\n\n_Figure 4.1_. The steep Aegean hillsides, like this one in eastern Crete, are best suited to raising orchard crops. Here, in a photo taken by the author in 1962, the upper slope is planted with olive trees, and the lower (bottom right) with grapevines. At the top of the vineyard is a well for irrigation (grapes need more water than olives). The water was traditionally raised by means of a bucket hung from one end of a long pole balanced on a forked tree trunk (visible in the center of the picture). A huge stone lashed to the pole counterweighted the bucket, to ease the work of raising the water.\n\nIn this comfortable setting it is no wonder that the women had leisure to pour unprecedented energy into making beautiful cloth. They had, in addition, a new plaything: wool.\n\nFlax had been in use around the Mediterranean since the Palaeolithic, whereas wool, on the backs of woolly sheep (as opposed to hairy or kempy ones; see Chapter 3), had been introduced into the Balkans from the Near East only around 3500 B.C., late in the Neolithic. White wool, unlike flax, is easy to dye, and wool, in addition, grows naturally in different shades\u2014from black, gray, and brown through ruddy and tawny to cream and white\u2014according to the pigmentation of the individual sheep.1 Patterned textiles depend largely on the use of color. White-on-white designs are handsome but extremely subtle; contrastive colors are more vividly satisfying. Thus the arrival of wool marked a new era in textile development.\n\nBy 2300 B.C., the people of Crete had turned the herding of these new, woolly sheep into a major part of their economy. The Minoan culture itself, fertilized by ever-increasing trade, stood ready to burst into full bloom, and so, we can deduce, did textiles. Our first evidence comes from a prehistoric village near Myrtos, almost the only thoroughly excavated Minoan site dating to this early period. Lying on the south coast of Crete atop a steep, windy little hill looking out across the deep blue Mediterranean toward Egypt (well beyond the horizon), Myrtos is a convenient place for watching for the return of the fishermen and sea traders, if not for lugging the daily water up the hill. The houses are party-walled together in a tight clump. An occasional narrow alley winds through for access, with steep little steps here and there to accommodate the sharp rise in ground.\n\nThe Myrtos dwellings proved chock-full of evidence for textile manufacture. Simple clay spindle whorls turned up in many of the rooms, as though women did their spinning anywhere and everywhere (just as in rural Greece today). In one room the diggers unearthed a shallow clay dish with a \"handle\" on the inside, and fragments of another: special bowls for wetting linen thread as it is being worked. New linen is so stiff and full of slivers that it is much easier to handle damp. The bowls were designed to receive a ball of thread straight into a puddle of water in the bottom (fig. 4.2). The end of the yarn ran under the loop of the interior \"handle,\" an arrangement that not only forced the thirsty linen through the water but kept the ball from jumping out as the spinner pulled on the thread while she plied it or added twist to make it stronger. This peculiar technology, better known from wall paintings and looped bowls that survived in Egypt and also from a similar archaic tradition of thread making in modern Japan, is appropriate only for working with bast, the stem fibers of plants. Since flax (linen) is the indigenous bast fiber of the Mediterranean countries, the presence of such a bowl, locally made and with a characteristic worn spot under the loop from the thread's constantly running past, demonstrates beyond doubt that the women of Myrtos were working flax.\n\n_Figure 4.2_. Fiber-wetting bowl and its use. To spin plant stem fibers like flax and hemp, which are more easily worked when damp, several cultures have independently invented wetting bowls to speed the process. The bowls are formed with a loop inside on the bottom. Water is put in the bowl, and the partly formed thread is passed under the loop to force it through the water on its way to the spindle. The ancient Egyptians and Minoans made such bowls, and similar ones are still employed in Japan.\n\nThey also processed wool. Numerous sheep bones turned up in the Myrtos excavations, but most of them came from adults of both genders, a distribution indicating that the people expected to harvest the sheep flocks for wool. In two or three of the houses, large spouted tubs overhung runoff areas arranged beneath, and in one case a channel cut into the soft bedrock directed a substantial flow off down the hill. (Note that if you are pressing grapes and olives for wine and oil, you do _not_ want the liquid to run away, so this installation was designed for other purposes.) The material from one of the tubs was analyzed and found to contain remains of animal fats\u2014most likely from washing wool. Sheep were undoubtedly eaten, too, but this was not where they were cooked, since there was no hearth or fire pit, no way to heat these tubs. Smaller cooking bowls and a large stone grinder lay nearby. Were these for preparing food, or perhaps for grinding and extracting dyestuffs?\n\nClay loom weights occurred, but not scattered like the spindle whorls. Instead they were concentrated largely in two areas at the site\u2014the same two areas as the main tub installations. The weights in at least one case, however, lay in the upper fill, having fallen from above. Peter Warren, the British excavator, suggests reasonably that the loom had been set up on the flat roof and, further, that its beams had been made of oak, since he found charred oak in the fill as well. One of the sets of loom weights is of the small, disk-shaped variety associated with the pattern weaving of wool. Some of these weights have grooves across the top, possibly for a bar to stabilize them and stop them from clanking so loudly with each change of the shed during the weaving process (see Chapter 1).\n\nGreek island villages are not so different even today from what we see at Myrtos (fig. 4.3). Steep and narrow streets wind between the little party-walled houses, everything whitewashed to reflect the heat. Upstairs, shaded from the sun and raised into the breeze above the worst of the dust, the women work together at preparing the food and the clothing, chatting while they wait for the men to return from fishing and sponge diving at sea.\n\n_Figure 4.3_. Steep village street with whitewashed houses and rough stone-slab paving, on the Aegean island of Mykonos. Although the scene is 1962, it could well be 1500 or 2200 B.C., to judge by the remains of excavated Bronze Age towns.\n\nAll in all, at Myrtos, two or three areas at the site seem well equipped to take the production of cloth from start to finish. If we pull the evidence together, we can see that both linen and wool were being processed, that spinning and weaving took place in considerable quantity, and that the wool was probably also being dyed. Several dye-producing plants and animals were available in the vicinity of the village, while small pierced stone weights\u2014found in abundance at much later dyeing installations\u2014occurred all over the site. The windiness of the hill could have played a part as well, since dyers always seek a steady wind to help the fabrics dry and to remove the sometimes dreadful stench of the dyestuffs. It all adds up to label Myrtos as a perfect place to make colored cloth. But the excavator Peter Warren stopped shy of suggesting anything so radical as _patterned_ textiles.\n\nWarren published his admirably thorough description of the excavated site in 1972. What he could not know then, since the research had not yet been done, is that the Europeans had already been making ornate patterned cloth for millennia and that, not long after the little coastal village of Myrtos burned down, the Minoans were already exporting their versions of it to the Nile Valley. The exported textiles had patterns so complicated that one has to assume a long running start on learning to make them\u2014back at least to the time of Myrtos.\n\nWhat were the pretty patterns the Minoans liked so much to weave?\n\nThe first favorite on exports to Egypt, to judge from copies painted there from around 2000 B.C. onward, consisted of blue heart-spirals set point to point (much like the design typical today on a wrought-iron fence) with a red diamond between each pair of double hearts, all on a white ground (fig. 4.4). It must have been stunning. At any rate, the women of Crete wove that design for at least another thousand years, for we catch glimpses of it here and there both in Egypt and in Crete, all the way down into the Iron Age long after the fall of the Minoans. Patterns favored in the Egyptian market a little later included rows of yellow or white spirals, often running on the diagonal with red and blue rosettes alternating in the spaces between.\n\n_Figure 4.4_. Two renditions of a favorite Minoan textile design, the double heart-spiral, as recorded by Egyptian artists. Left: on the tomb ceiling of a Middle Kingdom nobleman, Wahka II (at Qau, ca. 1900 B.C.). Right: on the (heavily damaged) kilt of an Aegean visitor to the Egyptian court at Thebes ca. 1450 B.C. (tomb of Menkheperraseneb). The color schemes are very similar on all known renditions: blue spirals with red palmettes and partly red lozenge figures.\n\nThe Minoan men who carried these beautiful textiles to Egypt did not go home empty-handed, let alone empty-headed, from their long trading voyages. (The journey from Crete to Egypt was about five hundred miles, and often more than a thousand miles to return because of the prevailing wind directions.) One thing they brought back from Egypt was the idea that one could paint scenes on walls. From then on we see their own depictions of themselves, including what they wore. For centuries Cretan men wore simple loincloths, sometimes with fancy borders and always fastened with cinch belts. But the women clothed themselves in ever more gorgeous attire\u2014another tip-off that they were the ones in control of producing the stuff.\n\nEven the simplest costumes are fancy. The earliest representations, some clay figurines around 1900 B.C. (two or three centuries before the frescoes begin), already show women in large bell-shaped skirts with open-fronted bodices. Not only are these flaring skirts and open bodices features we associate with the Minoans, but they are clearly old within the culture and basic to a Minoan woman's concept of normal clothing. One of the little statuettes (fig. 4.5) is both complete and painted, in an outfit reminiscent of the flamboyant ladies of 1780 at the court of George III. On the woman's head sits a large, eye-catching chapeau, boldly decorated with black and white stripes; her bodice sweeps up to a high peaked collar behind her neck, while her dress has an equally bold light-on-dark design, just like the elegant new style of pottery of that period, the so-called Kamares ware.\n\n_Figure 4.5_. Clay figurine of a Minoan woman of the early second millennium B.C., from Petsof\u00e1, Crete.\n\nTwo to three centuries later we see that flounces had become the rage among ladies of fashion. The frescoes show them, thus colorfully attired, dancing in gardens and courtyards (fig. 4.6), while lively crowds of fellow citizens look on from surrounding bleachers. (We have found just such bleacherlike arrangements of stone steps at every Minoan palace yet excavated.) The men in the paintings sit together in one area, gesticulating with their arms, and the women sit in another section, largely in front of the men, in animated conversation\u2014perhaps over the performance, their own splendid jewelry and gracefully piled hairdos, and their elegant dresses.\n\n_Figure 4.6_. Wall painting of a beautifully dressed woman dancing (?) in a garden, from the villa at Hagia Triada, an important Minoan port town in southern Crete, mid-second millennium B.C.\n\nThe plainest dresses are merely striped; the fanciest ones display a mind-boggling array of all-over patterns: grids of tiny diamonds filled with various little squiggles, complex figures of three- and four-pronged interlocking shapes (petals, stars, lobes, or crosses), as well as spirals, \"yo-yos,\" and rosettes. Bright tassels and patterned edgings replete with zigzags, spirals, rosettes, wavy lines, and simple bars trimmed the outfits, along with thick sashes, sculpted aprons, and colorful hair bands.\n\nWe also have a fairly good idea of how the Minoans must have obtained the brightly contrastive colors\u2014red, blue, yellow, and white\u2014that made pattern weaving so much fun.\n\nNatural dyes come in two fundamental types. With the simpler kind, called direct dyes, what you see is pretty much what you get. Thus, if you chop and simmer the root of the madder plant, which still grows wild on Crete, you get a dark red soup which will dye wool an orangy red; if you simmer the stamens of the saffron lily, found on many Aegean islands, you will get an orange broth and a bright yellow dye color. Minoan reds and yellows probably came mostly from madder and saffron, although red may also have been obtained from kermes, a type of insect the female of which contains a gorgeous red dye (our word _crimson_ comes from _kermes_ ). Warren notes the presence of the kermes-bearing species of oak near Myrtos.\n\nDyes of the other type are called vat dyes and are much more complicated to process. One of the most popular vat dyes even today is indigo blue, the natural chemical used to color blue jeans. The Minoans probably obtained the dye from a European plant called woad; the word is so old that we know the proto-Indo-Europeans already knew of it. The indigo plant itself was not imported into Europe from India (whence it got its name) for another two thousand years. The people of Crete also extracted royal purple (so called because the Roman emperors later decreed that only they could wear it), deriving it from several varieties of sea snails, such as murex. We have their shell heaps from the early second millennium on to prove it. Each little mollusk produces only a single drop of the splendid dye, so purple-dyers had to catch and slaughter hundreds to tint a single piece of cloth. Depending on the water in which the sea snail grew, its dye could vary from purplish blue through deep purple to cherry red.\n\nThe advantage of vat dyes is that they don't wash out. To make madder and most other plant dyes colorfast, one needs a mordant, a chemical which fixes the dye. Soon after the height of the Minoan culture we have evidence of the mineral alum, the best natural mordant, being imported into the Aegean from Cyprus, so perhaps the Minoans knew of its use already. But all the way up until the invention of synthetic dyes in 1856, reds and blues were the easiest colors to keep from either washing out in water or fading from long exposure to light. (Hence the flags of most countries that became political entities before 1856 are colored red, white, and\/or blue.) It is probably no accident that these were the colors that the Egyptians depicted their Aegean visitors wearing.\n\nSince dyestuffs other than sea purple don't leave durable evidence like shells behind, and dye sources can seldom be determined unambiguously from the chemistry of their residues (even when we are lucky enough to have dyed objects preserved), we often can't prove that an available dyestuff was actually in use. But occasionally we are lucky, and in one case we also get a charming glimpse of women at their work.\n\nA recently discovered set of frescoes, still under restoration, from a Minoan-style house on the volcanic isle of Thera shows women out on a saffron hunt (fig. 4.7). A young girl has decked herself out in a handsome yellow bodice with blue edging and red tassels, a divided skirt with blue, yellow, and white flounces, gold hoop earrings, and gold and silver bracelets. Most of her head is lightly shaved (boys' heads were treated similarly, and still are, in modern Greece, to cure or prevent ringworm). Only a forelock and a single ponytail have been spared. As she plucks the stamens from the lilies on the craggy lava rocks before her, she looks up toward an older girl, whose locks have just grown out but are not yet very long. The latter, in turn, keeps picking saffron with one hand while she carefully holds her collection pail with the other and glances back over her shoulder at her young companion. A third woman, a young matron with long coils of black hair, fancy necklaces, and a garland of flowers over her elaborately patterned dress, holds out a string of beads in her hand, while a fourth girl, with sprigs of flowers and greenery stuck into her hair, has sat down to rub a bare foot she stubbed on the jagged rocks. Her mouth forms an \"ooh\" of mild pain. Yet another girl empties her basket at the main collection point, while a sixth girl looks back, wearing a polka-dot veil over her head and shoulders. Her head is still partly shaved, but she has several long locks. It has been suggested that she is the cause of this scene, that the saffron hunt is part of her rite of passage to the state of womanhood, since saffron is not only a dye but is considered in the Greek islands even today a specific for women's menstrual pain. The use as a dye for clothing is closely connected. In Classical Greek times, yellow apparel was considered appropriate for women only, including goddesses like Athena. The comic poet Aristophanes got a lot of mileage out of this by jokingly portraying the more effeminate Athenian politicians as dressed in yellow.\n\n_Figure 4.7_. Young women in fancy Minoan-style dress, picking saffron\u2014the stamen of a lily used as a yellow dye, as a spice, and as medicine for menstrual cramps. Wall painting from a mid-second millennium house on the Aegean island of Thera.\n\nThus the archaeological finds on Crete and the Aegean islands repeatedly give us solid evidence of a textile industry strong in technology and tradition and closely tied to the women's cultural as well as economic and medical concerns. Those, however, who enjoy reclothing the dry bones of archaeology and reanimating a long dead way of life can go a few steps farther, with Homer.\n\nHigh Minoan civilization fell, sometime between 1500 and 1400 B.C., weakened in part by devastating volcanic eruptions and quakes in the Aegean. The Bronze Age in turn ended around 1200 B.C., two generations after the Trojan War. Thus Homer, around 800 B.C., lived in an entirely different age as he composed his oral epics of the battles at Troy and of the difficult homeward journey of the Greeks after they had won the war. Without a doubt Homer worked from orally transmitted material; some of the objects he describes, like a helmet made of boar's tusk, had not been seen in the Aegean for centuries, although they are now known from archaeology. Classicists argue incessantly over how much he made up. Some have even suggested that all of it is fiction. But ethnographers working with oral histories learn that remarkably little of this sort of material is freely invented. The point of passing history along orally is that it contains information viewed by the tellers to be important. Making it up defeats the purpose, although embroidering it a bit from other known information can make it more fun and memorable.\n\nConsider, then, the famous tale which Homer tells of Odysseus shipwrecked on the island of the Phaiakians. It is an idyll, a sort of fairyland, but also a perfect picture of the kind of horticultural society we have just been visiting. Minoan Crete, last of its kind in Europe, was long gone, so Homer knew of this life-style\u2014with considerable accuracy\u2014either from some long-standing oral tradition or from a small enclave of emigrants still keeping to the old horticultural ways nearby. Either way we can profit from Homer's tale, by taking a brief walk through the sort of life that the luckier of Bronze Age Aegean women lived.2\n\n### THE LAND OF THE PHAIAKIANS\n\nHalf dead from swimming, the shipwrecked Odysseus struggles ashore at night onto an unknown island at a sandy rivermouth and burrows into the warm, dry leaves of a nearby thicket to sleep. He is awakened the next afternoon by the cries of young women who have been washing clothes in the river.\n\n_Girls can be seen even today at work and play on the riverbanks in rural parts of the Balkans, much the way Homer describes_.3\n\nThey took the garments in their arms from the wagon and carried them into the dark water,\n\nand stomped them in the pools, making a lively contest of it.\n\nThen after they had washed and cleaned away all the grime,\n\nthey spread everything out in rows on the shore of the brine, wherever\n\nthe sea had scrubbed the pebbles on the beach especially clean.\n\nHaving bathed and anointed themselves with olive oil,\n\nthey had their lunch on the banks of the river\n\nand waited for the clothes drying in the rays of the sun.\n\nThen after both Nausikaa and her maids were satisfied with food,\n\ntossing aside their headgear, they played ball,\n\nand white-armed Nausikaa led the song for them. [6.90\u2013101]\n\nIt is their shout, when someone misses and the ball goes into the river, that wakes up Odysseus. Hiding his nakedness behind a convenient branch, he delicately approaches their leader, the young princess Nausikaa, who gives him food, a tunic, and oil for bathing and then directs him to the nearby town, which lies between two harbors. She explains to him that\n\nThere the men busy themselves with the tackle of their black ships\u2014\n\nthe ropes and the sails\u2014and they sharpen their oars.\n\nFor bows and quivers are of no concern to Phaiakian men,\n\nbut rather masts and oars of ships and the balanced ships themselves,\n\nin which, rejoicing, they cross the gray sea. [6.268\u201472]\n\n_The Greeks, by contrast_ , _loved to hunt_ , so _Odysseus learns right here that he has arrived in a society rather different from his own_.\n\nNausikaa tells Odysseus to ask in the town for the house of her parents, and then gives him the following careful instructions:\n\nGo quickly straight through the hall until you reach\n\nmy mother\u2014she is sitting by the hearth in the light of the fire,\n\nspinning sea-purple roves of wool, a marvel to see,\n\nleaning against the pillar, and her maids sit behind her.\n\nAnd there the seat of my father is leaned, opposite her,\n\nwhere he sits and drinks wine like the immortals.\n\nPassing him by, on the knees of my mother\n\nplace your suppliant hands, in order to see your day of homecoming\n\nwith great rejoicing, even if you have come from very far.\n\nFor if _she_ takes friendly thoughts in her heart,\n\nthen there is hope for you to see your friends and reach\n\nyour well-built house and your native land. [6.303\u201315]\n\n_Different again. No married woman ran the Classical Greek household or made its principal decisions._4 _These peculiarly un-Greek instructions_ , _however_ , _are perfectly in line with what we know of matrilineal societies in which the men spend much of their time away. Since the woman owns and controls the house, she has control of which guests may stay in the house._\n\nAt the city gate who should meet him to give him directions but his old friend Athena, goddess of useful knowledge, disguised as a young woman.\n\n_Everywhere else in the Homeric epics Athena disguises herself as a man. So far everyone important on this island has been a woman, and Homer seems to be going out of his way to show that._\n\nAthena warns him first that the islanders are very suspicious of strangers on their own shores, since they rely on their ships for defense of their land. Then, as they walk along, she tells him the genealogy of Nausikaa's parents, Arete and Alkinoos. The Earth-shaker Poseidon had a son Nausithoos by the daughter of one of the Giants, and Nausithoos in turn had two sons, Rhexenor and Alkinoos. Rhexenor died young,\n\nleaving only a single daughter,\n\nArete; her Alkinoos made into his wife\n\nand honored her as no other woman on earth is honored. [7.65\u20137]\n\n_Let's translate that. Poseidon, the god first of earthquakes and next of tidal waves and the sea, mates with the daughter of a Giant\u2014a euphemism for a volcano. Odysseus is now among people for whom seismic activity is the most important of all_ \" _supernatural_ \" _forces, as several other points in the story show. Arete, an orphaned heiress, is married by her paternal uncle\u2014incest in many cultures, but precisely what the law requires for lone heiresses in the early law code from Gortyna, in Crete. Although written in Greek about 450 B.C., this huge inscription contains many laws that are very unlike Greek laws elsewhere, especially those relating to marriage, heiresses, and the often considerable property of the women. The differences, which include easy divorce initiated by either partner and what anthropologists call tribal cross-cousin marriage (typical of matrilineage), have been attributed to strong local holdovers from Minoan society. Homer may have made up all the names\u2014Arete simply means \"virtue\"\u2014but not the rules of cross-cousin marriage so foreign to the Greeks_.\n\nAthena continues:\n\nThus most heartily she was honored, and still is\u2014\n\nby her children and by Alkinoos himself\n\nand by the people, who, viewing her as a deity,\n\ngreet her with words when she walks through the city.\n\nFor she herself lacks in no way of noble intellect;\n\nand she resolves the quarrels of the women to whom she has good will, and their menfolk. [7.69\u201374]\n\n_The women of similarly structured societies among the Pueblo Indians also had the right to arbitrate quarrels and to say whether a stranger would or would not be allowed to stay within the home. They also had the system of cross-cousin marriage. Thus Homer's details are entirely consistent with modern ethnology._\n\nOdysseus is astonished at the opulence of the house. First to meet his gaze is the gilt and faience-tiled courtyard with its statuary. Next come the house itself and its gardens:\n\nInside, seats were placed at intervals along the wall, straight\n\nthrough to the inmost room from the threshold, and on them\n\ndelicate, well-spun draperies were thrown, the work of the women.\n\nThere the great-hearted Phaiakians would sit,\n\ndrinking and eating; for they held the [seats] in perpetuity.\n\nAnd indeed, young men of gold stood on well-built pedestals\n\nholding flaming torches with their hands,\n\nlighting up the nights for the feasters throughout the halls.\n\n_A common feature of Minoan palaces (but not Greek ones) is a huge room near the kitchens, apparently for massive communal dining. We are also just beginning to find evidence of life-size, fully realistic Minoan statuary of ivory and gold._\n\nAnd fifty serving women belonged to the house,\n\nsome of whom grind on the millstone the ruddy grain,\n\nwhile others weave at the looms and twirl their spindles\n\nas they sit, restless as the leaves of the lofty poplar,\n\nand the liquid olive oil runs down from the linen warps.\n\nBy how much the Phaiakian men are expert above all other men in\n\npropelling a swift ship on the sea, by thus much their women\n\nare skilled at the loom, for Athena has given to them beyond all others\n\na knowledge of beautiful craftwork, and noble intellects.\n\n_Here is the central expression of women's work in this kind of society_ , _exactly as we have come to expect it. We also see that the men's arena of activity is far from home and the soil\u2014down at the harbor and out to sea._\n\nBut outside the courtyard near the doors is a great orchard\n\nof four acres, and around it on either side runs a hedge.\n\nAnd there tall trees have grown luxuriant\u2014\n\npears and pomegranates and shining-fruited apples,\n\nand also sweet figs and plump olives. [7.95\u2013116]\n\n_Truly_ , _a horticultural economy raised to fairy-tale perfection. Yet every fruit mentioned was important to the Aegean economy._\n\nAnd beside the last row of vineyard, tidy garden beds\n\nof all sorts grow, ever shining;\n\nand in it are two fountains, one of which sprinkles\n\nthe whole garden, while from the other side the second flows under the courtyard's edge\n\ntoward the lofty house, whence the citizens draw water. [7.127\u201331]\n\n_Minoan sites are known for their highly advanced technology in waterworks. Those who built the palace at Knossos piped supplies of fresh water through the buildings in stone channels running under the floors, accessible at intervals, and built extensive drains for the sewage as well. Elsewhere in the palace the water runs in clay pipes, subtly tapered to keep the water moving. Open pools surrounded by a broad stone lip were constructed in a frescoed portico at the end of the road to the palace, where dusty travelers could sit comfortably, wash their feet, and cool off before entering the royal domain. Down the steep east side, just beyond the royal living quarters, the Minoans constructed what seems to have been a pleasure garden with little pools and channels of running water fed by a gurgling cascade._5 _Truly they loved their gardens._\n\nEntering the house, Odysseus does as he has been instructed, casting himself at the feet of the queen, and is accepted as a guest, to be fed, housed, and entertained before being given safe convoy home. The entertainments include athletic contests, the singing of a bard, and dancing. Watching the dancers, Odysseus exclaims to Alkinoos,\n\nYou boasted that your dancers were the best,\n\nand indeed it has been shown to be so. Awe seizes me as I look on them! [8.383\u20134]\n\n_We have a remarkable number of Minoan representations of dancing: not only the frescoes from Knossos, mentioned above, showing women dancing in a great courtyard, surrounded by bleachers full of lively spectators, and others from both Knossos and Hagia Triada (fig. 4.6), but also, for example, a small set of clay figurines of women joined in a round dance_.6\n\nFinally the Phaiakians heap Odysseus with gifts, listen to the long tale of his adventures, and take him home across the sea to Ithaca as he sleeps. But as the sailors return, Poseidon vents his wrath on them for saving his enemy, Odysseus, by destroying the ship within sight of the harbor. The citizens are terrified by the memory of an oracle to the effect that Poseidon would one day destroy a convoy ship and pile a mountain on top of their city, in anger because they gave safe passage to everyone. Seeing the one part fulfilled, they rush off to make sacrifices in hopes of averting the second apocalyptic disaster. And that is the last we hear of them.\n\n_Just such a disaster had actually happened in the Aegean around 1600 B.C., when the island volcano of Thera, sixty miles north of Crete, erupted with great violence, burying the Minoan towns on its flanks under a hundred feet of volcanic ash before partially collapsing into the sea_.\n\nCenturies later the people at Tanagra (four miles from the Aegean coast and twenty-five miles north of Athens) were still burying their dead in Cretan-style clay coffins painted with running spirals and with mourning scenes of women in Minoan-looking flounced skirts (fig. 4.8)\u2014at a time when all others in Greece were burying their dead coffinless and wearing baggy chemises and tunics. So at least a few people long maintained some of the old customs, perhaps even down into Homer's time. Whether or not, like the Amish of Pennsylvania today with their horse-drawn plows and carts, they still used archaic ways of producing their food, they clearly kept their habits of dress from a bygone age, as the Amish in bonnets and long dresses do also.\n\n_Figure 4.8_. One of many painted clay sarcophagi from the town of Tanagra, in eastern Greece, showing mourning women wearing strikingly Minoan-looking dress. Such clay coffins are known elsewhere only from Minoan Crete, rather earlier. The Tanagra examples date mostly to the thirteenth century B.C.\n\nIt is by their clothes that we recognize them instantly as a breed apart, an isolated remnant of a life-style that had grown and flourished for millennia but now languished far from the stream of change. And it is to the central importance of clothes as social indicators that we will now turn our attention.\n\n1A closely parallel effect can be observed in the third millennium B.C. in China, where the discovery of how to unwind silk from the cocoon of a particular species of silkworm revolutionized the technology of clothmaking. Silk, like wool, is easily dyed, producing a wide range of bright and attractive colors. Furthermore, its particular properties, so different from the plant-stem fibers used previously, led to major innovations in weave structures. For example, to bring out the wonderful shininess of silk, the weavers began to develop satin weaves, in which one set of threads (usually the warp) almost totally hides the set at right angles. They also developed new types of pattern weaving based on how the warp is treated. The same sort of thing happened with wool. The Europeans developed twill weave and patterns based upon it, and the Near Easterners invented weft-faced tapestry weave\u2014in each case to exploit the peculiar properties of wool.\n\n2Because the interest and importance of the details are not always immediately obvious to one not thoroughly acquainted with the archaeological and ethnographic literature, I have chosen to present the story with a running commentary at the side. My readers may thus choose to read the two strands in any order they wish without losing track of what relates to what.\n\nHomer knew of Crete, of course, but mostly of a Crete full of Dorian Greeks with a few \"true Cretans\" and other minor ethnic groups scattered about. Nowhere does he specifically equate the Phaiakians with either the Minoans (whom he also has heard of; see below, on dancing) or Crete, although when Odysseus gets home he tells everyone the \"lie\" that he has just come from Crete.\n\n3Many a Serbo-Croatian courting song mentions that the young man saw the girl of his desires when she was at the river doing this chore. One, for example, begins: \"I saw Jovana washing her white linen in the stream. . . .\" Nausikaa, in fact, was prompted to go to the river by a dream that she should begin to prepare for marriage. Textiles not only made up much of the trousseau but were among the main gifts to the wedding guests in rural European weddings up into this century.\n\n4Women were virtually household prisoners in fifth-century Athenian society in particular, as the legal orations of Lysias show (see Chapter 11), and this seems to have been the typical state of affairs from shortly before the time of Homer onward. There are many exceptions, however, in the Mycenaean world, most notably with Helen of Troy. Not only does her husband, Menelaos, carry on a ten-year war to retrieve her, but then, far from punishing her (as later Greek husbands of wayward wives were known to do\u2014usually by death), he sits around placidly while she tells stories of her escapades to their guests! The reason that he had to fetch her back can only be a matter of succession: that the right to the throne of Sparta passed through her female bloodline, not his. Without Helen, Menelaos could not be king. This analysis is borne out by every detail known of the family: Helen is the queen even though she has two brothers, the famous twins Kastor and Polydeukes (Pollux in Latin), and her daughter Hermione\u2014not one of Menelaos' sons\u2014becomes the next ruler of Sparta after her death. (See Atchity and Barber, \"Greek Princes and Aegean Princesses,\" for a full discussion.)\n\n5The staircase leading down the east retaining wall to the garden is unique in having beside it an open channel that carried whatever fresh water had not been used up in passing through the palace. The channel curves to match each step of the stair, enhancing the pleasant sound of the rushing water. At the bottom, shaded during the hot afternoons by the steep wall retaining the hill, it runs along two flagstone terraces through a series of tiny square pools, much too small for washing laundry, as the excavators suggested. The entire arrangement is much more likely to have been a pure pleasure garden. One of the Knossos frescoes depicts a splashing fountain rather like the one described by Homer.\n\n6One is reminded of yet another Homeric passage, the description in the Iliad of the many scenes depicted on the shield of Achilles. Among them (18.591\u20134) is a dance floor\n\nlike the one which once, in broad Knossos,  \nDaedalus built for Ariadne with the beautiful plaits of hair.  \nAnd there, youths and maidens worthy of a large bride-price  \nwere dancing, holding each other's hands by the wrist.\n\nMore than Hearts on Our Sleeves\n\n\"Clothes make the man\"\u2014but women made the clothes\n\nThe advent in the fourth millennium B.C. of colored thread, in the form of various natural and dyed hues of wool, triggered a major revolution in the clothes that women wove for their families to wear. Already in the Early Bronze Age, soon after 3000 B.C., we see the forms of dress proliferating from a small number of rather simple types into much more complex regional costumes. The Bronze Age, in fact, witnessed the development of many of the basic modes of dressing that we find characteristic of the cultures of the world today. Since the production of these new garments affected the lives of women in both what they wore and what they spent their labor on, we will find considerable interest in a closer look at the structure, meaning, and ramifications of the changes that occurred at this time.\n\nWhy do people wear the clothes they do? Why do people wear clothes at all?\n\nMost people will reply that clothes are for warmth, yet this argument does not hold up against the evidence. On the one hand, the inhabitants of very hot climates such as the Arabian Desert may wear lots of clothes\u2014for protection against the sun and sand. On the other, the human body can adapt to much lower temperatures than pampered Americans usually think it can. I recall my astonishment, upon coming to New England from a lifetime in a hot climate, at seeing a fellow graduate student wheeling his tiny children through the snow in light shirts and cotton pants. Then I learned that the family was from Finland and that to them this constituted warm weather: thirty degrees above, not thirty below. In fact, most clothing is worn for social reasons\u2014to mark sex, age, marital status, wealth, rank, modesty (whatever that may be within a particular culture), place of origin, occupation, or occasion.1 A few candid souls may, as the saying goes, wear their hearts on their sleeves, but we all wear a great deal of our pedigree and social aspirations written all over our apparel. The economic developments of the Bronze Age caused major cultural differentiation in most of these categories, and clothing types could now proliferate to mark the new variety.\n\nRelatively few Neolithic figurines wear clothes, and those that do are predominantly female. The simplest of straight skirts, often ankle-length, characterizes the common garb for women in central Europe, Egypt, and probably Mesopotamia. One imagines these skirts as wraparound, so that the person would have enough room to walk, but the depictions are too sketchy for certainty. Some European women wear a string skirt, the old Palaeolithic carrier of social information (see Chapter 2), while a few in both Europe and the Near East wear only a belt or sash. Such raiment is simple in the extreme.\n\nRitual, however, already occasioned the use of unusual attire. One of our earliest finds of actual textiles, from a cave in Israel known as Na\u1e25al \u1e24emar (ca. 6500 B.C.; see map, fig. 3.1), includes an elaborate net bag with a small stone button on it (fig. 5.1). The use of this linen net gradually became clear as the excavators sifted through the contents of the cavern in the mid-1980s.\n\n_Figure 5.1_. Needle-netted linen bag with stone button, thought to be a ceremonial hat and thus the oldest preserved clothing. From Na\u1e25al \u1e24emar Cave, Israel, ca. 6500 B.C.\n\nThe little cave in question burrows into a sheer cliff just above the floor of a canyon in the Judean Desert, near the southwestern tip of the Dead Sea. From the cave mouth one can see across arid heaps of stones to small tar seeps welling up from below the earth\u2014tar that the early Neolithic people traveled out to this distant and desolate spot to fetch. Between trips they stashed some of their gear in the little cave, using it as a convenient natural storeroom. Among its abandoned contents archaeologists discovered stone and bone tools, raw materials, and half-finished objects. One concludes that while here, the cave visitors spent time manufacturing things.\n\nThe half-finished containers in particular demonstrate that the natural tar or asphalt in the gully formed the main attraction. Pottery had not been invented yet, and these people exploited the tar to make waterproof vessels by thoroughly caulking their baskets and other fibrous containers with it. The sticky stuff invited other uses as well. The ancient artisans left a curved sickle with sharp flint bladelets set in with tar, as well as a human skull onto which someone had begun to model in tar a hairnet something like the one found in the cave. From contemporary sites, such as Jericho (only fifty miles away and already a thriving town five thousand years before Joshua), we know that members of this culture saved the skulls of important ancestors. After the flesh was gone, they remodeled the facial features with plaster, placing shiny oval cowrie shells where the eyes had been. People must have been carrying out such grisly work at this site, for cowrie shells, too, figure among the many remains in the cave, along with beads, cloth, figurines, and fright masks painted with violent red and green stripes. So much elaborate work went into the preserved linen hairnet (and into the shell-ornamented remains of a second such net) that the headpiece must have served for more than everyday wear\u2014perhaps for the same ritual or magical ceremonies in which the modeled skulls and gaping masks found use.\n\nFar away, in Hungary and the Balkans, people marked ritual by other means. Clay statuettes of both sexes (often sitting formally enthroned) were covered with geometric or swirling designs, some of which appear to be decorations on clothing (woven? painted?). But in other cases these patterns run straight across obvious anatomical details such as the navel or pubic triangle, as though they were right on the person's skin\u2014body paint or tattooing rather than patterned clothes.\n\nArchaeologists seldom see the skins of the people they dig up, but a tomb frozen solid by permafrost in the Altai Mountains of central Asia proves that decorating human skin is an antique art. It contained a man's body embellished from shoulder to ankle with tattoos of rams, a giant fish, and all manner of toothsome griffins. This find, which had to be excavated with buckets of hot water rather than trowels, probably dates to the fourth century B.C., Iron Age rather than Neolithic, but the sure-handedness of the designs shows that tattooing was no new art. The practice of painting designs on one's skin persists in parts of the Balkans and Turkey right up to this day. At Neolithic sites in the Balkans, small seallike blobs of clay often come to light, with incised geometrical patterns on them quite suitable for stamping paint onto textiles, skin, or walls\u2014a way of producing multiple copies of the same design quickly and easily. (Once again, I have seen rooms of modern peasant houses in northern Yugoslavia and Hungary\u2014as well as local textiles\u2014handsomely decorated with just such tiny stamped designs.)\n\nWhat we know of Neolithic pigments and dyes suggests that most of them would not have survived a washing. So the sort of swirling body art and textile paint seen on the figurines would have been quite temporary, as in parts of Africa today. We children of industry view such wash-off art as a scandalous waste of time and effort, but if we had to put in the hundreds of hours needed to make a _garment_ by hand from scratch, we might see the practice of repainting one's dress appropriately for each festival during the year as a tremendous savings, a necessary frugality.\n\nIn general, then, our picture suggests that Neolithic clothing was rather spare, with occasional elaborations in the sphere of ritual. Our first insight into what caused matters to change so radically in the Bronze Age comes from a pair of widely separated but parallel events late in the Neolithic. One occurred in China, the other in Europe, and both cases involve the advent of a new and more versatile textile fiber.\n\nAll through the Neolithic, weavers in Europe and the Near East employed flax, and in China they worked with hemp. Both are bast fibers\u2014that is, derived from plant stalks. About the time metalworking began, or a little before (late fourth millennium in Europe, late third or early second in China), animal fibers became available: wool in the west and domestic silk in the east. Both of these animal fibers insulate the wearer better than the plant basts, and both of them also accept dyes much more readily than bast. It was this second feature, color, which suddenly made it possible to send a vast new variety of social signals by means of cloth and clothing. Overnight, dress became far more than a wrap for cold nights or a shield from the sun. Only in Egypt, where wool never came to be used much, did the clothing itself remain fairly plain\u2014white linen garments of simple design\u2014while social signals came to be marked almost exclusively by jewelry.\n\nIn Europe we have the evidence to trace some of the changes in dress occasioned by colored thread. We have already seen in Chapter 2 that the proto-Indo-Europeans of the Early Bronze Age handed down words for only the simplest of attire\u2014belts and a general word meaning merely \"what you wear\" (or perhaps \"what keeps you warm\"). We also saw that many of them soon borrowed a word and the garment it represented\u2014the tunic\u2014from their Semitic neighbors to the south.2 This tunic itself was a plain linen garment of simple cut, a tubular body wrapper with places for head and arms.\n\nWhy should this linen garment have been borrowed into Europe just _after_ the advent of wool? Wool may be colorful, but it is also scratchy against the skin. The soft white tunic, made of smooth plant fiber (linen, hemp, nettle, and later cotton), served as a convenient buffer between the skin and the otherwise wonderful new wool\u2014all the more convenient because linen is so easily washed, bleached, and dried to clean it of body sweat. Thus the sartorial strategy became one of wearing a soft white tunic as a foundation garment, with the colored woolen clothes over the top for warmth and for show. We still dress by much this principle today in Western society\u2014largely white shirts, blouses, slips, and T-shirts as foundation beneath our colorful woolen sweaters and jackets, skirts and trousers.\n\nTunics developed in two major directions. The simpler variety consisted merely of a big rectangle of cloth, just as it came off the loom. The wearer draped it suitably over the body and pinned, tied, or belted it into place (fig. 5.2 a and b), while the manufacturer had it easy since no cutting or sewing was required to shape the dress. But that was also its drawback: One had to redesign the garment each time one dressed, and it wasn't always easy to keep it in place. (Many a quip has been made over the years about the poor Venus de Milo losing her drape altogether because she has no hands\u2014fig. 10.1.) The more complicated type of tunic dealt with this problem by taking several rectangles of cloth and sewing them up into tubes: one tube for the torso and two smaller ones sewn on for the arms (fig. 5.2 c).\n\n_Figure 5.2_. Types of simple tunics found in the ancient world: (a) Greek type, made by folding cloth and suspending it from two points at the shoulders (usually belted as well); (b) Mesopotamian type, made by wrapping the cloth around the body (see fig. 8.6); (c) Mycenaean and Slavic type, made from three tubes of cloth.\n\nIn Mesopotamia, where linen had been important for thousands of years, Sumerian women wore simple shoulder-to-ankle tunics wrapped so that the right arm and shoulder were bare (figs. 5.2 b and 8.6). The representations of this fashion date from the late fourth millennium B.C. onward. The men, when they wore anything at all, evidently preferred a longish skirt made either of a sheepskin with the shaggy fleece on the outside, or of a shaggy-weave textile. (Women sometimes wore tufted skirts and cloaks, too.) It is only in the mid to late third millennium that we see the habit of wearing linen tunics spreading to the menfolk, a date which accords with the apparent time of the linguistic borrowing farther north and with the time at which the eastern Semites began to get the upper hand in Mesopotamia. Probably the tunic had already become characteristic of these Semites, without our having the evidence to demonstrate it.\n\nMeanwhile, just to the south of the western Semites, the Egyptians were working on sleeved tunics, after perfecting short and knee-length kilts for the men and a simple shoulder-strap jumper for the women, all in plain linen. The earliest complete garment yet found by archaeologists anywhere in the world is a highly sophisticated Egyptian linen shirt from the First Dynasty, ca. 3000 B.C. (fig. 5.3).\n\n_Figure 5.3_. World's oldest preserved body garment: linen shirt from a First Dynasty Egyptian tomb at Tarkhan, ca. 3000 B.C. The shoulders and sleeves have been finely pleated to give form-fitting trimness while allowing the wearer room to move. The small fringe formed during weaving along one edge of the cloth has been placed by the designer to decorate the neck opening and side seam. Creases inside the elbow (making the lower half of the sleeves angle forward) prove that the shirt had actually been worn. It was found inside out, as though stripped off over the head. (UC 28614B\u2032: photograph courtesy of the Petrie Museum, University College London, where the piece is on display.)\n\nSir William Matthew Flinders Petrie had dug up this shirt during his 1912\u20131913 seasons at the site of Tarkhan. Even as far back as the First Dynasty, dead men and women embarked for the next world with linens and other useful goods piled high around their coffins. In the case of tomb 2050, robbers had already ransacked the burial in ancient times, chucking a good deal of linen out into the hot, dry sand, which soon blew over the cloth and protected it rather well until uncovered by Petrie's spade. A meticulous British archaeologist, Petrie concentrated on recording the minutest details of Egyptian daily life at a time when most museums and scholars prospected only for splendid works of ancient art and discarded the rest of what they uncovered (see Chapter 12). As with so much else of a homely nature that he found, and that no one else wanted, he tucked the ragged prize into his study collection and took it back to University College London. There it hibernated until 1977, when two women curators interested in textiles found it as they began to sort through the heaps of dirty \"funerary rags\" in storage. It proved a fine piece, with seams, fringes, and elaborate pleating largely intact after five thousand years. Moreover, creases at the elbow still make the long, slim sleeves bend forward at a comfortable angle, showing clearly that the shirt was actually worn. In fact, it was found inside out, just as the wearer had left it after stripping it off over the head. The linen rectangles from which the tunic was stitched together had been woven with a fringe of weft running along one edge, and these edges had been placed so as to adorn the neck opening and the side seam. What's more, the linen had been carefully pleated in row upon row of tiny tucks, not sewn but simply pressed in, to give it both elasticity and a trim fit. All this before 3000 B.C.!\n\nIt may well have been a simple version of the Egyptian shirt that the western Semites adopted in the next centuries and passed on up the coast to Syria and then Anatolia (roughly modern Turkey). There we find a long sort in use when we begin to get depictions of clothing in that area in the second millennium B.C., and from there it passed westward with Mycenaean Greeks along with the Semitic-based word _khit\u014dn_ to refer to it (see fig. 5.2 and note 2 above). Short-sleeved tunics appear in Mycenaean palace murals of 1400\u20131200 B.C. If we keep our eyes open, however, we can also detect long-sleeved ones in some of the shaft burials of 1650\u20131500 B.C. at Mycenae. In several of these royal graves, very thin gold foil surrounded the wrists of the deceased\u2014foil so thin that it could not have held shape alone but had to have been supported by a cloth sleeve.\n\nThis sleeved and rather long garment, which I will refer to as a _chemise_ , became the basis of clothing in much of the Balkans, central Europe, the steppelands, and the Caucasus.3 In Classical Greece and Rome, however, the simpler, sleeveless, draped tunic prevailed, probably brought in at the end of the Bronze Age by less sophisticated Indo-European tribes that invaded and infiltrated from the north during the period after 1200 B.C. Breezy in the extreme, it suits the warm Mediterranean climates. Our earliest Greek find of complete clothing conforms to this kind: a white linen tunic with a bright pattern-woven sash, dating to about 1000 B.C. Notice that the Classical tunic does not hang at all the way the Sumerian one does; instead of being spirally wrapped, the cloth is folded in half and suspended equally from both shoulders (fig. 5.2).\n\nWith the foundation garment\u2014soft white tunic or chemise\u2014in place, people began to elaborate and embellish woolen overwraps. That meant that the average housewife needed to learn to work both wool and flax, which require very different handling. But for her effort, she got much fancier and more diverse clothes to wear. The earliest-preserved example of this new mode of dress comes from the burial of a chieftain in the Kuban area, just north of the Caucasus, around 2500 B.C. He was laid in his grave wearing a white undergarment embellished with red tassels; over it was a black and yellow plaid wrap apparently of wool, and over that a fur wrap. Such an outfit is also just about what one would expect from comparative reconstruction based on more recent folk costumes of Eurasia and is heavily (though not exclusively) associated with the groups of Indo-Europeans expanding through Europe and the steppes. But to understand that remark and to decipher the interesting history of the European woolen overgarment, we need a new tool.\n\nWe can learn a lot about the development of ancient dress from applying the methods of comparative analysis (developed by linguists for language study) to the costumes themselves, not just to the words for them. To the extent that habits of speech and habits of dress occur largely below the level of conscious thought, they behave the same way. That is, we just _use_ these tools as a means to some end without contemplating the basic tools themselves. (Most people, for example, don't sit around asking themselves why the word _spoon_ contains those sounds. They just ask for a spoon to eat their breakfast with and get on with life.) Constant subtle changes and adjustments in these unconscious habits go on everywhere all the time, causing the forms of speech\u2014and dress\u2014in one area to end up different from those in another. The changes also happen much more slowly in a peasant culture than in a crowded urban environment. Since the changes occur at different rates in different places, they are reflected gradually across space, and a folk-costume map can end up looking rather like a dialect map.4\n\nApproaching matters thus, we can coax into view the historical evolution of the woolen outer garments that Europeans now placed over the soft white tunic or chemise. Like the tunic, its simplest form is a plain rectangle of cloth straight off the loom. The men of Homer's epics, for instance, each wore a big woolen rectangle over the tunic, using it as a cloak by day and as a blanket by night. Later Scotsmen did likewise: Their pieces of plaid wool (often worn with a shirt) used to be some sixteen feet long, half being belted around the waist like a skirt, with enough pleats tucked in each time to allow free movement, and the other half being thrown over the shoulder as a cape. Stories have it that the Scots were able to outlast the English soldiers in running warfare because the Highlanders would take off their kilt-cloths after dark, roll up in them three or four times, and remain warm enough to sleep out the night under any bush. Unfitted clothing has great versatility.\n\nWomen had cloaks, too, but a tradition arose among them of tying smaller squares on in addition, to use as aprons. (I have often thought, while puttering around my kitchen garden, that aprons must have been invented by prehistoric farm wives. The apron shields the undergarment and is always available as an impromptu basket of variable size to carry miscellaneous produce and wayward tools or toys, with the sacrifice of only a single hand to hold up the corners.) In parts of the Balkans (especially Romania) and Ukraine, this simplest, most archaic type of European folk costume could still be found into the middle of this century: a white chemise and a pair of narrow aprons, one in the front and one in the back (fig. 5.4 a). Nearby, dialectlike, one finds a slight but important variant, in which the back apron has become so wide that it wraps most of the way around, the small gap that it leaves in the front being overlaid by a small front apron (fig. 5.4 b). Survivals of this style can be found also in the Banat and Serbia, just to the west, and northward at least into Or\u00ebl, Tula, and Penza provinces in central Russia, just south of Moscow. Like the string skirt (see Chapter 2), which it partially replaced, the woolen back apron came to signal women's marital status.\n\n_Figure 5.4_. Types of women's uncut overwraps: (a) narrow front and back aprons; (b) wraparound back apron with a small front apron to cover the gap; (c) wide apron sewn up into a skirt; (d) skirt raised and lengthened to form a simple jumper.\n\nThe next variant in time and space comes with the idea that the wide back apron does not have to be rewrapped every day, nor does it have to let in the cold in front. One can sew up the square of cloth into a tube\u2014a skirt\u2014and belt it on somehow, either with a sash to bind it on or with a drawstring (fig. 5.4 c). In fact, we possess a plaid woolen skirt with a drawstring from the Danish bogs, dating to the Iron Age. (Because an outfit required a huge expenditure of time, effort, and materials, older folk costumes are usually constructed so that the person could grow in the usual directions\u2014taller or fatter\u2014without making the garment useless. A fixed belt band is less accommodating than a drawstring.) The skirt, of course, has become a particularly common element in Western clothing, still worn over the chemise, which itself has only recently been split at the waist to form a blouse or shirt above and a slip or petticoat below.\n\nIn the clothing \"dialect\" to the north of skirt territory, we find a similar woolen tube over the chemise, except that the top edge has been hauled up under the armpits, with the effect of keeping more of the torso warm (fig. 5.4 d). Since the skirt doesn't get much purchase up there, it requires shoulder straps to stay up. This, in effect, is the design of the Russian _sarafan_ and the jumperlike overdress found in parts of Scandinavia.\n\nThus an apparently wide array of traditional garments, scattered across thousands of miles, turns out to reflect an underlying unity of concept, a basic way of approaching the notion of clothing. The tradition we have just traced lies behind _our_ way of dressing, but of course, it is not everybody's. Traditional notions of what constitutes basic clothing differ radically from one part of the world to the next. Most of us do not recognize that fact now, because so much of the world has recently adopted traditional Western dress. Consider, however, how differently conceived the Indian woman's sari is from our tailored dresses or how different the Scotsman's kilt is from a Western business suit. And each of these differs widely from the Hawaiian girl's grass skirt, the Japanese woman's elaborate kimono, the African man's dignity robe, or the Australian aborigine's loincloth.\n\nReturning to our European playground, we can discern that another ancient tradition by which women fashioned their attire lurks in the Balkans, in addition to the blanketlike wraps of uncut woolen cloth. Minoan women, approaching the problems differently, based their clothing on cutting and tailoring, traits especially visible in the tightly fitted sleeved bodices and rounded aprons (figs. 4.5\u2013 and 6.3). A not unsimilar costume (considering the variety of clothing in the world), with big skirts and a sculpted bodice, appears on figurines from the Danube in the Bronze Age\u2014e.g., at C\u00eerna (fig. 5.5 left). Since Minoan weaving techniques tie in closely with those developed along the Danube, I suspect that this tradition of cutting and tailoring is linked, too, and is ultimately responsible for the woolen jumper with deeply cut neck-hole so prevalent in parts of Bulgaria and Serbia (fig. 5.5 right). Even some of the details of ornamentation on recent folk costumes of the Balkans resemble with astonishing closeness the Bronze Age representations of women's wear (see Chapter 6). But then, when the string skirt has lasted twenty thousand years, other traditions can make it through four thousand.\n\n_Figure 5.5_. Left: Bronze Age clay figurine of a woman, found in a cremation urn at C\u00eerna, southern Romania (mid to late second millennium B.C.). Right: Typical Bulgarian folk costume of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries A.D. Note the similarities of cut and decor to the C\u00eerna figurine of thirty-five hundred years earlier.\n\nWomen's dress was not the only kind to evolve. We left the Indo-European man wearing a white chemise or tunic, a belt (preferably red), and a woolen cloak. To judge from their first distribution, trousers were invented about 1000 B.C. in response to the chafing of tender parts incurred in the new art of horseback riding. The man's chemise was then shortened ( _shirt_ means \"cut short\") to allow the straddling position. Horses had been domesticated long before on the steppes, where they served to pull carts and chariots for a couple of thousand years before riding on the horse's back became common. Riding revolutionized life on the steppes, however, just as it did for the Plains Indians on the American prairies, because it meant that the humans were now faster and more mobile than the animals they chased. They could manage such large flocks, in fact, that the herds alone provided a good living for relatively little work. On both continents we see formerly sedentary people pulling up stakes and riding off after the herds. The great grassy steppeland, much of it far better suited to grazing than to agriculture, became a giant pastureland controlled by trousered nomadic riders. They inhabit it still today.\n\nAt the east end of the Eurasian steppes the Chinese watched the same transformation of herding early in the first millennium B.C. and recorded it with dismay. To them it spelled attack: swift, repeated raids on the rich Chinese farmlands by mounted barbarian nomads in search of food, women, and, above all, silk cloth. In vain the Chinese rulers tried to bribe the raiders with silk and grain to stay away. Finally, in self-defense, one of the Chinese kings, Wu-ling of Chao, ordered his people (in the words of an ancient Chinese historian) \"to adopt barbarian dress and to practice riding and shooting.\" Trousers and riding, as we saw, went together at the west end of the Eurasian continent, too, and the Chinese adopted both, around 400 B.C., from the same source as the West had. Thus prepared to fight fire with fire, Wu-ling led his men in a successful foray against the nomads and then began building sections of defensive wall to keep them out in the future. Affairs were more manageable after that, but hardly solved. A couple of centuries and many pieces of wall later, another emperor joined the sections into what we now know as the Great Wall of China, and in 174 B.C. the emperor Wen wrote to the leader of the nomadic barbarians as follows, suing for peace: \"We . . . send you from our own wardrobe an embroidered robe lined with patterned damask, an embroidered and lined underrobe, and a brocaded coat . . . ; one sash with gold ornaments; one gold-ornamented leather belt; ten rolls of embroidery; thirty rolls of brocade; and forty rolls each of heavy red silk and light green silk.\" Bright-hued silk and silken cloth, manufactured by countless Chinese women, finally induced the roving horsemen to leave the land in peace for a little while.\n\nIt was these same irrepressible nomads yet a millennium or two later who contributed the last major feature of many eastern European folk costumes, the fitted jacket. Undoubtedly they had invented their jackets, too, in the struggle to stay warm and dry while dashing about on horseback.\n\nBesides the line of development leading to the shirt and trousers, and besides the Minoan loincloth, the Bronze Age gives evidence of a third men's tradition in the northern Mediterranean: that of the short wrapped kilt. Of uncertain origin, perhaps starting as an animal skin wrapped around the hips (as the Egyptians saw at least a couple of Mycenaeans doing), it is so simple that, like the apron, it might well have been thought up independently in several places. Yet for all that, it is not particularly common in the world.\n\nIn Cyprus and in Egyptian paintings of visitors from the North Mediterranean, the kilt is associated with another article of apparel: plaited leather shoes, often with turned-up toes and worn with highly decorated socks or leggings. This distinctive footwear is also depicted in great detail on a Mycenaean pot modeled in the form of such a shoe, with all the minutiae painted on (fig. 5.6). There is no doubt that the slipper is constructed just like the _opanci_ still made today all over the central Balkans and Turkey (fig. 5.7)\u2014another incontestable survivor of several thousand years. The shoes are very comfortable, and the turned-up leather at the tip is particularly suited to protecting the toes from getting stubbed on rocky ground. They do not fare well slogging through mud or sand, however, so one concludes that they evolved to cope with just the sort of dry, mountainous areas where they persist today.\n\n_Figure 5.6_. Left: Cypriot bronze stand from Episkopi-Kourion, showing man wearing long kilt and turned-up-toed shoes. Right: Mycenaean vase from Attica, in form of a leather shoe (compare fig. 5.7). Fourteenth century B.C.\n\n_Figure 5.7_. Traditional leather shoes with turned-up toes _(opanci)_ from various parts of the central Balkans. Compare fig. 5.6. The turned-up tips help keep one from stubbing one's toes in the rocky terrain.\n\nIn such ways have the underlying clothing traditions of the world grown up, from a combination of available materials and felicitous inventions to meet the needs of climate, terrain, and lifestyle. We have followed these traditions in only one large region, but along the way we have seen how old such customs can be. Once a viable form had evolved for a given econiche, what need was there to replace it? Having established the fundamentals, people of a particular culture just kept adding new ideas and modifications on top of the old.\n\nThe frosting on these increasingly diverse and distinctive \"layer cakes\"\u2014these accumulations of types of attire used in different regions of the world\u2014comes in the surface decoration of the individual garments. As with the forms of the clothes, the observer can gather large amounts of social and geographical information from looking carefully at patterns, colors, and placement. The cultural codes of surface decor are so arbitrary, however, compared with the forms of the garments themselves, that we will have to treat them within a different framework.\n\n1To discover the nature of this practice, look around you. Does a party guest wear expensive silk? Cheap polyester? Motorcycle boots? Lace gloves? We deduce much from such clothing about the owner. If the veiled woman is all in white, she's the bride; if in black, she's the widow, or at least in mourning. If the man's bow tie is white, he is host or guest, but if it's black, he's probably the waiter. And if he has no ribbon at all around his neck, some clubs and restaurants won't serve him any dinner.\n\nNote, too, how specific these codes are to a particular culture. In China, for example, white is for mourning whereas the color for weddings is red. In nineteenth-century Russia leather boots were a sign of wealth. Modesty, likewise, is culture-specific. In China a woman's feet were traditionally considered her most private part, and if caught undressed, she would cover them first.\n\n2The word _tunic_ comes into English from the Latin _tunica_ , which itself was borrowed from some West Semitic language. In Hebrew, for example, the garment is called _kutton-eth_. (The Romans took the word in as _*ktuni-ka_ and simplified the beginning. The Greeks took the same word and made _khit\u014dn_ out of it.) The Semites, for their part, had borrowed from the Sumerians some names for the linen that this garment was made of. Thus cuneiform records show that the East Semitic Akkadians had _kitinnu_ , meaning \"linen; linen cloth,\" and _kit\u00fb_ , \"flax, linen,\" which latter was ultimately borrowed from Sumerian _gada_ , \"linen.\"\n\n3The English word _chemise_ comes, via French, from Latin _camisia_ , itself probably a borrowing from Celtic. Note that words for types of clothing frequently bounce about from one language to another, the way _tunic_ and _chemise_ have done. For one thing, many people enjoy borrowing novel forms of clothing from other cultures. (The Romans, for example, avidly imported cloth and clothes from the Celts to the north of them.) The second big reason is that textiles and garments were favorite forms of booty during raids and other warfare. This fact is fossilized in our language with the term _robe_ , which came from the verb _to rob_.\n\n4In applying this principle to the archaeological world, we must beware of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalism, which artificially heightened and overcodified local differences. Thus the beloved tartans of the Scottish clans did not exist as such before the rise of Scottish nationalism in the 1800s. People wore woolen twill cloth, and plaid was a favorite type of pattern; but that was about all. On the other hand, even though details were added, the basic local notions of what constituted the proper approach to clothing men and women were not changed. (Some modern debunkers have gone so far as to claim that even the idea of plaid was new to the Celts at that time, but archaeological finds such as those discussed in the Introduction show that to be untrue. Celts had been making simple two-color plaid twills for a good twenty-five hundred years when nationalism took hold.)\n\nElements of the Code\n\nKnow first who you are, then deck yourself out accordingly.\n\n\u2014Epictetus, _Discourses_ , 3.1\n\nHuman beings, the quintessential social animals, constantly send and receive complex social information. Our most acute sense is vision, yet eons ago the human race selected sound, not vision, as its primary channel for linguistic communication.1 That kept our newly evolved hands free for using tools and allowed us to send and receive messages even when we weren't looking or couldn't see, for instance, in the dark of night or in a thick forest. But how to deal with the need to send certain social messages _continuously_ , like \"I'm married\" or \"I'm in charge here\"? Sound waves die away the moment they leave your mouth, yet saying something over and over is a bore, and tiring, too.\n\nVisual symbols, so easily made permanent or semipermanent, provide the answer. For instance, one can carry a scepter to mark one's continued authority or set up a stone circle and stand inside it to mark a religious event in progress. A scepter, of course, engages your hands\u2014a disadvantage\u2014and a stone circle, being too heavy to lug about, keeps you in one place. Painting the body itself with symbols avoids both these problems, and we know that people did this in prehistoric times (see Chapter 5) and still do, especially in the tropics. In colder climates, however, where putting on a warming wrap will cover up these emblems, the easiest and most adaptable solution is to hang a suitable cloth outermost on the person, place, or thing to be marked and remove it when it is no longer appropriate. Thus an embroidered towel slung over the shoulder, a gift from the bride, marks the groom's kin at a Croatian wedding, and a handsome cloth wrapped around an object in Japan marks it as an honored present. The bride, too, is \"wrapped\" in a ceremonial white gown in Western society, as she is \"given away.\" Clothing, right from our first direct evidence twenty thousand years ago, has been the handiest solution to conveying social messages visually, silently, continuously.\n\nIt also became the normal solution, as we see from some notable counterexamples. European societies in the Middle Ages developed heraldic devices adorning shields and banners (another type of cloth) to announce in some detail who was who. Why? Because knights had gotten completely covered up in armor. Thus no one could see much of them or their clothes anymore. Similarly today, where commuters are swallowed up in the armor of their cars for hours on the freeways, they have resorted to bumper stickers and vanity plates to display their individuality. That is, when you can't _see_ the clothes, people invent new visual devices to carry the social signals.\n\nNote, however, a critical difference between modern bumper stickers and message T-shirts on the one hand and medieval heraldry on the other. Today in America we assume that everyone can read. We have only to locate a place to _write_ the message. But writing wasn't even invented until roughly fifty-five hundred years ago, not long after the wheel and woolly sheep came along, and even then the script was so complicated that only a very few\u2014and highly privileged\u2014individuals could read and write. It wasn't until a script as simple as the Greek alphabet had both been invented and become widespread, a good three thousand years later, during the \"golden age\" of Athens in the late fifth century B.C., that message senders could assume some literacy in the general population. The Classical Greek and Roman urban citizens could read and write, even (!) women and slaves in many cases. But all of that was lost in the barbarian wars that followed. So during medieval times messages like family lineage had to be signaled by symbolic coats of arms, and shop signs needed to be pictorial: a loaf of bread for a bakery, a sheaf of wheat for a miller, a steer's head for a butcher shop. Widening literacy, born with the printing press and the Renaissance, is but a few centuries old.\n\nCloth, like clothing, provided a fine place for social messages. Patterned cloth in particular is infinitely variable and, like language, can encode arbitrarily any message whatever. Unlike language, however, it is not organized around sweeping syntactic patterns that can compress large amounts of information into simple rules. Hence one has to learn the textile and clothing code one element at a time. Within this riot of information, we will seek the chief goals of such systems and ferret out the basic principles.\n\nWhat did ancient people try to accomplish when they deliberately made cloth bear meaning? A good look at folk customs and costumes recently in use reveals three main purposes. For one thing, it can be used to mark or announce information. It can also be used as a mnemonic device to record events and other data. Third, it can be used to invoke \"magic\"\u2014to protect, to secure fertility and riches, to divine the future, perhaps even to curse. Today clothing is also used as an indicator of fashion, but the subtleties of that expression, which change so very rapidly, are largely beyond our ability to reconstruct in the ancient world.\n\nThe string skirt announcing the readiness of a woman for childbearing, discussed in Chapter 2, is an excellent example of the first category, the announcement of information. In the mountains of south-central Asia Kafir women wear distinctive headgear but remove it for a few days each month to indicate a temporary nonreadiness, menstruation.2 Examples abound in Western society, too: for instance, the indication of mourning by wearing black.\n\nSocial rank, too, has probably always been encoded through symbols in the material, design, color, and embellishment of the clothing. In Rome, for instance, the emperor and no other enjoyed the privilege of wearing a robe entirely of \"royal purple.\" Lower nobility, freeborn boys, and certain priests could sport at most a purple stripe, and others no purple at all. Both the Egyptians and the Sumerians were already marking their kings with crowns in the late fourth millennium. Because the top rulers were virtually always male, the royal headdress in Egypt also came to symbolize virility and included a false beard. When Hatshepsut, the stepmother and regent of Thutmose III, chose to take the throne herself around 1500 B.C., she faced the incongruity of needing to assume clearly male regalia as \"pharaoh.\" Her statues\u2014what was left of them after Thutmose III got through destroying them following her death twenty years later\u2014are quite recognizable for the feminine delicacy of her face and the ever so slight modeling of her breasts, despite the traditional male kilt, false beard, and pharaonic wig that mark her as \"king.\"\n\nCloth is also used to mark someone as a participant in a ceremony. In the Minoan scene of picking saffron discussed in Chapter 4, one of the young women wore a special veil with red polka dots, apparently to mark her as the center of the ritual. Minoan women also signaled some kind of special function by donning a scarf looped in a large knot at the back of the neck (fig. 6.1). This scarf is clearly not directly functional as clothing, and as a symbol it came to operate by itself. Thus we see the \"sacred knot\" repeatedly represented alone\u2014carved in ivory, modeled in faience, or painted as a fresco motif. In the same way, Athena's sacred garment, the aegis, came to represent her in Classical times. Such symbols could be used alone to mark the location or existence of a ritual, much as the cross associated with Jesus is used in Christianity.\n\n_Figure 6.1_. Minoan woman wearing a \"sacred knot\" at the back of her neck, signaling that she is in the service of the deity. Fresco from palace at Knossos, fifteenth century B.C.\n\nHanging up a distinctive textile is a common way of making ordinary space special, even sacred. The folk of southern Sumatra place a special ritual cloth, made by the women of the family, as a backdrop to the key participants in the most important rites of passage, such as marriage, birth, or death. Mary Kahlenberg, an expert on Indonesian textiles, tells us that these special figured cloths \"identified the nexus of ritual concern and by their very presence delineated a ritual sphere.\" For example, \"the bride sits on one or more . . . during specific times in the wedding ceremony\" and \"the head of a deceased person rested on one . . . while the body was washed.\" Similarly, in Greek representations of funerals from the Geometric period (around 800 B.C.) special backdrops, almost certainly cloths, hung over or behind the deceased.\n\nTextiles can be chosen to mark off and provide information about secular space, too. In Egypt we see gaily colored mats and textiles hung to form sun-shading pavilions, where the lord and lady are sometimes depicted taking cooling refreshment from a servant girl (fig. 6.2). As time went on, the materials for these canopies grew ostentatious, including brightly patterned rugs imported all the way from the Aegean. The rank, wealth, and \"connections\" of the family could thus be seen in how fancy the tent was and in the sorts of fabrics available to the family.\n\n_Figure 6.2_. Egyptian linen chest painted to represent the lord and lady enjoying refreshments in a shady pavilion formed from bright mats (end, with window) and textiles (roof). From the Eighteenth Dynasty tomb of Kha at Thebes, ca. 1450\u20131400 B.C.\n\nIn Classical Greek times, too, important banquets were sometimes laid out in tents made of fancy textiles. For instance, Ion, the young hero of Euripides' play _Ion_ , sets up such a pavilion for a feast to celebrate his reunion with his father. Since his mother had orphaned him as a baby on the steps of Apollo's temple at Delphi, he grew up as a temple servant. He thus has both the right and the duty to select from the rich temple storehouses a series of ornate cloths with which to make tent walls to shelter the sacred feast.\n\nIn all these ways, textiles mark special people, places, and times and announce specific information about them. But cloth can also be used as a vehicle for recording information, such as history or mythology.\n\nIn the third book of the _Iliad_ (lines 125\u201327), Helen of Troy is described as weaving into her purple cloth \"the many struggles of the horse-taming Trojans and the bronze-tunicked Achaians.\" In fact, as she does so, the messenger-goddess Iris comes to her in human disguise to say that the Greeks and Trojans are no longer fighting. Helen should come up onto the city wall to see for herself that now her first husband, Menelaos of Sparta, and her new husband, Paris of Troy, have engaged in single combat for her sake while the two armies ring around to watch. The passage implies that Helen should stop weaving old events and move on to recording the new ones.\n\nWhether or not Helen herself actually wove episodes of the Trojan War, we know that Greek women sometimes did produce large storytelling cloths and that some of these \"tapestries\" were kept in the treasuries of Greek temples, where they could be seen upon occasion. (Greek temples, like medieval cathedrals, served as storehouses for cultural treasures, much like our modern museums.) It is just such textiles, covered with stories of Orion (the hunter who still chases the seven Pleiades sisters across the starry sky each night), Cecrops (the snake-bodied progenitor of Athens), and various barbarian battles, that Euripides has Ion use for his temporary banquet hall. Penelope's famous cloth, which she wove by day and unwove at night to fool her suitors, was almost certainly a story cloth. Because we are told that it was for her father-in-law's funeral, most people interpret the phrase _funerary cloth_ (used by Homer when he tells the story in Book 2 of the _Odyssey_ ) as a shroud or winding sheet. But she could have woven that in a couple of weeks and wouldn't have come close to fooling her suitors for three years. Homer's audience would have known that only the weaving of a nonrepetitious pattern such as a story is so very time-consuming, but we who no longer weave or regularly watch others weave are more easily misled. We even possess pieces of two story cloths from Greek tombs in the Black Sea colonies, where textiles are preserved more often than in Greece (fig. 9.6).\n\nWe also know from Athenian records that young women periodically wove a new woolen garment to dress the ancient cult statue of Athena on the Acropolis and that this robe had scenes on it. Two priestesses called the \"workers\" _(ergastinai)_ , helped by two young girls chosen for the privilege from among the noble families of Athens, wove the saffron-colored robe over a period of nine months. This weaving took so long, even though the statue was only life-size, because it had woven into it in purple the important story of the battle between the gods and the giants. During this horrendous uproar (a \"mythical\" account of a major volcanic eruption, probably the explosion of Thera between 1600 and 1500 B.C.) Athena was credited with saving her city, Athens, from destruction. The entire festival, occasion of the new dress's presentation, was apparently a giant thank-you for salvation, and the story on the dress was of focal importance.\n\nRecords of history and mythohistory on textiles are not uncommon elsewhere in the world. The Hmong women who recently escaped to Los Angeles from Cambodia are busy making picture cloths in a traditional style, depicting the incidents of recent wars in their homeland, since they do not know how to write. Pile rugs knotted recently in Afghanistan sometimes show Stinger missiles downing flaming Soviet helicopters, and the conflict between Harold of England and William of Normandy (later William the Conqueror) was immortalized in the Bayeux Tapestry. (Ironically it is not, in fact, a tapestry, which is woven, but an embroidery, which is sewn.) This 231-foot wool-on-linen strip also shows a remarkable natural event, the passing of Halley's Comet, datable to April 1066.\n\nThird and last, cloth and clothing often invoke magic in their encoding. Within this magical world, fertility, prosperity, and protection are three of the most common objectives.\n\nWe have seen that at least one modern descendant of the string skirt, the Greek _zostra_ , has moved from being a signal that the woman could bear children to being a magical talisman to help her do so safely. The hooked lozenges woven on the modern string aprons from Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, and Romania (and embroidered on other parts of the women's costumes from these areas) are also to promote fertility (fig. 2.8).3 Another motif on these same costumes that seems to be very old is the rose, a symbol of protection. George Bolling furnishes an interesting argument that Homer portrays the Trojan princess Andromache weaving specifically protective roses onto a cloak for her husband, Hector, at the moment at which she hears that he has been killed. Her work in vain, she drops her bobbin and rushes to the city wall to see for herself, wrenching from her head, as she collapses in grief, the elaborate headdress that marked her as a married woman. She is married no more. The pathos of her patient attempt to weave a frail web of magic for her beloved in the midst of this tumultuous war heightens the power of the scene enormously.4\n\nMarija Gimbutas has drawn together extensive evidence of the use of bird and egg motifs, from far back in the Neolithic. These two\u2014the bird and the egg, so closely related to each other\u2014are still common today in Greek and Slavic territory, as well as in other parts of Europe, as potent fertility symbols. Eggs encapsulate the miraculous power of new life, and birds produce eggs, a life-giving process remote (to the na\u00efve viewer) from our own live birth, and much more abstract. It is no accident, either, that eggs are part of Easter, the celebration of renewed life in the spring. Among the early Slavs (and residually down into this century), birds\u2014especially white ones like swans\u2014were thought to be reincarnations of girls who had died before having children. Called _rusalki_ or _vily_ (willies), they were thought to possess the powers of fertility that they hadn't used during their lifetimes and to be able to bestow that fertility on the crops, animals, and households of those who pleased them. It is noteworthy that the farther north and west you go, the more crotchety and ill willed the willies become. In Ukraine, although they are touchy and you have to be nice to them, they are extremely beautiful and are likely to favor your crops and might even do your spinning for you. By the time you get up into southern Poland and eastern Germany, they are terrifying and often ugly creatures that will harm pregnant women and will dance or run to death any men unlucky enough to see them out in the forest at night. Someone who \"has the willies\" is being hounded by these wraiths. Images of birds and bird-maidens were carved on the houses, barns, and gates and embroidered on the folk costumes, a tradition which undoubtedly goes back much further than we are able to document in that area. Ladles for food, in a long tradition going back at least to the mid-second millennium B.C. on Russian soil, were formed in the shapes of water birds. Many a classical ballet has used variations on these themes to advantage, the most famous being _Swan Lake_ , in which an evil sorcerer has turned a whole flock of maidens into white swans, and _Giselle_ , in which the heroine dies of a broken heart in the first act and in the second saves her now-penitent lover from being danced to death at night in the forest by her companion willies.\n\nSnakes, frogs, and fish (egg layers all) are also thought to bring wealth and fertility to the household, in various parts of Europe. Rusalki are sometimes shown as girl-headed fish, at least one Greek vase shows a woman overlaid with a fish figure, and snakes were an integral part of ancient Greek and Minoan lore. Phidias' great statue of Athena in the Parthenon, a temple built in part to give thanks for the end of the Persian Wars in 480 B.C., shows a snake emerging from under Athena's shield, which she has just set down, Victory standing in her hand. The message is clear: It is safe to come out now and go back to running happy, prosperous households. It would be interesting to know whether the famous Minoan statuettes of young women holding up snakes, found in religious contexts, had a similar meaning (fig. 6.3). Quite likely they did. An important Slavic pagan deity named Berehinia (Protectress5), whose cult survived up into this century and who still appears on ceremonial towels, shows up as a figure with a full skirt and raised arms, in exactly the same stance (fig. 6.4). In her hands she holds bunches of vegetation (flowers or grain), or birds, or occasionally snakes. Or sometimes (and this is the form we see often in Greek art) she controls with her upraised hands a pair of large animals. In Greek this form is known as the _Potnia Theron_ (Mistress of Animals). In Ukrainian villages in the spring the women carried an image of the Protectress around the perimeter of all the village fields, in a solemn procession in the dead of night, to ensure fertility and protection throughout the coming year. Woe befell any male so foolish as to go out that night.\n\n_Figure 6.3_. Minoan statuette of a young woman\u2014either priestess or goddess\u2014displaying snakes in her hands, while a creature perches on her hat. This clay figurine, another similar one, and clay models of ornate dresses were found in the temple repositories at the great Cretan palace of Knossos (mid-second millennium B.C.).\n\n_Figure 6.4_. Nineteenth-century A.D. Russian embroidery design of the pagan Slavic goddess Berehinia, the protectress of women and their fertility, displaying birds in her hands. Such archaic survivals are frequent in Slavic folk art; the motif of the protecting goddess with her arms raised, hands full of birds or plants, is still in active use in Ukraine and other Slavic areas.\n\nEurope had no monopoly on protective images on clothing, although we know much less about their history elsewhere. In Tutankhamon's tomb, among the wealth of royal clothing preserved there, lay a richly decorated tunic. Its neckhole forms an _ankh_ , or long-life sign, with the king's name embroidered at the center of the cross and surrounded by the traditional _cartouche_ , a protective oval made by a magic rope\u2014the Egyptian equivalent of the European magic circle. Around the bottom of the tunic are panels embroidered with an array of real and mythical beasts and plants, clearly of Syrian workmanship. What messages, if any, these were intended to convey to or for the pharaoh is unknown.\n\nSo far, all our examples of encoded magic have been in the form of decorative motifs. But people have devised more structural approaches to working magic. European folktales are full of references to the making of magical garments, especially girdles, in which the magic seems to be inherent in the weaving, not merely in special decoration.\n\nOne possibility is to weave the spell in as number magic. In Chapter 2 we mentioned a Middle Bronze Age belt from Roswinkel, in the Netherlands, that smacked of number magic. The weaver chose warp threads of red wool for her work, 24 spun one direction, and 24 spun the other way. (Opposite spins catch the light differently and, when placed next to each other, give a striped effect.) She divided the bunch spun one way into 3 sets of 8, and the other bunch into 4 sets of 6, and alternated them. All this is perhaps perfectly innocent, but in this same area of northern Germany, Holland, and Denmark at a somewhat later date these numbers were considered particularly sacred. The scheme is best known from the runic alphabet, which at first consisted of 24 letters in 3 sets of 8, and later of 32 letters in 4 sets of 8. Also important were 3 and 6. Thus the handsome red sash from Roswinkel looks suspiciously like a \"magic girdle.\"6\n\nThe Batak tribes of Sumatra generate woven magic another way. In one area, the ethnographers tell us, the women wove special magical cloths on circular warps, which were never cut because\n\nthe continuity of the warp across the gap where the woof had not been woven in was said to be magic to insure the continuity of life from the mother to the child. . . . The birth of the child was represented by the beginning of the woof at one side of the uncut fringe. As one drew the cloth through the hands it represented the growing up of the child, and when the other side of the uncut fringe was reached, it represented the beginning of a new generation whose life would repeat that of the mother, and so indefinitely.\n\nThus the circular form of the cloth itself is seen as magical.\n\nAmong the Batak the act of creation itself is viewed as women's special work, not only in producing babies, who grow where nothing has existed before, but also in creating cloth, which comes into being where nothing has existed before. Cloth and its making are thus taken as analogs for life and birth, in every sense. Mattiebelle Gittinger tells us, further:\n\n[W]omen were traditionally responsible for the cultivation of the cotton, its harvesting, cleaning, spinning and, as today, dyeing, starching and weaving the yarns. However, the woven textile carries connotations beyond those of merely women's labor. The _ulos_ [ritual cloth] is a symbol of creation and fertility. In the very process of weaving the woman creates a new object\u2014a united whole\u2014from seemingly disparate elements. This magical quality can escape none who see the woven cloth emerge behind the moving shuttle. Further, just as music is an experience monitored through time, so too does the total cloth emerge as the finished expression of the metrical time invested in each throw of the weft. The cloth thus becomes a metaphor for both time and fruition.\n\nWhen a girl is pregnant for the first time, her parents give her a cloth made specially for her. Called her soul cloth, it is covered with tiny designs that are used to foretell her future (yet another use of magic). She will rely on this cloth throughout her life \"as a guardian of her well being.\" In particular, \"its inherent revitalizing and protective powers are sought in the time of child birth . . . and in cases of her or her child's illness.\" The motifs on these particular cloths, and their arrangements into zones, are thought to be very old, for they are characteristic of the sorts of designs found on prehistoric cast bronzes in Southeast Asia.\n\nWe have looked at the various purposes for which cloth was deliberately encoded: giving or recording information and invoking the powers of magic. But how did people come upon the codes they adopted?\n\nPerhaps the most frequent means of arriving at a sign is through imitation on some level, some sort of analogy of form or color. The Batak, for example, use a circular warp in analogy with cycles of life. In Europe the hooked lozenge imitated the vulva, to assure fertility, and roses were invoked for protection, apparently because of their thorns. (As the thorn protects the rose, so the rose protects me.) The Slavs (and many other peoples) use the color red to signify vitality, in imitation of red blood; until recently men wore red sashes and women embroidered the shirts and chemises of both sexes with red motifs (roses and lozenges in abundance). Our earliest European example of a person clad in a white tunic or chemise with woolen overwrap, from the Kuban in the third millennium, already had red tassels of thread and purplish red embroidery on that tunic (Chapter 5).\n\nAs another example of analogy, note that Slavic red embroideries are generally located at the openings of the clothing\u2014neckhole, wrists, and shirttail. This decoration was meant to discourage demons from crawling in at the openings since demons were thought to cause illnesses, bodily and mental. The notion of the demons entering is an analogic construct, based on such events as vermin creeping into food and contaminating it. The placement of the demon repellent (life-bolstering colors and designs) follows logically from such images.\n\nThe northern Mediterranean use of the color yellow, on the other hand, appears to derive from association. If the theory is correct that prehistoric women in the Aegean Islands, like their modern descendants, saw saffron as a specific medicine for menstrual ills, then their use of this bright yellow dye and medicine came to link the color with women. The women may even have come to dye their clothes with saffron expressly to avoid\u2014to turn away\u2014the sickness ahead of time.\n\nMuch of the time, however, as with language, the relation between the code and the meaning is purely arbitrary, as, for instance, with number magic or the Roman stripe denoting rank. But even within this group one can spot an occasional symbol that started out as something more practical. Thus veils for the bride, while a mere token now, once served to cover the sexually \"unknown\" woman until the proper moment.\n\nIn all these ways, then\u2014through imitation, analogy, and arbitrary symbols often viewed as magical\u2014human cultures have over time built a sort of language through clothing, allowing us to communicate even with our mouths shut.\n\n1Oral speech, as we know it, is on the order of 150,000 to 100,000 years old, to judge by the fossil evidence for the evolution of a mouth and vocal tract adapted to oral speech. For comparison, writing was first invented a mere 5,500 years ago, and a widespread, standardized sign language for the deaf was developed only in the last century. (Upright stance, together with \"modern\" hands and feet, developed about 4 million years ago.)\n\n2They also wear small string skirts over their clothes, but I have not been able to determine what significance is attached to them. The Kafir people are Indo-European; Kafiristan is former Nuristan. These particular women lived in the Birir Valley of the Karakoram Mountains, at the northeastern tip of Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to information gleaned at the Ethnographic Museum, Florence, where photos of them were on display.\n\n3The lozenge is intended to represent (rather graphically) the female vulva. Europe is not the only place where this symbol is used. In Hawaii, for example, the hula dancers traditionally make a lozenge shape with their hands to signify the same thing, and novices have to be careful not to make this sign accidentally when trying to make the partly similar sign for a house!\n\n4The translation of the key word _thronoi_ has long been a puzzle, and Bolling's set of arguments that it means roses is not accepted by all classicists. But he has considerable evidence, and the interpretation makes good literary sense out of an otherwise random set of details in the scene. Homer is not usually so uneconomical. The passage occurs in Book 22 (lines 438\u201372) of the _Iliad_.\n\n5Perhaps also to be translated \"riverbank spirit\" since the Slavic word roots for \"protect\" and \"riverbank\" are homonymous.\n\n6Scholars have assumed that number magic began with the introduction of Mithraism into the area, via the Romans. The Mithraic religion, from the Near East, is full of number magic. But I keep wondering why Mithraism took hold just exactly here. Could it be because the local people were already into number magic and viewed the new cult as enlarging their \"information\" on a subject already important to them?\n\nCloth for the Caravans\n\n  | One heavy cloth  \nto Ashur-Malik  \npreviously  \nfor his caravan-trip I gave;  \nbut the silver from it  \nhe has not yet brought  \nme . . .  \nWhen the purse  \nyou send,  \ninclude some wool:  \nwool  \nin the city  \nis costly.  \n---|---  \n\u2014Cuneiform letter from  \nAssyrian businesswoman,  \nto her merchant husband,  \nca. 1900 B.C.\n\nThe realization that domestic animals could be exploited for wool, milk, and muscle power while alive, not just for meat when killed, revolutionized human society as profoundly as domestication itself. By 4000 B.C. in the Near East we see major changes occurring as a result. The advent of plowing with large draft animals, as we have seen, permanently removed women, especially those with children, from the mainstream of food production. Draft animals were big and dangerous, but the sowing of large fields of grain provided such an efficient source of food that there could be no going back to the old ways. Full-scale agriculture was a largely male occupation.\n\nOn the other hand, women had new things to occupy them. For some, this probably included small-scale dairy farming, since the making of yogurt and cheese from the milk of domestic animals increased the variety of storable foods and got around the problem that most adult humans can't digest fresh milk. The ability to produce the enzymes that break down milk sugar (lactose) in the stomach, before it gets to the intestines and causes major trouble, is controlled by a dominant gene but has to be selected for. Longtime pastoral populations, like the Masai of Africa and the people of northern Europe, have developed that trait. The Masai consume much milk, while northern European cooking relies heavily on fresh cream and milk. Mediterranean and steppe peoples, however, developed their cuisines around yogurt, cheese, and koumiss (fermented milk). In these products, nontoxic strains of bacteria (which are carefully preserved and transmitted from one batch to the next) have been introduced to break down or \"predigest\" the sugar, thereby functioning also as a short-term preservative. Thus the French consume the largest amount of milk per capita of any nation in the world today\u2014almost entirely in the form of cheese. Most Chinese adults, on the other hand, cannot tolerate milk, yogurt, or cheese in any form. Their civilization did not use milk, and genetic selection moved in other directions.\n\nIn areas where milk did become important, the work became so great that men and women divided it. Thus in Mesopotamia in the third millennium B.C., where the milk herds were large, sculptures show that men tended the flocks and milked them, but cylinder seals depict women doing a task that resembles churning.\n\nAs the reliance on grain increased, another related task grew up that fit well with child rearing: grinding the grain for use, once it came in from the fields. Thus the equipment for spinning and weaving lies side by side with the grinders in archaeological excavations throughout the Near East\u2014for example, at the little Minoan village of Myrtos (see Chapter 4) or the Iron Age palace of Gordion, in central Anatolia. At Gordion the servingwomen lived in special quarters. Each of these houses yielded scores of spindle whorls, hundreds of loom weights\u2014approximately six hundred in one case\u2014and long rows of grindstones. Our earliest European author, Homer, repeatedly yokes the two occupations to each other and to females, as we have seen in the _Odyssey_ (7.103\u201305):\n\nFifty serving women belonged to the house,\n\nsome of whom grind on the millstone the ruddy grain, while\n\nothers weave at the looms and twirl their spindles. . . .\n\nOrdinary housewives daily ground the flour and worked on cloth for the household, while the rich bought slaves to do these tiresome jobs for them. Slavery now flourished\u2014and indeed lasted until self-powered machines became available to do the tasks instead.\n\nUsing animals for muscle power solved yet another problem: It made it far easier to move goods about, especially after the invention of the axled wheel, which made a load-bearing cart possible. In a sense, the \"wheel\" had already been in use for some time, in the form of a spindle whorl, and log rollers had probably been in use since the Palaeolithic. The trick was to figure out how to _attach_ the rolling part to a nonrotating load bed. Of course, carts needed roads\u2014a new concept in the Neolithic\u2014not just narrow footpaths. People had to construct such roads, or at least beat them flat, little by little. (Many a road in use today in Europe and the Near East was first laid down in the Bronze or Iron Age.) Furthermore, the earliest type of wheel (the solid slice-of-a-log kind we see so clearly in Sumerian representations of 2500 B.C.) was cumbersomely heavy. As a result of both these factors\u2014cumbersome vehicles and few roads\u2014pack animals were far more effective than wheeled transportation for a long time, for both great distances and difficult terrain. They still are, in remote regions.\n\nThe ability to transport large quantities of goods with animal power (however harnessed) meant that trade could blossom, and women's textiles with it. Trade in small luxury goods like shells from the seacoasts, amber from the Baltic, lapis lazuli from eastern Iran, and obsidian from scattered volcanic sites (such as parts of Armenia, central Turkey, and the island of Melos) had been trickling across the continents for a long time. Early in the Neolithic, people had discovered that obsidian (volcanic glass) made particularly sharp stone knives, and explorers hunted ever farther for sources of these precious nodules. In fact, one of the first large towns, \u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck in south-central Turkey (see Chapter 3), grew up shortly before 6000 B.C. near the foot of a great volcano that in eons past had spewed quantities of obsidian onto the flatland around. The local inhabitants grew rich, it seems, from trading this volcanic glass. Among the crafts that flourished in the leisure provided by this relative wealth was weaving. Fine textiles of several types (both wide and narrow plain-weave fabrics, weft twining of two sorts, fringed edges, rolled and whipped hems, and reinforced selvedges) have survived where they lay buried under the house floors, wrapped around the excarnated bones of ancestors. Unfortunately the portion of the town in which people carried out their crafts has not yet been excavated, so we know nothing of that aspect of this society's organization.\n\nThe size, wealth, and complexity of this very early town, however, show the powerful effects of trading an important raw material, in a way strongly parallel to towns later involved in metal trade. As with obsidian, the advent of metal triggered a search that took people far and wide. They sought most especially for the tin with which to harden copper into bronze, as well as for gold and silver for jewelry and tableware. Luxury goods such as fancy textiles and ornate metal vessels, manufactured in the growing cities, often paid for the new raw materials with which to make more, in a never-ending cycle. All these goods traveled along the ever-extending trade routes by means of another invention, the pack-animal caravan.\n\nAn archaeologist excavating in central Turkey in 1925 located the end point of one of the most important of the ancient Near Eastern caravan routes, at a city known in early times as Kanesh (fig. 7.1). Its modern name, K\u00fcltepe, simply means \"ash mound\"\u2014a frequent place-name in Turkey, where people have lived, warred, and burned one another's cities down for thousands of years. Kanesh was no exception. Enemies burned it to the ground around 1750 B.C., about two hundred years after the Assyrians, trekking westward across six hundred miles in pursuit of metals, had established a trade colony, or _karum_ , there. We know from the cuneiform records that nine such karums eventually grew up, of which Karum Kanesh was the largest. It also functioned as the center of the network. (A second of the nine was recently discovered and excavated at Acemh\u00f6y\u00fck, a little farther west.) The city of Kanesh, inhabited by the native people, sat atop a high mound composed of the accumulated debris of many centuries of living there. Near Eastern houses were commonly built of mud brick, which lasts at best a few decades, and each time a house needed rebuilding, the remains of the previous dwelling were simply leveled and the new house was constructed on top. As a result, such city mounds grew rather quickly, and they can still be seen all over the landscape in the Near East today. Being high up was an advantage to defense, moreover, especially when the man-made cliff was enhanced by a city wall.\n\n_Figure 7.1_. Map of Near Eastern trade routes, third to second millennium B.C., including important sites mentioned in this chapter.\n\nAt Kanesh the Assyrian karum lies just outside the parapets of the native town. There the foreign merchants lived, did their business, and kept their records\u2014written, fortunately for us, in cuneiform on clay tablets, which survive the millennia very well. We have accounts of their transactions with the local king and his deputies, who inspected the goods from each incoming caravan and took a hefty portion as import tax before allowing the merchants to start selling the rest on the open market. (Even so, the 100 percent profits available clearly made such taxation bearable.)\n\nWe also have many of the letters that the traders' wives wrote to them from far away in Ashur, the capital of Assyria\u2014letters not just about how the family was getting along but also about business matters. For at least some of the wives, daughters, and sisters were in business for themselves, acting as textile suppliers to their menfolk six hundred miles away in Anatolia and taking considerable profit therefrom to use for their own purposes.\n\nThe men's trade efforts revolved principally around metals. Anatolia was rich in silver and gold, as well as in copper. But to alloy copper into a bronze tough enough for tools and weapons, the local people needed tin as a hardener. The Assyrians had access to sources of tin far to the east of Assyria, and this they transported westward across the continent, first to Assyria and then in part on to Syria and Anatolia.\n\nTin is heavy, however\u2014too heavy to load much of it onto a donkey's back. But mixed with textiles, which are bulky (too bulky to put enough of them on an animal for a profitable trip), the load is well balanced. Tin and textiles: That's what the Old Assyrian traders carried for nearly two hundred years from Ashur in northern Mesopotamia to their trade colonies in central Anatolia. The tin belonged to the merchants, but many of the textiles were the produce and property of the womenfolk, as we learn in circumstantial detail from the little clay tablets.\n\nAssyrian textiles found a ready market in Anatolia, and the women scrambled to get a few more woven before each packtrain departed, negotiating directly with the caravan drivers to carry the merchandise. Lamassi, the wife of the merchant Pushu-ken, is the woman about whom we know the most. She writes to her husband such business information as: \"Kuluma is bringing you 9 textiles, Idi-Suen 3 textiles; Ela refused to accept textiles (for transport); Idi-Suen refused to accept (another) 5 textiles.\"\n\nThese drivers had to load their donkeys carefully for the long trip over the mountains; one letter writer warns the recipient not to pile too much on his donkeys. The cloths were put into protective bags or wrappers, roughly five to a bag but sometimes more. The cloths might be sorted by quality (ordinary or expensive), and the package might be sealed by the woman sending it. Most of the tin, too, was sealed, after being wrapped in special cloths that were also sold at the other end. Then there was usually some loose tin, purposely left unsealed so the driver could trade it as needed along the way for his travel expenses. It was so much in demand that it could function as ready cash. (Coins, the first true money, were not invented for another fifteen hundred years.) The records tell us that one particular donkey heading for Kanesh carried twenty-six cloths of two sorts, sixty-five units of sealed tin, and nine units of loose tin. Usually the goods were grouped into two side packs, carrying ten or twelve textiles each and\/or some tin, plus a smaller pack across the top carrying half a dozen cloths or some \"loose\" tin and the driver's personal belongings.\n\nAt the other end the merchants sold the textiles and the tin for the best prices they could get, after paying the import taxes in kind to the local rulers. Then they sent the profits on the textiles back well and what poorly. A letter from Puzur-Ashur to Waqartum (apparently Lamassi's daughter) says that he is sending her one mina of silver (about a pound), and please to make more fine textiles like the one he had just received from her, preferably sending them back with the same driver bringing her the payment. But, he says, put more wool into it, and \"let them comb one side of the textile; they should not shear it; its weave should be close.\" And don't send any more \"Abarnian\" textiles, he instructs her; it must be that he can't sell them readily because Anatolian tastes differed from Assyrian ones. That does not mean, however, not to keep weaving. In fact, he concludes, \"if you don't manage to make fine textiles [in time for the caravan], as I hear [it] there are plenty for sale over there. Buy (them) for me and send (them) to me.\"\n\nFrom such little remarks we glean that, unlike the women of later times who were strictly confined to the harems, these women were free to go out to the marketplaces and buy textiles from other women or buy the wool to make more cloths. They also dealt directly with the donkey drivers and sometimes were asked to attend to legal matters for their absent men.\n\nThe women's rights were still far from equal to those of their husbands. Contemporary dowry contracts from farther south in Babylonia show that if a woman refused to stay married to her husband, she could be drowned, whereas if he refused _her_ , he merely paid her a fine. But women owned their own property and could engage in business for themselves. One woman's dowry tablet lists a set of weights and a cylinder seal in its own box among her possessions; she was all set up for some sort of commerce. Another Old Babylonian dowry included four slaves or servants, gold and silver earrings and bracelets, \"one shekel of gold as a ring for the front of her nose,\" as well as \"ten dresses, twenty headdresses [fig. 7.2], one blanket, two coats, one leather bag.\" Other gear included a huge cauldron, two grindstones for flour, four chests, a bed, five chairs, a basket, two trays, and two jars of oil, one of them scented.\n\n_Figure 7.2_. Sumerian women were fond of large headdresses, like this one on a mid-third millennium B.C. statue found at Mari on the middle Euphrates. See figs. 7.5 and 7.6 for other fancy headdresses.\n\nNot every girl was so well equipped. Of the ten dowry tablets collected and published by Stephanie Dalley, only two mention looms. The poorest girl received \"two beds, two chairs, one table, two chests,\" plus two grindstones and two empty jars. The ten shekels of silver earnest money put down by the groom's family, we are told, had been duly tied to the hem of the girl's dress. Thus, according to the custom, when the girl was delivered and accepted, the earnest money was automatically returned and the marriage deal complete. The dowry list, however, ensured that if the man divorced her or left her a widow, she would get back everything that belonged to her personally, without his relatives being able to cheat her of it.\n\nThe particularly rich lady with the nose ring, a priestess, was supplied not only with the homemaking equipment listed above but also with \"one ox, two three-year-old cows, thirty sheep, twenty minas (10 kg) of wool\" plus \"two combs for wool, three hair combs, three wooden spoons, two wooden _asu_ -looms(?), one wooden container full of spindles, one small wooden pot-rack.\" What with two looms, spindles, and all those sheep, she was set up to carry on the kind of home-based business that Lamassi was engaged in. Indeed, among the cloths regularly transported to Anatolia from Assyria are specifically \"Akkadian ones\"\u2014that is, cloths from central Babylonia.\n\nIf, however, like Lamassi and Waqartum, one had no sheep of one's own, getting the wool to make the next textiles was sometimes a problem. In three different letters Lamassi asks her husband to send her wool all the way from Anatolia, complaining that in Ashur it is very expensive at the moment. (In one of these she even asks him to hide her silver in the middle of the wool, to avoid the attention of a tax collector who is after her.) Sending wool from Anatolia was unusual but not difficult. In general, the men expected to buy up gold and silver in Anatolia to send home, but when silver was scarce, or when something else profitable offered itself, such as particularly nice Anatolian cloths (some of them are mentioned as \"red\"), that would do, too. Since the silver and gold were rather smaller than the tin and textiles of equivalent value, many fewer donkeys went home to Assyria than caravaned out to Anatolia (some were sold off at the karum), and even those might be more lightly laden. So there was plenty of room for the wool. Sometimes the men even included presents such as jewelry for their wives. The women, for their part, occasionally sent other \"good buys\" to their husbands. A letter to Pushu-ken from someone else mentions that Lamassi had just arranged to send her husband ten textiles with one caravan, and with another driver a bundle of minerals.\n\nThe money these women earned was not for playing around with, however. They used it chiefly to run their households, to pay taxes, and as capital to buy raw materials for the next textiles to be woven. As a result, they complained bitterly when the men delayed payment. Waqartum writes to her brother that he told her not to go to a solicitor and that she trusted him and did as he said. \"But to-day I mean even less to you than a pawned (?) slave-girl, for to a slave-girl you at least measure out regularly food rations; but here I have to live from my debt(s).\" She complains that he has swiped the mina of gold that her husband dispatched to her as her profit from various cloths, which she enumerates at length, totaling \"in all fifteen textiles of good quality. All this is my production, my goods entrusted for (sale with) profit. . . . My gold you have taken! I beg you . . . , send it to me with the first caravan and give me courage!\"\n\nWe get tantalizing glimpses of the households they ran. Lamassi had several children; the older sons went off to join their father at Karum Kanesh, while the daughters stayed in Ashur and undoubtedly learned to weave by helping their mother. Waqartum seems to have been the oldest daughter, doing weaving for her own profit, as we have just seen, apparently in her own household. She was also a priestess, and one gathers that her husband, like her brothers, joined her father's firm in Anatolia. But there were others in Lamassi's house, as we see from the following letter she composed to her husband, Pushu-ken: \"About the fact that I did not send you the textiles about which you wrote, your heart should not be angry. As the girl has become grown-up, I had to make a pair of heavy textiles for (placing\/wearing) on the wagon. Moreover I made (some) for the members of the household and the children. Consequently I did not manage to send you textiles. Whatever textiles I (lit.: \"my hand\") can manage I will send you with later caravans.\" Klaas R. Veenhof, the scholar who has translated and analyzed many of these letters, remarks that \"Lamassi is occupied by some important event in the family\u2014mentioned in several of her letters . . . , apparently a religious ceremony involving [a] daughter. . . . In view of these ceremonies the family had to be provided with garments and 'textiles for the wagon.' . . . Unfortunately we do not know who the _nisi bitim_ [members of the household] were, but it is possible that these people co-operated in the production of textiles in Lamassi's house.\" It is also conceivable that part of the profit at one time or another went to purchase slave girls who could help with the weaving and thus expand the business. Capital, then as now, can beget capital.\n\nI shall take many garments with my tribute to Babylon; I have collected together all the garments that are available here, but they are not sufficient.\n\n\u2014Letter to a Mesopotamian queen from her husband, after the neighboring city was sacked by Hammurabi of Babylon; ca. 1820 B.C.\n\nWomen of the merchant class were not the only ones running textile establishments. Queens did it, too, but for the \"state\" rather than directly for themselves. The caravans for which these textiles were destined carried royal \"gifts\" from one court to another, an important part of ancient diplomacy which the kings arranged and the queens, to some extent, provided for. Again we learn about it from cuneiform letters, in this case letters to rather than from the women.\n\nIltani was the daughter of King Samu-Addu of Karana, a small city-state on the caravan route between Assyria to the east and Anatolia to the west. She lived a couple of generations after Lamassi and Waqartum and became queen of Karana when her husband, Aqba-hammu, usurped the throne from her brother. Times were tough. Samu-Addu had lost his throne to an earlier usurper, and his son had gotten it back only to lose it to Iltani's husband when political alliances shifted again. Assyria was losing its grip on the trade routes, while Hammurabi of Babylon\u2014he of the famous law code\u2014was on the rise, and Aqba-hammu seems to have seen what was coming. History proved him right: Iltani's brother fled to the great city of Mari, on the Euphrates River to the south, and when its ruler Zimri-Lim, the strongest man in northern Mesopotamia, refused to become Hammurabi's vassal, Hammurabi sacked the city ruthlessly. Aqba-hammu took heed and lost no time in paying tribute to the great Babylonian prince\u2014better safe than sorry.\n\nCompared with the great palace operations at Mari, the royal workshops at Karana were small-time stuff (although officials from Mari reported the Karana palace to be especially beautiful). Iltani had at her disposal only about twenty-five textile workers, in comparison with eighty-seven in one of five textile-related workshops at Mari. Because Karana was a fairly small state, the king could not afford the luxury of a man paid to manage the palace and its business, as Zimri-Lim could at Mari, and his queen took over much more of this work than her Mari counterpart, Queen Shibtu. According to Stephanie Dalley, who has compiled the information from the tablets, Iltani had\n\n\"some 15 women who spun and wove (2 of them brought a child) and 10 male textile workers. In addition she employed 2 millers, and a brewer named Samkanum; and 6 girls who worked . . . in an unknown capacity. 13 more women, 3 of them [each] with a child, worked for Iltani, again with an uncertain task; she had a doorman named Kibsi-etar, and a man called Anda in charge of pack-asses, also 4 other men.\"\n\nA man named Kissurum supplied her with wool and did her textile accounts (cf. fig. 7.3), \"which had to be checked and sealed by Iltani.\" The men involved with textiles\u2014to judge from nearly contemporary archives at other Mesopotamian sites\u2014were most likely employed in such ancillary crafts as dyeing the wool or \"finishing\" the woven cloth in some way (cleaning it, putting in sizing, fluffing or shearing the nap, etc.). Men elsewhere were also assigned the arduous job of making felt for pads, covers, and linings out of sheep's wool or goat hair.\n\n_Figure 7.3_. Hittite lady spinning, attended by a scribe holding clay tablet and stylus. Stone relief from Mara\u015f, in eastern Turkey, ca. 800 B.C.\n\nPalace workers seem to have come largely from the spoils of war, from inheritance, or occasionally from gifts. While on campaign Zimri-Lim wrote to his queen: \"To \u0160ibtu say, thus (says) your lord: I have just sent you some female-weavers. In among them are (some) _ugbab\u0101tum_ priestesses. Pick out the _ugbab\u0101tum_ priestesses and assign them (i.e. the rest) to the house of the female-weavers.\" He then instructed her to select the most attractive ones from both this group and the previous batch of captives, to send them to a particular overseer (apparently to become religious singers), and to be sure that all of them got enough rations \"so that their appearance does not worsen.\" Slaves were valued for their work, so it behooved one to feed them. They might even be blind, but if they could still work, they merited their keep. A blind woman who ground grain is listed among the recipients of rations in another city, and her rations were as big as anyone else's. The children of slaves could grow up to become valuable slaves, too, adding to the estate. We know that women who spun and wove in the palace and had children were issued extra rations to feed them.\n\nIltani, on the other hand, had to live with the fact that her husband was too small a vassal to do very much plundering, and far from being supplied with lots of extra slaves, the queen was constantly being importuned for slaves she felt she could not spare. For example, one of her sisters, a priestess, writes: \"The slaves whom my father gave me have grown old; now, I have sent half a mina of silver to the king; allow me my claim and get him to send me slaves who have been captured recently, and who are trustworthy. In recollection of you, I have sent to you five minas of first-rate wool and one container of shrimps.\" A little bribery there. Presents of slaves were not uncommon among the rich, but Dalley mentions several letters showing that giving away slaves who had served faithfully for a lifetime \"was regarded as an insensitive thing to do.\" She cites a plea to Zimri-Lim from a woman who \"begs him not to give away her ageing mother as a present.\" On the other hand, one wonders whether very old and very young slaves were sometimes given away as a means of satisfying a request for a slave while getting rid of a liability. Apparently Iltani once sent as a present a serving boy who was so young that the recipient complains that he has to take care of the boy rather than the other way around!\n\nOther glimpses into daily life, through these archives, show us that most of the women working in the palaces were either making cloth\u2014spinning and weaving (fig. 7.4)\u2014or helping with the food. The latter involved grinding grain, drawing water, cooking, baking, and making beverages (iced fruit juices and wines were among the summer favorites). In Iltani's palace, however, Dalley points out that \"the millers were men, probably for heavier work on a much larger scale.\" Women singers and musicians of both sexes entertained, a woman doctor was available at Mari, and no fewer than nine of the Mari scribes were women. The women who were most comfortably fixed, after the queen, seem to have been the priestesses. One of Iltani's sisters was a priestess in a nearby city, while another oversaw some type of weaving in Ashur.\n\n_Figure 7.4_. Mosaic fragments showing two women working with a spindle. From Mari, on the middle Euphrates, early second millennium B.C.\n\nThe raw wool from which Iltani's workers made the palace textiles came mostly from a regular supplier, the accountant named Kissurum\u2014presumably from palace-owned flocks out in the countryside. Occasionally, as in the case just quoted, wool came in as a personal gift and may then have been used by the queen for her own dresses. In one case she herself sent wool to a less fortunate friend living in a city that had just been plundered. Sometimes, too, her husband sent her wool directly, especially when he was in a hurry for gifts to distribute. One letter from him says: \"Now, I have sent you 25 kg of wool for 50 garments. Make those garments quickly. I need those garments.\" Large though it may seem, the size of Aqba-hammu's requisition differs radically from those made by Zimri-Lim in Mari\u2014in one case, six hundred garments at once, in five different colors!\n\nMost often the king needed the cloth and garments for gifts, not only for the formidable Hammurabi himself but also for minor vassals. One letter to Iltani reads: \"The king of Shirwun has arrived; he asked the caravan that was going out of Karana, but it had no garments fit for presents available. Now send me quickly any garments that you have available, whether of first-rate or second-rate quality, for presents.\" Some of the textiles were used, however, simply to clothe the palace personnel. Zimri-Lim received an almost comical letter from his trusted overseer of palace business, who finally turned to the king to resolve a dispute between two obstinate heads of departments. It seems that the four hundred palace workers were due new sets of clothes, but only one hundred had actually received them. When the manager looked into the matter, each of the two functionaries insisted that it was the other one's job to provide the remaining clothes, and neither would budge from his position.\n\nThe types of cloth provided were quite varied, and those intended for presents were often quite expensive. One request to Iltani reads, \"Send me quickly the garments, both with applique and without applique, which you have made.\" Zimri-Lim, on the other hand, says he will take to Babylon, as a royal gift, a Syrian-style carpet\u2014most likely, from what we now know of the history of pattern weaving, a tapestry-woven rug like the kilims still made in Anatolia today. Near Eastern kings right up into this century traditionally gave such carpets as royal favors.\n\nThis palace system of manufacturing and distributing cloth and clothing was not entirely new in the nineteenth century B.C. Two kings of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, who lived just after 2400 B.C., were already setting up for big business. Lugalanda, the earlier of the two, employed twelve spinners and weavers. Year by year the number increased, until a dozen years later his successor, Urukagina, had 114, divided into several workshops or weaving houses, each with an overseer.\n\nThe people making the textiles at this earlier date are all women, mostly designated as weavers with a few extra women called spinners (figs. 7.5 and 7.4). But four spinners cannot supply thirty-seven weavers (these are the figures we have for Year 6). Spinning by hand takes much longer than weaving, so one has to assume that the weavers in these shops normally spun what they then wove. On the other hand, the craft of spinning is quicker to learn and requires far less equipment than weaving, so perhaps women with less skill were assigned to help out with the spinning, perhaps even while learning weaving as apprentices. They are recorded as receiving the lowest amount of adult rations (one-eighth of a unit), along with a few of the weavers. At the beginning a man known to be involved in other palace departments functioned as overseer of the textile women, and by the beginning of Year 6 of Lugalanda's reign, two more men had been added as group overseers. But the rapid expansion in the next few years apparently made it necessary to promote some of the women weavers to the rank of overseer. Unfortunately, for them the title carried no known tangible benefits, only the extra responsibilities, because they still got one-sixth of a measure of rations, like the other \"senior\" weavers, instead of half a measure, like the male overseers.\n\n_Figure 7.5_. Figures of women spinning (right), warping (center), and weaving (left), from four Mesopotamian cylinder seals of the late fourth millennium B.C. The women typically sat on low stools or the floor to spin. The warping frame consisted of two upright poles set in heavy blocks\u2014seen here twice in side view and once in an awkward top view. The loom was pegged out on the ground, and two weavers squatted on either side, as in Egypt (fig. 3.5).\n\nAmong the ration lists for these workshops (our chief source of information here), we see a few children listed, both boys and girls\u2014clearly the children of the women. They are assigned a twelfth of a unit of grain each. In addition, however, there are a small number of \"orphans,\" also both male and female and also given a twelfth of grain. It would be interesting to know whether they were assigned for apprenticeship (but then, why boys?) or for the women in the shop to act as their wet nurses or foster mothers\u2014a second job in addition to weaving.\n\nAlthough we do not know what products these particular women were making, we know from excavation that royalty was already splendidly arrayed. The sumptuous burial of a lady known in the archaeological literature as Queen Shub-ad (or Puabi)1 astonished the world when Sir Leonard Woolley published the Ur excavation reports in 1934. Some seventy-four retainers, male and female, had been drugged and killed in the great \"Death Pit\" surrounding her tomb. Guards fell beside their weapons, cart attendants by their animals, musicians next to their great inlaid harps. Each lady-in-waiting departed this world wearing an ornate headdress of gold and silver, huge gold earrings, and necklaces of precious stones. The queen herself wore an even larger headdress over what must have been a huge bouffant wig (fig. 7.6). The garments of all the ladies radiated splendor. Woolley says of them:\n\nIn the case of two or three bodies . . . a stray fragment of cloth was preserved . . . , a thick but closely woven fabric the dust of which still retained a bright ochrous red colour. Very many of these same bodies had round their wrists beads of gold, carnelian, and lapis-lazuli which had not been strung together as loose bracelets but had been sewn on to the edges of the sleeves of a garment. . . . [Around her waist] Queen Shub-ad had a row of gold rings pendant from a heavy band of beads which were sewn to a cloth background.\n\n_Figure 7.6_. Headdress of the queen of Ur, fashioned of gold and precious stones and worn over a huge wig. The Sumerian queen was buried with seventy-four servants, many of whom also wore elaborate headdresses. Mesopotamia, mid-third millennium B.C.\n\nAfter citing much more evidence for the positions of durable things like beads, he concludes:\n\n[I]t would seem, therefore, that the costume of ladies of the court, at least, included a coat reaching only to the waist and having long . . . sleeves; the cuffs and bottom hem of the coat might be enriched with beads, or along the hem there might be a row of pendant rings in shell or metal; it is likely that the coat was fastened in front and the border with its ring pendants did not hang loose but formed a belt in one piece with the garment. . . . Of skirts and under-garments no traces were discovered.\n\nSuch are the problems of trying to learn about something as perishable as cloth. In another spot, however, Woolley had better luck.\n\n[T]here lay round the legs and feet of the skeleton a great quantity of cloth; it was all reduced to fine powder but did, so long as it was undisturbed, preserve the texture of the original sufficiently for three varieties of material to be distinguished. One stuff was rather coarse with a plain over-and-under right-angle weave; the second was a finely woven cloth with a diagonal rib; the third was a loosely woven right-angle weave fabric on one side of which were long threads forming either a very deep pile or else \"tassels\" like those on the skirts of the figures represented on the monuments.\n\nClearly the palace weavers and seamstresses of Mesopotamia were far down the road to producing sumptuous clothing by 2500 B.C., the approximate time of these burials. The labor may have been increasingly that of slave women\u2014hapless captives of the incessant wars that had sprung up over water rights, territorial disputes, and the fun of owning sheer material wealth. But in some places, at least, an independent-minded middle class of free women continued for centuries to create handsome, salable textiles for the busy commercial caravans run by their equally business-oriented menfolk.\n\nEven a millennium after the Old Assyrian caravans ceased to ply their routes to Anatolia, in another corner of the Near East we get a glowing picture in the last chapter of Proverbs (31.10\u201325) of the Hebrew woman who still worked industriously at home for the household good:\n\nWho can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her. . . . She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens. She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard. . . . She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night. She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff. She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy. She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet. She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is [fine linen] and purple. . . . She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant. Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.\n\n1The exact readings of these early cuneiform signs are uncertain but need not concern us here. Many of the splendid artifacts described below are on display in the University Museum in Philadelphia and the British Museum in London.\n\nLand of Linen\n\nThe Egyptians do practically everything backwards from other people, in their customs and laws\u2014among which the women go to market and make deals, whereas the men stay at home and weave; and other folk weave by pushing the weft upwards, but the Egyptians push it down. Men carry burdens on their heads, whereas women do so on their shoulders. The women piss standing up, and the men sitting down.\n\n\u2014Herodotus, _Histories_ , 2.35\u201336\n\nHerodotus, who lived in Greece in the fifth century B.C., invented the notion of history as an independent form of study, using the word _historia_ \u2014literally \"research, a seeking out\"\u2014at the start of his book on the Greco-Persian Wars of 490\u2013480 B.C.: \"This is the laying out of the _historia_ [research] of Herodotus of Halicarnassus. . . .\" Other Greek authors soon copied the new genre. Thus began \"history\" as we know it. Of course, to reconstruct the details of ancient life for periods after people began to write \"history\" is much easier than to mine the earlier periods we deal with here. And Herodotus' book provides an especially rich mine of information, for he was curious about everything. Throughout his extensive travels to research the Persian Wars he inquired about anything that caught his attention\u2014and threw it all into his book. Thus his visit to the land of the Nile (fig. 8.1) yielded a lengthy description of Egypt and its people.\n\n_Figure 8.1_. Map of Egypt and Palestine, showing important Bronze Age sites mentioned.\n\nArchaeology amply supports the view of Herodotus that the Egyptians did things their own way. Isolated for millennia from other cultures by a sea of sand, they received occasional basic ideas from others (such as the notions that one could spin, weave, and write) and then developed them locally to suit their peculiar environment. In this same way, to take a trivial example, the European settlers in New England learned of pumpkins from the local Indians and then developed pumpkin pie according to their own tastes.\n\nBy the time Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century, he was describing a culture in which customs had changed little in more than three thousand years. New tools were occasionally taken up. The male-operated vertical loom, for example, was introduced into Egypt around 1500 B.C. By that time, however, Egyptian women\u2014and women only\u2014had already been weaving linen on horizontal looms for fully three thousand years. The Middle Kingdom, which lasted from roughly 2150 to 1800 B.C., is particularly interesting from the point of view of women and their work. Egypt's isolation had not yet been penetrated by the invasions that ended the Middle Kingdom, but still the records of daily affairs are much fuller than in earlier periods.\n\nIn the magnificent Old Kingdom, which began about 2750 B.C., pictorial representations and the newly-invented writing system were largely reserved for important religious uses, ones that promoted the immortality of the pharaoh and the nobility. So we know little of daily life. But when the kings of the Sixth Dynasty fell, around 2250 B.C., the myth that pharaohs were gods incarnate and therefore invincible fell with them. Chaos, famine, and political scrambling ensued. Some commoners even had the temerity to begin wearing their kilts folded in the royal manner, with the left edge wrapped over the right, instead of vice versa. When the pharaohs of the Eleventh Dynasty emerged triumphant a century later, the struggle had left its mark. Earlier rulers were portrayed with unshakable looks of eternal peacefulness, as though they expected their small, orderly world to march on unchanged forever, whereas Middle Kingdom pharaohs look uniformly worried, even harassed, with furrowed brows and sad eyes peering out at unending disruption and insecurity.\n\nWith all its uncertainties, however, life in Middle Kingdom Egypt comes across as particularly, vibrantly human. The struggles for power had taught that petty chiefs could become magnificent pharaohs\u2014in other words, that what one _chose_ to do could determine what one's life became and that heredity wasn't everything. So people piled in and did things, and they recorded their lives with great gusto and not a little pomposity in their tombs. The theory\u2014a basic corollary of the Egyptian belief in an afterlife\u2014was that if you recorded your wealth and achievements and comforts attained in this life, you would have them for eternity in the next life. So the tomb walls of wealthy Egyptians abound with pictures of daily work and play, and if the deceased wasn't wealthy enough to have a huge painted tomb, cheap little wooden models depicting the daily activities would do the trick (figs. 3.5 and 8.7).\n\nFrom the models and paintings we learn that once again the chief occupations of women were spinning and weaving, grinding grain and preparing food. We know little about the steps of food preparation, but we can follow the process of making cloth and trace its subsequent use with some accuracy from start to finish, at least in a generic way. In Mesopotamia the accidents of excavation gave us detailed data about a few women (see Chapter 6). In Middle Kingdom Egypt, on the contrary, we know little about individual women but a lot about what people in general were doing and especially about how they did it. Our knowledge of women's work in Egypt thus falls largely within the framework of how they manufactured cloth for the society. It reveals to us something of how Egyptian women interacted both with their work and with the male half of their society.\n\nAlthough the Mesopotamians of 2000 B.C. wove mostly wool and a rather smaller amount of linen, the Egyptians produced almost exclusively linen for their cloth and clothing needs. There were reasons for this. Egyptian sheep were hairy rather than woolly, and Herodotus tells us that wool in general was considered ritually unclean\u2014not kosher, as it were. Moreover, linen was admirably suited to the hot, dusty climate of the Nile Valley, since it is cool and absorbent of moisture but sheds dirt readily from its smooth fibers.\n\nLinen is made from the stem fibers of flax, a tall, skinny plant about four feet high with thin dark leaves and bright blue flowers. The men began the production chain by raising, harvesting, and drying the flax, as we see in the pictures. We also catch a glimpse of the process in an _Arabian Nights_ -style Egyptian tale of magic. In this story a young servant girl, whose angered mistress had beaten her, threatened in revenge to inform the king. But instead, perhaps thinking better of that strategy, \"she went and found her older half-brother binding bundles of flax on the threshing floor\" and told him her woe. Thus we learn that the men bundled the flax after drying it and knocking the seeds loose for the next crop. Eventually, in the story, the brother scolded the little girl, so she went down to the river, where a crocodile ate her. Next her mistress repented\u2014and the manuscript breaks off leaving us hanging. (Such are the frustrations of working with ancient sources.)\n\nSome of the harvested flax went to the men for making rope and string; that was their special province, as it is today in the Near East. One can see teams of them, each paying out through a guide ring a strand of thick twine that he has prepared, while one strong man forces the several strands to twist around each other into a single rope as he backs slowly down the village street. It is heavy work. Some flax, on the other hand, presumably the finest grade, went to the women for making cloth.\n\nTo obtain the fibers from the dried flax, one has to keep it wet or damp just long enough to rot the fleshy part of the stem away from the tough, usable fibers. Although we have no depictions in Egypt of this necessary process, called retting, women in nearby Palestine spread their flax out in great quantity on the fields or flat rooftops and retted it from the dampness of the nightly dew, as we learn from a cloak-and-dagger scene in the Old Testament: \"But she [Rahab] had brought [the fugitives] up to the roof of the house, and hid them with the stalks of flax, which she had laid in order upon the roof.\"\n\nMost of the flax grown in Egypt was raised on the large estates of nobles and of the ever more powerful temples. Servant women on these estates made the flax into the linens needed. They seem to have been grouped into crews, and worked together in special weaving rooms, almost like a modern production line in a factory. Sometimes life in these weaving rooms sounds as wretched as that in the nineteenth-century sweatshops. A lament on the misery of conditions during a period of political chaos says:\n\nLo, citizens are put to the grindstones,  \nWearers of fine linen are beaten with [sticks] . . .  \nLadies suffer like maidservants,  \nSingers are at the looms in the weaving rooms,  \nWhat they sing to the goddess are dirges.\n\nTemple singers would have been too high-class, ordinarily, to weave cloth. In less stressful times, however, the women are shown attacking their work with spunk.\n\nPaintings often include an older woman acting as an immediate overseer in the workshop (figs. 8.2 and 8.4). She has double chins or rolls of fat on her tummy. \"Get to work!\" she calls to the girls before her. Like a prowling watchdog, the man who manages all the shops often lurks behind her, labeled \"overseer of the weavers.\" Several tombs known from the New Kingdom belong to men who styled themselves \"overseer of the weavers of Amon\"\u2014that is, the overseer of the slave workers belonging to the great temple of the sun-god Amon at Thebes. Servitude in the temples was a typical fate of women captured in war.\n\n_Figure 8.2_. Women in an Egyptian weaving shop. The woman kneeling at the center is splicing flax fibers end to end for the young girl at the right to spin into tighter thread. The pair squatting at the left are weaving on a horizontal ground loom (see fig. 3.5 for a more realistic perspective), while the older woman standing behind oversees the factory. The hieroglyphs name the activities. From the Middle Kingdom tomb of Khnemhotep at Beni Hasan, early second millennium B.C.\n\nInside the workshop three or four women crouch on the floor, cleaning and separating the flax fibers and splicing them end to end into crude thread, which they roll into balls or coil into a pile on the floor. Egyptian estate managers expected to store up enormous quantities of linens; we typically find hundreds of large sheets in a single unplundered tomb. The job must have seemed endless, like filling a bottomless hole. The women probably induced the splices, which are merely twisted, not knotted, to stick together by wetting them with saliva, since saliva contains enzymes that decompose the cellulose of the flax slightly into a gluey substance. The Hebrews practiced the same method, learning it while living in Egypt; the special Hebrew word in Exodus for making thread out of flax, _shazar_ , means both \"to twist\" and \"to glue.\" The women in the Egyptian depictions work on little dome-shaped mounds set on the floor, much as we might use a table. The names for what they are doing are written above them in the drawings: _s-sh-n_ for the women loosening the fibers from the stalks of flax, and _ms-n_ over the women splicing them end to end.1\n\nAfter the splicers finish, they pass their product to the next team of two or three girls, who have to add twist to the loosely formed yarn to strengthen it. Two problems confront these women. Linen is more manageable when wet, so the Egyptians learned to keep the balls of crude thread in a bowl of water. But any knitter who has tried to yank on a ball of thread in an open container knows that the ball immediately and invariably hops out and rolls away. So the ingenious Egyptians fashioned wetting bowls with handlelike loops inside on the bottom (fig. 4.2). If the end of each thread is passed under the loop before it is attached to the spindle, the thread is forced through the water and the ball is kept from jumping out, all at the same time.\n\nThe spinner now adroitly rolls the spindle down her thigh and drops it so it keeps turning\u2014hanging from the attached thread\u2014as she pulls from the bowl the crude yarn to be twisted. Eventually her spindle reaches the floor, and the spinning stops momentarily while she winds up the finished thread onto the spindle. Expert spinners, in fact, don't even have to reach down to get the spindle. They can give a sharp tug on the new thread that makes the spindle roll straight up it like a yo-yo. During all this the whorl, a small round weight stuck on the spindle shaft (fig. 8.3), acts as a flywheel to keep the spindle turning as long as possible. Grace Crowfoot, a historian of spinning, has remarked that \"Herodotus might have added to those manners and customs of the Ancient Egyptians which exactly contradicted the common practice of mankind the fact that they dropped their spindles whorl uppermost instead of whorl downwards.\"\n\n_Figure 8.3_. Spindles from Egypt (a) typical New Kingdom spindle, (b) typical Middle Kingdom spindle, (c) unusual spindle from Gurob (New Kingdom) made of Egyptian materials but in the European style\u2014whorl at the bottom instead of the top and thread groove (near the top of the shaft) going the opposite direction. (Linen twists naturally in the direction of the grooves on the normal Egyptian spindles, so linen spun on the Gurob spindle would tend to be weak and come apart\u2014it was probably used for wool.)\n\nAdding twist to a single thread gave a very fine product; we have Egyptian linens with up to two hundred threads per inch, finer than the finest handkerchief you can buy nowadays. It looks translucent, almost like silk. (A fine percale sheet today is usually one hundred threads per inch.) Twisting two or even three threads together gave a much stronger and thicker yarn, which was used for most of the cloth woven. Some of the spinners were so expert that they could keep two spindles going at once. In one mural, one of these prodigies glances over her shoulder at the women sitting on the floor behind her, who supply her with the hand-spliced yarn, and cries, \"Come! Hurry!\"\n\nAmong the spinners in another painting is a young boy, probably the son of one of the women (fig. 8.4). She has brought him with her to her workplace. If he is still too young to be sent to the men, he is nonetheless old enough to be put to work, and spinning, at least, will be a useful skill for him later in learning to make rope. (We see boys regularly employed in those scenes also.) The women's workshop thus serves as both a \"day-care\" center and a sort of vocational school. White as opposed to red paint for the skin (the common Egyptian painter's convention for women versus men) proves some of the working children to be girls; one has been set up on a high platform so she will be tall enough for her spindle to drop a good distance.\n\n_Figure 8.4_. Friezes from the Middle Kingdom Egyptian tombs of a father and son, Baqt and Khety (at Beni Hasan), showing men spinning cord and laundering, while women spin thread and weave. Among the spinners in Baqt's tomb is a little girl, while in Khety's tomb a young boy helps with the spinning; day-care seems to have included vocational training. The women are also shown playing a variety of acrobatic games.\n\nTo weave, one must first make the warp\u2014a set of threads to be tied onto the loom to form the foundation for the future cloth (see Chapter 1). We see that one or two women of the workshop might do this job, taking the thread straight from the spindles or from prepared balls. Sometimes they measured out the thread on a large stand with upright posts for the purpose; one of the hieroglyphs depicts such a frame. But a cheaper warping board consisted simply of pegs stuck into a wall. We find this in one of the wooden models and once in real life.\n\nAround 1350 B.C., the heretic king Akhenaton moved the Egyptian capital to a brand-new site on the edge of the desert. This site, now known as Amarna, was abruptly abandoned after Akhenaton died. Everyone moved back to Thebes, leaving the houses to the desert sands, where the ruins have endured like time capsules.\n\nIn the remains of a small workmen's village on the outskirts of Amarna, the modern visitor encounters such homely devices as warping pegs still stuck fast in the wall of an alley opposite the doors of some of the houses. In the trash round about were found many broken spindles and a few weaving tools. In this case the women\u2014dependents on the men who carved the royal tombs\u2014were probably weaving necessities for their own households rather than for an estate. Any woman in the little walled village who needed a warp for her loom could have walked over to this convenient spot to make it.\n\nWhere she then set up her loom is a more difficult question. Her Amarna village house, set in a long, monotonous row, typically had an entry room through which family and friends immediately passed to the all-purpose main room behind, with its stove, wall benches, and cupboards. Here the wife cooked the food and did her chores; here the family worked, ate, and chatted. Steep stairs led up and over the corner cupboard to a story above, perhaps no more than a flat roof with palm fronds set up as a sun shelter. Such a rooftop provided a cool place to sleep at night and a shady spot for the woman to peg out her loom for weaving during the day. (Rain was not a problem; recently it rained in Cairo for the first time in decades.) Most of the weaving equipment found by the excavators appeared to have fallen down the stairs. Even today in the Near East the rooftops are the province of women, places to talk with and signal to one another, havens from which to view events in the street without being seen.\n\nMaking the warp for huge cloths must have been tedious in the extreme. We have Egyptian linens as much as 9 feet wide and 75 feet long. At a mere hundred threads to the inch, that's more than 153 miles of yarn to measure out\u2014the distance from New York to Providence, or Seattle to Portland. But the Egyptians were an ingenious lot. Perhaps the stability of their civilization allowed good ideas to be passed around easily. And so we see in one painting that a woman is measuring a dozen threads out at once, pulling them simultaneously from twelve balls of yarn lying in as many compartments in a big box\u2014a real work saver.\n\nOnce the warp was made, helpers transferred it to the loom for weaving; \"binding on the warp,\" says the legend. The shop might have one or two looms pegged out on the floor, and each was attended by at least two women, who crouched at either side and sped the weaving by passing the weft bobbin back and forth between them.2 One woman was also responsible for the beater that packed the weft in tight, and the other was in charge of the heddle bar that raised the alternate warp threads for the weft to pass under (see Chapter 1). Sometimes an extra girl helped out by attending to tangles or other problems with the unwoven part of the warp.\n\nSomewhere on the cloth the women might weave in an extra thread in a little design or logo that functioned as a weaver mark\u2014probably that of the workshop, but possibly of the estate. (Not until Classical Greek times did individual artisans begin to sign their products.) The keeper of the linens would later ink onto it a little hieroglyphic notation indicating the quality, such as \"good\" or \"best quality.\"\n\nVirtually all of the Old and Middle Kingdom linen we have is plain white. (By contrast, in an Egyptian marketplace today, almost everyone wears black.) A few pieces were dyed as whole cloth, usually red or yellow, and the dyes were not colorfast, so the dyeing may have been carried out for funerals only. But not all of the cloth is totally plain. Most pieces were fringed, and a few pieces from the Middle Kingdom have simple patterns made with short tufts of extra weft, looking not unlike a modern chenille bedspread. Garments, moreover, were often pleated with row upon row of tiny pleats, to give them a snug but elastic fit. Our earliest preserved garment, from about 3100 B.C., already has this feature (fig. 5.3).\n\nWho added the pleats or how, we don't know; but the men, not the women, did the laundering. Sometimes they boiled the cloth, and sometimes they stomped it in the river. This was heavy and sometimes dangerous work, as we learn from the scribes:\n\nThe washerman washes on the shore  \nWith the crocodile as neighbor . . .  \nHis food is mixed with dirt,  \nNo limb of his is clean.  \nHe is given women's cloths . . .  \nOne says to him, \"Soiled linen for you.\"\n\nCrocodiles pose a real danger in Africa even today, but one has to take the text as a whole with a grain of salt. Middle Kingdom scribes gave their pupils literature to copy for practice. A particular favorite, the source of this excerpt, was a long tongue-in-cheek poem that extolled the virtues of becoming a scribe and exaggerated the horrors of taking up any other line of work, the moral being that scribes had cushy lives, were well fed, and were honored by everyone, so that the schoolchild would do well to study hard and learn the fiercely difficult hieroglyphics. These little stories served as carrots to entice the mulish students forward, but the stick was not far behind\u2014as in the schoolrooms of Europe and America up into this century. Another verse describes the lot of the mat weavers (who were men) and at the same time puts to rest any thoughts that women's work might be enviable:\n\nThe [mat]weaver in the workshop,  \nHe is worse off than a woman;  \nWith knees against his chest,  \nHe cannot breathe air.  \nIf he skips a day of weaving,  \nHe is beaten fifty strokes;  \nHe gives food to the doorkeeper,  \nTo let him see the light of day.\n\n(These \"satires of the trades\" were composed with the assumption that all scribes were men, but we now have direct evidence for four or five women who were scribes in the Middle Kingdom.)\n\nWhen the linen was quite clean, despite the snapping crocodiles, the men wrung it out by twisting it between two sticks (fig. 8.4), laid it out to dry, pressed it with weights, folded it, and returned it to the keeper of the linens, who stored it in large woven hampers or in big chests of wood or terra-cotta. Some of these storage chests have survived from the Middle Kingdom. Others\u2014fancy wooden ones from the New Kingdom\u2014are gaily painted to represent the lord and lady sipping cool refreshments in a cloth-covered outdoor pavilion, while a small serving girl attends their wants, like English gentry taking tea at Ascot (fig. 6.2).\n\nMiddle Kingdom pavilions, like those pictured in the Old Kingdom, were normally made of brightly colored reed mats rather than cloth. But the tomb of Hepzefa, a deputy who ruled the nome, or county, around Asyut in the Twelfth Dynasty, around 1900 B.C., displayed on its ceiling the designs of six cloths, mostly imported from the Aegean (see Chapter 4) and sewn together into a colorful canopy top. Only one pavilion cover has come down to us: that of Princess Isimkheb of the Twenty-first Dynasty. It is woven of strips of green leather with handsome figures appliqu\u00e9d around the edges and was found tucked into a crevice in the tomb, where it had escaped the notice of ancient tomb robbers.\n\nLinen was more than just clothing or decor. Sheets of woven linen, made and stored up in huge quantities, also counted as wealth and served as a sort of money for barter. (Coinage was another fifteen hundred years into the future.) No fewer than thirty-eight folded linen sheets, for instance, lay atop the mummy of the estate manager Wah, who lived and died during the Middle Kingdom, and a great many more sheets had been used to wrap the body. Some were marked with his name, and some with the names of others. Nor was Wah particularly wealthy. He was not the owner of the estate, and he died rather young. If this many linens went into _his_ tomb, one of the rare ones to have been discovered intact, the tombs of the really wealthy must have been copiously supplied. In fact, we gather that linens, too, along with gold and jewels, were plundered from the tombs and sold. After all, not every household contained someone who wove, so basic cloth and also clothing sometimes had to be purchased (see Chapter 11).\n\nThe linen, once woven, had myriad uses. Plain lengths of it served as towels, bed sheets, and blankets, the blankets sometimes made with long loops of extra weft on one side, to insulate by trapping air (fig. 11.4). Egypt has a hot climate, but in winter the nights become chilly. Strips of linen provided bandages for wrapping the dead, and little pieces were drafted for wrapping all manner of things, much the way we use tissue paper. For example, a small wooden cosmetics casket found in a Middle Kingdom tomb and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art was described by William Hayes, the curator there, as \"containing a tiny alabaster vase tied up in a scrap of linen, and four alabaster jars, including two beakers for ointments, each wrapped or sealed with linen cloth.\"\n\nBoth women and men regularly kept small chests or lidded baskets with an array of cosmetics, the most important of which were ointments to soften the skin (dried out by heat, dust, and frequent washing) and eye paint, which was used not only for beauty but to help prevent eye infections and destroy parasites. Finely ground green malachite, a particular favorite from 4000 B.C. on, consists of oxide of copper\u2014lethal to both bacteria and fly eggs. The exaggerated eye makeup that we associate with Queen Cleopatra in Hollywood spectaculars was originally of this nature. Ancient Egyptian women, however, clearly enjoyed the aesthetics of face paint, too (fig. 8.5).\n\n_Figure 8.5_. Egyptian woman applying face paint with one hand while she holds her mirror and paintpot in the other. From a pen-and-ink sketch on a New Kingdom papyrus.\n\nClothing was entirely of linen in this era. Men wore knee-length kilts, especially for active work, but might also possess sleeved shirts, long kilts, and mantles for other occasions. The garments were tied on with a square knot. Women typically wore slim, tubular jumpers reaching from the breasts (either above or below them) to the ankles and supported by shoulder straps. One exception is the costume of a woman named Sit Snefru and titled \"nurse\" (fig. 8.6). Her statue, found in Adana on the southeastern coast of Turkey, shows the archaeological usefulness of knowing about clothing styles. Hayes likens her ankle-length dress, a single large rectangle wrapped so that the right arm and shoulder are bare, to the mantles sometimes worn by Egyptian men. It is identical, however, to the wrapped tunics worn at this time by Sumerian and Semitic women of Mesopotamia and Syria. Hayes supposes that she \"was attached to the household of an Egyptian official assigned to this remote station, and, before leaving home, had the statuette made to be placed in her tomb. . . .\" Since the statue is otherwise \"wholly characteristic of the best sculptural tradition of the Twelfth Dynasty,\" she must have had it made, instead, during a temporary return to Egypt, after she had adopted the native dress of her new country. We learn from this that at least a few Egyptian women traveled as great distances as some of the men.\n\n_Figure 8.6_. Left: Stone statue of Sit Snefru, an Egyptian nurse of the Twelfth Dynasty (early second millennium B.C.), who accompanied the family she served all the way to Adana, at the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. There she evidently adopted the local Near Eastern style of clothing; compare the typical wrapped tunic of the Mesopotamian woman on the right (this statue came from Tell Asmar, mid-third millennium B.C.), and contrast the sewn-up jumpers normally worn by Egyptian women (e.g., figs. 8.2, 8.4, and 8.7).\n\nLinen, with its slick-surfaced fibers, is difficult to dye, so colored thread was not easy to obtain. Furthermore, the Egyptians, priding themselves on cleanliness, constantly washed both themselves and their clothes. The linen was easier to bleach clean when it was plain white. Yet color is attractive to the human eye, and here and there on the statues and paintings one glimpses bright patterns on the clothes (fig. 8.7 left). These women are wearing skirts and even entire dresses of beaded nets, put on over the linen jumpers. One such bead dress survives from the Fifth Dynasty, so the custom already existed in the Old Kingdom. We also have Middle Kingdom bead skirts from burials at the southern outpost of Kerma in the Sudan, made with huge quantities of blue, white, and black faience beads and found along with such oddities as fluffy rugs woven with the long barbs from ostrich feathers as pile. Occasionally the net dresses were not linen, but cut from fine leather. One pharaoh on record got his fun, in fact, from watching his serving girls rowing up and down his pleasure lake wearing nothing else.\n\n_Figure 8.7_. Small sculpted models of women servants. One wears a bead dress over her linen tunic as she carries a basket of bread on her head and a bird in her hand (Middle Kingdom, ca. 2000 B.C.). The other kneels at the arduous task of grinding grain, the staple of life (Old Kingdom, ca. 2500 B.C.). In some areas of the ancient world the knee and toe bones of women are found deformed from spending so much time in this position (Chapter 3).\n\nThe Egyptians are famous, of course, for their huge beaded necklaces\u2014pectorals, actually, covering the whole chest\u2014which did a lot to dress up a clean white outfit. Fancy wooden boxes inlaid with precious materials like ivory held the necklaces and other jewelry owned by wealthy women and men, for men wore much jewelry, too, and particularly treasured the pectorals given out by the pharaoh as marks of honor. Both men and women might have among their jewelry a personal seal, in the form of a sacred scarab beetle with an inscription on the flat bottom and a hole pierced for a linen cord by which it could be worn. Upper-class women in the Middle Kingdom also developed a taste for huge wigs, the tresses of which were sometimes bound with ribbons of silver or linen and topped with still more jewelry, as fancy as any from the court of Marie Antoinette. We find these wigs carefully stowed in the tombs in large chests and see the servant girls in the paintings adjusting them for their mistresses. One female title carved onto the monuments of the time is \"hairdresser.\"\n\nIf we judged only by the genre scenes painted on tomb walls and carved as little wooden models, we would have to conclude that most types of work were done by men. The women, instantly recognizable by the convention of painting their skins white (the men's are red), appear as laborers essentially only in the scenes of weaving and of grinding grain. But they also appear as attendants of wealthy mistresses\u2014serving food, assisting the toilette, entertaining as singers, harpists, and dancers\u2014and they turn up in an interesting sequence showing some rather acrobatic games (fig. 8.4). In one of these, two girls play ball while sitting astride the backs of two other girls, who have leaned over to make \"horsie\" and are supporting the weight with their hands on their knees. Each has her hair pulled back into two pigtails. Others perform flips, jumps, and backbends, while two girls try to keep a pair of balls in the air at once.\n\nIf we analyze the titles accorded to women on their monuments, however, we learn a few more details. In addition to weavers, we find a few women listed as overseers and \"sealers\" of storehouses. In one case the store held \"royal linen\" that seems to have belonged to a temple. More often the stores in question contained food, and a large number of the titles of women have to do with food, all the way from scullery maid through grinder (fig. 8.7 right), brewer, and table attendant up to a butler and the keeper of the dining hall. More unusual are a woman who helped with winnowing the grain and another who was a gardener. Elsewhere in the house we find housekeepers, nurses (including wet nurses\u2014women who suckled other women's infants), hairdressers, cosmeticians, cleaning women, and just plain servants. We also encounter the dancers and various sorts of female musicians that we saw in the murals, both free citizens in the service of a deity and servants on a private estate. Not a few women were priestesses of some sort. Then, of course, we have the women who styled themselves the \"lady of the house\"\u2014that is, a married woman whose job was to run her husband's household\u2014and those who called themselves simply \"townswoman\" or \"freewoman.\" The lady of the house often appears in the murals seated in an elegant chair, her pet goose or monkey crouching beneath it.\n\nWilliam Ward, in making a thorough study of Middle Kingdom women's titles, points out that \"of all these professions, only the 'Gardener' and 'Winnower' worked outside the house and its subsidiary buildings. This points to the general observation that outside work in the fields, etc., was performed by men, including washing clothing. There would seem to be a division of labour on large, private estates: men worked outside (except for household servants) and women worked inside.\" The division would account for the convention that men were shown with dark skin and women with white. It also fits well with Judith Brown's thesis (Chapter 1) as elaborated within the peculiar Egyptian environment: In the blistering sun of Egypt, the cool of the house shade is the only reasonable place to tend small children, especially since, as the ancient satires tell us, the invitingly cool waters abounded with swift and lethal crocodiles. The analysis of one mummy has revealed that the deceased's legs had been torn off and the lungs showed signs of drowning.\n\nIndoors, however, the women had all the work they could manage, preparing the food and turning flax into linen cloth, which, along with metal, was the very currency of Egypt. In the Middle Kingdom most of these women\u2014weavers and grain grinders included\u2014were not slaves but serfs of the estates or entirely free women, equal in either case in the eyes of the law to the men of that rank. Massive slavery came later, with the wars of conquest in the New Kingdom, and it changed the economic structure thoroughly, right down to who was doing the weaving. In Chapter 11 we will explore that changed world, when men moved into textile work to make luxury goods. For now we will leave the women of the Nile not only with their endless manufacture of linen but with their leisure activities\u2014their ball games, dancing and acrobatics, pet geese, music, and cool drinks. The work of these women was not easy, but life had its pleasures.\n\n1The Egyptian writing system specified only the consonants, not the vowels, of the words. To reduce the resulting ambiguity, a sign that indicated the general semantic category of the intended word was often added. As a result, the system was extremely large, complicated, unwieldy, and hard to learn; that is why so few people were literate.\n\n2 One must be careful, in interpreting the weaving scenes, to pay attention to the Egyptian way of presenting objects. They did not choose to use ocular perspective, the way we do, because that angle would often hide some important part of the object or person that needed to arrive in the next world intact. So the looms are shown as if from above, to make everything visible, whereas the operators are shown side view for the same reason. See fig. 3.5 for the true form of the Egyptian loom; then compare fig. 8.2.\n\nThe Golden Spindle\n\nAlkandre, the wife of Polybos, who lived in Thebes\n\nof Egypt. . . bestowed on Helen beautiful gifts:\n\na golden spindle she gave, and a silver wool-basket\n\nwith wheels underneath and finished with gold on the rims.\n\n\u2014 _Odyssey_ , 4.125\u201326, 130\u201332\n\nGold and silver spindles may seem to us the stuff of fairy tales, as when Sleeping Beauty hurt her finger on a golden spindle and fell asleep for a century. After all, why should a woman rich enough to own so much gold need to spin thread, the unending task of the lowest servant girl? Yet archaeologists have actually found such precious objects. The earliest golden spindles lay in opulent tombs dating to the middle of the third millennium B.C., in the Early Bronze Age, not long after the use of soft metals had become widespread.\n\nThe royal graves of Alaca H\u00f6y\u00fck in central Turkey, spectacularly rich in precious metals, are the best documented of this group. Each broad, flat tomb at Alaca contained a person laid out on his or her side, surrounded by statuettes, religious or status objects, jewelry, weapons, and tools of gold, silver, and copper. In the grave that the excavators labeled Tomb L (fig. 9.1), for instance, lay a woman wearing a golden diadem, necklaces of precious stones, a belt with a golden clasp, gold and silver bracelets, a silver pin, and buttons of stone and of gold. Near her face a variety of religious objects had been set out, but just beyond her hands lay two implements useful in normal living: a large silver spoon and a silver spindle with a golden head. It is tempting to say that this woman, obviously a figure of prominence, was symbolically equipped to deal with food and clothing, the two occupations most closely associated with women in the ancient world.\n\n_Figure 9.1_. Burial of a rich and important woman at Alaca H\u00f6y\u00fck, in central Turkey (Tomb L), in the Early Bronze Age (mid-third millennium B.C.). Near her hands lay a gold and silver spindle, a large silver spoon, and religious paraphernalia. She wore much gold and silver jewelry. Bulls' heads and feet, probably the tokens of a massive funerary sacrifice, decorated the roof of the low log-built tomb.\n\nWhen I first began to work with this material fifteen years ago, I assumed that the Alaca lady's spoon and spindle were translations into precious metal of daily objects made of wood and had been made only for funerary purposes. The shape of the large, flat whorl in the middle of the spindle is not so different from wooden ones used today in Turkey and Greece. It is an easy shape to fashion in wood\u2014certainly not a copy of a clay whorl, which needs to be small and compact because of the greater density and greater fragility of clay. So, yes, the silver spindle probably does imitate a common wooden prototype.\n\nBut was a spindle so precious made only for show? By now we know of half a dozen more from the same Early Bronze era and the same region of Turkey (fig. 9.2): two from Horoztepe, two from Merzifon, at least one more from Alaca, and one from Karata\u015f to the southwest, made variously of silver, bronze, gold, and electrum (a handsome alloy of gold and silver). That we have so many from so early an age suggests that constructing a precious metal spindle was not just the passing whim of one eccentric noblewoman. We also have Homer's description of gold and silver spinning gear being presented as gifts by one highborn lady to another, which suggests that they might have been part of a form of diplomacy akin to the presents that Mesopotamian kings and queens gave one another (see Chapter 7). Now, the garments and rugs that composed those gifts, no matter how ostentatiously ornate they might be, were directly useful. Were these spindles intended for use, too? If so, they would have been for the hands of rich queens and princesses only. But why would queens be spinning and weaving at all? There lies the crux of the matter.\n\n_Figure 9.2_. Map of Greece, the Aegean, and western Anatolia, showing Bronze Age and Classical sites mentioned.\n\nThe answer seems to be that royal ladies were indeed producing cloth themselves, ornate cloth woven from expensive yarns that other women could not afford: linen strung with precious beads, or skeins of wool colored with costly dyes such as the purple obtained from sea snails like the murex. Murex dye was later called Tyrian purple because it became the specialty of dyers from Tyre in Phoenicia or royal purple because it was so costly that in Rome, for example, only the emperor had the right to wear an entire garment dyed of it. Why was it so dear? Because each snail contained only a single drop of the dye and had to be destroyed to get it. The Minoans and Greeks had their own banks of purple snails, off the east end of Crete, which they fished until none was left.\n\nIn the scene quoted above, Homer goes on to show Helen of Troy sitting comfortably at home in Sparta in a chair, her foot on a footstool, chatting with visitors and using her golden spindle to spin the expensive purple wool which fills her silver wool basket with its gold-rimmed wheels. Again, were this scene unique, we could point the finger at poetic license. But over and over in the literature we hear of highborn ladies learning to spin and weave precisely in order to produce ornate cloth. For example, in Euripides' play _Ion_ , Ion's mother, Kreusa, describes the cloth she wove as a girl and left in his baby basket when she abandoned him at birth:\n\nNot a finished piece, but a kind of sampler of weaves. . .\n\nA Gorgon is on the central warps of the robe . . .\n\nbordered with snakes like an aegis.\n\nNor would this be the only time in history that noblewomen worked at textiles. In the Middle Ages, for example, and in the eighteenth century, elegant ladies passed their time spinning and embroidering silks, not for sale but for conspicuous use at court.\n\nThreads colored with expensive dyes that don't wash out make it possible to weave designs that won't disappear. The repetitive patterns that the Minoans wove (see Chapter 4) could be partially mechanized, but the elaborate fabrics that Helen and her noble friends wove may well have been pictorial, a kind of nonrepetitive weaving that takes enormous amounts of time. None but the rich had that kind of leisure. Says Homer of Helen, living at Troy:\n\nShe was weaving a great warp,\n\na purple double-layered cloak, and she was working into it the many struggles\n\nof the horse-taming Trojans and bronze-clad Achaians.\n\nNor were such pictorial cloths for personal clothing, but for the rituals of the gods and kings. So, too, in medieval Europe, no textile was too expensive for the glorification of God and his servants.\n\nThe silver and gold spindles of the Early Bronze Age suggest that a tradition of noblewomen weaving may have sprung up quite early in Anatolia, fourteen hundred years before the Trojan War of around 1250 B.C. At Troy itself Heinrich Schliemann came upon quantities of gold fashioned into vessels and jewelry not unlike those at Alaca. Passionately fond of Homer and guided by ancient descriptions, Schliemann had arrived at the site of Hissarlik in northwestern Turkey to dig up what he hoped would be the legendary city of Troy. The year was 1870, archaeology was in its infancy, and Schliemann (a wealthy businessman in his sixties) had no clear concept of stratification\u2014the principle that the debris from more recent periods is laid down on top of the residue of older periods, leaving a sort of layer cake from which one can deduce the relative ages of the remains. Assuming that Troy's mound was homogeneous, he and his hundred workmen started shoveling their way through the very middle of the great hill of debris, hunting for buildings and objects worthy of great King Priam and the other Homeric heroes. Although Schliemann was both curious and meticulous enough to save and record in his diary the artifacts he found, he destroyed irretrievably most of the architectural and stratigraphic history of this important site.\n\nWhen the diggers finally came upon giant defense walls and a regal hoard of gold, they had burrowed right past Priam's Troy of 1250 B.C. (now identified as Level VII), all the way down to the Early Bronze Age (Level II), around 2600 B.C. This city, too, had clearly been sacked and burned, just like Homer's Troy, a finding that only confirmed Schliemann in his belief that he had finally found what he was looking for. By now it was June of 1873, and Schliemann had endured for too long the scorn and ridicule of European scholars who thought that both he and his scheme to find Troy were crazy. To enhance the small troves of gold he found stashed about the city by the frantic inhabitants of the burning city, he secretly sent his wife off to buy additional pieces of prehistoric gold from antiquities dealers round about, while partially falsifying his diaries about what was found when and where. Then he smuggled the whole lot out of Turkey to Athens and eventually to Berlin, carefully \"leaking\" spectacular news of his success to the press, once the treasure was safe, and soon thereafter writing two copiously illustrated books detailing the uncovering of Troy. A particularly famous lithograph portrays his wife, Sophia, dressed up in lavish Trojan jewelry\u2014not that of Helen, Andromache, and Queen Hecuba, as they believed, but of nameless queens and princesses who had lived some fourteen hundred years earlier.\n\nAmong his finds from the burnt city (Level II), Schliemann describes a small round clay box or casket, within which nestled the remains of a linen fabric decorated with tiny blue-green faience beads and a spindle full of thread. Perhaps it was a noble lady's workbox. Elsewhere he mentions tiny gold beads. Where Schliemann had no posture to maintain, his books are apparently excellent records of what he found. But where gold is concerned, a more reliable source is his set of copious diaries (and even they have to be treated with discernment at times). While in Greece a few years ago, and curious about these beads, I called at the Gennadion Library in Athens, where Schliemann's diaries reside, and asked if it were possible to consult them. The next thing I knew, I was seated at a huge polished wooden table with three volumes of the diaries piled in front of me.\n\nI confess that I spent the first hour in awe, leafing through the pages just to see what this great man, one of my childhood heroes, had been like in his private moments. The diaries are not easy to read since they are handwritten in four different alphabets and at least seven languages. In the volumes before me I found Greek (Greek alphabet), Turkish (Arabic script), Russian (Cyrillic alphabet), French, occasionally English, and most often his native German. Schliemann was an astounding polyglot, having taught himself to read, speak, and write more than a dozen modern languages as well as to read Classical Greek and Latin\u2014often from the most meager resources. He tended to write in whichever language he was speaking most often at the moment. Fortunately for me, the days at Troy were recorded not in Turkish but in German, along with numerous sketches of the artifacts he was finding. At least one reason for choosing German was to keep the diary unintelligible to the local authorities! After much browsing, using the sketches as the quickest guide, I gradually located a few more references to small finds of gold and faience beads, but no others with a clear context of cloth decoration.\n\nMuch luckier, however, were the American archaeologists who reexcavated Troy in the 1930s in hopes of working out something of the stratigraphy. In an area missed by Schliemann's diggers, they discovered hundreds of tiny gold beads all through the dirt around the remains of a warp-weighted loom. This loom had been set up in the palace with a half-finished cloth on it on that fatal day when Troy II was sacked and burned. Given what we now know of bead-decorated cloth from other sites in Bronze Age Greece and Turkey, we can conclude that a most royal cloth beaded with gold was in the making. Troy II is contemporary with both Alaca H\u00f6y\u00fck and the other sites with gold or silver spindles; perhaps the royal ladies knew each other. At any rate the \"common\" women of Troy were busy with the cloth industry, too, for the Early Bronze Age levels at Troy disgorged some ten thousand clay spindle whorls, a truly phenomenal number.\n\nWhat form such an extensive cloth industry took at that early date we can only guess. We see evidence for linen, for massive production of woolen cloth, and for luxury fabrics like those with the gold and faience beads, and we see considerable social stratification, with the leaders of the city commanding great wealth. But we know little of the women who made these textiles. On the other hand, we have rather more information about the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age on both sides of the Aegean\u2014that is, information about some other palace-run societies that were equally appropriate settings for Homer's golden spindle.\n\nThe direct ancestors of the later Greeks that we so admire began to trickle into the Greek peninsula from the northeast sometime after 2000 B.C. They are hard to trace, but by 1600 B.C. they were numerous and powerful enough to build citadels and palaces in several key locations in the eastern half of Greece, especially on the previously uninhabited hilltop of Mycenae (see map, fig. 9.2). Mycenae overlooks the rich agricultural plain of Argos to the south, a fertile source of food. It also controls the pass through the hills from the north, just beyond which lies the narrow Isthmus of Corinth, the only way for northerners to reach the entire southern half of Greece by land. Truly a strategic position\u2014so strategic that Mycenae became the capital of the loose federation of chiefdoms that ensued, giving its name to the era and to the people themselves. The Mycenaean Greeks were above all warriors and organizers, organizing everyone and everything they conquered so that they could keep efficient control, like the Romans in later times.\n\nOne way to keep order is to keep records of who is to do what and who owes what to whom. The Mycenaean Greeks, illiterate when they entered Greece, soon learned how to write from the Minoans or other Aegean peoples and began keeping palace accounts on small clay tablets, using a script that we call Linear Script B. Unfortunately Linear B was adapted from local scripts that were ill suited both to clay and to the sound structure of the Greek language (see below). To the extent that we can understand the contents, we can say that many of the tablets have to do with personnel, especially with rations issued and with work meted out and completed (fig. 9.3). It is interesting for our purposes that most of the workers listed are women; their named occupations include grinders of grain, water carriers, a wide variety of textile workers, priestesses, nurses (?), serving women, and new captives.\n\n_Figure 9.3_. Clay tablet from Pylos, Greece, inscribed in Linear Script B and telling of rations sent to textile workers and their children. The signs read: \"Pu-lo ra-pi-ti-rya: WOMEN 38, ko-wa 20, ko-wo 19. WHEAT 16, FIGS 16.\" That is, \"Pylos seamstresses: 38 women, 20 girls, 19 boys. Wheat: 16 measures, figs: 16 measures.\" The sign for \"woman\" is a pictogram showing her head and long skirt.\n\nThe last term is the key to the social structure: Most of these women, perhaps all except the top priestesses, seem to have been captured during the sorts of raids so frequent in Homer's epics, right from the opening of the _Iliad_ , where Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, makes the following boasts:\n\nWe went to Thebes, the sacred city of Eetion,\n\nand sacked it and brought everything here.\n\nAnd the sons of the Achaians divided it up among themselves,\n\n[including] the fair-cheeked Chryseis . . .\n\nAnd I will not release [Chryseis], not before old age comes upon her\n\nin our house in Argos, far from her father,\n\nwalking up and down at the loom and tending my bed.\n\nWhen a town or settlement was overwhelmed and looted, the men who survived the fighting were typically slaughtered, while the women and children were hauled away to become captive laborers.\n\nI hesitate to call them slaves. The general attitude seems to have been that women were relatively docile and did not have to be fettered or beaten, once co-opted. So the newly captured women were employed in the palaces and temples, where they could be kept track of and taught skills if necessary. But once they had a child or two, born of a local father, they were too encumbered and too tied to their new homes to run away. From then on they might live in suburbs or farmhouses, continuing to do piecework for the palace (like weaving garments) and perhaps tending orchards or gardens, while they raised their children. Such a life was more like serfdom than slavery. It is the census and supply lists for these dependent workers, both inside and outside the palace, and accounts of their products that constitute the bulk of our Linear B documents.\n\nNot only do the women greatly outnumber the men, but the majority of the workingwomen labored in the textile industry. Indeed, textiles for export must have been a main source of Aegean wealth. At Knossos alone, records for a single season list at least seventy to eighty thousand sheep, the vast preponderance of them wethers (neutered males, which give the finest fleeces, but no milk and only tough meat). At upward of a pound and a half of wool per adult sheep, by the Mycenaeans' own reckoning, we come up with some sixty tons of wool\u2014a count that checks well against the Knossos accounts of cloth made. For comparison, a bulky ski sweater today might contain a pound and a half of wool. Imagine spinning and knitting eighty thousand of them by hand in one season. This was no small industry. A single shepherd could run several hundred sheep, although fifty to a hundred was more normal. But to get enough women to spin and weave all the wool grown by those sheep, the palace warriors had to go out raiding for captive female labor, even when no war was afoot. Being carried off was a constant hazard for women and children during Mycenaean times, especially for those living near the sea. A servingwoman in the _Odyssey_ reports her entry into bondage thus:\n\nPirate men from Taphos [a Greek island] grabbed me\n\nas I was coming from the fields, and bringing me here they sold me\n\nto the household of this man; and he paid a good price.\n\nQuite a few of the women listed in the Linear B archives of Pylos, an important Mycenaean town on the west coast of Greece, came from such faraway places as Lemnos, Knidos, and Miletos on the east side of the Aegean.\n\nMuch of the populace, then, consisted of captive women manufacturing textiles. As usual, men lent a hand at each end of the textile production, in this case raising the fibers and disposing of the cloth, while the women handled the part in the middle\u2014chiefly spinning and weaving.\n\nA careful look at the accounts, however, reveals a marked difference in how the Mycenaean women were organized to make textiles, compared with the other systems we have looked at. Egyptian and Mesopotamian women, having obtained their fibers one way or another, made the cloth from start to finish, either alone or as a workshop team. Not so in the Mycenaean world. Here the palace controlled the means of production at each stage, manipulating the system from the center like an orb-spider in its web. The people who did the successive bits of work specialized in doing only that one task, living and working separately from those who did other parts of the job, connected as a production team chiefly via the palace. A system in which no one person or workshop alone could complete an entire piece of cloth from start to finish gives the central manipulator yet more control over a large captive populace.1 The same sort of outworker system for cloth production, but run by private entrepreneurs for profit, is documented from the Netherlands and northern France in the Middle Ages and from the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta as recently as the last century.2\n\nLinen was manufactured in the Aegean as well as wool, and considerable quantities of flax were raised in the western Peloponnesos, in the same area in which the Classical Greeks produced linen. But clearly wool ran the show. Let us, then, follow a pound of wool through the hands of the Mycenaean people who worked it, to get some glimpses of their daily lives.\n\nFirst we catch and fleece a sheep, preferably in the spring. Men raised the sheep; the names of the shepherds are masculine. Who removed the wool from the sheep, however, is not clear. Scholars often assume that the wool was sheared off in a mass, as is done today, but archaeological, zoological, and linguistic evidence indicates that Bronze Age sheep still molted (shed) their wool and that wool for weaving was typically retrieved by combing it loose from the bristly kemp hairs that molted later in the spring than the wool itself. (Modern sheep have evolved to the place where they don't molt, and they don't have scratchy kemp in their coats either.) By combing the wool out, the Bronze Age people thus came away with a much finer, softer fleece to spin than shearing everything at once would have produced.3 In the Mycenaean records we find some women listed as _pektriai_ , meaning \"combers.\" One can imagine the combers and shepherds working together at the task in molting season, when, as in most harvesting jobs, speed must have been essential so as not to lose the crop.\n\nThen as now, and also as in Homer, the herdsmen lived most of the time with their flocks, in lonely huts out in the hills. The combers, on the contrary, lived in towns and villages, perhaps going out to the pastures only when it was time to fleece the sheep. One tablet records a monthly ration of wheat and figs for eight comber women and their children living at Pylos. They may have spent the rest of the year cleaning and combing tangles out of the harvested wool for spinning, for those were the next jobs to be done.\n\nBefore the women could touch it, however, our pound of wool had to be brought to the palace (or at least to the palace officials) and weighed in balance pans with the rest (see fig. 9.4), only then to be redistributed for processing. Lest moths spoil the uncleaned wool, it must have been sent out again just as fast as the textile workers could manage. We read of the weighed-out units of wool being dispatched to various work forces for various purposes, each batch carefully sized for the job to be done, from little items like headbands to great cloaks and blankets. The palace bureaucrats intended to lose track of nothing.\n\n_Figure 9.4_. Greek women engaged in all phases of textile work: preparing wool, folding finished cloth, spinning, weaving, and weighing out unworked wool. From a Greek vase of ca. 560 B.C. (fig. 3.6 is a photograph of one side of this vase).\n\nAfter cleaning the allotted wool by removing the burs and other debris, the women needed to wash it. That it had not been washed previously is suggested by the fact that small amounts of raw wool from the inventory went directly to the ointment makers, presumably so they could extract the lanolin, an oil with skin-softening properties still in demand today. Sometimes the palace dispatched aromatic herbs along with the raw wool and olive oil. With such plants, these early \"pharmacists\" could have perfumed the ointments for the queen and her ladies. ( _Pharmakon_ is a Greek word, occurring already in Mycenaean texts, that denoted any substance that comes in small quantities and will do something useful for you. It includes drugs and remedies but also dyes, aromatics, spices, and miscellaneous chemicals like astringents and fixatives.) Perfumes and ointments may also have constituted important exports, as much in demand abroad as Chanel perfume is outside France today.\n\nOnce our pound of wool was clean, the women would have combed and rolled it into fluffy sausages of fiber (see fig. 9.4), and from these rolls the spinners spun the yarns required by the palace for the weavers. The spinners, like the weavers, functioned in groups, at least for administrative purposes, although spinning can easily be done alone. One group of spinners working for the palace at Pylos consisted of twenty-one women (along with their children: twenty-five girls and four boys); another contained thirty-seven women (with forty-two children). Many lived in outlying villages, others in the local capital itself. One member was put in charge, and supplies of wool and food were allocated to her to distribute to the other women in her group. For this extra responsibility (unlike her Mesopotamian counterparts) she received double rations.\n\nTheir food rations seem to us a strange diet: wheat and figs. Occasionally barley replaced wheat, and sometimes olives supplanted figs. Even in Classical Athens, meat was a rare treat for most people, available only after animals had been slaughtered for a religious sacrifice and the meat distributed to the populace. (The philosopher Socrates, in fact, complains of associating stomachaches with big festivals because of the unaccustomed feasting on meat.) As in Classical and later times, villagers could supplement the grain, figs, and olives by collecting tasty wild vegetables in season, such as members of the onion and celery families. The Linear B tablets list coriander, cumin, and fennel seeds\u2014still among the basic spices in Greek cooking today\u2014as condiments collected and stored for the palace kitchens, along with safflower and two types of mint (a word that we borrowed from the Greeks, after the Minoans had lent it to them).\n\nWhen the spinners finished their work, half the yarn went to women who specialized in preparing the warp on a distinctive band loom\u2014an entirely different piece of equipment from the large loom designed for making cloth.\n\nOur only ancient European depiction of the key process of making the warp comes from Etruscan times, almost a thousand years later (fig. 9.5). Our ability to interpret this scene, however, comes from a Norwegian scholar, Marta Hoffmann, who discovered that women in remote parts of northern Norway and Finland were still using the warp-weighted loom in 1964. She traveled around to the farms where families possessed these looms (usually stored away somewhere) and persuaded them to demonstrate the processes to her. Oddly, some of the women had modern floor looms as well, but they explained that only on the warp-weighted loom could they produce the large, heavy bedspreads needed for winter sleeping. Hauling the pieces out of storage, they set up the looms while Hoffmann took notes and pictures. From such firsthand evidence, it became possible to interpret many of the weaving scenes from ancient Europe. In fact, some of the Norwegian scholar's pictures of the women working at their looms look remarkably like the ancient ones.\n\n_Figure 9.5_. Etruscan women helping each other construct a warp, the threads of which are being stretched out to the proper length on the pegged stand at right. Yarn baskets sit on the floor. From a damaged bronze pendant of about 600 B.C., found at Bologna, Italy.\n\nThe Etruscan (or Villanovan) scene engraved in bronze (fig. 9.5) shows two women working as a team to make the warp\u2014the foundation for the cloth. One sits in front of a band loom weaving the starting band that will stabilize the warp as it is formed (see Chapter 1 for technical terms). She pushes a loop of warp yarn through the shed of the dozen threads on the band loom in front of her and hands the loop to her companion. As the weaver pays out yarn, the second woman takes the new loop and walks across the room with it until it is long enough to slip it over a peg on a specially constructed stand set up exactly as far away as the warp is to be in length. Then she walks back to fetch the next loop while the weaver changes the shed (to lock the last loop into place) and begins to form another loop.\n\nBecause of the starting band, which organizes it and holds it together, a warp for this sort of loom could be made up separately and carried from one workplace to another. We possess a warp from Norway dating to the Iron Age, when it was lost in a bog as it was being transported. The warp strings had been tied up in loose knots in groups, to keep everything neatly organized in transit.\n\nAround 1400 B.C. some weaver discovered a simple trick for weaving brightly variegated starting bands rather than plain white ones, by dividing up two or four colors of thread in the right order on the band loom when setting up. Suddenly it became the height of fashion to wear these bright borders. We see a pattern of bars in alternating colors on many a fresco from this era and read of \"cloths with white edges\" versus \"cloths with variegated edges\" in the Mycenaean accounts. Lappish women weaving on warp-weighted looms in rural Scandinavia only thirty years ago were still using an identical pattern for their starting bands.\n\nOnce the entire warp was made, it could be turned over to the weavers, who also worked more efficiently in pairs. They would lash the starting band to the top beam of a big warp-weighted loom, divide the shed, add the clay weights to the bottom for tension, and begin to weave the cloth, using the other half of our pound of wool spun up into yarn for the weft. Weft yarn, incidentally, often differs considerably from warp thread. The warp has to be very strong and hard, to stand up under the tension and punishment of the weaving, but the weft can be of any quality desired\u2014for instance, soft and fluffy so as to produce a warm cloth.\n\nWeaving seems simple enough. Over, under, over, under, and soon you have a length of cloth. But in fact, learning to control everything so you come out with a _nice_ piece of cloth, with the threads evenly spaced and the edges straight, takes a good deal of time and practice. It is not surprising, then, that we find Mycenaean women billed as apprentices. For example, one village near Knossos housed two supervisors, ten regular craftswomen, one woman who had just been trained, four older girls, and one little boy\u2014these last five presumably the children of the grown women. The listing, as always, is in order of seniority. Other tablets distinguish between \"new\" trainees, set to work \"this year,\" and \"old\" apprentices, who were assigned \"last year\" and are apparently about to assume full status. Training slave women was a regular part of the world Homer describes. Odysseus' elderly nurse and housekeeper, Eurykleia, refers to the other women in his house as \"the servants, whom we taught to do their work, to comb the wool and to bear their slavery.\"\n\nLinear B records are tantalizingly cryptic regarding the kinds of cloth the Mycenaeans would have made from our pound of wool. We learn much more from the frescoes depicting people and their clothes. And there we see radical changes from the earlier Minoan times (see Chapter 4), among both men and women. Minoan women had worn elaborate dresses fashioned from densely patterned textiles (figs. 4.5\u2013 and 6.3), while the men sported only skimpy loincloths with cinch belts and ornate footwear. With the advent of the Greeks, the tables turned. In Crete we suddenly see men wearing the intricate patterns formerly associated with women, but in the form of an ample kilt rather than a brief loincloth\u2014a new form of dress worn also by the Hittites, the Indo-European cousins of the Greeks, next door in Anatolia. We also observe the cloth of the women's dresses suddenly becoming plain, with at most a decorative edging, as though the men had preempted for themselves the use of the fancy Minoan cloth. Soon the men's cloth becomes plain again, too, although still with fancy edgings sometimes.\n\nIt is not hard to reconstruct what was happening. In fact, the clothing provides an excellent mirror of the radical changes in economic and social structure brought by the Mycenaean Greeks. We have already seen that the Mycenaeans were organization men. Upon entering Crete, they quickly marshaled the defeated local populace into labor groups to produce quotas of cloth for the central palace at Knossos; the Linear B records list not only how many pieces of cloth a team of weavers finished but also how many they fell short of their quota. Apparently these conquerors requisitioned the existing supply of handsome local fabrics for their own clothing. But clothing soon wears out, and the new labor system was not geared to manufacturing such fancy cloth. So very soon the men's clothing became as plain as the disenfranchised women's.\n\nWorking within a quota system of production is not like weaving for oneself. It is no longer fun, nor does the weaver get the benefit of extra effort put in. Mass production is not at all like making single pieces at will; there isn't time to do a careful job. This economic principle is illustrated many times in history. For instance, in Mesopotamia, when people first figured out how to make pottery, they painted it with truly exquisite designs, but when the potter's wheel was invented and it suddenly became possible to mass-produce the pots, the designs rapidly degenerated into a quick swish of the brush for a little color. The same effect is visible in Cretan textiles made for the central palaces, under Mycenaean rule, as they rapidly became plain with at most a fancy edging. Elsewhere on Crete, however, in remote areas that the Mycenaeans failed to subjugate, the Minoan women continued to make their elaborate fabrics all the way down into the Iron Age.\n\nIndeed, independently woven edgings suited Mycenaean parsimony very well: When the main cloth wears out, the good parts of the fancy border, which is more expensive than the cloth, can be removed and reused. (Many a European folk costume has been adorned in this way.) Linear B accounts mention several different kinds of band weavers and several styles of edgings.\n\nWe do not have the bookkeeping on the dyers who colored the thread for the pretty edgings. But we have ration lists for thirty-eight seamstresses at Pylos, together with their children. The seam-stresses must have sewn on the edgings and stitched up the linen tunics listed. Elsewhere a few men who sew are mentioned, but they seem to be involved with stitching leather for harnesses and the like.\n\nOnce the cloth had been finished by the weavers and enhanced, if need be, by the band makers, seamstresses, and fullers, it was returned to the palace to be stored until needed. Some cloths were designated \"royal\" in quality, others as suitable for retainers, and yet others for guests. Again we catch a glimpse of diplomacy through the giving of textiles to honored visitors, a practice often seen in Homer. As the Phaiakians prepare to send Odysseus home, they present to him a new tunic and cloak and a chest full of clothing and other goods. We also see that the king was responsible for clothing his retainers as well as his servants and slaves, a common practice in the ancient Near East and in medieval Europe. Thus the cloth made by the captive women did not merely dress people but also functioned at the heart of the economy, both domestic and external.\n\nAt the other end of the social scale from the dependent workers in the Mycenaean accounts were those who ruled. As the result of reconstruction work done in the wake of archaeological excavation, we may now stroll through their frescoed halls, try out their contoured thrones for size, and admire their great hearths, pillared porticoes, and comfortable bathtubs, while we picture them living a lazy life on the labor of their captives.\n\nBut another Homeric example of textiles used as guest gifts furnishes us with a different perspective. While Menelaos prepares to give Odysseus' son, Telemachos, a silver cup and mixing bowl as guest gifts, his wife, Helen\u2014she of the golden spindle\u2014picks out a particularly beautiful robe from those in the storeroom, one \"which she had made herself.\" She presents it to the young man \"as a remembrance from the hands of Helen, for your bride to wear at the time of much-desired marriage; and until then let it lie at home in the care of your mother.\" We deduce from this and numerous other passages that queens, in Homer's view, were in the habit of spinning and weaving certain types of special cloths themselves and of keeping at least some track of the royal stores of cloth and clothing. Penelope and Hecuba are presented the same way.\n\nIn short, Mycenaean queens were remembered as busy ladies, just like their counterparts at Mari and Karana (Chapter 7), with many of the same duties in running the palaces. The large numbers of storerooms in the excavated palaces at Pylos, Tiryns, and Mycenae (Schliemann started in to dig at Mycenae just as soon as he had finished Troy) suggest that there was much to run.\n\nManaging a palace is one thing, but actually spinning or weaving like the slaves, even with a spindle made of gold, is another. To understand what cloth was so special that it took a queen to make it, it helps to understand other aspects of early Greek and indeed Indo-European society (see Chapter 2).\n\nOver and over, we find early Indo-European literature obsessed with renown\u2014the renown of the individual, of the family or clan, and of the deities thought to protect that family. We find this as true in Germanic and Indic epics and sagas as in Greek and Roman, and we see the Hittites, when they become literate, creating a genre new to the ancient Near Eastern world: the long historical expositions that prefaced their treaties, cataloguing the deeds that led up to the event at hand. But how do you carry people's fame on down into future generations forever if you don't know how to read and write?\n\nTechnically Mycenaean society was literate: it had its syllabic Linear Script B, built on the model of such local Aegean scripts as Minoan Linear A. But Linear B is very poorly suited to writing Greek. Its models made no provision for clusters of consonants\u2014Greek is chock-full of them\u2014and they allowed little room for distinctions between many sounds that are critical to telling words apart in Greek. Thus the Greek word _khiton_ \"tunic\" would be written with the syllable signs that we transliterate _ki-to_. But _ki_ could theoretically represent _ki, khi, gi, ski, skhi; kin, khin, gin, skin, skhin; kis, khis, gis, skis, skhis; kir, khir, gir, skir_ , or _skhir,_ while _to_ could represent either _to_ or _tho_ , with long or short _o_ and with or without _n_ , _s_ , or _r_ at the end of the syllable. Theoretically more than three hundred different words could end up written simply _ki-to_ , with no way of distinguishing them.4 In practice this all but intolerable ambiguity meant that Linear B could be used only for short-term, repetitive (i.e., very redundant) records that would probably be read only by the person who wrote them originally, as a memory aid soon discarded as obsolete. (The account tablets were not baked by the scribe to preserve them, as they often were in Mesopotamia, so they survive only when someone conveniently burned down the palace.) That is, the script was fit only for mundane and fleeting accounts, in which most of the information lay in the numerals rather than in the words\u2014and that is just how we find it used. No complex confections here: no poetry, no history.\n\nHow intolerable it must have seemed that such glorious kings and queens as ruled Mycenae and Sparta should die unremembered! Epics there were, but even the bard needed a jog to his memory. It was for this express purpose that men toiled to raise huge funeral mounds\u2014variously called barrows, kurgans, or tumuli\u2014over the bodies of their heroes, from central Asia all the way to Greece and Britain. Achilles piled up one for his dead comrade Patroklos, on the shore near Troy, that all might see and remember, just as the friends of Beowulf raised one for that early Germanic king after his death: a great mound \"on the headland, [built] so high and broad that seafarers might see it from afar.\" The largest one we know of was raised over the wooden tomb of King Midas of Phrygia\u2014he whose touch was said to turn anything into gold\u2014just after 680 B.C., at Gordion in central Turkey. One hundred and seventy feet high, the mound dominates the landscape, dwarfing the dozens of other tumuli in the neighborhood. (Ironically, Gordion had just been sacked by another warlike Indo-European tribe, so Midas' followers had not a scrap of gold left to put into their lord's tomb.)\n\nThus the Indo-European men raised mounds and composed oral epics to try to attain immortality for their names and deeds, during long periods when writing was not widespread. But the women turned to their textiles to portray the deeds of their families. We have already mentioned the women who made the Bayeux Tapestry to glorify William of Normandy's victory (Chapter 6), and from western Europe we could add the story found in the _Nibelungenlied_ that Br\u00fcnhilde depicted the exploits of Siegfried on her web, ripping the cloth in fury when he betrayed her (no more memory of him!). There is mounting evidence that noble Mycenaean ladies likewise recorded the deeds and\/or myths of their clans in their weaving. Homer implies as much of Helen and Penelope, and in Classical times noble Athenian girls still carried on an ancient tradition (almost certainly from the Bronze Age) of weaving an important story cloth for Athena every year (Chapter 6). The stories were woven in friezes, using a supplementary weft technique perfected in Europe in the Neolithic and Bronze ages. We have many depictions of Iron Age Greek story cloths, and fragments of at least two have been discovered in Classical Greek tombs in the Crimea (fig. 9.6).\n\n_Figure 9.6_. Greek story cloth composed of several friezes of mythological and quasi-historical figures, reserve-dyed in red, black, and white, from the fourth century B.C. Found in a tomb near the Greek colony at Kertch, on the north shore of the Black Sea. It was sufficiently precious that it had been carefully mended in antiquity.\n\nCaptive women undoubtedly wove the mass of towels and bed sheets, cloaks and blankets, tunics and chemises used by the ruling household and its many dependents, plus extras for the guests and the export trade. The noble ladies may have chosen to make especially fancy clothing for themselves and their highborn friends as well. But the recording of the mythohistory of the clan would have been a task so important that it could be entrusted only to the queens and princesses, with their gold and silver spindles and royal purple wool.\n\n1Some of the Mesopotamian palaces, too, may have used this kind of outworker system. We have little information about the internal organization of the women textile workers to whom rations were issued there. But we do not seem to see these women divided a priori into such specialty groups as combers, spinners, weavers, seamstresses, etc., and the Mesopotamian form of agriculture, which required large numbers of people to band together to maintain the irrigation channels across great wide-open spaces, seems to have precluded the sort of scattered villages with cottage industries that were the norm in Europe for millennia. Security for workers in outlying districts would have been nil.\n\n2Bowen-Jones et al. describes the Maltese system thus: \"In 1861 there still remained almost 9000 workers occupationally described as spinners and weavers and some 200 beaters and dyers. Ninety-six percent of the total were women, and male labour was generally used only in the final stages of cloth preparation. The industry included all processes from the growing of indigenous short staple annual cottons to the manufacture of cloth. The actual operations however were carried out almost entirely by individual workers in their own homes and were linked only by merchants specialising in this trade. In many cases merchants advanced seed to the farmers on a crop-sharing basis. In all cases they bought the picked lint and then distributed quantities by weight to 'out-work' spinners. These would return the yarn, . . . and were paid by weight and fineness of the yarn. The village merchant would store the yarn until he received an order for cloth and then would make similar contracts with domestic weavers.\"\n\n3Nor was it possible to invent an efficient pair of shears for a few more centuries, until the advent of iron. Iron has spring to it, so the shears (built much like old-fashioned grass clippers) will open automatically after each clip, but bronze will not do this. If the Mycenaeans cut the wool off their sheep, they would have to have done so with a straight knife, which is much slower and riskier. Worse yet for such a hard-driving economy, clipping a molting sheep wastes a lot of good wool\u2014namely, the part between the cut and the root, which will soon fall out anyway and could have been used. The partnership between kempless sheep that no longer molt readily and efficient iron shears seems to have begun in the mid-first millennium B.C.\n\n4Some languages, by contrast, are well suited to such a writing system because their words are built largely without consonant clusters. Japanese and Cherokee use syllabaries with no trouble, and Hawaiian could if it weren't already using the Roman alphabet. (Consider the sequences of consonants and vowels in Hawaiian words like _a-lo-ha, Ho-no-lu-lu, Ka-me-ha-me-ha,_ and _hu-la_.) We are aware of one or two such languages having existed in the Aegean before the Greeks arrived. Presumably the speakers of one of them were responsible for inventing the first of these syllabic scripts, which later comers then took up without rethinking the structure. We do not know how well Minoan fitted the mold, but apparently it fitted it with less ambiguity than Greek, for we find many more kinds of inscriptions in Linear A than just accounts\u2014on jewelry, on pottery, on walls, on religious objects. (Minoan Linear A is still undeciphered, but we can infer a good deal about its structure.)\n\nBehind the Myths\n\nI will don a white dress  \nand turn into a white swan;  \nand then I will fly away  \nto where my darling has gone.\n\n\u2014Russian folk song\n\nWhite linen is the paper of [housewives], which  \nmust be on hand in great, well-ordered layers,  \nand therein they write their entire philosophy  \nof life, their woes and their joys.\n\n\u2014Gottfried Keller, _Der gr\u00fcne Heinrich_ (1854)\n\nOnce upon a time an Athenian princess named Prokne was wed to Tereus, king of the barbarous Thracians of the north. When Prokne's unfortunate sister, Philomela, came for a visit, Tereus fell madly in love with the girl, locked her away and raped her, then cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone of the crime. Philomela, however, wove into a cloth the story of her misfortune. When Prokne, receiving the cloth, understood what had befallen, she freed her sister, killed her own son, Itys, whom she had borne to Tereus, and served the child up to his father at a feast\u2014the vilest revenge she could think of. When Tereus discovered the truth, in wrath he pursued the two sisters, thinking to kill them, but the gods transformed all three into birds: Tereus into the hoopoe (a large, crested bird with a daggerlike beak), Philomela into the swallow, which can only twitter unintelligibly, and Prokne into the nightingale, which spends the night singing \"Itys, Itys!\" in mourning for her dead son. All these birds have reddish spots, it is said, from getting spattered with the blood of the child.\n\nSo Ovid tells the tale for his jaded Roman audience, embroidering it more profusely than Philomela herself. (Aeschylus, five hundred years earlier, tells it in briefest outline.) Clearly we have here a \"just so\" story\u2014the explanatory sort of tale found worldwide and polished to a modern art form by Rudyard Kipling. It is interesting for our purposes because it shows in yet another way the great importance that clothmaking had in women's lives, becoming central to their mythology as well.\n\nIn an increasing number of cases, archaeological understanding throws light on myths and their shaping. Consider the stories in which someone is poisoned by donning clothes dipped in dragon's blood\u2014preposterous on the face of it, since we know that there is no such thing as a dragon.\n\nThere are at least two such stories in Greek mythology. In one, the sorceress Medea uses poisoned cloth to kill her rival, Kreusa, the young princess of Corinth, whom her longtime husband, Jason, has just arranged to marry behind Medea's back. She sends a beautiful dress steeped in dragon's blood as a royal bridal present and gloats over the lethal results. In the other, the centaur Nessos (half man, half horse) offers violence to Herakles' bride, Deianeira, for which offense Herakles mortally wounds him. As he dies, Nessos whispers to Deianeira to gather some of his blood\u2014itself mixed with that of the Hydra, a water dragon\u2014and to keep it, so that if she should ever doubt the hero's love she can color a garment with it and win him back through his wearing it. Deianeira falls for the trick and many years later uses the blood on a garment in an attempt to win Herakles back from a younger woman. The monster's blood turns out to be fatal poison, of course, not a love charm, and Nessos' revenge is complete.\n\nBits of evidence pieced together from archaeology, geology, and ancient texts now suggest that the soft mineral realgar, which is a dark purplish red (a favorite royal color), was one of several stones sometimes crushed and used as pigments\u2014for cloth, among other things. Realgar also upon occasion was known as dragon's blood, as its bright color typically occurred splashed across the surface of harder rocks. But realgar has another property: It is the \"arsenic ruby,\" sulfide of arsenic\u2014a deadly poison if kept in prolonged contact with the skin. I have collected estimates that a month or so of wearing a garment colored royal purple with arsenic would be sufficient to do one in. Arsenic poisoning is not a fast and fiery death, as Euripides pictures it for dramatic purposes in his play _Medea_ (written perhaps a millennium after the alleged events). But it kills just as dead, after (ironically) giving the victim an especially lovely skin complexion for a few days. And so we see that death by poisoning from cloth dipped in dragon's blood could be quite real, even without any dragons. Once the cause of death is handed down in story to a time or place where this pigment is unknown (realgar is not widely found), it becomes easy for fertile minds to supply the dragons.\n\nAnother example of the real turning fantastic when people don't understand it concerns magical shirts made from nettles, which occur in fairy tales from several parts of Europe. Everyone knows that nettles sting the skin painfully; therefore, to make a soft and handsome shirt from such a plant would clearly take nothing short of magic. Or at least so it must have seemed to peasants who were vaguely aware that such objects had once existed. Laboratory studies have shown that all the Scandinavian archaeological finds of fabric thought to be linen were in fact made of nettle fiber. The nettles had been picked in the wild, then retted (see Chapter 8), spun, and woven exactly like flax. Furthermore, the technology was practiced right up into this century. (During World War II, when domestic supplies of the common fibers were getting scarce, elderly peasant women who still knew how to prepare nettle fiber were set to work by the Germans.) It turns out that nettles can be picked comfortably if one is careful always to move the hand in the direction in which the stingers will lie flat (up the stalk), and the process of retting rots away the stingers, so there is no problem at all after that. The resulting fiber is finer and silkier than flax, giving a much nicer chemise. Magic indeed!\n\nMany ancient myths that revolve around women's textile arts function on the basis of analogy. For example, fate, to the Greeks, was spun as a thread. Both thread and time were linear, both easily and arbitrarily broken. One could argue that, since women were the people who spun, the spinners of one's destiny would have to be women. These divine female spinners were called the Moirai, or Apportioners, and are often mentioned in Greek literature as being three in number: Klotho, \"Spinner,\" who spun the thread of life, Lachesis, \"Allotment,\" who measured it out, and Atropos, \"Unturnable,\" who chose when to lop it off. Homer is less specific, and in both the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ he repeats a stock couplet probably passed down from bards much older than he:\n\nAnd then [the person] will suffer whatever Fate and the heavy [-handed] Spinners\n\nspun into their linen [thread] for him, coming into being, when his mother gave birth to him.1\n\nThe triple image of Klotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, however, has caught the popular imagination both then and now. In a modern clay sculpture of three peasant women, the Hungarian artist Margit Kovacs has splendidly encapsulated this tradition of fate. Hungarian girls customarily learned to spin at about twelve to thirteen years of age, so the spinner is shown as a young girl, plying her task with a rather na\u00efve and hopeful expression. A young matron beside her, now old enough to be mistress of her own household, measures out the thread between her hands in gentle self-importance. Beyond them an old woman, slightly stooped and eyeing her companions a bit enviously, wields the shears.2\n\nThe notion of female deities creating a life by spinning a thread is particularly Greek and runs through Greek mythological thinking at a very deep level. It may have begun from the association of childbirth with attendant women who did their spinning while waiting to act as midwives in the birthing room. The parallel between bringing forth new thread and new humans\u2014both done by women\u2014strengthened the image. The Romans, for their part, equated the Greek Moirai with their minor goddesses the Parcae, who presided at childbirth but were not necessarily spinners. Scholars also compare the Moirai to the Germanic Norns, of Wagnerian fame. These female deities had indeed to do with fate, but their function seems to have been to warn humans of impending doom by speaking out somehow\u2014their name has etymologically to do with vocal noises\u2014and sometimes to produce destinies by weaving cloth.\n\nThe Greeks associated another deity of procreation with spinning. Close analysis of the musculature of the famous Venus de Milo\u2014the ancient Greek statue of Aphrodite found on the island of Melos in 1820 and now in the Louvre\u2014shows that she couldn't hold on to her drapery even before the statue lost its arms. Why? She was holding both arms out (fig. 10.1). One, the left, she held high and a little back, counterbalancing its weight by curving her body. The other she held out in front of herself at about chest level; her gaze rests about where the hand would be. In those positions lies a story. Modern art critics are not often aware of it, but this was a pose painfully familiar to women in ancient Greek society. They spent many hours holding a distaff loaded with fiber high in the left while working the thread and spindle with the more \"dexterous\" right, out in front where it could be watched. This Aphrodite (or Venus, as the Romans called her) was spinning.\n\n_Figure 10.1_. Venus de Milo, the famous marble statue of Aphrodite (Roman name: Venus), goddess of love and procreation, found on the Aegean island of Melos. The musculature of what is left of her arms suggests that she stood in the typical position for spinning thread in the Greek manner. Spinning was a common symbol for the creation of new life in Greece and elsewhere.\n\nWe have other statues of Aphrodite with the arms similarly placed, although the distaff and spindle, which would have been sculpted from more perishable materials, are not preserved. We also possess several vase paintings of women spinning that show a similar positioning of the implements (cf. figs. 1.3 and 9.4).\n\nWhy should the goddess of love and procreation be a spinner? For the same reason, ultimately, that the Moirai who attend the birth are spinning. Something new is coming into being where before there was at most an amorphous mass. Listen to the description of a na\u00efve onlooker; the scene happens to be laid in Africa:\n\nThe woman . . . took a few handfuls of goats' hair and beat them with a whippy stick so that the hairs became separated. Then, taking a stiff piece of dried grass stem in her right hand she twisted some hair round it and continued to twist, while a thread as if by magic grew out of the mass of hair continually fed into it by her left hand.\n\nThe analogy of a person's life-span to a thread goes beyond length and fragility to the very act of creation. Women _create_ thread; they somehow pull it out of nowhere, just as they produce babies out of nowhere. The same image is latent in our own term _lifespan. Span_ is from the verb _spin_ , which originally meant \"draw out, stretch long\" and only later shifted to mean \"turn, whirl\" as people refocused on the whirling spindle that stretched the newly forming thread.\n\nThe analogy between women's making thread and bringing souls into (or back into) the world finds expression in another famous Greek myth. According to the tale, the Athenian hero Theseus went to Crete to bring down King Minos by confronting his powerful beast, the Minotaur. There Minos' daughter, Ariadne, fell in love with Theseus and gave him a ball of thread that would lead him back out of the Labyrinth if he succeeded in killing the fearsome bull-monster. (Linguists have argued that _Labyrinth_ was actually the name of the palace at Knossos. Its hundreds of rambling rooms in at least three stories would have been bewildering to a mainland Greek accustomed to houses with two rooms and a porch. Bull-jumping games were apparently held in the huge courtyard in the center of this palace.)\n\nA nice story\u2014and perhaps the original purpose of the thread was indeed to lead Theseus to safety. But at some point a cult of \"Aphrodite Ariadne\" sprang up on some of the Greek islands. There Theseus was said to have abandoned the princess Ariadne on his way home to Athens after killing the Minotaur. This cult\u2014of Ariadne and Aphrodite combined\u2014included the peculiar custom of having a young man imitate the sounds and motions of a woman going through labor.3 Thus we find Ariadne, the girl with the thread, tied simultaneously to the bringing back of souls (Theseus and his companions) from death's door, to the birthing of new lives, and to Aphrodite, goddess of procreation.\n\nWeaving, as opposed to thread making, was the special province of Athena. Wherever divine weaving was to be done, ancient Greek storytellers looked to Athena. In Hesiod's tale of Pandora (\"All-gifts\") and her infamous box\u2014a box filled with all the evils of the world, including hope (no better than delusion, to the Greek mind)\u2014Zeus orders Hephaistos to make the image of a beautiful girl out of clay. Aphrodite is to \"shed grace on her head\" and \"Athena to teach her skills\u2014to weave a complex warp.\" As the various gods busy themselves in tricking Pandora out,\n\nThe owl-eyed goddess Athena girdled her, and bedecked her\n\nwith a shining garment, and on her head a fancy veil\n\nshe spread with her hands, a wonder to behold.4\n\nThus Athena provides for the young bride both her clothing and her instruction in weaving, the basic household craft.\n\nPerhaps the most famous story of Athena's weaving is that of Arachne. This uppity girl boasted that she could weave better than Athena, the patron goddess of weaving. Not a wise thing to do: Athena heard and challenged her to a weaving contest. According to Ovid, again embroidering his tale to the utmost, Arachne boldly wove into her web the stories of the most scandalous love affairs of the gods: how Zeus, the king of the gods, repeatedly was unfaithful to his wife as he disguised himself to rape or seduce a dozen women\u2014appearing to Leda as a swan, to Europa as a bull, to Dana\u00eb as a shower of gold, and, most treacherously of all, to Alkmene as her own absent husband, Amphitryon. Not content with that, Arachne depicted Poseidon, Apollo, Bacchus, and Hades as they also assumed false forms to take advantage of various hapless maidens. Athena, for her part, grimly wove stories of mortals who had lost contests with the gods and been soundly punished. (We have a representation of this weaving contest on a little oil flask from Corinth, from about 600 B.C.\u2014fig. 10.2. Athena, a divine being, is so much taller than the human women that her head scrapes the top of the picture.) Gods always win, of course. When the cloths were finished, in wrath Athena turned Arachne into the Spider, doomed to weave in dark corners for the rest of time.5\n\n_Figure 10.2_. Design on a small Greek perfume flask from Corinth showing the contest between the goddess Athena and the mortal Arachne. Arachne unwisely boasted that she could weave better than the goddess of weaving herself. After the contest Athena (recognizable here as taller than the humans) turned the unfortunate girl into a spider to weave webs forever. The Greek word for _spider_ is _arakhn\u0113_ , from which we get our scientific name for spiders, arachnids.\n\nBut Athena's purview is much wider than just the making of cloth and clothing. Athenians worshiped her also as the one who brings fertility to the crops and protection to the city, as the inventor of the cultivated olive (one of the central crops in the Aegean), as the patroness of shipbuilders and other handcrafters, as a goddess of war, and so on. In fact, she is the goddess of so many things that modern commentators lose sight of her central nature.\n\nThat nature is most clearly seen by looking at what she is not, at what opposes her. Her traditional opponent is Poseidon, with whom she strove first for possession of Athens. As a sign of supremacy, Poseidon hit the rock with his trident and a salt spring gushed forth, but Athena produced the first olive tree. (Both the trident mark and the \"original\" olive tree were proudly shown to visitors at the Erechtheum, on the Athenian Acropolis, in Classical times.) The citizens of the new state judged that Athena's gift was going to be much more useful to them than a salt spring and awarded her the prize. But Poseidon was a poor loser and in revenge sent a tidal flood, which Athena barely halted at the foot of the Acropolis, protecting her people. (Bad tidal waves did occur in the Aegean.)\n\nThis whole tale, despite its anchors in reality, is obviously another packet of \"just so\" stories to explain origins, but the nature of the opposition shows us that Athena is the beneficent deity that protects humans and makes them prosper, pushing back the untamed forces of nature represented by Poseidon.6 More exactly, she represents everything that human skill and know-how ( _tekhn\u0113_ , whence our word _technology_ ) can accomplish; she is goddess of \"civilization\" itself. Exactly this same opposition motivates the _Odyssey_ , where Athena helps Odysseus by means of clever stratagems and skills (including building a seagoing raft) to escape the wrath of Poseidon, who for his part throws an endless barrage of storms, gales, and wild seas at the poor mortal. Homer treats Athena in both epics as the goddess of good advice and clever plans. Hence she functions as the embodiment of one's \"conscience\" and bright ideas.\n\nIf human skill and cunning are personified by Athena, and the central womanly skill is weaving, then weaving can itself become a metaphor for human resourcefulness. One's life-span was conceived by the Greeks as a thread, formed by the Fates at birth, but the act of weaving the thread symbolized what one did with that life, the choices of the individual. Thus throughout the _Odyssey_ Athena and \"the wily Odysseus\" (her favorite devotee) are constantly hatching ingenious plots to escape one tight situation or another, rallying with the words \"Come, let us weave a plan!\"\n\nOdysseus' clever wife, Penelope, is from the same mold. Not only does she, too, use this phrase, but she actually attempts to weave her way out of trouble, telling the suitors who pester her in Odysseus' prolonged absence that she cannot marry until she finishes an important funeral cloth for her aged father-in-law. For three years she tricks these men by unraveling at night what she has woven during the daytime. Truly she was a worthy wife for the trickiest of all the Greeks.\n\nGood evidence exists that the basis of Athena's mythology lies far back in Aegean prehistory, long before the Greeks themselves arrived. The names of Athena and Athens are not Greek or Indo-European names but come from an earlier linguistic layer. Furthermore, most of the Greek weaving vocabulary is not Indo-European. The proto-Indo-Europeans (see Chapter 2) seem to have had scant knowledge of weaving, their women knowing only how to weave narrow belts and bands. Probably they were ignorant even of heddles, which mechanize the weaving process and make it efficient (see Chapter 1). The Greeks clearly learned how to use the large European warp-weighted loom _after_ they broke off and moved away from the proto-Indo-European community since all their terms for using a large loom (as opposed to a small band loom) have been borrowed. The people who taught the Greeks this technology, vocabulary, and associated mythical lore must have been the \"indigenous\" inhabitants of the Balkans (skilled in weaving since the middle of the Neolithic, perhaps even 5000 B.C.). The Athenians referred to these natives as \"autochthonous\"\u2014born of the land itself\u2014and Athena must belong originally to them. After all, no one develops a major deity around a technology one doesn't even know yet.\n\nThe antiquity of Athena as a local, non-Indo-European deity is hinted at further by her frequent representation as an owl, that wise-looking bird so common in parts of Greece. In Classical times, after money had been invented, the Athenians chose Athena's owl to stamp on their silver coins. But we also have, from the same period, loom weights stamped with the owl of their favorite goddess. A particularly charming weight shows the owl with human hands, spinning wool from a wool basket at its feet as it looks cockily out at the spectator (fig. 10.3). It gives a new image to Homer's stock epithet, \"owl-eyed Athena,\"7 and it underscores once again the importance of this deity to the women on whose textiles so much of Aegean commerce and social interaction was built.\n\n_Figure 10.3_. Greek loom weight showing an owl spinning wool. The reference is to the goddess Athena, patroness of spinning and weaving, whose sacred bird was the owl. Several such weights are known, dating to the fourth century B.C.\n\nThe fairy tales of the rest of Europe frequently involve spinning and sometimes weaving and sewing. Most of these tales were first written down long after Classical Greek times, and they often show the influence of that important culture. But often, too, they go their own way.\n\nIn late Roman times the neuter plural word _fata_ \u2014\"those things which have been spoken\" (therefore equated with destiny)\u2014was reanalyzed as a feminine singular noun (both end in _a_ ) and consequently personified as a woman. This divine lady Fate then developed a host of identical sisters (the Fates) and took over the duties and attributes of the Parcae, the birth goddesses who determined a person's destiny. English _fairy_ comes from a derivative of French _f\u00e9e_ , which itself comes directly from the Latin _fata_.8 In France and other countries that developed from Roman culture, a fairy is popularly viewed as a female spirit who turns up at birth to bestow good or evil on the child's life. She need not have a spindle\u2014a simple wand is more likely\u2014but occasionally she does.\n\nThe tale of Sleeping Beauty illustrates the type well. To celebrate the birth of their child, the king and queen of a mythical land throw a magnificent party, inviting among others the birth fairies. One fairy is not invited\u2014either because she is evil or because she is the thirteenth fairy on the list (which in Christian lore amounts to evil, since the thirteenth person at the Last Supper\u2014counting Jesus as the first\u2014betrayed the Savior). Enraged, the uninvited one crashes the party and curses the baby princess, saying the child will die when she reaches fifteen (some versions say sixteen), upon pricking her finger on a spindle. All seems lost. A good fairy who has not yet made _her_ wish, however, commutes the sentence to a century-long sleep instead of death. As a precaution, the king banishes all spindles from the kingdom, but to no avail, for on the girl's fifteenth birthday, the evil fairy in the guise of an old woman brings the fateful spindle into the castle. Entranced by the spindle's dancing motion, the princess reaches for it, pricks her finger, and she and the entire court fall asleep for a hundred years. An enormous hedge of thorny roses grows up around the castle to protect it (in the version collected by the Grimm brothers, she is named Dornr\u00f6schen, meaning \"Little Thorn Rose\"). One hundred years pass. At the end of them the princess is aroused by the kiss of a handsome and valiant prince, who has found his way through the thicket to her side.\n\nThe old elements of birth Fates are still there, but their purposes are only hazily remembered. No longer does the thread carry the child's destiny. That function has moved to the spindle itself, even though one would be hard put to find a European spindle sharp enough to prick one's finger. Spindles are typically made with rather rounded ends and polished smooth so as not to catch on the thread. The finger prick seems almost to have wandered over from the rose thorns, which have the very real and ancient job of protecting the innocent (see Chapter 6).\n\nMost European fairy tales to do with spinning concern the plight of some poor woman left to carry out this endless task. For example, supernatural creatures may transform roomfuls of flax or even worthless straw into the finest of spun gold\u2014hence instant wealth\u2014as in the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. (The source of the image is not far to seek. Flax that has been retted in standing or running water turns golden; flax retted in the nightly dew is pale silver.) Or they may simply spin prodigious amounts.\n\nIn one of the Grimms' tales, called \"The Three Spinsters,\" a lazy girl who hates spinning is forced to spin impossible amounts for the queen. Three deformed women turn up in the nick of time, one with a huge foot, the second with a huge lower lip, the third with an enormous thumb. They offer to spin it all for the lazy girl if she will promise to invite them to the head table at her wedding. She agrees, and in no time they spin all the thread. The queen, amazed at what she thinks is the girl's skill and industry, marries her to the crown prince. But the girl does not forget her promise and seats the three women at the bridal table. The curious prince asks each one how she got her deformity. The woman with the large foot allows that it came from treadling a spinning wheel all the time, the one with the enormous lip says she got it from always wetting the flax, and she of the huge thumb blames her problem on constantly drafting the fibers into the yarn. Horrified, the bridegroom decrees that his beautiful new wife is never to spin again.9\n\nMore than a little wishful thinking lurks in both these tales!\n\nThe Slavic women of eastern Europe took a slightly different approach to getting help, one that seems to go very far back. In the north the Slavic women preserved memory of a pagan goddess named Mokosh or Mokusha, possibly Finnic in origin, who walked at night spinning wool and to whom one might pray for help both with spinning and with doing the laundry. If the sheep were losing their wool, the saying was: \"Mokosh has sheared the sheep.\" The eastern and central Europeans also paid attention to female spirits known as _rusalki_ or _vily_ (mentioned in Chapter 6), thought to be the souls of girls who had died before having any children\u2014that is, cut off from living on through their offspring. As such a _vila (rusalka)_ had the power to bestow her unused fertility on the crops, livestock, and families of others. In the cold and infertile north these deities were portrayed as ugly and unkempt, and of vicious temper, but farther south, in Ukraine, they were imagined as beautiful young nymphs with long hair, who hid in the water and made it rain by combing their wet tresses. If properly treated, they might help out during the night with such female tasks as spinning. But if surprised during their nightly dances, especially by a man, they would surround the poor unfortunate and dance him to death. (Someone who \"has the willies\" has just been terrified by a forbidden glimpse of them.) Images of the _vily_ , usually half girl and half bird or fish, adorned the women's distaffs and wedding jewelry as well as the window frames and barnyard gates, in perpetual silent appeal for their protection and fertility (fig. 10.4 a and b).\n\n_Figure 10.4_. Slavic representations of _vily (rusalki)_ , female fertility spirits who appeared typically as birds ([a], from a medieval wedding earring of gold) or fish ([b], from an eighteenth-century windowsill carving). In ancient times women danced in their honor, using their long sleeves to imitate the _vila_ 's wings ([c], from a twelfth century wedding bracelet of silver).\n\nSince the _vily_ were conceived as bird-women\u2014beings that could take either womanly or avian shape, especially that of white water birds like swans\u2014the women performed dances in their honor at certain festivals by loosening the tremendously long white sleeves of their chemises and waving them about like wings (fig. 10.4 c). Some of these dance figures survive, as do several representations of the women dancing with loosened sleeves\u2014both in a medieval manuscript and on ancient wedding bracelets dug up in Ukraine. (The bracelets normally held the sleeves up at the wrists so the woman could use her hands.) These dancers of the summer Rusalii festivals were vehemently taken to task by the proselytizing Christian priests, newly arrived from Byzantium, who considered the whole business utterly anti-Christian. We wish they had told us more details in their railings, however, so we could understand the ritual more clearly. But knowing even this much will allow us to interpret better one of the most famous Russian fairy tales, that of the Frog Princess.\n\n\"In ancient years, in times of yore,\" a king of a far-off kingdom demanded that his three sons shoot their arrows into the air and then marry whoever retrieved and returned them. The arrows of the two older princes were brought back by highborn ladies, but Ivan's was retrieved and presented by a female frog, which he was obliged to marry anyway. Soon, to test their skill, the king requested his daughters-in-law to make shirts for him. Ivan was in despair. His wife was a frog. How could she weave? But during the night, as he slept, the frog-bride shed her green skin, turned into a beautiful girl for a short while, and procured from her _rusalka_ -handmaids a shirt so fine that the king chose it as best by far.\n\nNext the king ordered the three brides to bake bread for him\u2014the second household skill requisite in a good wife. This time, suspecting that the frog was magical, the brides of the older princes spied on the frog to learn her recipe. Aware of their presence, the frog set about making bread in preposterous ways so that when the brides went off and imitated what they had seen their bread fell and tasted terrible. Then, in the middle of the night when everyone slept, the frog called her servants to bring her the finest loaf ever tasted, decorated, moreover, with figures of birds, animals, and trees.10\n\nFinally the king announced a great ball at the palace, to judge which of the three brides danced the best. The frog told her dejected husband to go on ahead, that she would follow in an hour. Then she shed her frog skin, dressed, and went to the banquet hall to join him. He was overjoyed at her great beauty, but her sisters-in-law were dismayed, since the Frog Princess was clearly a magician. Again they decided to imitate whatever she did, in hopes of learning to do magical things too. When they saw her put the bones from her swan-meat supper into one sleeve and the dregs of her drink into the other, they did likewise.\n\nIt came time to dance; the tsar called on the older daughters-in-law, but they deferred to the frog. She immediately took hold of Prince Ivan and came forward: how she danced and danced, spun and turned\u2014everything a marvel! She waved her right arm\u2014forests and waters appeared; she waved her left\u2014all sorts of birds began to fly. Everyone was astonished. She finished dancing and all disappeared. The other daughters-in-law went to dance, and tried to do the same: but when one waved her right arm, the bones flew out, right among the guests, and from her left sleeve water was flung about, also all over people. The tsar was not pleased.\n\nEntranced by his wife's new form, the prince rushed home, seized the frog skin, and burned it so his beautiful bride would have to keep her human shape. The princess, upon reaching home, was horrified. Mournfully she told him that if only he had waited three more days, the evil spell that had made her a frog would have been broken. Now she must return whence she came, and he would have to seek for her \"beyond the thrice ninth kingdom.\" At that she vanished.\n\nEventually the prince learned from an old witch that Elena the Beautiful (as she was called) was living with this witch's eldest sister. The younger witch then gave him the following advice: \"As you begin to come close, they will become aware of it. Elena will turn into a spindle, and her dress will become gold. My sister will start to spin the gold; when she finishes with the spindle and puts it in a box and locks up the box, you must find the key, open the box, break the spindle, throw the top behind you and the ase in front of you\u2014and she will spring up before you.\" Prince Ivan followed her instructions and finally regained his wife. They flew away home, where they continued to \"live and feast wonderfully.\"\n\nIt is clear from what we know of the _rusalki_ that the princess's dance involving waving the long white sleeves was intended to symbolize not just birds and countryside but the magical creation of nature itself\u2014the plants, waters, and creatures (especially the white water birds) over which the _vily_ \/ _rusalki_ presided and among whom they lived. The mysterious and powerful nature of the egg, and with it the birds, frogs, fish, and snakes that produce eggs, is the central image of Slavic creation lore. (In one version of this story Prince Ivan must also feed the princess an egg at the witch's house before she can recognize him again.) In the Slavic _rusalka_ dance, the woman arranges the color, form, and use of her clothing to _imitate_ the life-giving deities in their form of swan-maidens, thus sharing their magic \"sympathetically.\" This is quite a different image from the Greek one of creating by spinning thread, although even more intimately tied to females. By contrast, the spinning that occurs at the end of the tale equates the golden thread on the spindle with the girl's golden dress. The thread is merely the source of clothing, and the woman the tool that makes the thread.11\n\nWhen Adam delved and Eve span,\n\nWho was then a gentleman?\n\n\u2014John Ball, at Wat Tyler's Rebellion, 1381\n\nLay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,\n\nwhere moth and rust doth corrupt. . . .\n\n\u2014Matthew 6:19\n\nBiblical references to spinning, weaving, and other aspects of textile making are rather few, compared with those in early European texts, but popular culture draws upon them constantly. While staying with friends in the hill country of Wales recently, I was taken to see a flock of sheep that were considered remarkable because they were all speckled and spotted, instead of the usual white with black face and feet. \"Jacob's sheep\" they were called. The reference is to Genesis 30\u201331, where Jacob performs a bit of sympathetic magic by placing speckled rods in front of the mating animals so that the offspring will be speckled. This he does in order to increase his pay, since he is to receive all the spotted animals from his master's flock.\n\nThe lack of references to spinning and weaving is surely not because these crafts were unknown in the days of Genesis and Exodus. From the point of view of Abraham and his family the textile arts were very old; Eve had consigned herself and all womankind to an eternity of spinning and weaving the moment she ate of the Tree of Knowledge and realized that she and Adam were naked. The Patriarchs, in fact, were primarily shepherds and had lots of wool at their disposal. Moreover, they used it for modes of clothing that the Egyptians who came in contact with them found quite distinctive. Joseph's \"coat of many colors\" answers nicely to Egyptian tomb paintings of their well-to-do neighbors in Palestine (fig. 10.5), depicted from their visits to the Nile in the Twelfth Dynasty (the early second)\u2014probably not far from the time of Joseph's arrival. There we see both men and women wearing gaily striped and patterned tunics, some of them fringed, that look very heavy compared with the Egyptians' thin linen garments. Color plus thickness, in light of what we know about ancient cloth, almost guarantees that the foreigners are wearing wool. They are driving donkeys laden with their children and their goods, much the way Joseph's family must have looked when it moved to Egypt.\n\n_Figure 10.5_. Egyptian depiction of Aamu visitors from Palestine, bringing eye paint to trade to the Egyptians. Like the biblical Joseph, they wear \"coats of many colors.\" From the Middle Kingdom tomb of Khnemhotep at Beni Hasan, early second millennium B.C. (cf. fig. 8.2).\n\nPhilologists still dispute the exact technical meaning of the Hebrew word translated by the phrase \"of many colors\" in the King James Bible\u2014whether it means \"striped\" or simply \"patterned.\"12 One scholar, however, provides a slightly more sinister slant to the whole story by pointing out that, whatever it means, the same term is used of some princesses in 2 Samuel 13:18, where we are told that this was the special dress of the ruling class. No wonder Joseph's older brothers, already enraged at him for telling them his dreams that he would become their ruler, stripped him of his ruler's garment!\n\nIn Exodus we begin to hear a bit more of textile arts. When Moses rallies the people to furnish the new tabernacle, as they settle in their new lands, he asks them to bring all the necessaries, including cloth of various sorts: \"And all the women that were wise hearted did spin with their hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine linen. And all the women whose heart stirred them up in wisdom spun goats' hair.\" From these offerings were made great \"curtains of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet wool].\" The distinction made in the verbs between the spinning of the colored wool _(tavah)_ and the \"twining\" of the linen thread _(shazar)_ shows us that these women, who had just come from Egypt, had learned to splice and twist linen in the peculiar Egyptian manner while living there (see [Chapter 8). In the early layers of the Late Bronze Age sites in Israel, moreover, we suddenly begin to find locally made clay imitations of Egyptian fiber-wetting bowls (fig. 4.2), developed for just this purpose. The appearance of these humble textile tools, used only by women, alerts us that this is a time when _women_ had just arrived in Palestine from Egypt in considerable numbers and settled there\u2014and there is no other such time that we have found. Thus, out of the several points in Egyptian history that scholars have suggested for the date of the Exodus, the women's artifacts tell us that this one (around 1500 to 1450 B.C.) is the archaeologically most probable layer to equate with their Exodus from Egypt.13\n\nIn later books of the Old Testament we see further references to weaving that are elucidated by excavation. The next major change in textile technology visible in the archaeology of this area occurs around the start of the Iron Age, shortly after 1200 B.C., when we see loom weights of the sort long used in Anatolia and the Balkans suddenly flooding into parts of Israel. By 1000 B.C. they are turning up in great numbers in special weavers' shops\u2014that is, men now seem to be weaving on a large scale for commerce, at Gezer, Lachish, and Tell Beit Mirsim, to name a few (see map, fig. 8.1). Equally abruptly we begin to find metaphors to do with this industry used among _men's_ affairs. The most intimidating spears, for example, are now said to be thick as a weaver's beam. Goliath's was among them. Indeed, Goliath was a Philistine champion, and the material remains of the Philistines\u2014loom weights, pottery, and all\u2014show strong connections with the Mycenaeans and other northerners from warp-weighted loom territory. (For that matter, the bones in the royal burials at Mycenae from a slightly earlier age showed that those warrior-kings stood over six feet tall\u2014veritable giants in comparison with the five-foot men of the eastern Mediterranean.) Once again the textile remains help glue the fragmentary data back into a more coherent picture.\n\nBy New Testament times the weaving technology was shifting once again, to the more advanced looms and methods gathered together by the Roman Empire. One of the new techniques, known directly from Coptic Egypt, was that of dividing the warp into two layers and weaving with a circular weft, so as to produce a seamless tube big enough for a tunic. Judicious manipulation of the weft at the sides and top make it possible to build in armholes and a neckhole without any cutting or stitching: the sort of \"coat without seam\" mentioned in John 19:23 as belonging to Jesus. Wool still dominated the economy, as we see from references to moths as the corrupters of earthly treasure.\n\nThe final (though not the only other) mention in the Bible of a matter of textile interest comes with the reference, toward the end of Revelation, to an apocalyptic battle to be fought \"at the place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.\" There is some memory here of another devastating battle fought at this spot shortly after 1500 B.C., when Thutmose III set forth from the Nile into Palestine with his troops, determined to push far away from his borders the enemy that had harassed Egypt for centuries. In one of his bloodiest frays he captured and sacked the walled city of Armageddon (now known as Megiddo; a shadow of the old name still lurks). It must have been a terrible catastrophe for the people there\u2014the end of the world as they knew it. In his annals the pharaoh records that he not only took home masses of booty in the form of beautiful textiles but also carried off the craftworkers into bondage in Egypt, after killing the soldiers. Shortly thereafter we find the Egyptian textile industry, which before this had produced nothing but white linen, undergoing a thorough revolution: new type of loom, new techniques of patterning, and increasingly lavish use of colored thread. All these techniques had been developed much farther north, in Syria or the Caucasus, in the third millennium B.C., and were finally transmitted to Egypt via such men and women as the poor captives from Armageddon.\n\nAll these stories and many more, tucked away throughout early literature, contain references to women's work\u2014to spinning, to weaving, and to the clothes the women made. Most of the myths and legends about women, in fact, hover around the craft that was of such central importance to their lives. Archaeology and the technology of clothmaking help us understand these stories. But the latter, in turn, add details about cloth and clothing that are not recoverable directly from the archaeology and\u2014better yet\u2014details about women's lives. In truth, cloth for thousands of years was the notebook that recorded the woes and joys, hopes, visions, and aspirations of women.\n\n1These lines occur in the _Odyssey_ , Book 7 (197\u201398) and almost verbatim, for example, in the _Iliad_ , Book 20 (127\u201328) and Book 24 (210). In each case the participle _gignomen\u014di_ , which means \"coming into being,\" is ambiguous in its reference, applying equally well in both sense and grammatical agreement to the thread and to \"him,\" thus further emphasizing the parallelism perceived in the events.\n\n2This sculpture and many other celebrations in clay of women and their work are on display in the museum made from Margit Kovacs's house in Szentendre, just north of Budapest. Male subjects, though fewer, are equally powerfully portrayed. Visitors to Hungary who enjoy the visual arts will find it well worth their while to make a sidetrip up the Danube to Szentendre.\n\n3Mock labor by a man is well known in other parts of the world\u2014for example, in Guyana and among the Ainu of northern Japan\u2014as a way of deluding and diverting the attention of evil spirits who might harm the newborn child. (It is known in the literature by the French term _couvade_.) The woman who is undergoing parturition elsewhere, meanwhile, is supposed to keep quiet and try to look as though nothing were happening to her. Couvade has been reported fairly recently in Europe, too, in Corsica and Albania.\n\n4Note that the first and apparently most important garment for this young woman is the girdle, as everywhere else in the early Greek texts. I suspect that this is some traditional form of the ancient string skirt, with all its significance for mating (see Chapter 2). Unfortunately we are seldom told more, because everyone at _that_ time, of course, knew all about it and didn't need to have it explained.\n\n5The English word for spider means \"spinner\"; our culture has fastened on to a different aspect of the spider's repertoire. Biologists, on the other hand, call all spiders by the name _arachnids._\n\n6Modern scholarship has made it clear that Poseidon is a local Aegean deity of earthquakes and tidal waves, who got grafted onto the pantheon of the incoming Greeks in the spot where the Indo-European god of fresh water belongs (Roman Neptune, etc.). \"Raging waters\" are the point of crossover. Big rivers were major forces to Indo-Europeans living around the Volga, Don, Danube, etc., but there are no such enormous rivers in Greece. The most fearsome body of water there is the sea, especially when seismic activity whips it up into a killer tidal wave.\n\n7This much-disputed epithet, _glauk-opis_ , is often translated \"bright-eyed\" or \"gray-eyed,\" which is etymologically a possibility, but the term has good company in Hera's epithet _bo-opis_ , which can only mean \"cow-eyed.\" (The word for _owl_ is _glauks_.) Such animal forms for deities are common in the layers of European culture that preceded the classically Indo-European populace, persisting here and there in dark corners even up to the present.\n\n8Neuter plural and feminine singular sounded the same, both ending in _-a_ : _fata._ The switch to feminine singular was further helped by the Parcae (singular: Parca), who had the same function, and Fama, meaning \"Rumor,\" who had the same kind of name. The Italian word _fata_ still preserves both the form and the meaning, whereas the French _f\u00e9e_ (whence English _fee-rie_ , _fairy_ ) and the Spanish _hada_ (both meaning \"fairy\") have undergone changes in the sounds that are normal in each of these languages.\n\n9Note that the tale as it stands is no earlier than late medieval because that is when the spinning wheel was introduced into Europe.\n\n10In villages in parts of Russia to this day the bride brings bread decorated in exactly this way to the groom's house for the wedding. It is the traditional wedding loaf. In fact, the entire story of the Frog Princess embodies step by step the ancient Slavic wedding customs, starting with locating a prospective bride, testing her abilities to make clothing and food (traditionally in that order), testing her strength and endurance through dancing (is she strong enough to do the farmwork?), all the way down to presenting her to the family in a golden dress the morning after the wedding has been consummated. The groom, too, was tested, but those rites are harder to decipher in this text.\n\n11In fact, another layer of symbolism involved the spindle itself. Traditional Russian wedding songs often speak of the young hero finding his bride by shooting his arrow into the maiden's tower\u2014a simple phallic image. The lock plates of storerooms and wedding chests were traditionally made in the form of a lozenge (a simple female sexual image, but often painted to be quite graphic). Inserting the key into the hole in the center thus symbolically opened the way to nature's riches. Here the spindle functions the same way since the part Ivan is to throw away behind him is the shaft (which is not his), and the part that he throws in front of him that becomes his wife is the spindle whorl at the bottom\u2014a disk with a hole in it (fig. 8.3).\n\n12Or perhaps \"pattern-woven\" (Genesis 37:3). The Hebrew of the Septuagint is _ktoneth pasim_ , the first word meaning \"tunic\" (see Chapter 5) and the second word something like \"striped\" (to judge from other passages and from the Latin Vulgate's choice of translation).\n\n13The chief contenders have been that the Exodus took place in the thirteenth century B.C., under the long reign of Rameses II, or around 1500 to 1450, during the reigns of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III.\n\nPlain or Fancy, New or Tried and True\n\nFor people praise that song the most   \nthat is the newest to those listening.\n\n\u2014Homer, _Odyssey_ , 1.351\u201352\n\nWe are more ready to try the untried   \nwhen what we do is inconsequential.\n\n\u2014Eric Hoffer, _The Ordeal of Change_ (1964)\n\nCloth and clothing, once upon a time novelties in themselves, rapidly became essentials of living in the ancient world, locked into the fabric of society at every level\u2014social, economic, and religious. Those members of society responsible for making these new necessities soon found themselves on the proverbial squirrel wheel, always running just to keep up with daily demand.\n\nEarly on, because of the easy compatibility of clothmaking with child care, women had almost total responsibility for producing the cloth and clothing in their societies. But toward the end of the Bronze Age and in the Iron Age, references to male weavers turn up in increasing numbers. What has changed?\n\nFirst, the connections between societies.\n\nThe men, in contrast with the women, appear linked with new types of cloth, new techniques, new equipment, all brought in from elsewhere. Nor do they weave for their own households. Wherever we get a good glimpse of them, they are weaving for cash profit, for prestige, or (and here the women join them) for a slave master's profit.\n\nNovelty, prestige, and cash are remarkably closely intertwined.\n\n\"Cash\"\u2014not in the sense of coinage but of surplus commodities available to pay for things\u2014had grown increasingly available during the Neolithic and Bronze ages (probably from about 4000 B.C. on), as specialization flowered. People came to have extra goods\u2014more than they needed to live\u2014goods they could trade for things not essential to daily life: items to indulge one's fancy, to make life easier (including slave labor as well as better tools), or to enhance one's prestige and position in society.\n\nWhat is novel catches our interest; the purveyor of the new is looked upon as special. Fashion thrives on this principle, and what is so responsive to \"fashion\" as clothing? What are the top movie stars wearing? The royal family? There is prestige to be had from copying new fashions\u2014despite the sometimes considerable danger. Indeed, textile history is as full of people fearing novelty as it is of those obsessed with it. For instance, when the East India Company began importing cotton prints from India in the seventeenth century, this colorful cloth swept over Europe. It waxed so popular that European spinners and weavers, threatened by the competition, had stringent laws enacted against its importation. When people wore it still, stories have it that in parts of France women caught wearing the cotton prints were stripped and men selling them were sentenced to hard labor in the galleys.\n\nThose who can produce imitations of new objects of prestige will, of course, turn a fat profit. But who can take up this enterprise? Not those running on the squirrel wheel of providing daily necessities; they are too busy. The only people who have the leisure to experiment with how to make new articles, or how to use new tools, are those _not_ locked into basic subsistence production\u2014people with time and\/or cash to spare. So not only is spare cash needed to buy the prestigious new things, but cash or its equivalent in time is required to develop and produce them as well.\n\nLoose \"cash\" had been available for some time already when men finally entered the textile business in a big way in the late second and early first millennia B.C. But now access to the new was easier, apparently as a result of the vast searches for metal ores begun in the Early Bronze Age and the massive trade that developed in the wake of this search. Until about 1500 B.C. textile tools and techniques were developing in several areas of the Old World in virtual isolation of each other. Egypt, for instance, used flax and the ground loom, and decorated its cloth one way; Mesopotamia and the Levant wove wool as well as flax on the ground loom but decorated its cloth by a different technique; Europe wove both flax and wool on the warp-weighted loom and patterned it yet a third way. Significant differences also separated the spinning methods.\n\nAfter 1500 B.C., however, such distinctions fade. The techniques and even the tools for making patterned cloth were being passed from one area to the next, not to mention the cloth itself and the ideas for decoration. And this is when we begin to see male weavers turning up in significant numbers, starting with Egypt.\n\nShortly after Thutmose III sacked Armageddon (see Chapter 10), a new type of loom, new types of weavers, and a prestigious new kind of fancy cloth appeared in Egypt. The first manifestation comes from a wall painting in the tomb of Thutnofer, a nobleman of the Eighteenth Dynasty (Table 11.1, fig. 11.2). Thutnofer held the highly prestigious post of \"royal scribe\" at the court of Thutmose III's son, Amenhotep II, or his grandson, Thutmose IV, late in the fifteenth century B.C. On one wall of his tomb this scribe proudly presents a view of his townhouse in the royal city of Thebes\u2014not painted from a picturesque distance, as we might do, but shown in cutaway cross section so that all its important internal activities could be preserved for the eternal afterlife.\n\n**Pharaoh** | **Length of Rule**  \n---|---  \nHatshepsut (wife, half sister) | 2 year regency + 20 years  \nThutmose III (stepson, nephew) | 32 years after Hatshepsut  \nAmenhotep II (son) | 30 years  \nThutmose IV (son) | 9 years  \nAmenhotep III (son) | 38 years  \nAkhenaton (= Amenhotep IV) (son) | 17 years  \nTutankhamon (son-in-law, cousin) | 9 years\n\n_Table 11.1_. Succession of late Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs mentioned in the text. In parentheses is given the family relationship of that pharaoh to the preceding one. Absolute dates are still argued by the experts, but the period covers roughly 1500\u20131350 B.C.\n\n_Figure 11.2_. The Theban townhouse of the Egyptian nobleman Thutnofer, as he had it drawn in his tomb in the late fifteenth century B.C. The master sits in the main room at left, accepting a cool drink and flowers from his servants, while another servant fans the mistress above. Male servants in the basement weave cloth on newly imported vertical looms and spin rope; other servants run up and down the stairs, stowing supplies into the attic.\n\nIn the main hall the master is being served a cooling drink as he sits in his great chair in perpetuity. (He is rendered as far bigger than anyone else because he is the most important.) Upstairs another attendant fans the mistress. Despite the heat, servants busily run up and down the stairs, carting supplies to the attic, where yet other servants store them away. Below the master's feet, in the basement\u2014the dampest place in the house\u2014some men sit twisting fiber for rope while others weave linen at two great looms. Linen is more tractable when damp, and keeping it that way must have been a constant problem in hot, dry Egypt. The basement was ideal for such work.\n\nMen weaving: That's new. Moreover, the two looms shown here differ completely from the horizontal ground looms with a woman squatting on either side invariably depicted in the Middle Kingdom and earlier (figs. 3.5, 8.2, and 8.4). Thutnofer's looms are vertical, with a double frame to adjust for tension. The male weavers sit on low stools in front of the warp, so close that their knees have to stick out to either side. One loom is large enough that two weavers work side by side; the other, rather smaller, is manned by a single operator. Thutnofer seems to have been as proud of his unusual looms as of his well-appointed house.\n\nAnother detailed picture of the new upright looms occurs in the tomb of Neferronpet (fig. 11.3), who styled himself \"Chief of the weavers in the Ramesseum in the Estate of Amun on the west of Thebes.\" This nobleman served Rameses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty (thirteenth century B.C.). In the preserved part of the painting we see five weavers working at four large looms, as well as two warpers and two spinners(?). The looms are much the same in their design as Thutnofer's, two centuries earlier, but one of the weavers is now a woman, who has to sit with both knees twisted to one side because of her tight skirt. All are guarded by a doorkeeper\u2014a hint that we are looking at slave labor. One is reminded of the trade satire (quoted in Chapter 8) describing the poor weaver sitting with his knees under his chin, who must bribe the doorkeeper \"to let him see the light of day.\" This particular doorman, however, busies himself at the moment keeping people out rather than in, as he shakes a stick and gesticulates at two impish little boys running away as fast as they can. (Egyptians relished an occasional humorous \"slice of life\" among the formal drawings, and guards\u2014probably hated by all\u2014come in for more than their share. In another tomb, servants bringing home the new wine pound in vain on the door of the cellar because the doorman inside has been sampling too much and has fallen asleep drunk.)\n\n_Figure 11.3_. A Nineteenth Dynasty Egyptian weaving shop containing vertical looms. The male weavers sit on low stools with one knee to each side, in order to get close to their work, while the female weaver sits with both knees to one side. To their left, women measure out warps on vertical stands; two other (damaged) figures are probably making thread. Next to the door on the far right sits an irate guard chasing away two impish little boys (above) from the door. The workers are probably slaves. Painting from the tomb of Neferronpet at Thebes, thirteenth century B.C.\n\nThe third known depiction of an upright loom occurred in the tomb of one Neferhotep, from the late fourteenth century B.C. Badly damaged, the painting nonetheless shows us one noteworthy feature: The cloth being woven was partly colored, unlike the traditional white linen. In short, the men were weaving new patterned fabrics on the new vertical weaving frame that we today call a tapestry loom. It is no accident that textiles with colored designs also begin to turn up in Egypt at this time, mostly executed in a new technique, weft-faced tapestry.1\n\nThe earliest well-dated cloths with colored design that we have from Egypt come from the tomb of Thutmose IV, the short-reigned grandson of the illustrious and energetic Thutmose III (see Table 11.1). There are four linen fragments, belonging probably to three cloths. The simplest has rows of pink and green rosettes set off by a thin stripe, woven in a technique that combines rather tentatively a basic idea of tapestry weaving with the antique Egyptian method of inlaying a bit of thicker weft. (The inlay method was used previously only for such things as fringes and weavers' marks, not for an organized all-over pattern.)\n\nThe next cloth, now in two pieces, has multicolored hieroglyphs woven in true tapestry technique on a white linen ground. But there are two peculiar details. First, whoever wove the glyphs was a very competent weaver but had not yet made some very basic decisions about how to weave tapestry and so kept vacillating between methods, as though this were an entirely new technique full of unfamiliar problems. The second peculiarity is that the hieroglyphs on it spell out the name of Thutmose III, not of his grandson, Thutmose IV. The glyphs on the third piece, moreover, belong to Thutmose IV's father, Amenhotep II, son of Thutmose III. As a matter of fact, Thutmose IV's tomb was remarkably full of heirlooms\u2014five of the vases had belonged to his father and one to his grandfather\u2014as though the best this pharaoh could do was rest on the laurels of his predecessors. It seems that tapestry technique entered Egypt at just the same time as the new vertical \"tapestry loom.\" And no wonder! Can you imagine squatting for hours over a ground loom to do the detailed work of a tapestry pattern? Sitting upright with the work at a comfortable and well-lit height near one's face is infinitely more practical. The two-beam vertical loom is to this day the tool of choice for tapestry weavers, although it can also be used for other techniques.\n\nBy the end of the long and prosperous reign of Amenhotep III, son and successor of Thutmose IV, both the new looms and the fancy new cloth had trickled down from the pharaohs to the nobility. Tapestry, however, is a particularly costly way of decorating cloth, and we see signs that the nobles of not so great means were hitting upon ways of _looking_ as elegant as their betters without quite the expense. \"Keeping up with the Joneses\" has at least a forty-five-hundred-year history.\n\nIn the unplundered tomb of the royal architect Kha, Italian excavators found several handsomely painted linen chests with colossal numbers of linen sheets and tunics stowed for the next world. Among the linens were two large tapestry-woven bedspreads or coverlets (fig. 11.4). Broad bands of large, simple buds and leaves on stems occupy the four edges, while the plain white center is tufted underneath to insulate the sleeper. The design seems innocent enough, but weavers will notice that the flowers have been cleverly oriented in a direction that makes them as cheap and easy to weave as possible\u2014far less costly than the pharaoh's tapestries.2\n\n_Figure 11.4_. One of two tapestry spreads from the Theban tomb of the Egyptian nobleman Kha (mid-Eighteenth Dynasty, ca. 1450\u20131400 B.C.). The ends of the warp threads have been braided into an ornamental fringe. Note that the tapestry designs run as much as possible in lines _across_ the cloth\u2014that is, in the weft direction\u2014which is by far the easiest and cheapest way to weave tapestry. The blank area in the middle is worked with long white loops of thread on the back side, probably to insulate the sleeper.\n\nAnother prestige-seeking noble of less than adequate means owned a tapestry of the Nine Bows and Captives (fig. 11.5). In this traditional design a series of bound captives represent by their dress and skin color the nine parts of the \"known world\" and alternate in the composition with a strung Egyptian bow, symbol of their (wished-for) subjugation. For this cloth, the red and black parts of the design were woven in with tapestry technique, but the other colored parts (blue, green, and probably yellow) were painted on afterward\u2014an infinitely cheaper method! Unfortunately we do not know just which tomb this fragment came from, so we can say no more about the owner.3 But clearly tapestry cloth was becoming important to a nobleman's social standing if people went to such lengths to imitate it.\n\n_Figure 11.5_. Fragment of tapestry cloth woven in a favorite and traditional Egyptian design, the Nine Bows and Captives. Each captive (the legs and torso of one can be seen here) appears in the regional dress of one of the nine areas that the Egyptians thought constituted the world outside Egypt. Between captives appears an Egyptian-style bow, symbol of Egypt's wished-for domination of its enemies. All of one bow and part of another have survived, as well as some very elaborate edge patterns typical of Egyptian tomb paintings of the time (mid-Eighteenth Dynasty, ca. 1400 B.C.).\n\nOthers were getting into the colored cloth business, too. After Amenhotep III came the heretic king Amenhotep IV, who soon renamed himself Akhenaton (or Ikhenaten\u2014the exact pronunciation of the vowels is uncertain). Among the ruins of his capital city at Amarna, which he built from the ground up and which was abandoned after his death (see Chapter 8), excavators found a handful of cut ends from a warp\u2014that is, the wasted part left on the loom after the cloth has been finished and cut free. These ends are remarkable because they are not linen but wool, almost certainly imported, and dyed: mostly blue, with some red and green yarns as well. There would be no reason to find weaver's waste here unless somebody at Amarna had actually been weaving a colored woolen cloth, another novelty textile apparently fashionable at that time and one that almost certainly involved foreigners.\n\nThe fact that a European-style spindle was found in a woman's grave elsewhere in Egypt during the late Eighteenth Dynasty (at Gurob in the Faiyum, known from other data to be full of foreigners\u2014fig. 8.3 c) suggests that alien women living in Egypt may have found an adequate living making colorful textiles in their native styles. The spindle by its very design was unsuited to spinning linen and must have been used for imported wool, the easily dyed fiber. This woman, in fact, had a predilection for color, for the other noteworthy find in her simple grave was a pair of red slippers.\n\nAkhenaton was followed presently by the short-lived but now world-famous Tutankhamon. Enthroned at the age of eight or nine and dead by nineteen, this young and inconsequential pharaoh was bundled away into a small and hastily built tomb with his basic household and otherworldly furniture and clothing, probably a mere fraction of what a big and important king took with him. The tomb survived chiefly because another nobleman soon undertook to hollow out a huge tomb slightly higher up the slope in the Valley of the Kings and so totally buried the boy king's doorway in an avalanche of rock chips that it was not seen again until 1922.\n\nFor twenty years archaeologists had been hunting for the tomb of Tutankhamon. Almost every other New Kingdom pharaoh's burial site was known. Two caches of objects clearly taken from Tutankhamon's tomb had turned up right in the center of the Valley of the Kings at Thebes. Near those, in 1908, someone discovered behind a boulder a blue faience cup with Tutankhamon's name on it. Clearly an ancient robber had stashed it there in haste and never gotten back to fetch his prize. Now it lay as a tantalizing signpost without an arrow. The tomb was close by. In which direction should one look?\n\nHoward Carter and Lord Carnarvon took up the search after World War I, but they dug in vain, year after year. Finally in 1922, Lord Carnarvon, who financed the expeditions, was about to call a halt, but Carter begged for a bit more time in which to dig one last spot: under the path he had courteously left for tourists visiting the tomb of Rameses VI. On the fourth day his workmen hit the top of a staircase cut into the bedrock, and quickly they cleared enough steps to reach the top of a sealed tomb door. Whose? Mindful of his long-suffering sponsor, Carter refilled the passage, cabled Lord Carnarvon in England to come at once, and sat down to guard the tomb and wait.\n\nThe three-week journey must have seemed like eternity both to him who waited and to the travellers, Lord Carnarvon and his daughter (and assistant) Lady Evelyn Herbert. Meanwhile, offers of technical help poured in from every side as news of the find spread. Finally the time came to open the tomb. The first door at the bottom of the steps proved to have the long-anticipated seal of Tutankhamon\u2014but also, at the top, a resealing by the official guards of the royal necropolis. This 18th-Dynasty tomb had indeed been robbed before the 19th-Dynasty rock chips buried it, but not robbed again. How much remained? Laboriously the excavators emptied the long, rubble-filled passage to the second sealed door, and bored a small hole through the top corner of the barrier to the room beyond. Carter wrote:\n\n\"I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Callender [Carter's chief assistant] standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing . . . , but as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold\u2014everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment\u2014an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by\u2014I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, \"Can you see anything?\" it was all I could do to get out the words, \"Yes, wonderful things.\"\n\nAncient tomb robbers had indeed gotten in, but they must have been surprised in mid-robbery by the valley guards. One thief in his flight had stashed the blue cup; another, the other objects that had been found. The robbers had made a terrific mess, yanking open boxes and packages as fast as possible to find the most valuable contents. The guards hastily tidied up before they resealed the tomb, shoving things into containers that didn't fit and piling everything hodgepodge into the corners. It was this disorganized but glorious heap of royal belongings that Carter now saw.\n\nThe ancient robbers' loss was our gain. Even so insignificant a pharaoh's tomb was full of an astonishing array of articles that almost never survive for us to see. Gold\u2014that untarnishable prize\u2014makes headlines any day, and the amount in Tutankhamon's tomb was prodigious. Carter soon learned that the robbers had not reached the inner chamber where the king lay encased in gold. Yet the most precious treasure in some ways was not the gold but the perishables: elegant wooden furniture\u2014carved beds, tables, chests, stools, and chairs (one the right size for a child king)\u2014and sumptuous royal clothing, including tunics, tapestry gloves, and sandals painted with bound captives so the king could tread on his enemies with every step.\n\nTwo of Tutankhamon's tunics interest us in particular. One is done entirely in tapestry weave, which the king's weavers by this time handled with consummate ease and sophistication. The other tunic is a puzzle. First, it has sleeves\u2014a rarity in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. Fancy bands adorn it\u2014tapes that were woven separately and sewn over the side seams and around the neck. The neck was designed in the shape of an Egyptian ankh hieroglyph (the looped cross meaning \"long life\" that modern occultists still use), with Tutankhamon's name embroidered at the crossing point. Thus the garment was created specifically for Tutankhamon by people who understood Egyptian beliefs. Around the bottom, however, the designers sewed on a series of panels embroidered with typically Syrian motifs. Not only are the designs foreign, but true embroidery is otherwise virtually unknown in Egypt. Furthermore, the panels don't fit around the hemline; there is a small gap toward the back where things didn't come out quite even. Everything points to the panels' having been made by foreigners in a technique preferred by them\u2014namely, embroidery\u2014and produced separately from the tunic. The ensemble may have been made in Syria and sent to the young king as a royal gift (we have seen plenty of that kind of activity in Syria\u2014see Chapter 7). Or it may have been put together in Egypt by foreigners in the service of the royal family. We know that Thutmose III had brought back captive craftworkers from his campaigns in Palestine and southern Syria, women and men who had presumably helped introduce the vertical loom and tapestry weaving into Egypt. But that had been a hundred and fifty years earlier.\n\nThutmose IV, however, had broken Egyptian tradition by marrying a foreign princess, from the kingdom of the Mitanni (which extended over parts of eastern Syria and northern Mesopotamia), and his son, Amenhotep III, had followed suit. To the total amazement of the Egyptians, this second Mitanni lady arrived with an entourage of 317 handmaidens. We hear nothing more of them, but we can surmise that they spent their days doing _something_ \u2014most likely fine textile work. Back in Syria and Mesopotamia (as we saw in Chapter 7) a queen's women were mostly trained to make cloth, the fancier the better. Did the survivors of these 318 Mitanni women still live and work in Tutankhamon's palace?\n\nAll in all, the making of prestigious patterned textiles in Egypt seems to have been developed in the New Kingdom by royal captives, where the captives in the early stages of this revolution were teaching the Egyptians. Many of the new-style Egyptian weavers were clearly men. Meanwhile, the native Egyptian women continued to weave the household linens much as before, as we learn from the glimpses we have of a chap named Paneb.\n\nPaneb was without doubt a rascal and an evil-tempered bully. He worked as a stonecutter and headed a gang of workmen carving out and decorating noblemen's tombs at Thebes at the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty. These workmen and their wives, children, and servants lived near the tomb sites in a village. There they received, prepared, and ate their government rations of grain, vegetables, and occasional meat; there they kept house, slept, occasionally partied, and worked out their lives of hard labor.\n\nSome of the inhabitants were slave women assigned by the government to several stonemasons in common. A given workman might \"own\" a few days a month of a particular slave woman's work at grinding grain and whatever else was needed. Most of the weaving, however, was done by the workmen's wives, as we gather from a short papyrus in the British Museum listing the charges brought against Paneb by an irate fellow workman. Paneb had long ago usurped this unfortunate man's rightful position as head of the work gang by bribing a high official and then had gone on to other outrages.\n\nThe charges begin with an account of the official's bribery, followed by charges of thievery from the royal tombs, sacrilege in a temple, and perjury when confronted with same. Rape and robbery of a woman come next, then \"debauchment\" of at least three other women, harassment of the former chief workman, and battery of nine men who came to protect this man when Paneb threatened to murder him. Next comes a charge of frequent personal conscription of labor to which Paneb was not entitled, including making the other workmen's wives weave for him: \"Charge concerning his ordering to the workmen to work on the plaited bed of the deputy of the temple of Amun, while their wives wove clothes for him. And he made Nebnufer, son of Wazmose, feeder of his ox for two whole months.\" Then follow allegations of more murder threats, the cursing of tombs, more battery, throwing bricks at the workmen, stealing tools, more perjury, throwing stones at the servants of the village, and finally murdering some people who were on their way to tell the pharaoh.\n\nA rascal indeed! If you go to Egypt, you can visit at Deir el-Medinah the village where he lived\u2014excavated over many years by the French\u2014and see both Paneb's house and the place where he broke down the door of his former overseer. Fortunately you won't have to tangle with Paneb himself. His tomb is nearby and is decorated in part\u2014if we may believe the charges, at least some of which we _can_ substantiate from excavated evidence\u2014with things stolen from other tombs!\n\nFrom such circumstantial details as these we see that, despite the introduction of a new loom and new types of cloth, the women of ordinary families such as those in Paneb's village continued to weave household linens much as before. And apparently they did so on the traditional ground loom. One reason for this claim is that the new vertical loom required large, heavy beams for the frame. But wood, especially big, strong pieces, was exceedingly expensive in Egypt because it had to be imported. It was probably bad enough for a lower-class family to afford the few thin sticks and pegs needed for a ground loom; four thick beams would have been out of the question. Nor have any of the excavators yet published good evidence for upright looms in the working-class houses that have been excavated.\n\nPlain white linens (which did not _need_ a fancy new loom for their efficient manufacture) also continued to be a mainstay of Egyptian civilization for another two millennia. Women were thus not disenfranchised of their main product and continued to enjoy equal status with men in the eyes of Egyptian law\u2014both for protection and for punishment.\n\nAnother Nineteenth Dynasty lawsuit of which we have record concerns a woman named Erenofre, accused of using some goods that belonged to another woman as part of the price for two slaves. The objects used for payment included various bronze vessels, some beaten copper, and a large quantity of linen: a shroud, a blanket, five garments of some sort, and ten shirts. From this we learn that linen, like metal, was still a major form of currency, that women could make their own commercial deals, purchase slaves for themselves, and, of course, sometimes be as crooked as men. Such slaves performed mostly housework, especially the constant and laborious task of grinding grain for the family. But occasionally, especially in later times, they were set to work enlarging a free woman's textile production. For women's strong position in Egyptian society eventually enabled them to go into business for themselves. One of the last interesting textile records to come out of ancient Egypt, some fifteen hundred years later, A.D. 298, concerns a woman named Apollonia who bought a large and complicated secondhand loom for the high price of more than three hundred troy ounces of silver. The only possible reason for spending so much money was that she expected to recoup her capital by producing expensive textiles in her own weaving shop.\n\nArriving in the land of Euelthon, Pheretima requested of him an army which she could lead against Kyrene. But Euelthon gave her anything and everything other than an army, while she, accepting each present, said that this was nice but giving her the army she needed would be even better. Since she replied this way to every gift, finally Euelthon sent her as a present a golden spindle and distaff, and some wool besides. And when Pheretima again made the same remark, Euelthon answered that he honored women with these kinds of presents, not with armies.\n\n\u2014Herodotus, 4.162\n\nAthenian women, unlike Egyptian ones, lost their social equality during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. We learn from various texts that by the dawn of the Classical age the married women of Athens, like their Mesopotamian sisters, were held in haremlike seclusion and scarcely allowed out of the house except for major rituals and festivals. Their duties were to take care of the food and the servants (if any), to spin and weave the wool needed for clothing and other household uses, to bear and care for the children, and to obey their husbands.\n\nWe see this arrangement, for example, in the unusually intimate glimpses of Athenian married life that we catch in Lysias' legal oration on the killing of Eratosthenes, a man caught in bed with another man's wife and killed on the spot by the incensed husband. Lysias presents the unnamed husband's side of the case as a justifiable homicide.\n\nThe wife almost never left the house; a maidservant did the shopping. Trouble began, the husband says, when his wife walked in the procession for his mother's funeral and the roving rake Eratosthenes saw her there. This lover could get at the wife to woo her, however, only by finding the maid at the market and persuading her to carry notes secretly into the house. Eventually the husband was tipped off by the servant of yet another mistress of Eratosthenes; she was miffed that he wasn't coming to see _her_ anymore. Suddenly the husband remembered that one night, when he had come home unexpectedly early from the countryside, his wife had had face paint on, although she should have had no reason for it; in fact, with her brother dead not thirty days before, she should still have been properly mourning. And later in the night he had heard the outer door shutting. Alerted, the husband then forced his slave girl, by threat of torture and a life sentence of working in the grain mills, to tell him the whole story and to let him know when Eratosthenes next paid a secret visit. The visits were made easier by the fact that the husband had allowed the wife to sleep downstairs instead of upstairs (the usual sequestered arrangement for women) once their first child was born, so she would be closer to the washing facilities during the night. Four or five days later the maid woke him to say that Eratosthenes was paying a call. The husband lost no time. \"In silence I slipped out, went to this and that neighbor, . . . and found those who were home. Gathering as many as possible . . . and fetching torches from the nearest tavern, we returned home, where the outer door had been opened and kept ready by the maid. As we forced the door of the bedroom, those who rushed in first saw him still lying beside the woman, and those who got there last saw him standing naked on the bed.\" They grabbed and bound his hands. Eratosthenes admitted his guilt and begged to be allowed to pay damages with money instead of his life. The enraged husband replied, \"It is not I who kills you but the law of the city,\" and, acting on his legal right to slay _on the spot_ an adulterer caught in the act, cut him down.\n\nFrom this story we learn various details about the life of a \"free\" woman of Athens\u2014to name a few: the heavy restrictions on her movements, her use of cosmetics, and some typical and atypical arrangements of her living quarters. We also see something of a slave girl's life and treatment. Note that whereas the husband killed the lover, he gave immunity to the slave girl in return for her help (after roughing her up a bit), and whatever he did to punish his wife was not thought worth mentioning\u2014although if he didn't kill her outright, her marriage can hardly have been a pleasant one after that.\n\nA similar picture of how Athenian women lived, with many more details about domestic work, emerges from a long conversation that Xenophon records between a wealthy and rather self-satisfied Athenian gentleman named Isomachos and his fourteen-year-old bride, as reported to Socrates years later. The description begins when Socrates inquires whether Isomachos trained his young wife himself. Of course, says the gentleman, for being a girl of good breeding, she had spent her first fourteen years seeing, hearing, and saying \"as little as possible.\" It was therefore not astonishing that she knew no more than \"how by taking wool to produce cloaks, and she had seen how woolworking was allotted to the maidservants.\" (Cf. figs. 11.6 and 11.7.) Her chief virtue was that she had been taught self-control and modesty.\n\n_Figure 11.6_. Young woman at her loom, accosted by suitors who offer her jewelry from a fancy box. From a Greek vase found in Italy, early fifth century B.C.\n\nIsomachos' lessons to his wife began with teaching her that marriage has three purposes. Only the first of these is shared by the animals: to have offspring. These children then function as an insurance policy, supporting the parents in their old age. Marriage also helps maintain a shelter for both the family and its acquisitions. (Note how similar these goals are to the Neolithic ethic described in Chapter 3.) It is the woman's job, he explains, to keep the shelter in good order, since she is the weaker and more timid and needs to nurse the infants. The man, for his part, goes out to acquire the things with which to fill the storerooms, since he is stronger and more courageous\u2014and less tolerant of children. In all this Isomachos likens the wife's job to that of a queen bee.\n\n\"And what sorts of jobs,\" said she, \"does the queen of the bees have that are like those which I'm supposed to do?\"\n\n\"In this,\" I said: \"she stays in the hive and doesn't let the bees be idle, but the ones who have to work outside she sends out to their duties, and what each of them brings in she receives and saves up until it is needed for use. And when the time comes for it to be used, she measures out to each bee the proper amount. And she has authority over weaving the honeycomb inside, so that it gets woven well and quickly, and she takes care of the offspring born, and nourishes them. And when they've been raised, and the young have grown ready to work, she sends them out. . . .\"\n\nHer wifely duties, he explains, are parallel to these:\n\nYou will have to remain inside and to send out those of the servants whose work is outside; and you will need to oversee those who have to work inside and to receive what is brought in; and what must be doled out from them, this you must distribute, and what must be stored away, this must be cared for and guarded, so that what is to last a year is not spent in a month. And when you are brought wool, you must deal with it so that there are cloaks for those who need them. And you must see to it that the dry grain is properly edible.\n\n(This picture tallies well with that from Lysias' speech; but children are not discussed, as Isomachos tells Socrates, because the girl was still too young for them.) He then admonishes her to take care of the servants when they fall sick and to teach them skills: \"Other duties, pleasant ones, will fall to you also, Wife, as when, taking a servant girl ignorant of wool-working, you make her knowledgeable and she doubles in worth to you. . . .\" Basically the wife is to stay at home and work.\n\nWith women thus sequestered, the development of commercial textiles understandably was taken up chiefly by men. Whereas the women in their homes did every step from preparing the raw wool to weaving and sewing the cloth, the men typically broke the work up by specialties. Thus there were wool combers, flax preparers, spinners, weavers, tailors, and two kinds of experts whose services the housewives also sometimes employed\u2014dyers and fullers\u2014both of whose work tended to be very smelly and hence unsuitable for an urban home. (Many dyes had to be fermented, while other dyes and certain cleaning processes required uric acid and ammonia, obtained in those days from stale urine. In ancient Pompeii fullers and dyers even set urns out on their front sidewalk with a sign requesting passersby to contribute then and there to the supply!) Some of the men seem to have been in business alone, whereas others employed slaves to help them\u2014in a few cases even sizable numbers of slaves (perhaps forty), a portion of whom may have been women. The products, generally clothing and blankets, were then sold for cash. Who bought them is not clear, but apparently more people than just a few bachelors with no women to weave for them.\n\nAt least two classes of women, however, sometimes did do textile work for cash: those who were not properly married or not properly Athenian. We have a record of at least one foreign woman, named Andria, who made wool cloth to support herself for a while. In the lists of freed slaves that have come down to us, 77 women are listed (along with 115 men), and of the 57 women whose occupations are given, 44 were involved in textile work. The scholar who analyzed these lists, A. W. Gomme, remarks that \"where the occupation is given, it should be descriptive of the trade proposed to be taken, not just of past activity.\" Most likely they had learned the necessary skills as domestic servants and would now use them to stay alive. The other 13 ex-slave women included mostly shopkeepers, plus 2 cobblers and a musician. Gomme estimates that \"in the most prosperous times of the fifth century\" there may have been \"35\u201340,000 female slaves in domestic service\" in Athens.\n\nIn addition we gather that the prostitutes, or _hetairai_ (literally \"companions\") as they were called, supplemented their income in their spare time by making small textiles such as the stretchy headbands with which Athenian ladies tied up their curls. Widows, too, were sometimes forced to support themselves with textile work. Homer portrays a pitiful woman of this sort in a simile for evenhandedness:\n\nThus an honest woman, a handspinner,\n\nholds up the weights and the wool on either side of her balance\n\nkeeping them even, so as to earn a miserable wage for her children.\n\nThe idea that \"free\" women of good families should work commercially, on the other hand, was viewed as very strange, as we see from a little tale related by Xenophon about Socrates' customary helpfulness and concern.\n\nOne day Socrates sees that his friend Aristarchos is looking very gloomy and asks him if he can help. Aristarchos explains that during a recent political upheaval in the city, many had fled to the Piraeus (the port of Athens, then as now), and a crowd of stranded female relatives had come to live with him for protection, \"so that now there are fourteen freeborns in the house.\" He has no idea, he says, how he can feed them all, much as he would like to.\n\nSocrates begins to question, asking how it is that a well-known man named Keramon manages to feed that many and get rich besides.\n\n\"Why of course,\" said he, \"because he is taking care of slaves and I of free people.\"\n\n\"And which do you think are better\u2014the free people at your house or the slaves at his?\"\n\n\"I myself think,\" he replied, \"the free people at my house.\"\n\n\"Then isn't it disgraceful that he, because of his people, should be doing so well, while you, having much better ones, should be in dire straits?\"\n\n\"Of course! But he is taking care of craftspeople, whereas I am caring for people with a liberal education.\"\n\n\"So aren't craftspeople those who know how to make something useful?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"And isn't barley-meal useful?\"\n\n\"Very.\"\n\n\"What about bread-loaves?\"\n\n\"No less.\"\n\n\"What about cloaks for men and women, and shirts and mantles and half-tunics?\"\n\n\"Very,\" he replied; \"all these things are useful.\"\n\n\"Then,\" said [Socrates], \"don't the people at your house know how to make any of these?\"\n\n\"Indeed, _all_ of these, I would think.\"\n\nSocrates then enumerates at length all sorts of people who make good livings manufacturing one or another of these commodities, to which Aristarchos impatiently replies that they can do this because they have bought foreign slaves and can force them to work, whereas he, poor man, is saddled with free people, and relatives at that. (One can guess that part of his resistance stems from the knowledge that the only women he knows who work for commerce are slaves, ex-slaves, and whores.)\n\nSocrates expounds at length about the relative benefits to the human psyche of idleness versus useful employment, then suggests that if the gentleman were to order the gentlewomen to get to work and support themselves within the protection of his house, they would soon come to love him as well because they would no longer feel a burden to him.\n\nSufficiently convinced, Aristarchos vows to borrow enough money to get started, saying that he was unwilling to borrow money before, because he would have no way to repay it. The narrator continues: \"As a result, resources were found, and wool was bought. The women ate their noon meal while they worked, and quit working only at suppertime; and they were cheerful instead of gloomy.\" Presently Aristarchos returns to tell Socrates how splendidly everything is working out. But, he adds, the ladies are displeased at one thing\u2014namely, that he himself is still idle. The story ends with Socrates suggesting that Aristarchos tell them that he is like the apparently idle sheepdog, who gets better treatment than the sheep because his protection is what allows them all to prosper.\n\nWe do not hear how that fable went over with the women, but we know how it would be received today.\n\nElsewhere in the Classical Greek world (see map, fig. 9.2), the situation was often rather different from that in Athens. Spartan women were not hidden away but participated in civic life much more fully right from childhood, for as youngsters they were given strenuous physical training alongside the boys. This training, according to Plutarch, \"instilled in them the habit of a simple life\" that even today we call \"Spartan living.\" They cultivated simple and direct speech, too, a trait we still name \"laconic\" after Lakonia, the southern Greek province that Sparta ruled. But Spartan women did not spin or weave. The plain homespuns for their clothing were made by the serfs or bought in the marketplace since the elite were supposed to occupy their time entirely with serving the state.\n\n\"Respectable\" ladies in Ionia, by contrast, prided themselves on weaving ornate fabrics, and even did so for profit, as we deduce from the following anecdote told by Plutarch in his _Moralia:_ \"When an Ionian woman was showing great pride in one of her own weavings (which was very costly), a Lakonian woman, pointing out her four sons (who were very well bred), said, 'Such should be the products of the fair and virtuous woman, and over these should be her elation and her boasts.' \" The Ionian women's tradition of making elaborate textiles was one of many customs coming down from the Bronze Age that were preserved in Ionia but lost elsewhere in the Aegean area. Another was the relative freedom of these women to come and go from the house, if the poems of the irrepressible Sappho and the other island writers are a fair sample. In one surviving fragment (No. 114), for example, Sappho complains that she cannot weave because Aphrodite, the love goddess, has thoroughly smitten her with desire for a certain young person she has met. Furthermore, the names of several different objects of her passion occur in her poems. The young women of Lysias' and Xenophon's accounts seldom had the occasion to meet and fall in love with even one person, let alone several.\n\nThe Athenians, for their part, viewed both these Greek subcultures\u2014the Spartan and the Ionian\u2014as strange. Athenian women knew how to do elaborate weaving but did it chiefly in the service of their patron goddess, Athena. Each year the entire city and its outlying districts celebrated Athena's birthday with huge sacrifices, processions, and games, at a festival called the Panathenaia. The meat from the sacrificed animals was distributed to the populace, so it was a festive time indeed. As part of these celebrations, the women wove and presented to the goddess a new dress for her statue. The dress was in the form of a _peplos_ , a rather heavy rectangle of woven wool that was wrapped once around the body, pinned at the shoulders, and belted in the middle. We see from representations that the drape hung fairly straight, so it was probably about four feet by six. The peplos was no longer fashionable among mortal Athenian ladies by the fifth century. It had been outlawed a bit earlier (so the story goes) after a group of irate Athenian women used their long, straight dress-pins to stab to death a messenger bearing bad news of a battle in which the women's menfolk had been killed. But it was the traditional dress of the goddess, and so it remained.\n\nPeople made special trips to Athens to see the newest peplos, so splendid was it. Its lavish ornamentation depicted the battle of the gods and the giants, a horrific contest (described at length by the poet Hesiod in his _Theogony_ ) in which Athena and her father, Zeus, king of the gods, were said to have led the gods to victory. The garment celebrated Athena's powers and gave yearly thanks to the goddess for saving her city.\n\nSuch an ornate cloth, an especially appropriate gift for the goddess of weaving, took great time and skill to produce, but of course, nothing was too good for the great patroness. The freeborn women of Athens viewed it as a privilege to help spin the colored yarns. Saffron yellow, long associated with women's rituals in the Aegean (fig. 4.7), and sea purple provided the dominant hues for ground and figure. A full nine months before the festival, the loom was set up, the warp made and hung upon it, and the weaving begun. To weave an elaborate tapestrylike cloth of some twenty-four square feet covered with friezes of mythological figures would take that long. Priestesses known as _ergastinai_ , meaning \"workers,\" did the actual weaving, aided by two half-grown girls called _arrephoroi_ , who seem to have been chosen from among the aristocratic Athenian families to live on the Acropolis and serve the goddess for a year. When the sacred dress was finally presented to Athena and the sacred Panathenaic procession wound its way through the city streets, Athenian women obtained one of their rare excuses to leave the house.\n\nThe ancient European weaving technology, color associations, and mythology of the peplos all connect the robe with the Bronze Age, as do the offices of the the priestesses who produced it. Athenian women thus preserved as a largely religious tradition what the freer Ionian women to the east pursued for more secular (and profitable) ends. But the loss of fancy textiles as a major source of secular economic wealth undoubtedly went hand in hand with the decline of women's status in Athenian society. With no independent way of generating wealth, they lost their political clout and, like Aristarchos' female relatives, could at best envy the freedom of the watchdog while they toiled at endless household work, locked up at home (fig. 11.7).\n\n_Figure 11.7_. Young girl biting knots out of the wool in her thread as she spins. From the center of an early fifth century B.C. Greek cup, showing girls and their suitors.\n\nOur twenty-thousand-year odyssey has shown us women working under a wide variety of conditions. Their social status and economic production have varied together, reaching lowest ebb when people valued least the contributions that women could make while rearing children.\n\nWhen we picked up the story of women's work back in the Palaeolithic, we saw that women could conveniently combine certain crafts with the necessities of child raising. The fiber arts\u2014spinning, sewing, netting, basketry, and eventually weaving\u2014suited the purpose particularly well because these tasks posed no dangers or hardships to toddlers. Clothing, too, was already becoming the human race's next language after speech\u2014unique in its ability to convey important (if simple) information continuously and relatively permanently.\n\nThen the world changed. With the advent of settled life and food production, people began to acquire objects in quantity. Cloth and clothing became increasingly integrated into social customs, and the making of cloth shifted from a merely useful art to an essential of cultural life. With the shift came a mounting demand on women's time and labor to provide this commodity.\n\nAs commerce gradually rose in importance, women were able to keep up for a while in supplying cloth to their increasingly demanding societies, under a variety of economic systems\u2014some more favorable to women's freedom and economic standing than others. (None of this says anything about women's _happiness_ , of course. Some individuals feel lost when no one tells them what to do and blossom when integrated into a tightly tied position in society. Others are the opposite. Furthermore, women as a whole have seldom complained so loudly as today, when we have more freedom than ever before\u2014just as the loudest complainers in eighteenth-century Europe, the organizers of the French Revolution, were the richest peasants around. Happiness is a different and very personal issue.)\n\nBy the start of the Late Bronze Age (mid-second millennium B.C.), however, the flood of new technological changes related to prestige demands began to overwhelm the traditional textile workers in certain societies. Women lost economic ground, sometimes enormous ground, to those who could afford to specialize in the new and different\u2014to those men with some free time to experiment. Mothers were still too busy with uncontrolled pregnancy and children to play around with novel ideas. Only to the extent that the women's cloth recorded religious or historical information, as with the sacred dress woven for Athena, did the women then reap prestige for their work.\n\nAnd so matters remained, within the vicissitudes of social structure and customs, until the medically researched birth control methods of the last few decades. Now we see a strong movement in medically rich societies to reopen wide varieties of work, knowledge, and legal rights to women. Where women's work will go from here, the future will tell.\n\n1In tapestry the weft completely hides the warp, and each color of weft is used only where that color is needed for the design. As a result, a single weft thread usually goes back and forth across a compact area rather than across the entire width of the cloth. Structural problems frequently arise because of this, in making the cloth hang together\u2014see Note 2, below.\n\n2Lines parallel to the warp are difficult to negotiate in tapestry and cause the weaver a multitude of structural problems, whereas those in the other direction\u2014parallel to the weft\u2014are quick and easy. Kha's stems and petals are all carefully arranged to lie in the \"easy\" direction.\n\n3Enormous amounts of information, the presence of which is little suspected by the casual observer, can be deduced from the context in which an object is found\u2014even so simple a context as which tomb it was in. This principle has been illustrated many times in this book and is the reason why the scholarly community is so set against nonscientific digging of tombs (and against inadequate publication by those who pass as scholars). It is not, as dealers in antiquities keep telling the public, because scholars are \"selfish\" and want it all to themselves but because the riches of _information_ about our human past, which should be the legacy of everyone, are hopelessly destroyed to feed the monetary greed\u2014and need for prestige through novelty\u2014of a few.\n\nPostscript: Finding the Invisible\n\nA tough wedge must be sought for a tough log.\n\n\u2014Publilius Syrus, _Sententiae_\n\nPast scholars have generally dismissed the history of easily perishable commodities like cloth as unreconstructable, on the ground that there was no evidence. By tracking down a great deal of evidence from unusual sources, however, we have reconstructed much about ancient textiles and the people and societies that made them.\n\nWomen's work consisted largely of making perishables\u2014especially food and clothing. So if we are to retrieve significant amounts of women's history, or of the history of any evanescent occupation in particular (and I am thinking of such things as music and dance as well as food and clothing), we need better evidence than just that which falls into our laps. We need the skill to glean all surviving evidence and to wring out of it every last drop of information and useful analysis. A hypothesis, after all, is no better than the evidence that supports it, and hypotheses without evidence are mere wishful thinking. A tall order? Perhaps, but also a delightful challenge to those who, like Agatha Christie's immortal Poirot, enjoy \"exercising the little grey cells\" in the chase.\n\nLet us start by asking: What are the general directions from which the evidence for such ancient objects and activities might come? The conventional sources are archaeology and surviving texts. But the problem with archaeological remains is that what we want to study in our case may not survive directly or in a recognizable form. Cloth itself, for example, seldom makes it through the millennia except in tiny, hardly recognizable shreds. Until recently excavators tended to throw even those away, assuming they were of no value. Loom weights, on the contrary, survived in great quantities but were also assumed to hold little information, so their fate was just as bad. It didn't occur to either diggers or scholars how much these unprepossessing blobs of clay could reveal about the development of the looms needed to weave the cloth and about the users of the looms.\n\nThe problem with texts, moreover, is twofold. They may not discuss what we wish to learn\u2014for example, few ancient texts talk about women's lives, partly because very few women wrote or dictated texts\u2014and even when they do touch the subject we want, they may not tell us what we need to know. Thus the economic texts that discuss clothing use so many unknown technical terms that we learn next to nothing about clothing from them. The _scribes_ knew what they meant. Why should they think of explaining the details to us, three or four millennia later and half a world away?\n\nArchaeology, however, has gone through revolutions in the last century. For a long while it was little more than a branch of art history, its task being to fill up art museums and private collections with handsome curiosities. (Those whose acquaintance with archaeology comes only from films like _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ may think it is still that way; the film may be great entertainment, but it is terrible archaeology.) Around the turn of the century, however, archaeology began to pull itself up to the level of an investigative science, through the efforts of a few individuals who wanted to learn how ancient people lived. Scholars such as the great Egyptologist Sir W. M. F. Petrie were realizing that in removing an antiquity from its context the finder (whether \"scientist\" or \"treasure hunter\") destroyed forever any _social_ information recoverable from the find group. The taker therefore had a duty to humanity to record everything about that context, no matter how small.\n\nThis new view leapt to international fame through the notorious act of a French specialist in the Coptic period (the early centuries A.D.), named \u00c9mile Am\u00e9lineau. From 1894 to 1898 he obtained permission to excavate the incomparable tombs of the earliest Egyptian pharaohs at Abydos, who flourished around 3000 B.C. After ransacking them of their contents, keeping little record of what was found where, Am\u00e9lineau deliberately burned or smashed to bits any and every object that he chose not to take back to France, so as to make those he took more valuable, because unique. The burning lasted for days. A horrified Petrie rushed in as soon as Am\u00e9lineau had left, to glean \"a rich harvest of history . . . from the site which was said to be exhausted,\" by carefully sifting through the rubble and putting back together what he could of the five hundred years of pivotal human history that the treasure hunters had wantonly shattered. (This was, after all, the dawn of human writing and civilization.) If it did nothing else, _l'affaire Am\u00e9lineau_ (as it came to be called) finally got people's attention, and a more responsible archaeology began to develop, characterized by the sort of exhaustive recording that Petrie specialized in.\n\nSuch changes in basic approach took time, however, and Petrie ended up putting into his own collection (now in the Petrie Museum at University College London) many types of artifacts that no one else considered of value yet. Thus it was that in the 1970s two women, an Egyptologist and a textile conservationist, found treasure in \"a tumbled heap of dirty linens\" among the masses of labeled items stored in the Petrie collection: the earliest complete garment that has come down to us (see fig. 5.3). It is a fine off-white linen shirt of the First Dynasty. Its seams, fringes, and elaborate pleating are intact and still show the creases at the elbows that remained when its owner last stripped it off over his head, five thousand years ago. Petrie had seen the value in this linen shirt and trusted that eventually textile history would come into its own.\n\nEven at its blindest, when diggers of the mid-twentieth century were dutifully recording facts of no known use just because they were there, the new method of trying hard to preserve all objects and information found has proved its worth magnificently. In 1961 Emmett Bennett was able to reconstruct the filing system of the Mycenaean scribes, hence a great deal about their economic practices and even the geography of the kingdom, because the excavators of the Pylos archives decades before had meticulously recorded the exact three-dimensional findspot of every as-yet-undeciphered tablet scattered through the fill.1 We relied on some of this information in reconstructing the Mycenaean textile industry in Chapter 9.\n\nBut a second revolution was coming, too, one that radically increased the amount of information recoverable from what was dug up. After World War II a wide range of military technology and scientific knowledge that had accrued during the great struggle gradually became available for other uses, including the interpretation of archaeological data. Radiocarbon dating, infrared photography for seeing through unremovable dirt, isotope \"fingerprinting\" for tracing sources of raw materials like stone and ore, thin-layer chromatography for analyzing dyes, and a hundred other methods were and still are being worked out. Thus we have appealed over and over in this book to archaeological information that has been further interpreted through the natural sciences, from chemical analysis of the Lascaux string fragments to palaeobiological reconstruction of the era when sheep became woolly. Among the innovations have been a number of improved means for finding sites and artifacts. Thus magnetometers and other devices for finding metals, stone walls, and other anomalies have helped with archaeological prospecting, while new techniques of flotation and sieving have allowed excavators to find the tiny seeds, leaves, bone fragments, and so forth that tell us worlds about ancient environments. We learn what ancient climates were like, that ancient grain supplies were plagued by mice and weeds, and that hemp, a favorite fiber plant, was in use in Europe in the fifth millennium B.C., four thousand years before the narcotic subvariety (marijuana) was brought in from southern Asia. Improved methods of microscopic analysis, special photography, spectrometry, and other nondestructive techniques have added to our knowledge. For example, careful microscopic probing of an Iron Age woolen vest found in the salt mines at Hallstatt, Austria, showed that the ancient owner had been pestered by lice; the garment's seams were full of lice eggs. Textiles and other readily perishable objects are, as a result of all this, much easier to study now than they were twenty years ago, right within the discipline of archaeology and its scientific helpers.\n\nBut we need all the help we can get. What else is out there?\n\nIn this book we have often appealed to language itself via linguistic science, in addition to looking at such texts as have come our way. For example, we have used such revealing etymologies as _tunic, shirt_ , and _to ret_ to throw light on the history of clothing and the processes of preparing fibers. (We even added that the English word _robe_ comes from _rob_ because clothing was one of the most frequent forms of plunder in the Middle Ages, as in many another time and place.) The discussion in Chapter 9 of the stages of Mycenaean textile manufacture, too, was based on a careful linguistic analysis of the names of female professions in the Linear B tablets, worked out in detail elsewhere. We also combined archaeological with linguistic arguments to interpret the layering of vocabulary found in Greek, in which only the most primitive aspects of weaving show Indo-European names, the rest having been borrowed later. Since the technology for which they borrowed these terms\u2014weaving on the great warp-weighted loom\u2014is known from the loom weights to have developed in central and southern Europe in the Neolithic, the prehistoric Greeks must have learned the craft fairly late, as they were moving into Greece from farther east.\n\nAnother tool we have used in a particularly novel way is the comparative method of reconstruction. This method was gradually worked out in the nineteenth century by linguists interested in determining the historical relationships between languages. They began to realize that many languages were changed later forms of a common ancestor language (like French, Spanish, and Italian, all of which are simply later forms of Latin, each having changed gradually in its own way during many centuries) and that the parent could be reconstructed to a fair extent by meticulous comparison of the structures\u2014especially the sound structures\u2014of the daughter languages. The method works best when the structures used are both arbitrary cultural conventions (as language is) and so habitual that people don't think about them much. When we talk, we are worrying principally about framing our sentences well enough to get our message through to the other person, not whether our tongue is hitting this or that little spot in the mouth. What gymnastics the tongue has to go through to produce the needed words is _its_ problem, as it were; the tongue is on automatic. The sounds of language are thus excellent fodder for the comparative method. But we have the same sort of dichotomy in the cultural conventions of clothing. On the conscious level we worry about fashion and momentary social messages, but we take for granted and scarcely, if ever, think about the basic notions of what constitutes dress within our culture, including (depending on the culture) what is appropriate for certain social classes, sexes, etc. These \"automatic\" aspects of clothing yield to comparative reconstruction back into prehistory. Very conservative forms of decoration (see Chapter 6) turn out to be partly reconstructable in this way also, and ancient music and dance may, too. One of the checks we have on such work comes in collecting the most archaic vocabulary connected with these fields and comparing its reconstruction to the reconstructions of the costumes, decoration, dances, etc.2\n\nOther sources of evidence include mythology\u2014a difficult field not widely understood as a potential helpmate for archaeological problems since, having been roundly abused by some, it has been rejected by most.3 Then there is ethnology. Its particular virtue is to suggest possible solutions to archaeological problems by showing parallel behavior in other human cultures. That is, ethnographic studies can help determine the range of possibility and likelihood for what people did, especially if the researchers will take the time and courage to get a firsthand knowledge of whatever they are trying to study. Besides, it could even be fun!\n\nFor a century or more, pottery has been the mainstay of archaeological chronologies. It is central to the field. But few archaeologists have ever made a pot\u2014ever kneaded the clay (let alone found it and dug it out), built up the vessel, dried it, decorated it, fired it . . . and watched it come out of the kiln in shattered pieces the first time because as novices they hadn't gotten all the air out of the clay during the kneading. One learns just what the ancients faced by trying to do what they did, and overnight one's theories become a great deal more realistic. The same, of course, is true of spinning, weaving, cooking, woodworking, and any other craft.\n\nAvigail Sheffer tells of worrying whether the soft, crumbly, doughnut-shaped weights she was digging up by the dozens at Iron Age sites in Israel could really function as loom weights, as everyone assumed. She thought they would break as they swung around on the loom. So she and her colleagues made up a stack of unbaked clay doughnuts, strung up a makeshift warp-weighted loom with wool hand-spun for them by some local Bedouin women, and began to weave. She reports: \"The weaving was very easy and quick, taking less than an hour to produce a piece of material one metre long. No damage occurred to the weights even when the loom had to be moved from place to place.\" She learned a lot by trying it out\u2014even more than she had set out to learn\u2014such as how quickly one could weave on such a loom.\n\nPottery \"experts\" for a long time could get away with knowing little about how pottery was made, because there was so much else to study among the wealth of potsherds. (Today some scholars are also learning to make pots.) But with the study of perishable objects, we do well to _start_ by learning the craft firsthand and to keep experimenting at every turn as we go along. We need all the practical help we can get because if we take a wrong turn somewhere in the logic of our theories, we don't have piles of other evidence lying around to warn us of our mistake. I have found that the considerable time it takes to replicate ancient practices is always amply rewarded, as when I rewove the Hallstatt plaid (figs. 0.1 and 0.2). Theories are kept on a sounder footing and new information gathered about the problems and limitations people faced in those days. And there is the pleasure of doing something different, something so old that it is new again.4\n\nYet another way to get evidence\u2014and most difficult of all\u2014is to develop entirely new sources by looking carefully at the nature of the problem to be studied. For example, archaeologists have long been perplexed by evidence that new groups of people have infiltrated or overrun an area. How to tell whether whole families have arrived or just bands of men\u2014traders, warriors, or the like? The problem diminishes, however, once we have discovered what women were doing that men weren't and then ask what traces these activities may have left. We have seen that women spent most of their time raising young children and preparing the daily food and household cloth and clothing. We can follow the evidence for those to find the women.\n\nOne thing that women typically impart to their children is the first elements of language, including the vocabulary of highest frequency, and we have seen some of the value in analyzing the linguistic inheritance. Second, spinning and weaving were almost always women's work (except in a few cases of urban specialization; see Chapter 11). In this case we can trace the women by tracking their tools. The job is made easier because the textile tools were mostly very humble\u2014a few sticks, clay spindle whorls, and perhaps clay weights, with no intrinsic value for trade. So when we find Avigail Sheffer's crumbly clay doughnut weights, well known in Europe and western Anatolia, suddenly turning up in Israel in the Iron Age, far outside the homeland of the warp-weighted loom, we have every right to suspect that a group of women had moved in, along with their families, from rather far to the northwest. One may even suspect a connection with the biblical Philistines, whose pottery (as we said in Chapter 10) is related somehow to that of the Mycenaean Greeks and whom the Egyptians show arriving at the gates of Egypt around 1200 B.C., with husbands, wives, children, and baggage piled on oxcarts and in boats, looking for a home. Fought off and turned back by the Egyptians (who wrote the attackers' name, consonants only, as _P-l-s-t_ ), they settled around Gaza and gave their name to the whole area\u2014Palestine.\n\nOn the other hand (as an apparent counterexample that serves to prove the rule), we have no right to assume migration of women when we find fancy little Syrian spindles carved of local ivory turning up occasionally in Mycenaean settlements in Greece in the Late Bronze Age. Themselves handsome, these objects must have sold for a good price\u2014a wonderful trinket for a merchant or sailor to take home to his sweetheart.\n\nOnce we have located good sources of evidence, we need to sharpen our ability to make the most of what is there.\n\nThe first step, in my experience, is to trick oneself into focusing on every part of the data. _Draw it, count it, map it, chart it_ , and if necessary (or possible) _re-create it._\n\nFor example\u2014a personal one\u2014I inspected photographs of the Venus of Lespugue a dozen times, but it was not until I made my own tracing (fig. 2.1) that I noticed the marks showing that the strings of her string skirt were fraying out at the bottom, telling me that the sculptor knew of string made from twisted fibers twenty thousand years ago. The act of drawing forced me to pay minute attention to every tiny detail of the statuette for the first time. Similarly, it was not until I decided to color by hand my photocopies of all the known Mycenaean frescoes showing clothing that I began to appreciate how frequently a particular border pattern occurred on the frescoes as well as on the clothes and how easy it would be to weave it. That, in turn, prompted me to try to weave it, and during the relatively slow, step-by-step process of doing so I realized that I was making just the sort of band that I had seen\u2014but not thought about\u2014in black-and-white photos of rural women of this century starting their cloth on a warp-weighted loom in the traditional way. Except for color, the designs were the same between the modern Norwegians and the ancient Mycenaeans.\n\nMapping and charting help, too. Even after I had worked for ten years collecting the descriptions of every fragment of prehistoric cloth and textile tools that I could find in the archaeological literature of Europe and the Near East, I had no idea that these data separated into three main zones of development\u2014until in desperation I sat down to map the evidence. To my astonishment, the distribution of fiber use and loom types exactly correlated with the types of pattern weaving for which I had data (see Chapter 11).\n\nThe acquisition of facts in a tough subject seldom goes in a straight line\u2014that is, it seldom goes where you think _you_ want to go with it. I often have data I don't know how to use, on the one hand, and on the other hand, I am always missing lots of data I'd like to have. Faced with a pile of opaque evidence, one can usefully ask, _\"What are all the individual things I can deduce here?\"_ Thus we deduced from the bare bones of a lawsuit against a New Kingdom Egyptian woman (accused of using another woman's linens to help pay for two slaves; see Chapter 11) that linen could be used as a sort of currency, that women could themselves make such commercial deals as buying slaves, and that women were directly responsible in a court of law. We could also have learned about the price of slaves and the workings of the legal system had we wished. Once the details are systematically chipped loose from the matrix, it is often easier to figure out where they can be usefully filed\u2014these under textile studies, those under women's rights, and so forth.\n\nOn the other hand, the problem of missing data may respond to the query \"If I can't get at it by the straight path, _how else can I get at it?\"_ This takes us back to the question of creative use of sources, already discussed. For example, when I began working on textiles, I wanted to know about those specifically from Greece. But textiles don't survive in Greece. Eventually it became apparent that one could deduce information about Greek cloth from the textile tools left there, from the vocabulary, and from mapping the development of cloth and other related artifacts in neighboring areas.\n\nFinally, we need the best possible methods of analysis for our hard-won evidence. Methods of working from the internal structure of the data and those based on logical deduction are well known. Thus, for example, allover designs can be classed not just randomly by motif but exhaustively according to symmetry types.\n\nStudies also show that our sense of symmetry operates on a far less conscious level than our awareness of motifs and use of color. So when we see that the early Minoans use only Symmetry Type A but presently add to it the use of Symmetry Type B, which happens to be the Mycenaeans' favorite kind, we can deduce that a much more intimate contact than casual trade has started to occur between the two cultures. In fact, the use of the new symmetry type begins just about when we get evidence for the Mycenaeans' taking over part of Crete, and the decorative change can be used to help date that take-over.\n\nThe pursuit of the perishable, however, requires careful attention to a variety of invisible factors as well, factors that most people forget to consider because in some sense they \"aren't\": The factors aren't said, or aren't conscious, or aren't seen. It is their _absence_ that is the problem, precisely because they don't obtrude on our attention.\n\nFor example, one difficulty in working with texts is that ancient scribes didn't think to tell us much of what.we most need to know. _They_ already knew all about it. (We moderns are no wiser. When I first went to Greece, no one thought to explain to me that in that country when you nod your head down, it means \"yes,\" but when you nod your head up, it means \"no.\" I got on several wrong buses before I began to suspect that Greek head nodding was even a problem to me.) Among our textile discussions in Chapter 11 we investigated the dress that the Athenian women made for Athena's festival. But working out the problem has been greatly hampered by the fact that Athenian writers never bother to mention which of Athena's statues on the Acropolis, the big or the small one, was to be clothed in the new peplos. We are stranded to deduce it as best we can.\n\nOn the other hand, silent assumptions come quite as often from ourselves. (I had assumed I knew what head nodding meant, just as my Greek friends had assumed that I knew what head nodding meant.) In making their deductions about Athena's dress, several scholars assumed that, since it took nine months to make, the dress must have been very _big_ and therefore must have adorned the huge statue. The assumption that large size is the only reasonable cause for a long manufacturing time is unwarranted, however, as we see when we explore the technology thoroughly. Statistics of various sorts about weaving show that exactly that kind of time would have been needed to make a storytelling cloth big enough for the small statue. Furthermore, we are told of the setting up of a single weighted warp nine months before the festival. A Greek warp-weighted loom was not equipped to make a cloth much larger than that needed for the small statue.\n\nFinding one's own unwarranted assumptions is one of the most difficult things to wrestle with, precisely because they are so hard to recognize. Trying simply to _state all one's assumptions explicitly_ is the first major step. Thus, in the example of Athena's dress, it helps to say, \"I am assuming that the long time needed to make the cloth is due to its size. Is that the only possible cause for lengthy time in weaving?\" Put that way, one can begin to see some other possibilities: A small Persian carpet may take years to weave because the method is slow.\n\nAnother type of \"missing data\" can be found by systematic comparison. I had been working for years with the Egyptian material on spinning before I realized that nowhere was there a picture of a distaff in use, and nowhere among the thousands of textile artifacts a surviving distaff. So how were they draft-spinning a fiber that is typically longer than one's arm? (A distaff holds the unspun fibers and acts basically as an arm extender when the fibers are very long, so that a little group of fibers can be pulled or \"drafted\" most of the way past the next group, and so forth, to make a continuously long, thin thread.) The answer, I gradually discovered, was that they were not draft-spinning (unwarranted assumption discovered). Instead of _pulling_ the fibers past each other, the Egyptians were separating them entirely and splicing them end to end (see Chapter 8). All the phases of the work were represented in the tomb paintings, but I was not ready to understand the details of what I saw until I had been forced to discard my wrong assumptions. This occurred when I noticed that a crucial element for my theory was _missing_ , as the result of careful comparison to well-known examples of how people spin in most other parts of the world.\n\nThe principle is powerful: _the hardest thing to notice is what isn't there_ \u2014yet it may be every bit as important as what _is_ there, and it takes the most careful of methods to ferret it out. Sherlock Holmes, master of methodical deduction, solves the mystery of the missing racehorse, in \"The Adventure of Silver Blaze,\" precisely when he realizes that the dog _didn't_ bark the night the wicked deed was done, hence the villain must have been very well known to the dog.\n\nFinally, none of these methods will be of use unless the researcher is willing to learn what the subject has to say about itself instead of trying to make the topic come out in some predetermined way.\n\nOne of the most remarkable scholars I have studied with was Professor Albrecht Goetze of Yale University. Before I met him, I had heard that when his comprehensive book on the archaeology of ancient Anatolia was updated and republished some twenty years after it was first written the revisions consisted mostly of adding references to newly excavated material that further demonstrated the conclusions he had drawn the first time. I wanted to find out how a scholar could become so sensitive to the data as that. At first I felt very frustrated in this because he didn't talk much about method. But gradually I began to realize that the key was on the wall of his office, in a little hand-lettered sign to which he would often refer, laughing uproariously. It said, in German, \"What do I care about my garbage from yesterday?\" Each new fact discovered made the picture necessarily look a little different, and he was quite happy to let go of old, outmoded views\u2014the garbage\u2014and move on to a new vision with a joyful laugh of discovery. He never let his ego get in the way of learning, by hanging on to an idea simply because it was his.\n\nWe women do not need to conjure a history for ourselves. Facts about women, their work, and their place in society in early times have survived in considerable quantity, if we know how to look for them. Far from being dull and in need of fanciful paint to make it more interesting, this truth is sometimes (as the saying goes) stranger than fiction, a fascinating tale in itself.\n\n1As it happened, the baskets of clay tablets, filed by subject, had fallen off their wooden shelves one by one as the palace, and the shelves, burned. Each basketful was thus scattered in a characteristic fan across the accruing rubble as the destruction progressed, back on that terrible day around 1200 B.C.\n\nThe excavations took place in 1939 and the early 1950s, mostly before the decipherment of Linear B, which was worked out largely between 1952 and 1956. Until the tablets were readable, and until Bennett realized that different scribes could be recognized by their handwriting and that each scribe typically handled only one or a few types of accounts, no one had any inkling how useful the exact findspots would turn out to be. Recording them all was just \"good excavation method.\" What greater triumph can one ask of it?\n\n2A word of warning: This is not an easy task that one can whip off in a few days or weeks. Linguistic reconstruction of sounds and of the words that ride on them, although very simple in principle, is extremely complex in practice because there are so many intricately interlocking details to consider. Similarly, to do these other types of comparative reconstruction well requires enormous amounts of time, patience, and accuracy.\n\n3But for at least one pair of archaeologists who grasped the subject at its core, and wrote about it splendidly, see Henri and Mrs. H. A. Frankfort, \"Myth and Reality,\" in _Before Philosophy_ , ed. H. and H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen (Harmondsworth, 1949), 11\u201336. More recently, see also Paul Barber, _Vampires_ , _Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality_ (New Haven, 1988). Mythology, too, is susceptible in part to the comparative method of reconstruction. See, e.g., C. Scott Littleton, _The New Comparative Mythology_ , 2d. ed. (Berkeley\/Los Angeles\/London, 1973).\n\n4Another type of perishable commodity where the experimental approach has been invaluable is in the very important industry of making salt from brine. Beatrice Hopkinson, who has done much of the work, has found that many of the most intractable questions about the artifacts received answers as soon as she began trying to make salt in the ancient way.\n\nIllustration and Credit List\n\nDrawings by author unless otherwise specified; sources further discussed in Sources\n\n0.1 Artifacts from Hallstatt salt mines on display in Natural History Museum, Vienna. Photo by author\n\n0.2 Replica of Hallstatt twill, woven by author\n\n0.3 Chart of archaeological eras\n\n1.1 Woodcut: Johann Weichard Valvasor, _Die ehre dess hertzogthums Crain_ (Laybach and N\u00fcrnberg, 1689), 321\n\n1.2 Diagram of twist\n\n1.3 Greek vase painting of woman spinning; British Museum\n\n1.4 Diagram of plain weave\n\n1.5 Diagram of shed and heddles on loom\n\n2.1 Venus of Lespugue; Mus\u00e9e de l'Homme, Paris\n\n2.2 Tree of Uralic languages\n\n2.3 Triple cord from Lascaux Cave, France; after Glory\n\n2.4 Map of area in which string skirts are attested in Palaeolithic and later times\n\n2.5 Four Stone Age figurines with string skirts, from Gagarino, \u0160ipintsi, Vin\u010da, and Crnokala\u010dka Bara\n\n2.6 String skirt from Bronze Age burial, Egtved, Denmark. Photograph courtesy of the National Museum, Copenhagen\n\n2.7 Burial of woman with string skirt, \u00d8lby, Denmark. After 1880 etching reprinted in P. V. Glob, _The Mound People_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), 44, fig. 15\n\n2.8 Four string skirts from ethnic costumes: Mordvin, Walachian, Macedonian, Albanian\n\n2.9 Sash from Drenok, Yugoslav Macedonia. Collection of P. Hempstead\n\n2.10 Tree of Indo-European languages\n\n3.1 Map of Neolithic and other early sites\n\n3.2 Neolithic relief of pregnant woman, \u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck. After Mellaart\n\n3.3 Neolithic figurine of woman giving birth, \u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck\n\n3.4 Neolithic figurine of reclining woman, Hal Saflieni, Malta\n\n3.5 Wooden model of Egyptian weaving shop, tomb of Meketre. Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Photography by the Egyptian Expedition, 1919\u20131920; Metropolitan Museum of Art\n\n3.6 Greek vase, ca. 560 B.C., showing women weaving on a warp-weighted loom. Attic lekythos, attributed to the Amasis Painter. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fletcher Fund, 1931: no. 31.11.10\n\n3.7 Reconstruction of Neolithic house, Tiszajen\u0151, Hungary. After Tringham\n\n3.8 Hallstatt-era urn with weaving scene, from Sopron. Drawing by A. Eibner-Persy; courtesy of Natural History Museum, Vienna\n\n3.9 Hungarian village girls. After anonymous travel photo taken ca. 1950\n\n3.10 Reweaving of Neolithic linen \"brocade\" from Irgenhausen. Photograph courtesy of the Swiss National Museum, Zurich (5752.P)\n\n4.1 Cretan orchard and vineyard. Photo by author, 1962\n\n4.2 Diagram of fiber-wetting bowl\n\n4.3 Village of Mykonos. Drawing from photo by author, 1962\n\n4.4 Minoan heart-spirals from tomb of Wahka II at Qau, and kilt in tomb of Menkheperraseneb at Thebes. After Petrie and Vercoutter\n\n4.5 Clay figurine of Minoan woman, Petsof\u00e1, Crete. After Myres\n\n4.6 Fresco of Minoan woman, Hagia Triada. F. Halbherr, \"Resti dell' Et\u00e0 Micenea: Scoperti ad Hagia Triada . . . ,\" _Monumenti Antichi_ 13 (1903), pl. 10\n\n4.7 Fresco of Minoan women gathering saffron. Xesti 3, Akrotiri, Thera\n\n4.8 Painted clay sarcophagus from Tanagra, Greece\n\n5.1 Netted bag or hat from Na\u1e25al \u1e24emar, Israel. Drawing courtesy of Tamar Schick, \"Na\u1e25al \u1e24emar Cave\u2014Cordage, Basketry and Fabrics,\" ' _Atiqot_ XVIII (1988), fig. 12\n\n5.2 Types of tunics\n\n5.3 First Dynasty Egyptian shirt from Tarkhan (UC 28614B'). Photograph courtesy of the Petrie Museum, University College London\n\n5.4 Types of women's uncut overwraps\n\n5.5 Bronze Age clay figurine from C\u00eerna, Romania, and recent Bulgarian folk costume of similar design\n\n5.6 Man wearing kilt and shoes with turned-up toes, on bronze stand from Episkopi-Kourion, Cyprus; Mycenaean clay vessel in shape of shoe, from Voula, Attica (National Museum, Athens)\n\n5.7 Turned-up-toed shoes from the Balkans. From the author's collection\n\n6.1 Minoan fresco of woman wearing \"sacred knot,\" from Knossos\n\n6.2 Egyptian linen chest painted to represent pavilion, tomb of Kha\n\n6.3 Minoan statuette of young woman holding snakes, Knossos\n\n6.4 Nineteenth-century Russian embroidery of Berehinia. After Stasov\n\n7.0 Cuneiform letter from K\u00fcltepe. After Stevens\n\n7.1 Map of ancient Near Eastern trade routes. Figures adapted from Sumerian mosaics from Ur and Mari\n\n7.2 Mesopotamian woman with large headdress, from Ishtar temple at Mari\n\n7.3 Neo-Hittite woman spinning, attended by scribe, on stele from Mara\u015f\n\n7.4 Mosaic of women spinning, from Mari\n\n7.5 Scenes of spinning and weaving from Mesopotamian cylinder seals (from Susa, Choga Mish, and unknown sites)\n\n7.6 Gold headdress of Sumerian queen of Ur\n\n8.1 Map of Egypt and Palestine\n\n8.2 Tempera copy (by Norman de Garis Davies) of Egyptian wall painting of a weaving shop, Twelfth Dynasty tomb of Khnemhotep, Beni Hasan. Photograph courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Rogers Fund, 1933: no. 33.8.16\n\n8.3 Three Egyptian spindles\n\n8.4 Scenes of textile work and acrobatics, from the tombs of Baqt and Khety, Beni Hasan. Percy Newberry, _Beni Hasan II_ (London, 1894), pl. 4, 13\n\n8.5 Sketch of Egyptian girl applying face paint, from papyrus in Turin Museum\n\n8.6 Statues of Sit Snefru (Metropolitan Museum) and of a Sumerian woman found at Tell Asmar\n\n8.7 Statuettes of Egyptian servingwomen carrying burdens and grinding grain. Metropolitan Museum and Archaeological Museum, Florence\n\n9.1 Bronze Age burial of a woman with a silver spindle, Tomb L, Alaca H\u00f6y\u00fck, Turkey. After Ko\u015fay\n\n9.2 Map of Greece, the Aegean, and western Anatolia\n\n9.3 Linear B personnel tablet Ab 555. After Bennett\n\n9.4 Scenes of spinning and weaving from Attic Greek vase of about 560 B.C., attributed to the Amasis Painter. Drawing courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fletcher Fund, 1931: no. 31.11.10\n\n9.5 Women making a warp, from Etruscan or Villanovan bronze pendant. After Govi\n\n9.6 Friezes from a Greek story cloth found at Kertch, Crimea (now in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg)\n\n10.1 Venus de Milo with arms restored in position for spinning. Drawing by Steven Escandon\n\n10.2 Perfume flask from Corinth showing contest of Athena and Arachne. Gladys Davidson Weinberg and Saul S. Weinberg, \"Arachne of Lydia at Corinth,\" _The Aegean and the Near East: Studies Presented to Hetty Goldman_ (New York, 1956), 262\u201367, fig. 1 (courtesy of G. Weinberg)\n\n10.3 Greek loom weight with owl spinning wool\n\n10.4 _Vily (rusalki)_ from Slavic folk art\n\n10.5 Aamu visitors to Egypt wearing \"coats of many colors\"; tomb of Khnemhotep, Beni Hasan. Percy E. Newberry, _Beni Hasan I_ (London, 1893), pl. 31\n\n11.1 Table of pharaohs of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty\n\n11.2 Theban townhouse of Thutnofer. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Norman de Garis Davies, \"The Townhouse in Ancient Egypt,\" _Metropolitan Museum Studies_ 1.2 (1928\u201329), 233\u201334, fig. 1\n\n11.3 Weaving shop with vertical looms, tomb of Neferronpet, Thebes. After Davies\n\n11.4 Tapestry coverlet, tomb of Kha, Thebes. After Schiaparelli\n\n11.5 Egyptian Nine Bows and Captives design in tapestry. After Daressy\n\n11.6 Young woman at her loom, accosted by suitors, on Greek vase. Q. Quagliati, \"Pisticci: tombe lucane con ceramiche greche\" _Notizie degli Scavi di Antichit\u00e0_ 1 (1904), 199, fig. 4\n\n11.7 Young girl spinning, on Greek vase. Hugo Bl\u00fcmner, \"Denkm\u00e4ler-Nachlese zur Technologie,\" _Arch\u00e4ologische Zeitung_ 35 (1877), pl. 6\n\nSources\n\nAll translations were done by the author unless otherwise specified. All line numbers for Greek texts are given according to the Oxford editions.\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\nThe plaid fragment from Hallstatt was published by H.-J. Hundt as No. 74 (p. 52) in \"Vorgeschichtliche Gewebe aus dem Hallst\u00e4tter Salzberg,\" _Jahrbuch des r\u00f6misch-germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz_ 14 (1967), 38\u201367.\n\nThe technical details of the actual remains of ancient cloth and textile tools mentioned throughout this book are discussed, with full references, in E. J. W. Barber, _Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in Europe and the Near East with Special Reference to the Aegean_ (Princeton, 1991), hereafter referred to as \"Barber 1991.\"\n\nCHAPTER 1: A TRADITION WITH A REASON\n\nThe quotations come from Judith Brown, \"Note on the Division of Labor by Sex,\" in _American Anthropologist 72_ (1970), 1075\u201376; George Foster, \"Sociology of Pottery,\" in _Man in Adaptation: The Biosocial Background,_ ed. Yehudi A. Cohen (Chicago, 1968), 323; Elise Boulding, _The Underside of History_ (Boulder, Colo., 1976), 147.\n\nThe story of Hargreaves is collected with other such by Bette Hochberg in her booklet _Spin Span Spun: Fact and Folklore for Spinners_ (Santa Cruz, Calif., 1979), 46 and 62.\n\nCHAPTER  2:  THE STRING REVOLUTION\n\nConcerning the spread of the Gravettian culture and the radiocarbon dates for it, see Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott, _Prehistoric Societies_ (New York, 1965), 71, and Grahame Clark, _World Prehistory in New Perspective,_ 3d ed. (Cambridge, 1977), 96\u201397.\n\nThe double interment is described by Ren\u00e9 Verneau in _Les Grottes de Grimaldi_ (Monaco, 1906), vol. 2,29, and illustrated in pl. II.\n\nFor Uralic words, see Bj\u00f6rn Collinder, _Fenno-Ugric Vocabulary_ (Hamburg, 1977).\n\nQuotation (translated from French) from A. Glory, \"D\u00e9bris de corde pal\u00e9olithique \u00e0 la Grotte de Lascaux,\" _M\u00e9moires de la Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 pr\u00e9historique fran\u00e7aise 5_ (1959), 137\u201338; drawing interpreted from fig. 2.\n\nThe quotation about camel pullers comes from G\u00f6sta Montell, \"Spinning Tools and Methods in Asia,\" in Vivi Sylwan, _Woollen Textiles of the Lou-lan People_ (Stockholm, 1941), 114.\n\nFor a summary of early New World textile remains, see Mary Elizabeth King, \"The Prehistoric Textile Industry of Mesoamerica,\" in _Junius B. Bird Pre-Columbian Textile Conference,_ ed. A. P. Rowe, E. P. Benson and A. L. Schaffer (Washington, D.C., 1979), 265\u201378.\n\nThe \"clothed\" figurines from Gagarino and Kostienki, respectively, were originally published by L. M. Tarasov, \"Paleoliticheskaja Stojanka Gagarino,\" _Materialy i Issledovanija po Arkheologii SSSR_ 131 (1965), 132\u201338 and figs. 14\u201316, and by P. P. Efimenko, _Kostenki I_ (Moscow and Leningrad, 1958), figs. 140\u201342, pis. 14\u201317 and 20. The drawing of the Venus of Gagarino is based on Tarasov, fig. 16. The drawings of figurines from \u0160ipintsi, Vin\u010da, and Crnokala\u010dka Bara are based on photos by the author and on Marija Gimbutas, _Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe_ (Berkeley, 1982), 46, photo 13; 49, fig. 8; 52, fig. 21.\n\nDetails of the string skirt from Egtved are taken from Elisabeth Munksgaard, _Oldtidsdragter_ (Copenhagen, 1974), 71.\n\nFor a rather strongly drawn picture of theories of early mating strategies, see Pierre van den Berghe, _Human Family Systems: An Evolutionary View_ (New York, 1979). I am personally grateful to Terrence Deacon for pointing out to me how important this problem may have been for the evolution of language itself.\n\nThe seduction scene from the _Iliad_ occurs in Book 14, lines 153\u2013351; the quotations are lines 181, 214\u201317, and 220\u201321. Ildik\u00f3 Lehtinen discusses Mordvin and Slavic aprons in _Naisten Korut: Keski-Ven\u00e4j\u00e4ll\u00e4 ja L\u00e4nsi-Sipiriassa_ (Helsinki, 1979); quotation from the English synopsis, p. 208.\n\nA thorough discussion of Romanian folk costumes, including pictures of the details mentioned here, can be found in Elena Secosan and Paul Petrescu, _Portul Popular de S\u0103rb\u0103toare din Rom\u00e2nia_ (Bucharest, 1984). Illustrations of such aprons also occur in Max Tilke, _Kost\u00fcmschnitte und Gewandformen_ (T\u00fcbingen, 1945), pl. 43; the drawing is based on one of these.\n\nSlavic lozenge symbols are discussed at length by A. K. Ambroz, \"On the Symbolism of Russian Peasant Embroidery of Archaic Type,\" _Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology_ 6.2 (1967), 22\u201336. Early phallic keys are mentioned in _Stepi evropejskoj chasti SSSR v skifo-sarmatskoje vremja,_ ed. A. I. Meljukova (Moscow, 1989), 136.\n\nThe Macedonian costume with string skirts came from the village of Drenok; I am grateful to Peggy Hempstead for bringing it to show me from her collection.\n\nAndromaqi Gjergji illustrates Albanian string skirts in _Veshjet Shqiptare n\u00eb Shekuj_ (Tiran\u00eb, 1988), 163 and among the unnumbered color plates; the drawing is based on one of these.\n\nA discussion of the Bronze Age textile fragments that might represent magical belts can be found in Barber 1991, 184. All the ancient string, textiles, and clothed figurines from Europe that are mentioned in this chapter receive technical discussion (and often illustration) in that publication.\n\nA brief description of the netted girdles from the Argolid occurs in the _Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation Catalogue_ (Nafplion, 1981), 20\u201321, whence the quotation.\n\nCHAPTER 3: COURTYARD SISTERHOOD\n\nStatistics on early populations and growth are discussed by Paul and Anne Ehrlich in _Population, Resources, Environment,_ 2d ed. (San Francisco, 1972), 5\u201312.\n\nThe early settlement of Ain Mallaha (Eynan) is discussed, with illustrations, by James Mellaart in _The Neolithic of the Near East_ (New York, 1975), 31\u201338. This book comprises a thorough compilation of all the data we have (or had in 1975) on the development of the Neolithic in that area. Much shorter but almost equally broad is James Mellaart's _Earliest Civilizations of the Near East_ (New York\/London, 1965), with copious illustrations. More specific information on the peculiar village of Suberde is given by Dexter Perkins, Jr., and Patricia Daly, \"A Hunters' Village in Neolithic Turkey,\" _Scientific American_ 219 (November 1968), 96\u2013106. Jarmo was initially published by Robert J. Braidwood and B. Howe in _Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan_ (Chicago, 1960), and its textile impressions by J. M. Adovasio: \"The Textile and Basketry Impressions from Jarmo,\" _Paleorient_ 3 (1975\u201377), 223\u201330, and \"Appendix: Notes on the Textile and Basketry Impressions from Jarmo\" in Linda S. Braidwood et al., _Prehistoric Archaeology along the Zagros Flanks_ (Chicago, 1983), 425\u201326. For \u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck and Hacilar in detail, see respectively James Mellaart's books _\u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck, a Neolithic Town in Anatolia_ (London\/New York, 1967) and _Excavations at Hacilar_ (Edinburgh, 1970).\n\nInformation about birth spacings is found in Albert J. Ammerman and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, _The Neolithic Transition and the Genetics of Populations in Europe_ (Princeton, 1984), 63\u201367.\n\nThe early stone sculptures from Malta are collected and shown by J. D. Evans in _The Prehistoric Antiquities of the Maltese Islands_ (London, 1971), the famous recumbent ones from Hal Saflieni being on pl. 36, No. 6\u201311.\n\nQuotations from Homer's _Odyssey:_ Laistrygonian woman\u2014Book 10, lines 112\u201313; Calypso\u2014Book 5, lines 61\u201362.\n\nThe chief work on the warp-weighted loom is Marta Hoffmann's carefully researched book, _The Warp-Weighted Loom_ (Oslo, 1964\/74).\n\nRuth Tringham discusses and gives an artist's reconstruction of the Neolithic house at Tiszajen\u0151 in her book _Hunters, Farmers, and Fishers of Eastern Europe, 6000\u20133000 B.C._ (London, 1971), 84\u201387 and fig. 14 (upon which the drawing is based).\n\nThe original analysis of the crossing wefts is found in H. C. Broholm and Margrethe Hald, \"Danske Bronzealders Dragter,\" _Nordiske Fortidsminder_ 2.5\/6 (Copenhagen, 1935), 215\u2013347; see especially 242, fig. 31. Reprinted and discussed in Barber 1991, 178.\n\nFor a general account of how the Swiss pile dwellers' culture is now reconstructed, see Hansj\u00fcrgen Muller-Beck, \"Prehistoric Swiss Lake Dwellers,\" _Scientific American_ 205 (December 1961), 138\u201347. A complete analysis of all the textiles and basketry was done by Emil Vogt, _Geflechte und Gewebe der Steinzeit_ (Basel, 1937).\n\nThe Neolithic textiles found in East Germany were finally published as well as possible by Karl Schlabow, \"Beitrage zur Erforschung der jungsteinzeitlichen und bronzezeitlichen Gewebetechnik . . . ,\" _Jahresschrift f\u00fcr mitteldeutsche Vorgeschichte_ 43 (1959), 101\u201320.\n\nA thorough (if controversial) analysis of the symbols on the Neolithic art of southeastern Europe has been done by Marija Gimbutas, _The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe_ (Berkeley, 1982). B. A. Rybakov has drawn some very similar conclusions by other methods in _Jazychestvo drevnikh Slavjan_ (Moscow, 1981).\n\nMany details of Hopi society can be found in Fred Eggan's classic book _Social Organization of the Western Pueblos_ (Chicago, 1950).\n\nThe peculiar evidence for bones deformed by too much grain grinding is given by They a Molleson, \"Seed Preparation in the Mesolithic: The Osteological Evidence,\" _Antiquity_ 63 (1989), 356\u201362.\n\nThe notion of a \"secondary products revolution\" was first proposed at length by Andrew Sherratt, \"Plough and Pastoralism: Aspects of the Secondary Products Revolution,\" in _Pattern of the Past: Studies in Honour of David Clarke,_ ed. I. Hodder, G. Isaac, and N. Hammond (Cambridge, England, 1981), 261\u2013305.\n\nConcerning \u00c7ay\u00f6n\u00fc Tepesi and early Neolithic metalworking, see Halet \u00c7ambel and Robert J. Braidwood, \"An Early Farming Village in Turkey,\" _Scientific American_ 222 (March 1970), 50\u201356.\n\nCHAPTER 4: ISLAND FEVER\n\nFor an up-to-date and very readable account of Aegean archaeology (including the site of Myrtos), see Peter Warren, _The Aegean Civilizations_ , 2d ed. (New York, 1989).\n\nDetails of the excavation of Myrtos appear in Peter Warren, _Myrtos: An Early Bronze Age Settlement in Crete_ (Oxford, 1972), the tubs, loom weights, etc. on pp. 26\u201327, 52\u201354, 64\u201365, 75,153, 207, 209, 243, 262\u201363.\n\nThe data for reconstructing the Minoan textile patterns are compiled in Barber 1991, 311\u201357; the zigzag belt is described on p. 197, and the ancient technology of dyeing on pp. 223\u201343.\n\nThe drawings of Minoan heart spirals are based on W. M. F. Petrie, _Antaeopolis: The Tombs of Qau_ (London, 1930), pl. 1, and Jean Vercoutter, _L'\u00c9gypte et le monde \u00e9g\u00e9en pr\u00e9hell\u00e9nique_ (Paris, 1956), pl. 26, No. 188. That of the clay figurine from Petsof\u00e1 is based on John L. Myres, \"Excavations at Palaikastro. II.13: The Sanctuary-Site of Petsof\u00e1,\" _Annual of the British School at Athens_ 9 (1902\u20131903), pl. 8.\n\nFragments of the fresco of the saffron gatherers were first published (in color) by the excavator, Spiridon Marinatos, in _Excavations at Thera VII_ (Athens, 1976). More of the fresco plus interpretative data (such as medicinal use today) can be found in Nanno Marinatos, _Art and Religion in Thera_ (Athens, 1984), especially 61\u201372.\n\nFor discussion of yellow as a women's color see E. J. W. Barber, \"The Peplos of Athena,\" in _Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens,_ ed. J. Neils (Princeton, 1992), 116\u201317. For Aristophanes' jokes, see most particularly his play _The Thesmophoriazousai._\n\nA lengthy discussion of the matrilineal vestiges found in Greek mythohistory can be found in Kenneth Atchity and E. J. W. Barber, \"Greek Princes and Aegean Princesses\" in _Critical Essays on Homer,_ ed. K. Atchity (Boston, 1987), 15\u201336.\n\nA major work on the interpretation of the archaic Cretan law code found at Gortyna is Ronald F. Willetts, _The Law Code of Gortyn_ (Berlin, 1967).\n\nA classic description of Hopi society is found in Fred Eggan, _Social Organization of the Western Pueblos_ (Chicago, 1950).\n\nSome of the Tanagra sarcophagi are illustrated by T. Spyropoulos, \"Terracotta Sarcophagi,\" _Archaeology 25_ (1972), 206\u201309.\n\nCHAPTER 5: MORE THAN HEARTS ON OUR SLEEVES\n\nThe net cap and other early textile finds at Na\u1e25al \u1e24emar in the Judean Desert were published by Tamar Schick, \"Perishable Remains from the Na\u1e25al \u1e24emar Cave,\" _Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society_ 19 (1986), 84\u201386 and 95*\u201397*. More of the finds are to be found in the exhibit catalog by Ofer Bar-Yosef, _A Cave in the Desert: Na\u1e25al \u1e24emar_ (Jerusalem, 1985).\n\nMost of the Neolithic statuettes from central Europe, along with the symbolism of their decoration, have been treated at length by Marija Gimbutas, _The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe_ (Berkeley, 1982).\n\nThe frozen tombs of Pazyryk (including the boots and the tattoos) are nicely described and illustrated by M. I. Artamonov, \"Frozen Tombs of the Scythians,\" _Scientific American_ 212.5 (May 1965), 100\u201309. Full treatment of the site and its rich finds can be found in S. I. Rudenko, _Frozen Tombs of Siberia,_ tr. M. W. Thompson (Berkeley, 1970).\n\nPerhaps the most complete picture book of Sumerian art, including a number of statues of women (and presently men) wearing wrapped tunics, is Andr\u00e9 Parrot's magnificent volume _Sumer: The Dawn of Art_ (New York, 1961), the best-known statuette of this type being one from Tell Asmar, shown on pp. 101 and 107.\n\nThe earliest complete garment known from Egypt was retrieved and published by Sheila Landi and Rosalind Hall, \"The Discovery and Conservation of an Ancient Egyptian Linen Tunic,\" _Studies in Conservation_ 24 (1979), 141\u201351.\n\nThe early Greek funerary urn containing a shaggy linen tunic and its belt was described by Mervyn Popham, Evi Touloupa, and L. H. Sackett, \"The Hero of Lefkandi,\" _Antiquity_ 56 (1982), 169\u201374.\n\nN. I. Veselovskij originally published the discovery of the Kuban chieftain and his clothing in the 1898 report of the Imperial Russian Archaeological Commission (29\u201339). His photograph of the plaid cloth has been reprinted, together with a partial translation and synopsis of Veselovskij's report, in Barber 1991, 168\u201369. The comparative reconstruction of costumes of this era is discussed in Barber 1991, 295, note 6, and in E. J. W. Barber, \"The Proto-Indo-European Notion of Cloth and Clothing,\" _Journal of Indo-European Studies_ 3 (1975), 294\u2013320.\n\nPerhaps the best source currently for Russian regional folk dress is the photo book _Russkij Narodnyj Kostjum,_ meaning \"Russian Folk Costume\" (Leningrad, 1984), published by the State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg from the costumes in its collection.\n\nThe Iron Age plaid skirt from Huldremose, Denmark, is illustrated in Elisabeth Munksgaard's pictorial history of ancient Scandinavian dress, _Oldtidsdragter_ (Copenhagen, 1974), figs. 97\u201398.\n\nThe Bronze Age statuettes from C\u00eerna, Romania, are published in V. Dumitrescu, _Necropola de Incinera\u0163ie din Epoca Bronzului de la C\u00eerna_ (Bucharest, 1961); the drawing is of statue No. 3.\n\nFor the ancient Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien's account of the Hsiung-Nu and other nomads, see section 110 of his book _Shih Chi_. The quotations given are from Burton Watson's translation, _Records of the Grand Historian of China_ (New York, 1961), vol. II, 159, 170.\n\nCHAPTER 6: ELEMENTS OF THE CODE\n\nRoman coding of clothes by rank is explained in some detail in the _Oxford Companion to Classical Literature,_ ed. Sir Paul Harvey (Oxford, England, 1969 edition), 110\u201311.\n\nThe quotations from Mary Kahlenberg come from her book _Textile Traditions of Indonesia_ (Los Angeles, 1977), 28.\n\nThe passage in Euripides' _Ion_ in which Ion builds the pavilion occurs in lines 1133\u201365, although the whole play revolves around textiles and is well worth reading for the insights it gives.\n\nDiscussion of Helen, Penelope, and the whole question of Greek story cloths and funeral cloths, along with reproductions of parts of the Black Sea ones, can be found in Barber 1991, 358\u201382 and figs. 7.11\u201313 and 16.15.\n\nFuller discussion of Athena's dress is found in Barber 1991, 380\u201382, and in E. J. W. Barber, \"The Peplos of Athena,\" in the exhibition catalog _Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens,_ ed. J. Neils (Princeton, 1992), 102\u201317.\n\n_National Geographic_ published a new set of color photographs of the entire Bayeux Tapestry on the nine hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Hastings (August 1966), 206\u201351.\n\nGeorge Melville Bolling presents his case for Andromache's rose magic in _\"Poikilos_ and _Throna,\" American Journal of Philology_ 79 (1958), 275\u201382.\n\nMarija Gimbutas's treatment of Neolithic egg and bird motifs (along with snakes, frogs, and fish) occurs in her book _Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe_ (Berkeley, 1982).\n\nA prehistoric bird-shaped ladle and much other related Slavic folk art are illustrated in Tamara Talbot Rice, _A Concise History of Russian Art_ (New York, 1963), No. 61, etc.\n\nMary Kelly has collected material on Berehinia, her festivals, and the associated textiles in \"Embroidery for the Goddess,\" _Threads Magazine_ (June-July 1987), 26\u201329, and in her book _Goddess Embroideries of Eastern Europe_ (Winona, Minn., 1989). Further material, also with copious illustration, can be found in A. K. Ambroz, \"On the Symbolism of Russian Peasant Embroidery of Archaic Type,\" _Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology_ 6.2 (1967), 22\u201336. The drawing is based on material from V. V. Stasov, _Russkij narodnyj ornament_ (St. Petersburg, 1872), part 1.\n\nTutankhamon's tunic is reproduced with discussion in Barber 1991, fig. 5.10.\n\nThe first quotation on Batak textiles comes from Harley Harris Bartlett, _The Labors of the Datoe and Other Essays on the Bataks of Asahan (North Sumatra)_ (Ann Arbor, 1973), 138, note 7; the others are from pp. 22\u201323 of Mattiebelle Gittinger's article \"Selected Batak Textiles: Technique and Function,\" _Textile Museum Journal_ 4.2 (1975), 13\u201326.\n\nCHAPTER 7: CLOTH FOR THE CARAVANS\n\nThe Old Assyrian correspondence between women of Ashur and their husbands in Anatolia is largely published and analyzed by Klaas R. Veenhof, _Aspects of Old Assyrian Trade and its Terminology_ (Leiden, 1972). The opening quotation is from BIN 6,7, translated on p. 113; the remaining quotations come respectively from pp. 114 (\"Kuluma . . .\"), 104 (\"let. . . ,\" \"if. . .\"), 110 (\"but . . . ,\" \"in . . .\"), 115 (\"About. . . ,\" \"Lamassi. . .\"). Material concerning the packing of donkeys is on pp. 70, 26\u201327; Akkadian cloths are on p. 98; Lamassi's letters on pp. 113\u201315. The cuneiform transcription is based on Ferris J. Stephens, _Old Assyrian Letters and Business Documents: Babylonian Inscriptions in the Collection of James B. Nies, Yale University,_ VI (New Haven, 1944), pl. 2, No. 7.\n\nConcerning milk, see Andrew Sherratt, \"Plough and Pastoralism: Aspects of the Secondary Products Revolution\" in _Pattern of the Past: Studies in Honour of David Clarke,_ ed. I. Hodder, G. Isaac, and N. Hammond (Cambridge, England 1981), 261\u2013305; also Margaret Ehrenberg, _Women in Prehistory_ (London, 1989), 101\u201302 for milkers.\n\nThe women's workrooms at Gordion were published by Keith de Vries, \"The Greeks and Phrygians in the Early Iron Age,\" in _From Athens to Gordion: the Papers of a Memorial Symposium for Rodney S. Young,_ ed. Keith de Vries (Philadelphia, 1980), 33\u201349.\n\n\u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck is described in full by James Mellaart, _\u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck, a Neolithic Town in Anatolia_ (London\/New York, 1967).\n\nThe material on women's dowries in Mesopotamia is culled from Stephanie Dalley, \"Old Babylonian Dowries,\" _Iraq_ 42 (1980), 53\u201374, the quotations being from pp. 61 and (in the note) 57.\n\nThe archives of Queen Iltani of Karana and the rulers of Mari are extensively discussed by Stephanie Dalley in _Mari and Karana_ (London, 1984), an extremely readable and graphic re-creation of the world of nineteenth-century-B.C. Mesopotamia. The direct quotations are from pp. 40 (\"I. . .\"), 103 (\"some . . . ,\" \"which . . .\"), 82 (\"The . . .\"), 70 (\"begs\"), 109 (\"the . . .\"), 102 (\"Now . . .\"), 43 (\"The . . .\"), and 53 (\"Send . . .\") respectively. The historical background is on pp. 37\u201340, the palace on 26, Iltani's workers on 53 and 103, blind workers on 72, slave singers and children's rations on 99, giving away slaves on 70 and 102, women's jobs on 72\u201374, 93,104,109\u201310, Iltani's sisters on 103, the dispute on 72, and the carpet on 52. Zimri-Lim's letter to Shibtu is quoted from B. F. Batto, _Studies on Women at Mari_ (Baltimore, 1974), 27. Men who dyed and finished cloth are discussed by H. Waetzoldt, _Die Neo-Sumerische Textilindustrie_ (Rome, 1972), 153\u201354, while felt making is treated by P. Steinkeller, \"Mattresses and Felt in Early Mesopotamia,\" _Oriens Antiquus_ 19 (1980), 79\u2013100, and Mesopotamian rug techniques by Barber 1991, 170\u201371.\n\nCylinder seals with representations of spinning and weaving (from Susa, Choga Mish, and unknown sites) are discussed and illustrated with references in Barber 1991, 56\u201357, 84.\n\nThe information on the workers of the two kings of Lagash was collated and analyzed by M. Lambert, \"Recherches sur la vie ouvri\u00e8re: Les ateliers de tissage de Lagash,\" _Archiv Orientalni_ 29 (1961), 422\u201343.\n\nThe quotations from Sir Leonard Woolley were taken from _Ur Excavations_ , 2 (London, 1934), 238\u201340.\n\nCHAPTER 8: LAND OF LINEN\n\nHerodotus relates his memoirs of Egypt in Book 2 of his _Histories,_ including sheep in section 37 and wool in 81.\n\nFor the Egyptian way of donning a kilt, see William Kelly Simpson, \"A Protocol of Dress: The Royal and Private Fold of the Kilt,\" _Journal of Egyptian Archaeology_ 74 (1988), 203\u201304.\n\nMiriam Lichtheim has published highly readable translations of many interesting texts in her paperback book _Ancient Egyptian Literature,_ Vol. 1, _The Old and Middle Kingdoms_ (Berkeley, 1975). Quotations were taken as follows: the tale of the little servant girl, pp. 221\u201322; the lament of the weaving rooms, 153; the satires of the trades, 188\u201389.\n\nThe Old Testament story of the fugitives under the flax is quoted from Joshua 2:6, while the twisting of flax is mentioned repeatedly in Exodus 35\u201339.\n\nTwo tombs from Beni Hasan, those of Baqt and Khety, picture the processes of spinning and weaving rather extensively. They were published by Percy E. Newberry, _Beni Hasan II_ (London, 1894), pl. 4 and 13. For all such scenes and for the extant patterned textiles, see Barber 1991.\n\nThe quotation from Grace Crowfoot comes from her very lucid pamphlet _Methods of Hand Spinning in Egypt and the Sudan. Bankfield Museum Notes,_ series 2, No. 12 (Halifax, 1931), p. 30.\n\nThe workmen's village at Amarna is published by T. E. Peet and Sir Leonard Woolley, _Tel el-Amarna, the City of Akhenaten_ (London, 1923); further discussion of the weaving remains occurs in Barber 1991, 88\u201389.\n\nInformation on women's professions was gleaned from the titles listed and discussed by William A. Ward, _Essays on Feminine Titles of the Middle Kingdom and Related Subjects_ (Beirut, 1986), 3\u201323. The quotation about the female gardener and winnower comes from p. 23. Further data on textile-related professions in the Middle Kingdom appear in William C. Hayes, _A Papyrus of the Late Middle Kingdom_ (Brooklyn, 1955), especially 105\u201308.\n\nThe ceiling of Hepzefa's tomb and other data concerning tombs with Aegean textile motifs on the ceilings are collected, discussed, and illustrated in Barber 1991, 330\u201357.\n\nThe leather canopy was published by Emil Brugsch, _Le Tente fun\u00e9raire de la Princesse Isimkheb_ (Cairo, 1889).\n\nWah's tomb linens, which are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, are described by William C. Hayes in _The Scepter of Egypt_ I (New York, 1953), 304. The quotation about the casket comes from p. 246, and that concerning Sit Snefru from p. 215.\n\nThe beaded dress of the Fifth Dynasty from Qau is illustrated and discussed, along with the leather-net dresses, by Rosalind Hall, \"Fishing-Net Dresses in the Petrie Museum,\" _Gottinger Miszellen_ 42 (1981), 37\u201343. The later ones from Kerma are described by George Reisner, _Excavations at Kerma_ IV (Cambridge, Mass., 1923), 103\u201304, 300, 303.\n\nCHAPTER 9: THE GOLDEN SPINDLE\n\nThe Alaca tombs were published by Hamit Z. Ko\u015fay in _Les Fouilles d'Alaca H\u00f6y\u00fck, 1937\u20131939_ (Ankara, 1951). The silver spindle is mentioned on p. 168 as an object of unknown use; the tomb drawing is based on pl. 191. Data and illustrations of the other Anatolian spindles are collected in Barber 1991, 60\u201362.\n\nThe passage from _Ion_ of Euripides is lines 1417\u201322.\n\nThe quotation from the _Iliad_ about Helen weaving comes from Book 3, lines 125\u201327; about Chryseis, from Book 1, lines 366\u201369 and 29\u201331. The quotations from the _Odyssey_ are as follows: the Taphian pirates, 15.427\u201329; Eurykleia and the servants, 22.422\u201323; the Phaiakians giving Odysseus clothes, 13.10 and 13.67; Helen giving Telemachus a robe, 15.105 and 15.126\u201328.\n\nHeinrich Schliemann's accounts of his excavation of Troy can be found in _Troy and Its Remains_ (London, 1875; reprinted, New York, 1968), and _Ilios: The City and Country of the Trojans_ (London, 1880). The clay box containing beads is discussed and pictured in the latter book on pp. 360\u201361. The subsequent discovery of gold beads in the fill around a loom was published by Carl Blegen, John Caskey, Marion Rawson, and Jerome Sperling, _Troy: General Introduction: The First and Second Settlements_ I (Princeton, 1950), 350\u201351. These and further finds of ancient beadwork are collected in Barber 1991, 171\u201373.\n\nFor the reexcavation of Troy, see Carl Blegen, John Caskey, Marion Rawson, and Jerome Sperling, _Troy_ I (Princeton, 1950); for the loom and beads, see vol. I pp. 350\u201351 and fig. 461.\n\nThe analysis of the Linear B archives and of the economic reality represented is an ongoing process involving many scholars. The most comprehensive and readable treatment is that done by the decipherers of the script, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, _Documents in Mycenaean Greek,_ 2d ed. (Cambridge, England, 1973). Much of the synopsis given here can be gleaned from that source. See also John T. Killen, \"The Knossos o-pi Tablets,\" _Atti e memorie del 1.o congresso internazionale di Micenologia_ (Rome, 1968), 636\u201343. The drawing of Pylos tablet Ab 555 is based on Emmett L. Bennett Jr., _The Pylos Tablets_ (Princeton, 1955), 57.\n\nDetails on fleece weights, flock sizes, and other technical aspects of the Mycenaean (and medieval English) wool industry were taken from John T. Killen, \"The Wool Industry of Crete in the Late Bronze Age,\" _Annual of the British School at Athens_ 59 (1964), 1\u201315; John T. Killen, \"Minoan Woolgathering: A Reply II,\" _Kadmos_ 8 (1969), 23\u201338; and J. P. Olivier, \"La S\u00e9rie Dn de Cnossos,\" _Studia Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici 2_ (1967), 71\u201393. Work on the status of apprentices in particular is published by Killen in \"Two Notes on the Knossos Ak Tablets,\" _Minos_ 12 (1972), 423\u201340.\n\nConsiderable information on textile production in northwestern Europe in the Middle Ages occurs in Edouard Perroy, _Le travail dans les r\u00e9gions du nord du XIe au d\u00e9but du XIVe si\u00e8cle_ (Paris, 1963). The quotation concerning the Maltese textile industry came from H. Bowen-Jones, J. C. Dewdney, and W. B. Fischer, eds., _Malta, Background for Development_ (Durham, England, 1961), 124.\n\nThe evidence for the evolution of sheep fleece is discussed fully in Michael Ryder's tome _Sheep and Man_ (London, 1983). A much briefer account of it and of the role of shears can be found in Barber 1991, 20\u201330, along with an analysis of the associated archaic vocabulary on 260 ff.\n\nThe Etruscan pendant was published by Christiana Morigi Govi, \"Il Tintinnabulo della 'Tomba degli ori' dell'arsenale militare di Bologna,\" _Archeologia Classica_ 23 (1971), 211\u201335; the drawing is based on pl. 53\u201354. Marta Hoffmann's book _The Warp-Weighted Loom_ (Oslo, 1974) contains her descriptions and pictures of the warp-weighted loom in use as well as of the warp found in the bog at Tegle, Norway (p. 169, fig. 81) and the Lappish woman weaving a heading band for her warp-weighted loom (p. 66, fig. 26).\n\nE. C. Clark considers the problem of Turkish rug weavers in \"The Emergence of Textile Manufacturing Entrepreneurs in Turkey, 1804\u20131968,\" Ph.D. thesis, Princeton University, 1969, 54. The development of textiles in Crete is discussed at length in Barber 1991, 311\u201357, and (Iron Age) 371\u201372.\n\nConcerning grave mounds: Patroklos' funeral is described in Book 23 of the _Iliad,_ and Beowulf's mound in lines 3156 ff. of _Beowulf._ (See, for example _Beowulf,_ tr. M. Alexander. [Harmondsworth, 1973], 151.) A brief account of Gordion appears in Seton Lloyd, _Early Highland Peoples of Anatolia_ (London and New York, 1967), 124\u201335.\n\nThe story cloths from Kertch are discussed and illustrated (with Russian references) in Barber 1991, 206\u201309.\n\nCHAPTER 10: BEHIND THE MYTHS\n\nOvid tells the story of Philomela and Prokne in his long poem, _Metamorphoses,_ Book 6, lines 424\u2013674, and that of Arachne's contest with Athena in Book 6, lines 1\u2013145.\n\nRealgar and the mineral called \"dragon's blood\" are discussed by H. Quiring, \"Vorphonizischer K\u00f6nigspurpur und _uqn\u00fb_ -Stein,\" _Forschung und Fortschritte_ 21\u201323 (1945\u201347), 98\u201399.\n\nFor the archaeology and folklore of nettles, see Margrethe Hald, \"The Nettle as a Culture Plant,\" _Folk-Liv_ 6 (1942), 28\u201349. Perhaps the most famous tale involving nettles is that of Hans Christian Anderson called \"The Wild Swans.\" But Hald also mentions Lithuanian and Hungarian tales.\n\nAn entire book has been written on the subject of _The Spinning Aphrodite_ by Elmer G. Suhr (New York, 1969). The quotation concerning the magical effect of spinning comes from Grace M. Crowfoot, _Methods of Hand Spinning in Egypt and the Sudan. Bankfield Museum Notes,_ series 2, No. 12 (Halifax, 1931), 11, and is attributed to C. G. and B. Z. Seligman.\n\nAriadne and the cult involving couvade are mentioned by Plutarch in section 20 of his _Life of Theseus._\n\nThe short quotations from Hesiod come from _Works and Days,_ lines 60\u201365, the longer one from _The Theogony,_ lines 573\u201376.\n\nFor a fuller discussion of the nature of Athena, see Kenneth Atchity and E. J. W. Barber, \"Greek Princes and Aegean Princesses,\" _Critical Essays on Homer,_ ed. Kenneth Atchity (Boston, 1987), 15\u201336. For Greek weaving vocabulary, see Barber 1991.\n\nThe quotation concerning Mokosh is taken from Marija Gimbutas, _The Slavs_ (London\/New York, 1971), 168. The geographical differences in the _vily_ are discussed by Linda J. Ivanits, _Russian Folk Belief_ (Armonk\/London, 1989), 75\u201376.\n\nMany of the early representations of women dancing at the Rusalii festivals are reproduced by B. A. Rybakov, \"The _Rusalii_ and the God Simargl-Pereplut,\" _Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology_ 6.4 (1968), 34\u201359.\n\nThe translated sections from the story of the Frog Princess are taken from the first of the three versions collected in the mid-nineteenth century by Aleksandr Afanasiev, published by him in _Narodnyje Russkije Skazki_ (\"Russian Folk Tales\") as No. 267. This is also the version found in the abridged translation by N. Guterman in _Russian Fairy Tales_ (New York, 1973). The third and longest version (No. 269) is close to the one used by the Russian artist I. A. Bilibin in his beautiful illustrated edition of the tale.\n\nFor scholarship about the \"coat of many colors,\" see Rabbi J. H. Hertz, _The Pentateuch and the Haftorahs_ (London, 1976), 142. For the tomb paintings, see Percy E. Newberry, _Beni Hasan I_ (London, 1893), pl. 28, 30\u201331.\n\nThe quotations from Exodus come from 35:25\u201326 and 36:8, that concerning Goliath's spear comes from 1 Samuel 17:7, and the passage from Revelation comes from 16:16.\n\nThutmose III's account of the captives and other booty from the battle of Megiddo is partly translated in James H. Breasted, _Ancient Records of Egypt_ II (Chicago, 1906), 187\u201388.\n\nCHAPTER 11: PLAIN AND FANCY, NEW OR TRIED AND TRUE\n\nThe story of the East Indian prints is collected with other such by Bette Hochberg in her booklet _Spin Span Spun: Fact and Folklore for Spinners_ (Santa Cruz, Calif., 1979), 46 and 62.\n\nThutnofer's townhouse is pictured and discussed by Norman de Garis Davies, \"The Townhouse in Ancient Egypt,\" _Metropolitan Museum Studies_ 1.2 (1929), 233\u201355. Neferronpet's titles are found in Alan Gardiner and A. E. P. Weigall, _A Topographical Catalogue of the Private Tombs of Thebes_ (London, 1913), 28, Tomb No. 133, while Davies published drawings of the weaving scene in _Seven Private Tombs at Kurnah_ (London, 1948), pl. 35 (on which the author's drawing is based). What can be gleaned about Neferhotep's weaving scene is brought together by Henry Ling Roth, _Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms. Bankfield Museum Notes,_ series 2, No. 2 (Halifax, 1913; 2d ed. 1951), 15\u201316, with illustration.\n\nAll the pieces of fancy Egyptian cloth from the Eighteenth Dynasty are discussed at length both by Barber 1991, 153\u201362 and by Elizabeth Riefstahl, _Patterned Textiles in Pharaonic Egypt_ (Brooklyn, 1944). Both works contain extensive bibliographies. The Amarna weaver's waste and the Gurob spindle are also discussed in Barber 1991, 49, note 6, and 64\u201366, with references. The drawing of the Nine Bows and Captives tapestry fragments was based on the photograph in G. Daressy, _Fouilles de la Vall\u00e9e des Rois_ (Cairo, 1902), pl. LVII, no. 24987. The drawing of Kha's bedspread was based on E. Schiaparelli, _La Tomba intatta dell' Architetto Cha_ (Turin, 1927), 131 fig. 114.\n\nHoward Carter describes his discovery of Tutankhamon's tomb in vivid detail in his book with A. C. Mace, _The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen_ (New York: Dover, 1970), a reprint of _The Tomb of Tut'Ankh'Amen . . ._ (London, 1923), vol. 1. The quotations come from pp. 95\u201396 of the reprint.\n\nA brief account of the Mitanni princesses occurs in John A. Wilson, _The Culture of Ancient Egypt_ (Chicago, 1951), 202, 230. The accusations against Paneb are published by Jaroslav \u0108ern\u00fd, \"Papyrus Salt 124 (British Museum 10055),\" _Journal of Egyptian Archaeology_ 15 (1929), 243\u201358; the quotation is from p. 246. Other information about slaves and workers was drawn from J. J. Janssen, _Commodity Prices from the Ramessid Period_ (Leiden, 1975), and about Deir el-Medinah in particular from Jaroslav \u0108ern\u00fd, _A Community of Workmen at Thebes in the Ramesside Period_ (Cairo, 1973).\n\nThe trial of Erenofre was published by Alan Gardiner as \"A Lawsuit Arising from the Purchase of Two Slaves,\" _Journal of Egyptian Archaeology_ 21 (1935), 140\u201346.\n\nApollonia's loom is discussed by Diane Lee Carroll, _Looms and Textiles of the Copts_ (Seattle, 1988), 42\u201344.\n\nThe quotation from Lysias' speech \"On the Slaying of Eratosthenes\" comes from sections 23\u201326 (Oxford ed.). Xenophon's story about Socrates and Isomachos occurs in his _Economics,_ Book 7; the quotations are from sections 5\u20136, 32\u201334, 35\u201336, and 41, respectively. The story of Aristarchos and his female relatives is told in his _Memorabilia,_ Book 2; the quotations are from sections 2, 3\u20135, and 12.\n\nThe material for studying professional textile work in Athens is to be found in Wesley Thompson, \"Weaving: A Man's Work,\" _Classical World_ 75 (1982), 217\u201322, and in A. W. Gomme, _The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C._ (Oxford, England, 1933); the quotations are from pp. 42 and 21.\n\nThe Homeric quotation about the wool worker comes from the _Iliad,_ 12.433\u201335.\n\nPlutarch talks about \"the Spartan life\" at length in his _Life of Lykourgos;_ the quotation is from section 14. The quotation from _Moralia_ comes from section 241d.\n\nConcerning the peplos of Athena, see John M. Mansfield, \"The Robe of Athena and the Panathenaic Peplos\" (Ph.D. thesis, University of California, 1985); Barber 1991, 361\u201382; and E. J. W. Barber, \"The Peplos of Athena,\" in _Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens,_ ed. Jenifer Neils (Princeton, 1992), 103\u201318. For the festival more generally, see Erika Simon, _Festivals of Attica_ (Madison, Wis., 1983).\n\nCHAPTER 12: POSTSCRIPT: FINDING THE INVISIBLE\n\nThe story of Petrie and Am\u00e9lineau is told more fully by Michael Hoffman in _Egypt before the Pharaohs_ (New York, 1979), 268\u201369. The quotation is from W. M. F. Petrie, _The Royal Tombs of the Earliest Dynasties_ (London, 1901), Part II 2.\n\nThe First Dynasty Egyptian shirt was published by Sheila Landi and Rosalind Hall, \"The Discovery and Conservation of an Ancient Egyptian Linen Tunic,\" _Studies in Conservation_ 24 (1979), 141\u201351.\n\nEmmett Bennett Jr.'s work on the filing systems at Pylos appeared as \"The Find-Spots of the Pylos Tablets\" in _Mycenaean Studies: Proceedings of the 3rd International Colloquium_ . . . , ed. E. L. Bennett Jr. (Madison, Wis., 1964), 241\u201352.\n\nThe Hallstatt cloth with lice in it was published as No. 34 (p. 141) by H.-J. Hundt in \"Vorgeschichtliche Gewebe aus dem Hallst\u00e4tter Salzberg,\" _Jahrbuch des r\u00f6misch-germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz_ 7 (1960), 126\u201350.\n\nFor linguistic analyses of Greek (including Mycenaean) textile terms, see Barber 1991, 260\u201384.\n\nThe loom weight experiment was described by Avigail Sheffer in \"The Use of Perforated Clay Balls on the Warp-weighted Loom,\" _Tel Aviv_ 8 (1981), 81\u201383. The quotation is from p. 82.\n\nThe basic book on applying symmetry analysis to cultural material is Dorothy K. Washburn and Donald W. Crowe, _Symmetries of Culture_ (Seattle, 1988). The application to Cretan motifs appears briefly in E. Barber, \"Reconstructing the Ancient Aegean\/Egyptian Textile Trade,\" _Textiles in Trade: Proceedings of the Textile Society of America, Biennial Symposium_ (Washington, D.C., 1990), 104\u201311.\n\nIndex\n\nPage numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text.\n\nd = definition, i = illustration, m = map, t = table\/chart\n\nAamu, 253i\n\nAbraham, 252\n\nAbydos, 187m, 288\n\nAcemh\u00f6y\u00fck, 168, 168m\n\nAchaians, 153, 211, 215\n\nAchilles, 124, 228\n\nacid: as preservative, 56, 86, 90\n\nacquisitiveness, 54, 72, 275\n\nAcropolis, 154, 242, 282, 297\n\nAdam and Eve, 252\n\nAdana, 187m, 202, 203i\n\nAegean, 73m, 102\u20133, 105, 108, 110, 113\u201317, 122, 124\u201325, 152, 162, 199, 209m, 214, 216\u201318, 227\u201328, 237, 241\u201344, 281\u201382\n\nAeschylus, 233\n\nAfghanistan, 150, 154\n\nAfrica, 54, 76, 102, 131, 141, 165, 198, 238\n\nAgamemnon, 215\n\nAin Mallaha, 73, 73m\n\nAinu, 239\n\nAkhenaton, 195, 260t, 266\u201367\n\nAkkad, 168m\n\nAkkadian, 132, 173\n\nAlaca H\u00f6y\u00fck, 207\u20139, 208i, 209m, 211, 214\n\nAlbania, 55m, 62i, 65, 155, 239\n\nAlbanian (language), 66\u201367, 67i\n\nalkali: as preservative, 90\n\nAlkinoos, 120\u201321, 124\n\nAlkmene, 240\n\nAlps, 18, 100\n\nAltai, 131\n\nAmarna, 187m, 195, 266\u201367\n\nAm\u00e9lineau, E., 288\n\nAmenhotep II, 259, 260t, 263\n\nAmenhotep III, 260t, 264, 266, 270\n\nAmericas, 27, 41, 53, 66\u201367, 95\u201396, 121, 125, 127, 142, 148, 154, 186, 199, 228\n\nAmish, 125\n\nAmon (Amun), 190\u201391, 261, 271\n\nanalogy, 94, 161\u201363, 235, 238\u201339, 251\n\nAnatolia(n), 67i, 95, 136, 166\u201375, 168m, 180, 184, 209m, 211, 224, 254, 294, 299\n\nAndria, 278\n\nAndromache, 155, 212\n\nankh, 157, 269\n\nAphrodite, 60\u201361, 236\u201340, 237i, 281\n\nApollo, 153, 240\n\nApollonia, 273\n\napprentice, 181, 224\n\nAqba-Hammu, 175, 179\n\nArachne, 240\u201341, 241i\n\nArete, 120\u201321\n\nArgos (Argolid), 65, 209m, 214, 216\n\nAriadne, 124, 239\n\nAristarchos, 278\u201380, 283\n\nAristophanes, 116\n\nArmageddon, 187m, 255\u201356, 259\n\nArmenia(n), 67i, 167, 168m\n\narrephoroi, 282\n\nAshur, 168m, 169\u201370, 173\u201374, 178\n\nAsia, 27, 41, 53, 131, 150, 161, 228, 290\n\nAssyria, 164, 168m, 173, 175\n\nAssyrians, 26t, 168\u201371, 184\n\nAsyut, 199\n\nAtchity, K., 119\n\nAthena, 101, 116, 119\u201320, 151, 157, 229, 239\u201344, 241i, 244i, 281\u201382, 285, 297\u201398\n\nAthens, 116, 119, 149, 154, 209m, 212\u201313, 221, 229, 232, 239, 241\u201344, 273\u201383, 297\n\nAtropos, 235\n\nAttica, 144i\n\nAustria, 18, 21, 290\n\nBabylon, 168m, 175, 180\n\nBabylonia(ns), 26t, 168m, 171, 173\n\nBacchus, 240\n\nBalkans, 32i, 56, 61, 93\u201394, 103, 117, 130\u201331, 137, 139, 141\u201342, 144\u201345, 243, 254\n\nBall, J., 252\n\nBaltic, 66, 67i, 73m, 167\n\nBanat, 61, 140\n\nBaqt, 196i\n\nBarber, E., 119\n\nBarber, P., 292\n\nBatak, 160\u201361\n\nBayeux Tapestry, 155, 229\n\nbeads, 43, 91, 96, 130, 183, 202, 204i, 210, 212\u201314\n\nBedouin, 80, 293\n\nBeni Hasan, 187m, 191i, 196i, 253i\n\nBennett, E., 289\n\nBeowulf, 228\n\nBerehinia, 157, 159i\n\nBible, 42, 130, 184, 190, 192, 245, 252\u201356, 294\n\nbirds, 48, 156, 159i, 232\u201333, 240, 244i, 244, 248i, 248, 251\n\nBlack Sea, 154, 230\n\nblack, 62, 102, 111, 128, 138, 150, 198, 203, 230i, 252, 264\n\nbody paint, 78i, 93, 131, 148\n\nbog finds, 86\u201387, 140, 223\n\nBoiling, G., 155\n\nbones deformed by work, 96, 204i\n\nborders, 23, 70, 92\u201393, 110, 113\u201314, 167, 223\u201326, 266i, 269, 295\n\nBo wen-Jones, H., 218\n\nbreaking (braking), 85d, 90\n\nbreast feeding, 29\u201330, 59, 181, 275\n\nbride, 59, 124, 152, 162, 226, 233, 240, 247, 249\u201351, 275\n\nBritain, 21, 99, 102, 136, 139, 228\n\nBroholm, H., 86\n\nBront\u00eb, C, 33\n\nBronze Age, 24, 26t, 27d, 56\u201358, 63\u201364, 68\u201369, 84, 86, 95, 99, 101\u201328, 132, 137, 141\u201342, 144, 159, 161, 166\u2013229, 252\u201372, 281, 283, 285\n\nBrown, J., 29\u201330, 33, 206\n\nBr\u00fcnhilde, 229\n\nBulgaria, 61, 141, 142i\n\nburial mounds, 228\u201329\n\nByzantium, 248\n\nCairo, 187m, 195\n\nCalypso, 87\n\nCambodia, 154\n\ncarding, 22, 36d\n\nCarnarvon, Lord, 268\n\nCarpathians, 73m, 100\n\ncarrying, 45, 48, 54, 76, 139\n\nCarter, H., 268\u201369\n\n\u00c7atal H\u00fcy\u00fck, 73m, 77, 78\u201379i, 80, 167\n\nCaucasus, 67, 73m, 98\u2013100, 137\u201338, 256\n\n\u00c7ay\u00f6n\u00fc Tepesi, 98\n\nCeltic, 67i, 137\n\nCelts, 19i, 21, 137, 139\n\nchanged later form, 65, 67\u201368, 138, 245, 255, 291\n\nchildbearing, 29, 44i, 59, 62, 65\u201366, 69, 72, 76\u201377, 78\u201379i, 150, 151, 155\u201356, 160\u201361, 216, 235\u201336, 238\u201339, 242, 245, 247, 273\u201375, 277, 281, 285, 294\n\nChina, 27, 128, 132, 143\n\nChinese, 38, 53, 165\n\nChristians, 151, 245, 248\n\nChristie, A., 286\n\nchronology, 25, 26 (chart), 211\n\nChryseis, 215\u201316\n\nC\u00eerna, 73m, 141, 142i\n\nCleopatra, 201\n\ncloth beam, 81, 82i\n\nclothing: archaic, 125\u201326, 139; as booty, 137, 255, 290; as gift, 154, 175, 179\u201380, 180, 209, 226, 233, 270, 282\u201383; as social signal, 60\u201362, 69, 126, 128, 132, 146\u201353, 291; basic notions of, 127, 133, 138, 141, 145, 291; earliest, 43, 54, 128\u201331, 129i, 134, 135i, 137, 198, 288; modern similar to ancient, 61, 87, 88\u201389i, 127, 138\u201342, 142i, 144\u201345, 155; types of: apron, 61, 62i, 113, 139\u201341, 140i, 144, 155; belt (sash, girdle), 55, 60\u201361, 63, 64i, 65, 68, 78, 83, 110, 113, 129, 132\u201334, 137, 140, 142\u201343, 159\u201360, 162, 183\u201384, 208, 224, 240, 243, 282; blouse, 58, 140; bodice, 110, 114, 141; chemise, 61, 125, 137d, 139\u201342, 162, 229, 235, 248; cloak, 86, 134, 139, 142, 155, 211, 226, 229, 275, 277, 279; coat of many colors, 252\u201353, 253i; coat without seam, 255; headdress, 19i, 21, 116, 129i, 130, 150, 155, 171, 172i, 182i, 204; jacket, 144; jumper, 134, 140i, 141, 201\u20132, 203i; kilt, 21, 110, 134, 139, 141, 144i, 144, 150, 186, 201, 224; loincloth, 110, 141, 144, 224; overwrap, 68, 137\u201342, 140i, 162; shirt, 134, 135i, 136, 139\u201340, l42d, 144, 234, 249, 279, 288\u201389; shoes, 56, 144\u201345, 144i, 224, 269; skirt, 110, 114, 128, 133\u201334, 139\u201341, 140i, 157, 202, 261; sleeve, 133\u201337, 135i, 141, 183, 248i, 248, 250\u201351, 269; string skirt, 44i, 44\u201345, 54\u201370, 55m, 56\u201358i, 62i, 64i, 83, 128, 140, 150, 155, 240, 295; trousers, 142\u201344; runic, 68, 86, 118, 125, 132\u201339, 134i, 142, 157\u201358, 162, 202, 203\u20134i, 226\u201327, 229, 252\u201353, 264, 269\u201370, 279; vest, 68, 290\n\nCollinder, B., 47\n\ncolorfast, 114, 131, 198, 210\n\nColumbus, 66\u201367\n\ncombing, 22, 36d, 63, 85, 171, 172, 218\u201320, 224, 277\n\ncommunal work, 18, 23, 85\u201389, 95, 107, 222\u201323\n\ncomparative reconstruction, 47\u201351, 138, 291\u201392, 298\n\ncompatibility with child care, 29\u201330, 33, 54, 75, 95, 98\u201399, 165\u201366, 206, 257, 283, 294\n\nCopenhagen: National Museum, 57i\n\nCorinth, 209m, 214, 233, 240, 241i\n\nCorsica, 239\n\ncosmetics, 200\u2013201, 201i, 220, 274\u201375\n\ncotton, 31, 33\u201335, 61, 133, 161, 258\n\ncourting, 88, 117, 276i, 284i\n\ncouvade, 239\n\ncreation, 160\u201361, 236\u201338, 251\n\nCrete, 101\u201325, 158i, 209m, 210, 224\u201325, 239, 297\n\nCrimea, 229, 230i\n\nCrnokala\u010dka Bara, 55m, 56i\n\nCroatian, 67i, 89, 117, 148\n\nCrowfoot, G., 194\n\nCyprus, 114, 144, 187m\n\nDaedalus, 124\n\nDalley, S., 172, 176, 178\n\nDana\u00eb, 240\n\ndancing, 87, 88i, 89, 111, 112i, 117, 124, 156, 205, 247\u201351, 248i, 286, 292\n\nDanube, 73m, 90\u201391, 93, 141, 236, 242\n\ndarning, 40d, 41\n\nDeianeira, 233\n\nDeir el-Medinah, 271\n\nDelphi, 153\n\nDenmark, 18, 25, 30\u201331, 56\u201358, 70, 86, 140, 160\n\nDickens, C, 33\n\ndistaff, 37d, 184, 238, 248, 273, 298d\n\ndivorce, 120, 171\u201372 domestication, 25, 47\u201348, 53, 72\u201377, 96\u201397, 101, 132, 164\n\ndowry, 171\u201372\n\ndraft spinning, 35\u201336, 247, 298d\n\ndragon's blood, 233\u201334\n\nDrenok, 55m, 64i\n\ndyes, 22, 91, 98, 103, 107, 109, 113\u201315, 127, 132, 161, 176, 198, 202, 210, 220, 223, 225, 230, 262\u201364, 266\u201367, 277, 289\n\nedging: _see_ border\n\neggs, 48\u201349, 84, 94\u201395, 156\u20137, 251, 290\n\nEgtved, 55m, 57i, 58, 70\n\nEgypt, 23, 26t, 27, 80i, 81, 83, 102, 104, 106, 109\u201310, 114, 128, 132, 134\u201336, 144, 150, 152, 168m, 185\u2013207, 187m, 217, 252\u201356, 259\u201373, 288, 294, 298; Coptic, 255, 288; Middle Kingdom, 26t, 80i, 110i, 186, 188, 191i, 193i, 196i, 198\u2013206, 203\u20134i, 252, 253i, 260; New Kingdom, 26t, 152i, 190, 193i, 199\u2013200, 201i, 206, 259\u201373, 294, 296; Old Kingdom, 26t, 134, 186, 198\u201399, 202, 204i, 288\n\nEnglish, 46, 67i, 68, 132, 137, 213, 241, 245, 290\n\nentertainment, 18, 86\u201389, 118, 123, 178, 196i, 206\n\nEpictetus, 147\n\nEpiskopi-Kourion, 144i\n\nEratosthenes, 273\u201374\n\nErechtheum, 242\n\nErenofre, 271\n\nergastinai, 154, 282\n\nEtruscans, 221\u201322, 222i\n\nEuphrates, 168m, 172, 175, 179\n\nEurasia, 47, 138, 143\n\nEuripides, 153, 210, 234\n\nEuropa, 240\n\nEurykleia, 224\n\nFaiyum, 187m, 267\n\nfate as spun thread, 235\u201336, 242\n\nFates, 235\u201336, 242, 245\u201346\n\nfertility (female), 59, 63, 77, 94\u201395, 149, 155\u201357, 161\u201362, 241, 247\u201348\n\nfiber-wetting bowl, 104, 106i, 191i, 192, 254\n\nFinland, 69, 87, 128, 222\n\nFinnish, 46, 47i, 61, 247\n\nfish, 49, 102, 131, 157, 248i, 248, 251\n\nfixative, 114, 220\n\nflags, 114, 148\n\nflax, 31, 34, 53, 80, 83, 85, 90, 102, 106, 132, 137, 184, 189\u201392, 206, 218, 234\u201335, 246\u201347, 259, 277\n\nfood preparation, 24, 30, 49\u201350, 54, 83\u201384, 95\u201397, 102, 107, 178, 184, 188, 195, 205, 208, 221, 249, 271, 273, 277, 279, 285, 294\n\nFoster, G., 31\n\nFrance, 21, 43\u201345, 51, 165, 218, 220, 245, 258, 271, 285, 288\n\nFrankfort, Henri and H.A., 292\n\nFrench, 39, 46, 67, 67i, 137, 213, 239, 245, 291\n\nFrog Princess, 249\u201351\n\nfrogs, 157, 249\u201351\n\nGagarino, 55, 55m, 56i, 60\n\ngarment: _see_ clothing\n\nGaskill, E., 33\n\nGerman, 67i, 68, 213\n\nGermanic, 67i, 227, 229, 236\n\nGermany, 21, 56, 93, 156, 160, 234\n\nGezer, 187m, 254\n\nGiants, 120, 154, 282\n\nGimbutas, M., 155\n\n_Giselle_ , 156\n\nGittinger, M., 161\n\nGlory, A., 51\u201353\n\nGoetze, A., 299\n\nGoliath, 254\u201355\n\nGomme, A., 278\n\nGordion, 166, 209m, 229\n\nGorgon, 210\n\nGortyna, 120\n\ngrain preparation, 25, 73, 96\u201397, 122, 165\u201366, 177\u201378, 188, 204i, 205\u20136, 215, 271\u201372, 274, 279, 290\n\nGravettian, 26t, 43\u201344, 54, 55m, 56, 61, 69\n\nGreece, 23, 26t, 27, 31, 65, 94, 104, 107, 114\u201315, 125, 137, 185, 208\u201331, 209m, 273\u201383, 291, 295\u201398\n\nGreek (language), 65\u201368, 67i, 102, 120, 213, 215, 215i, 227\u201328, 235, 241, 243, 290\u201391\n\nGreeks, 38i, 82i, 87, 116\u201321, 132, 134, 136, 149, 153\u201357, 185, 207\u201344, 241i, 251, 273\u201383, 284i, 291, 297\u201398\n\nGrimm brothers, 246\n\ngrinders, 25, 96, 107, 122, 166, 171\u201372, 178, 188, 190, 204i, 205\u20136, 215, 271\u201372, 274\n\nGurob, 187m, 193i, 267\n\ngut\/sinew, 44, 50\n\nHacilar, 73m, 77\n\nhackling, 85d, 91\n\nHades, 240\n\nHagia Triada, 112i, 124, 209m\n\nHald, M., 86\n\nHalley's Comet, 155\n\nHallstatt, 19\u201320i, 23, 26t, 73m, 87, 88i, 290, 293\n\nHammurabi, 175, 179\n\nHargreaves, J., 38\n\nHatshepsut, 150, 254, 260t\n\nHawaii(an), 102, 141, 155, 228\n\nHayes, W., 200, 202\n\nheading band, 70, 92, 222\u201323\n\nHebrew, 132, 184, 192, 253, 255\n\nHecuba, 212, 227\n\nheddle bar, 40d, 41i, 197\n\nheddle, 17\u201318, 22, 40d, 41, 41i, 243\n\nHelen of Troy, 119, 153, 207, 210\u201312, 226, 229\n\nhemp, 34, 53, 61, 85, 106, 132\u201333, 290\n\nHephaistos, 240\n\nHepzefa, 199\n\nHera, 60\u201361, 68, 244\n\nHerakles, 233.\n\nHermione, 119\n\nHerodotus, 185\u201386, 189, 194, 273\n\nHesiod, 239, 282\n\nHestia\/Vesta, 68\n\nHittite(s), 67i, 177, 224, 227\n\nHmong, 154\n\nHoffer, E., 257\n\nHoffmann, M., 87, 221\u201322\n\nHolmes, S., 299\n\nHomer, 60, 87, 101, 116\u201325, 139, 153\u201355, 166, 209\u201312, 214\u201317, 219, 224, 226\u201327, 229, 235, 242\u201344, 257, 278\n\nHopi, 60, 95\u201396\n\nHopkinson, B., 293\n\nHoroztepe, 209, 209m\n\nhorticulture, 76, 85, 95\u201396, 101\u20133, 116\u201317, 122\n\nHungarian (language), 46, 47i\n\nHungary, 21, 81, 83\u201384, 84i, 86\u201388, 88\u201389i, 91, 93\u201394, 130\u201331, 235\u201336\n\nhunter-gatherers, 42, 48, 54, 76\n\nHydra, 233\n\nIkhenaten: _see_ Akhenaton\n\n_Iliad: see_ Homer\n\nIltani, 175\u201380\n\nIndia, 27, 66\u201367, 81, 113, 141, 258\n\nIndie, 67i, 227\n\nIndo-European, 46\u201347, 66, 67i, 68, 113, 132, 137\u201338, 142, 150, 224, 227, 229, 242\u201344, 291\n\nIndonesia, 151\n\nIndustrial Revolution, 30, 33, 38, 45\n\ninheritance, 66, 95, 120, 176, 263, 290\n\ninnovation, 25, 27, 32, 42, 70\u201371, 80, 98\u2013101, 104, 127, 142, 145, 164\u201366, 257\u201363, 285\n\nIon, 153, 210\n\nIonia, 281, 283\n\nIran, 99, 167, 168m\n\nIranian (language), 66, 67i\n\nIraq, 41, 77\u201378, 83, 96\n\nIrgenhausen, 73m, 90\u201391, 92i\n\nIris, 153\n\nIron Age, 24, 26t, 27d, 109, 131, 137, 140, 149, 151\u201352, 166, 197, 214, 219, 225, 229, 242, 245, 254, 257, 273, 290, 293\u201394\n\nIsimkheb, 200\n\nIsomachos, 275\u201377\n\nIsrael, 72, 129\u201330, 254, 293\u201394\n\nItalian (language), 67, 67i, 245, 291\n\nItaly, 43, 222, 264, 276\n\nItys, 232\u201333\n\nJacob, 252\n\nJacobsen, T., 292\n\nJapan, 106, 141, 148, 228, 239\n\nJarmo, 73m, 77\u201380\n\nJason, 233\n\nJericho, 130\n\nJesus, 151, 245, 255\n\nJoseph, 252\u201353, 253i\n\nJoshua, 130\n\nJudean Desert, 130\n\nJutland, 86\n\nKafir, 150\n\nKahlenberg, M., 151\n\nKanesh, 168\u201370, 168m, 174\n\nKarana, 168m, 175\u201376, 179, 227\n\nKarata\u00a7, 209, 209m\n\nKastor and Poly deuces, 119\n\nKeller, G., 232\n\nkemp, 91, 103, 219\n\nKephalovrisso, 55m, 65\n\nKerma, 187m, 202\n\nkermes, 113\n\nKertch, 230i\n\nkeys, 62\u201363, 251\n\nKha, 162i, 264, 265i\n\nKhety, 196i\n\nKhnemhotep, 191i, 253i\n\nkill pattern, 97\u201398, 106\n\nKipling, R., 233\n\nKlotho, 235\n\nKnidos, 209m, 217\n\nKnossos, 123, 151i, 158i, 209m, 216, 224\u201325, 239\n\nKostienki, 55m, 55\n\nKovacs, M., 235\u201336\n\nKuban, 137, 162\n\nK\u00fcltepe, 168, 168m\n\n!Kung, 54, 76\n\nKybele, 77\n\nLabyrinth, 239\n\nLachesis, 235\n\nLachish, 187m, 254\n\nLagash, 168m, 180\n\nLaistrygonia, 77\n\nlake dwellings, 26t, 85, 90\u201393\n\nLakonia, 281\n\nLamassi, 170\u201375\n\nlanguage: change, 66\u201367, 138, 245; divergence, 67, 138, 291; origins of, 59\u201360, 147\n\nLapps\/Lappish, 46, 47i, 223\n\nLascaux, 43, 51\u201353, 55m, 289\n\nLatin, 36, 67i, 68, 119, 132, 137, 213, 245, 253, 291\n\nlaundry, 117\u201318, 123, 133, 196i, 198\u201399, 206, 247\n\nLeda, 240\n\nlegal rights, 120\u201321, 171\u201373, 175, 206, 272\u201373, 275, 296\n\nLemnos, 209m, 217\n\nLespugue, 44, 44i, 54, 55m, 61, 295\n\nLevant, 81, 259\n\nLibya, 102\n\nLinear A, 227\u201328\n\nLinear B, 215i, 215\u201317, 221, 224\u201325, 227\u201328, 289\u201390\n\nlinen, 34d, 61, 90, 103\u20134, 107, 122, 129i, 129\u201330, 132\u201337, 155, 184\u201386,, 189\u2013202, 205\u20136, 210, 212, 214, 218, 226, 232, 234\u201335, , 234\u201335, 253\u201354, 256, 260, 262\u201364, 266\u201367, 270\u201372; as money, 200, 206, 272, 288\u201389, 296\n\nlinguistic reconstruction, 46\u201348, 66, 68, 138, 290, 291\n\nLithuania, 69\n\nLittleton, C. S., 292\n\nloan words, 47\u201348, 132, 134, 137, 221, 243, 245, 291\n\nLondon: British Museum, 181, 271; Petrie Museum, 135i, 136, 288\n\nloom weights, 81, 83, 91, 93, 107, 166, 223, 244, 244i, 254\u201355, 287, 291, 293\u201394\n\nloom, 17\u201318, 22\u201323, 39d, 41i, 122, 166, 172\u201373, 190, 195, 216, 256, 266, 273, 287, 296; band-, 81, 221\u201323, 222i, 243; development of, 78\u201384; horizontal ground-, 80i, 80\u201381, 83, 180i, 186, 191i, 196i, 196\u201397, 259\u201360, 263, 272; on roof, 107, 195; power-, 31, 33, 38; spread of types, 81, 83; vertical tapestry-, 41, 186, 260\u201364, 261\u201362i, 270, 272; warp-weighted-, 41, 81, 82i, 83\u201384, 84i, 87, 88i, 92\u201393, 213, 216i, 221\u201323, 241i, 243, 255, 259, 276, 282, 291, 293\u201395, 298\n\nlozenge, 62i, 62\u201363, 65, 78, 155, 161\u201362, 251\n\nLugalanda, 180\u201381\n\nLysias, 119, 273\u201374, 277, 281\n\nMacedonia(n), 55m, 56i, 62i, 63, 64i, 65, 67i, 155\n\nmadder, 113\u201314\n\nmagic, 65\u201366, 78, 94, 130, 149, 155\u201363, 189, 234\u201335, 238, 249\u201352\n\nmale textile workers, 176, 254, 257, 259\u201361, 261\u201362i, 270, 277\n\nMalta, 73m, 77, 78i, 102, 218\n\nmaps, 55m, 73m, 168m, 187m, 209m, 295\u201396\n\nMara\u015f, 168m, 177i\n\nMari, 168m, 172i, 175\u201376, 178\u201379, 179i, 227\n\nmarital status, 59\u201360, 128, 147\n\nmarriage, 51, 59, 117, 120\u201321, 151\u201352,, 171\u201372, 226, 246\u201351, 273, 275; symbol of, 60\u201362, 69, 140, 147, 155\n\nMasai, 165\n\nmass production, 225\n\nmatriliny, 95, 119\u201320\n\nMedea, 233\u201334\n\nMediterranean, 27, 43, 73m, 79, 101, 103\u20134, 106, 137, 144, 162, 165, 168m, 203i, 209m, 218, 255\n\nMegiddo, 187m, 255\n\nMelos, 167, 209m, 236, 237i\n\nMenelaos, 119, 153, 226\n\nMenkheperraseneb, 110\n\nmenstruation, 59, 115, 150, 162\n\nMerzifon, 209, 209m\n\nMesolithic, 24\u201326d, 47\u201348, 69\n\nMesopotamia, 23, 27, 37, 73m, 81, 83, 96\u201397, 128, 133\u201334, 165, 170\u201384, 180i, 182i, 188\u201389, 202, 203i, 209, 217\u201318, 221, 225, 228, 259, 270, 273\n\nmetal, 21, 25, 27, 30, 48, 56\u201358, 98\u201399, 132, 167\u201373, 206\u20139, 259, 272, 290\n\nMidas, 229\n\nMiddle Ages, 22, 38, 62, 148\u201349, 153, 210\u201311, 218, 226, 247\u201348, 290\n\nMiletos, 209m, 217\n\nmilk, 59, 97\u201398, 102, 164\u201365, 216\n\nMinoan(s), 26t, 101\u201326, 150\u201351, 157\u201358, 166, 210\u201311, 215, 221, 225, 227\u201328, 297; dress, 110\u201313, 110\u201312i, 114, 115i, 125, 125i, 141, 144, 151i, 158i, 224; textile patterns, 109, 110\u201312i, 113, 224\n\nMinos, 239\n\nMinotaur, 239\n\nMitanni, 270\n\nMithraism, 160\n\nmodesty, 55, 58\u201359, 128, 275\n\nMoirai, 235\u201336, 238\n\nMokosh (Mokusha), 247\n\nmoney, 94, 170, 172, 200; 244, 258\u201359, 280, 296\n\nMongolia, 53\n\n_Moralia_ , 281\n\nmordant, 114\n\nMordvin (language), 46, 47i\n\nMordvins, 55m, 60\u201361, 62i, 65\n\nMoses, 253\n\nmurex, 113\u201314, 210\n\nMurten, 73m, 90\u201391\n\nMycenae, 137, 209m, 214\u201315, 227\u201328, 255\n\nMycenaeans, 26t, 119, 134, 136, 144, 214\u201327, 255, 289\u201390, 294\u201395, 297\n\nMykonos, 108i, 209m\n\nMyrtos, 104\u20139, 113, 166, 209m\n\nNa\u1e25al \u1e24emar, 73m, 129, 129i\n\nNausikaa, 117\u201318, 120\n\nneedle, 43, 50\n\nNeferronpet, 261\u201362, 262i\n\nNeolithic, 24\u201326d, 27, 37, 41, 47, 53\u201354, 56, 65, 71\u2013101, 103, 128\u201332, 156, 166\u201367, 229, 243, 258, 275, 291\n\nNeptune, 242\n\nNessos, 233\u201334\n\nnet, 43, 45, 49\u201350, 53\u201354, 69, 85, 91, 129i, 129\u201330, 202, 283; knot-less, 65\n\nNetherlands, 65, 159\u201360, 218\n\nnettle, 53, 133, 234\u201335\n\nNew York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 200\n\n_Nibelungenlied_ , 229\n\nNile, 187m; _see also_ Egypt\n\nNine Bows and Captives, 264, 266i\n\nNorns, 236\n\nNorway, 87, 221\u201323, 295\n\nnumber magic, 65, 159\u201360, 162\n\nobesity, 59, 76\u201377, 79i\n\nOdysseus, 116\u201324, 224, 226, 242\u201343\n\n_Odyssey: see_ Homer\n\n\u00d8lby, 55m, 58i\n\noral history, 116, 229\n\norchard crops, 96, 102, 105i, 122, 241\n\nOrion, 153\n\noutriders, 84, 96, 102, 122\n\noverseer, 178\u201381, 190\u201391, 191i, 196i, 205, 221, 224, 271 Ovid, 233, 240\n\nPalaeolithic, 24\u201326d, 42\u201372, 74, 76, 83\u201384, 103, 128, 166, 283\n\nPalestine, 187m, 190, 252, 253i, 254\u201355, 270, 294\n\nPanathenaia, 281\u201382\n\nPandora, 239\u201340\n\nPaneb, 270\u201372\n\nParcae, 236, 245\n\nParis: Louvre, 236; Mus\u00e9e de l'Homme, 45\n\nPatriarchs, 252\n\nPatroklos, 228\n\npavilions, 152\u201353, 152i, 199\u2013200\n\nP\u00e9loponn\u00e8se, 209m, 218\n\nPenelope, 153\u201354, 227, 229, 243\n\npermanent settlement, 54, 71\u201373, 76\u201377, 95, 143, 283\n\nPersians, 157, 185\u201386, 298\n\nperspective, 197, 259\u201360\n\nPetrie, W.M.F., 134, 136, 287\n\nPetsof\u00e1, 111i, 209m\n\nPhaiakians, 116\u201324, 226\n\npharaohs: succession list of, 260t\n\nPheretima, 273\n\nPhidias, 157\n\nPhiladelphia: University Museum, 181\n\nPhilistines, 255, 294\n\nPhilomela, 232\u201333\n\nPhoenicia, 187m, 210\n\nPhrygia, 209m, 229\n\npiecework, 216\u201318\n\nplaid, 18, 19\u201320i, 21\u201322, 138\u201340\n\nplain weave, 39d, 40i\n\npleating, 135i, 136, 139, 198, 288\n\nPleiades, 153\n\nPlutarch, 280\u201381\n\nplying, 22, 39d, 51i, 52, 56, 194\n\nPoirot, H., 286\n\nPompeii, 277\n\nPoland, 156\n\npopulation, 72, 76, 85, 99, 101\u20132, 278\n\nPoseidon, 120, 124, 240\u201342\n\nPotnia Theron, 157\n\npottery, 32, 54, 72, 94\u201395, 111, 130, 225, 255, 292\u201394\n\nPriam, 211\u201312\n\nProkne, 232\u201333\n\nprostitutes, 278, 280\n\nprotection, 102, 155, 157, 159i, 162, 241\u201342, 246, 248, 280\n\nPu-abi, 181\n\nPueblo Indians, 96, 121\n\npurple, 113\u201314, 119, 150, 153\u201354, 184, 210\u201311, 231, 234, 254, 282\n\nPushu-ken, 170, 173\u201374\n\nPylos, 209m, 215i, 217, 219, 221, 225, 227, 289\n\nQau, 110, 187m\n\nqueens, 150, 175\u201378, 181\u201383, 209\u201312,, 227\u201328, 230, 245\u201347, 270, 276\n\n_Raiders of the Lost Ark_ , 287\n\nRameses II, 254, 261\n\nRameses VI, 268\n\nred, 62\u201365, 78, 91, 94, 109, 113\u201314, 128, 130, 138, 142\u201343, 150, 159, 162, 173, 182, 184, 194, 198, 205, 230i, 254, 264, 266\u201367\n\nreplica, 18\u201324, 19\u201320i, 91, 92i, 293, 295\n\nreproduction strategy, 59\n\nretting, 54, 69d, 85d, 190, 234\u201335, 246\n\nRobenhausen, 90\n\nRomania(ns), 61\u201362, 62i, 65, 67i, 139, 142i, 155\n\nRomans, 25, 68, 113, 132, 137, 149\u201350, 160, 162, 210, 214, 227, 233, 236\u201338, 242, 245\n\nrope-making, 34, 53, 189, 194, 196i, 260, 261i\n\nroses, 155, 162, 246\n\nRoswinkel, 65, 159\n\nRumpelstiltskin, 246\n\nRusalii, 248\n\nrusalki, 156\u201357, 247\u201349, 248i, 251\n\nRussia, 46, 54, 56i, 61\u201362, 128, 140\u201341, 156, 159i, 232, 249\u201351\n\nRussian (language), 46, 67i, 213\n\nsacred knot, 151, 151i\n\nsaffron, 113\u201315, 115i, 150, 154, 162, 282 salt, 18\u201319, 21, 241, 290, 293\n\nSappho, 281\n\nScandinavia, 81, 141, 223, 234\n\nSchaffis, 90\n\nSchliemann, H., 211\u201313, 227\n\nScots, 19, 21, 138\u201339, 141\n\nselective breeding, 74\u201375, 97, 219, 290\n\nSemitic, 68, 132, 134, 136, 202\n\nSerbia(n), 55m, 56i, 61\u201362, 67i, 89, 117, 140\u201341, 155\n\nsewing, 30, 43, 50, 85, 133, 155, 167, 183, 199, 218, 225\u201326, 245, 269, 277, 283\n\nshearing sheep, 22, 31, 218\u201319, 247\n\nshed bar, 41i\n\nshed, 40d, 41i, 107, 222\u201323\n\nSheffer, A., 293\u201394\n\nShibtu, 176\n\nShub-ad, 181, 183\n\nSiegfried, 229\n\nsilk, 34, 103, 132, 143, 194, 210\n\nsinging, 85, 87, 89, 124, 176, 178, 190, 205\n\n\u0160ipintsi, 55m, 56i\n\nSit Snefru, 201, 203i\n\nslaves, 166, 171, 173\u201374, 176\u201378, 184, 191, 206, 215\u201317, 224, 226\u201327, 255\u201356, 258, 261, 262i, 270\u201372, 274\u201375, 277\u201380, 296\n\nSlavic (language), 66\u201367, 67i, 157, 247\n\nSlavs, 65, 94, 134, 156, 159i, 162, 247\u201349, 251\n\nSleeping Beauty, 207, 245\u201346\n\nsnakes, 49, 157, 158i, 210, 251\n\nSocrates, 221, 275\u201377, 278\u201380\n\nSopron, 73m, 88i\n\nSpain, 21, 43, 99\n\nSpanish, 46, 67, 67i, 245, 291\n\nSparta, 119, 153, 209m, 210, 228, 280\u201381\n\nspindle whorls, 37d, 91, 104, 107, 166, 192, 193i, 194, 208, 214, 251, 294\n\nspindles, 36d, 37\u201338, 91, 122, 166, 172\u201373, 179\u201380i, 184, 192, 193i, 194\u201395, 207\u201312, 208i, 214, 226\u201327, 231, 238, 245\u201346, 250\u201351, 267, 273; drop-, 37, 38i, 191i, 196i\n\nspinning jenny, 31, 33, 38\n\nspinning wheel, 38, 247\n\nspinning: at need, 69; fate, 235\u201336, 242; hand methods of, 34\u201339, 35i, 38i, 80i, 177i, 180i, 191i, 196i, 220i, 238; origins of, 43, 45; position for, 237i, 238; rate of, 31, 38, 87\u201388, 180\u201381; reverse-, 159; while doing other things, 31, 32i, 88i, 177i; word for, 238\n\nspirals, 109, 110i, 113, 125\n\nsplicing, 35, 191\u201392, 191i, 254, 298d\n\nsprang, 65, 87\n\nstarting band: _see_ heading band\n\nsteppes, 27, 137\u201338, 142\u201343\n\nStinger missile, 154\n\nStone Age, 24\u201327; _see also_ Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic\n\nStonehenge, 102\n\nstory cloths, 153\u201355, 211, 229, 230i, 232, 240, 282, 298\n\nstring: earliest preserved, 51i, 51\u201353\n\nsubconscious cognition, 138, 291, 297\n\nSuberde, 73m, 73\u201374\n\nSudan, 37, 187m, 202\n\nSumatra, 151, 160\n\nSumerian(s), 26t, 132\u201333, 137, 150, 166, 172i, 180\u201383, 182i, 202\n\n_Swan Lake_ , 156\n\nSwitzerland, 26t, 85, 90\u201393\n\nsymmetry, 296\u201397\n\nSyria, 72\u201373, 96, 136, 158, 168m, 169, 180, 187m, 202, 256, 268\u201369, 295\n\nSyrus, P., 286\n\nSzentendre, 236\n\ntailoring, 141, 277\n\nTanagra, 125, 125i, 209m\n\ntapestry weave, 104, 180, 184, 263\u201365, 265i, 266i, 269\u201370\n\nTaphos, 209m, 217\n\nTarkhan, 134, 135i, 187m\n\nTelemachos, 226\n\nTell Asmar, 203i\n\nTell Beit Mirsim, 187m, 254\n\ntension, 39, 81, 83, 223, 260\n\nTereus, 232\u201333\n\ntextiles: as social signals, 147\u201353, 265 ( _see also_ clothing); for keeping records, 149, 153\u201355, 229, 231, 282, 285; why women's work, 29\n\nThebes (Egypt), 110, 152i, 187m, 191, 195, 207, 259, 261\u201362i, 265i, 267, 270\n\nThebes (Greece), 209m, 215\n\nTheogony, 282\n\nThera, 114\u201315, 115i, 124, 150, 154, 209m\n\nTheseus, 239\n\nThessaly, 94, 209m\n\nThrace, 232\n\n_Three Spinsters_ , 246\n\nThutmose III, 150, 254\u201355, 259, 260t, 263, 270\n\nThutmose IV, 259, 260t, 263\u201364, 270\n\nThutnofer, 259\u201361, 261i\n\ntime, 89\u201390, 93\u201394, 161, 235, 258\u201359, 285\n\nTiryns, 227\n\nTisza River, 73m, 83, 93\n\nTiszajen\u0151, 73m, 84i\n\ntrade colony, 154, 168\u201370, 168i, 173\u201374, 230i\n\ntrade, 96, 99, 102, 104, 109, 167\u201371, 168i, 175, 229, 258\u201359, 284, 294, 297\n\nTrindh\u00f8j, 86\n\nTrojan War, 26t, 60, 116, 119, 153, 211\u201312\n\ntrousseau, 18, 117\n\nTroy, 60, 116, 153, 155, 209m, 211\u201314, 227\u201328; _see also_ Helen of Troy\n\nTurkey, 41, 72\u201373, 77\u201379, 83, 98, 102, 131, 136, 144, 167\u201368, 177, 202, 207\u20139, 209m, 211\u201313, 229\n\nTurkish, 213\n\nTutankhamon, 157, 260t, 267\u201370 twill, 18, 19\u201320i, 21d, 22, 104, 138\u201339\n\ntwist, 34, 35i, 36\u201337, 44, 50, 52, 54, 192, 194, 295\n\nTyre, 187m, 210\n\nUkraine, 54, 55m, 56i, 56, 61, 94, 139, 156\u201357, 159i, 247\u201348\n\nUr, 168m, 181\u201383, 182i\n\nUralic, 46\u201351, 47i, 61, 67, 69\n\nUrals, 46, 61\n\nUrukagina, 180\n\nValley of the Kings, 267\n\nVeenhof, K., 174\n\nVenus de Milo, 133, 236\u201338, 237i Venus figure, 44i, 44\u201345, 54\u201355, 56i, 59\u201361, 76, 295\n\nVienna: Natural History Museum, 19i, 21\n\nVillanovans, 222\n\nvily: _see_ willies\n\nVin\u010da, 55m, 56i\n\nVlachs, 61, 65\n\nvocational school, 85, 194, 196i\n\nVogt, E., 91\n\nVolga, 61, 242\n\nWagner, R., 236\n\nWah, 200\n\nWahka II, 110\n\nWalachia(ns), 55m, 61, 62i\n\nWales, 252\n\nWaqartum, 171, 173\u201375\n\nWard, W., 206\n\nwarp, 17\u201318, 20i, 23, 39d, 40, 41i, 70, 80i, 81, 82i, 92, 104, 122, 195\u201397, 210, 222\u201323, 260\u201366, 282, 298; circular, 160\u201361; cut ends of, 266\u201367\n\nwarping, 17, 22\u201323, 80i, 180i, 194\u201396, 196i, 221\u201323, 222i, 262i\n\nWarren, P., 107, 109, 113\n\nweaver's mark, 197\u201398, 263\n\nweaving, 39d, 41i, 80i, 180i; earliest, 70, 78; innovation in structure of, 104, 263\n\nweft, 17\u201318, 20i, 23\u201324, 39d, 40, 41i, 70, 87, 91, 136, 160\u201361, 197, 223, 263\u201365; circular, 255; crossing, 24, 86\u201387; supplementary, 91, 92i, 229, 263; twining, 57, 167\n\nweft-faced weave, 104, 263\n\nwethers, 98, 216\n\nwhite, 61, 103, 108i, 109, 111, 113\u201314, 128, 132\u201333, 137\u201338, 156, 162, 194, 198, 202, 205, 206, 223, 230i, 232, 248, 251\u201352, 256, 262\u201364, 272\n\nWilliam of Normandy, 154\u201355, 229\n\nwillies (vily), 156, 247\u201349, 248i, 251\n\nWilson, J., 292\n\nwoad, 113\n\nwomen: criteria for work of, 29; in business for self, 164, 169\u201375, 225, 273, 278\u201381, 283; migration of, 254, 294\u201395; occupations of, 24, 81, 122, 164, 166, 170\u201371, 178, 180\u201384, 188, 190, 199, 204\u20136, 215, 218\u201326, 272\u201373, 278, 280, 285\u201386, 290; rights of, 120\u201321, 171\u201372, 206, 225, 272\u201373, 280\u201385, 296\n\nwool, 17, 19i, 22, 31, 34, 56\u201358, 65, 86, 97\u201398, 101, 103\u20134, 106\u20137, 119, 127, 132\u201333, 137\u201341, 155, 159, 162, 164, 171\u201373, 176\u201378, 184, 189, 193, 210, 214, 216\u201324, 244, 247, 252\u201355, 259, 266\u201367, 273, 275, 277\u201378, 280, 282, 284i, 290, 293\n\nWoolley, L., 181\u201383\n\nwork party, 86, 117\u201318\n\nworkshops, 80i, 180, 190\u201394, 191i, 196\u201397, 196i, 217, 262i\n\nworsted, 17, 36d\n\nWu-ling, 143\n\nXenophon, 275, 278, 281\n\nyellow, 109, 113\u201316, 138, 153, 162, 198, 264, 282\n\nYugoslavia, 62\u201363i, 65, 131; _see also_ Balkans, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia\n\nZeus, 60\u201361, 68, 240, 282\n\nZimri-Lim, 175\u201376,, 178\u201380\n\n_zostra_ , 65\u201366, 68, 155\n\nZurich: Swiss National Museum, 91, 92i\n\"The abiding fascination of her book is the way Ms. Barber weaves the strands of mythology and literature, archaeology, ethnology, and documented history into a rich tapestry. . . . A delight to read.\"\n\n\u2014 John Noble Wilford, _New York Times Book Review_\n\n\"Her scholarship is active, wide, and deep . . . . Elizabeth Barber is as knowing and perceptive as any archaeologist-author in sight . . . . Her topic is wonderfully fresh.\"\n\n\u2014 Philip Morrison, _Scientific American_\n\n\"A fascinating history of . . . [a craft] that preceded and made possible civilization itself\"\n\n\u2014 _New York Times Book Review_\nOTHER BOOKS BY ELIZABETH WAYLAND BARBER\n\n_Archaeological Decipherment_\n\n_Prehistoric Textiles_\nElizabeth Wayland Barber teaches at Occidental College in California. She is the author of _Prehistoric Textiles_ , an authoritative study of the technical development of the craft. Her latest book, _The Mummies of \u00dcr\u00fcmchi_ , is also published by Norton.\nCopyright \u00a9 1994 by Elizabeth Wayland Barber\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nFirst published as a Norton paperback 1995\n\nBook design by JAM Design.\n\nThe Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:\n\nBarber, E.J.W., 1940\u2013\n\nWomen's work : the first 20,000 years : women, cloth, and society in early times \/ Elizabeth Wayland Barber.\n\np. cm.\n\nIncludes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.\n\n1. Textile fabrics, Prehistoric. 2. Women, Prehistoric.\n\n3. Textile fabrics, Ancient. 4. Women\u2014History. I. Title.\n\nGN799.T43B37 1994\n\n305.4\u2032 3\u2032 09\u2014dc20 93-47924\n\nISBN 978-0-393-31348-2\n\nISBN 978-0-393-28558-1 (e-book)\n\nW. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110\n\nW. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75\/76 Wells Street, London WIT 3QT\n\nwww.wwnorton.com\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n## DEDICATION\n\n_To this whole great nation of ballers._\n\n## CONTENTS\n\n  1. Dedication\n  2. Contents\n  3. One: I Am a Hooper\n  4. Two: Talk More\n  5. Three: En Vee Pee\n  6. Four: Hate Victory\n  7. Five: The Ink\n  8. Six: But Sometimes . . .\n  9. Seven: Passport\n  10. Eight: Surprise Return\n  11. Nine: I Hide Me\n  12. Ten: The Past Like Dirt\n  13. Eleven: Losing My Mind to the Owenses\n  14. Twelve: I Choose This\n  15. Thirteen: Kase and Carli\n  16. Fourteen: This Noise\n  17. Fifteen: The Fury\n  18. Sixteen: Pivot in the Post\n  19. Seventeen: Barry's Door\n  20. Eighteen: Asking for Myself, Receiving\n  21. Nineteen: My Real Home\n  22. Twenty: More Skills\n  23. Twenty-One: Great Jokes\n  24. Twenty-Two: To the City\n  25. Twenty-Three: Young Bloody Boy\n  26. Twenty-Four: Bad Reactions\n  27. Twenty-Five: Guidance, Part I\n  28. Twenty-Six: Giants of Basketball\n  29. Twenty-Seven: Guidance, Part II\n  30. Twenty-Eight: Mr. Calmness\n  31. Twenty-Nine: The F-W-B\n  32. Thirty: Telling No Jokes\n  33. Thirty-One: We Are a Team\n  34. Thirty-Two: I Am King\n  35. Thirty-Three: At Patrick's\n  36. Thirty-Four: Chasing the Ocean\n  37. Thirty-Five: Cooked in a Hot Tub\n  38. Thirty-Six: Bad Version of Me\n  39. Thirty-Seven: Hooper the Dragon\n  40. Thirty-Eight: I Like Barry\n  41. Thirty-Nine: Making out with a Hot Girl\n  42. Forty: Eating Twin Ports Pride for Lunch\n  43. Forty-One: The Perfect Life\n  44. Forty-Two: Here It Comes Again\n  45. Forty-Three: Not Okay\n  46. Forty-Four: Trying to Handle\n  47. Forty-Five: Bad Beef\n  48. Forty-Six: Barney Was a Dog\n  49. Forty-Seven: The Last Monday\n  50. Forty-Eight: 3:17 A.M.\n  51. Forty-Nine: The Last Tuesday\n  52. Fifty: 11:26 P.M.\n  53. Fifty-One: The Last Wednesday\n  54. Fifty-Two: 7:21 P.M.\n  55. Fifty-Three: The Last Thursday\n  56. Fifty-Four: 5:47 P.M.\n  57. Fifty-Five: The Last Friday\n  58. Fifty-Six: I Am Not Alone, Part I\n  59. Fifty-Seven: I Am Not Alone, Part II\n  60. Fifty-Eight: I Am Not Alone, Part III\n  61. Fifty-Nine: Devin Is Not Alone\n  62. Sixty: Barry Is Not Alone\n  63. Sixty-One: We Are Hoopers\n  64. Acknowledgments\n  65. About the Author\n  66. Books by Geoff Herbach\n  67. Back Ad\n  68. Credits\n  69. Copyright\n  70. About the Publisher\n\n# Guide\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Contents\n  3. Chapter 1\n\n  1. iii\n  2. iv\n  3. v\n  4. \n  5. \n  6. \n  7. \n  8. \n  9. \n  10. \n  11. \n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223. \n  224. \n  225. \n  226. \n  227. \n  228. \n  229. \n  230. \n  231. \n  232. \n  233. \n  234. \n  235. \n  236. \n  237. \n  238. \n  239. \n  240. \n  241. \n  242. \n  243. \n  244. \n  245. \n  246. \n  247. \n  248. \n  249. \n  250. \n  251. \n  252. \n  253. \n  254. \n  255. \n  256. \n  257. \n  258. \n  259. \n  260. \n  261. \n  262. \n  263. \n  264. \n  265. \n  266. \n  267. \n  268. \n  269. \n  270. \n  271. \n  272. \n  273. \n  274. \n  275. \n  276. \n  277. \n  278. \n  279. \n  280. \n  281. \n  282. \n  283. \n  284. \n  285. \n  286. \n  287. \n  288. \n  289. \n  290. \n  291. \n  292. \n  293. \n  294. \n  295. \n  296. \n  297. \n  298. \n  299. \n  300. \n  301. \n  302. \n  303. \n  304. \n  305. \n  306. \n  307. \n  308. \n  309. \n  310. \n  311. \n  312. \n  313. \n  314. \n  315. \n  316. \n  317. \n  318. \n  319. \n  320. \n  321. \n  322. \n  323. \n  324. \n  325. \n  326. \n  327. \n  328. \n  329. \n  330.\n\n## ONE\n\n## I AM A HOOPER\n\nThis is where I first found happiness in America. I am a hooper.\n\nI leap high, grab the rebound over all the Wauzeka boys. I drop the rock to the point guard, Caleb Olson, then jog down the court.\n\nShoes squeak. The pep band drummer drums. Cheerleaders cheer. The air smells like popcorn and nachos and the heat of all these people, a packed gym full of Northrup Polar Bear fans.\n\nThis is February. Sophomore year.\n\nI jog underneath the hoop. The defender tries to push me out. I am already too big. He is six foot one, maybe. I am six foot six and all bony arms and legs. I back him down just for fun. Caleb Olson, a senior, takes his time coming down the court. He is so good with the ball in his hand. He is such a fine shooter, too.\n\nWe are far ahead. No need to rush things.\n\nI swing outside the paint to the left wing.\n\nThe drum drums. The crowd cheers.\n\nOur offense runs through me and Caleb and no one else.\n\nCaleb moves into the frontcourt. The Wauzeka defense sets. I cut again underneath the basket, then explode from the post to the top of the key, where I set a pick on Caleb's defender.\n\nCaleb drives.\n\nI roll.\n\nCaleb lobs the ball high at the rim.\n\nI leap. I catch. I throw it down.\n\nIt's like water breaking through a dam.\n\nThe crowd goes crazy, even a kid at the end of our opponent's bench. He looks like me when I was a little boy, or like my little brother would look if I had one. Blond hair spiked up. Long arms. Long legs. So skinny. He wears a red T-shirt with a big yellow corncob on it. \"Fear the Cob\" is written in big letters.\n\nThat boy is so happy to see me dunk the basketball, and I do not fear the Cob.\n\nWauzeka, known as \"the Cobbers,\" won the Minnesota Valley Conference three years in a row, but this victory claims the crown for us.\n\nNorthrup Polar Bears reign supreme. We are the champions.\n\nMe and Caleb high-five.\n\nBut I don't like him.\n\nYou would think this victory makes me a popular guy. You would be wrong. After the game, no girls come to kiss my cheek. No teammates want to meet me for pizza at Patrick's. And I don't want to be with any of them. Instead, I leave the gym fast. I don't shower. I grab my bag of clothes from my locker and fire out the door into the night air.\n\nIn the parking lot, Barry Roland waits for me. Nobody in school likes him, but he is a good person. Barry Roland takes me to McDonald's down on the highway. I eat two quarter pounders and a large order of french fries.\n\nWhile I eat, Barry talks about tae kwon do. Although he is small, he is good at this martial art, the star pupil at Bob's Champion Tae Kwon Do Studio. He is so good, in fact, he helps teach the little kid classes and old people classes. Sometimes when we're at McDonald's a little kid or old person will come to say hi. He may not be popular in high school, but little kids and old people love him.\n\nThis February night he is excited because he has just begun to kick trees with his shins. He thinks he can have the most powerful shins in all of Minnesota by the time he attempts his second-degree black belt test in April.\n\n\"I saw it on YouTube? If you micro-splinter the bone on your shins it grows back harder? You can turn your shins into steel?\"\n\nI stop eating the quarter pounder. \"Your shin grows metal?\" I ask.\n\n\"No, it grows more bone. Strong bone! It just gets as hard as metal, okay?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say. \"Sounds good.\" I take another bite of my quarter pounder.\n\nBarry Roland ends many sentences with the sound of a question, even if there is not a question. I once thought he was asking many questions, but I learned that this is just his conversation style.\n\nHe has much style. He often wears his karate-style headband on his head, and he has thick glasses that make his eyes look big and surprised. He has puffy blond hair and a fluffy blond mustache.\n\nFood also fires from his mouth while he talks. It's only because he is so excited about life.\n\n\"Maybe, if my shins get hard enough, I can get on TV for breaking logs?\"\n\n\"Yes. Dope,\" I say. I make my voice deep to sound like a TV announcer. \"Mr. Strong Man can kick down your house.\"\n\n\"That's right, dude!\" he says. \"I thought of my TV name, too. Do you want to hear it?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHe lowers his head and whispers like a snake. \"The Shinja.\"\n\n\"The Shinja? Like a ninja with great shins?\"\n\nHe nods.\n\nI nod. \"That is very, very dope, bro.\"\n\nWhen we finish with the burgers, Barry Roland drives. He talks all the way to my dark home on the edge of a small college campus, on the outskirts of a tiny Minnesota town. In the house, Renata, my adopted mom, is fast asleep. Barry gives me a high five when he parks. \"See you for breakfast,\" he says, because he will come to eat breakfast with me and Renata in the morning.\n\nI point and say, \"Catch you in the morning light.\"\n\nHe smiles in his piece-of-shit Pontiac. This car has rust holes in its bottom. When there is rain or snow, there is rain or snow in the car. Barry doesn't mind. He is happy for what he has.\n\nHe drives away, and I go into the dark house across from the darkened college buildings, on the edge of all those dark farms.\n\n## TWO\n\n## TALK MORE\n\nA girl named Carli Anderson says I should talk more. So here.\n\nI come from Poland. My name was Adam Sobieski, but I changed it to Adam Reed, because my adopted mom, Renata, has the last name Reed. I have been in America for four and a half years. I just moved to Minnesota last summer. I like basketball. I sound funny when I talk in English, but that's not my fault. I work on it a lot. But I'm bad at school, even when I was in Poland and could do school in Polish.\n\nThat's me.\n\nIs that enough, Carli Anderson?\n\n## THREE\n\n## EN VEE PEE\n\nA week after we defeat the Wauzeka Cobbers, the playoffs come. Because Northrup is the conference champion, the first round is in Northrup High School's gymnasium (small and old, but okay).\n\nLike it has been the last couple of games, the gym is filled. The old farmers and businessmen and hairdressers and dental assistants and the guys who hang out in bars, they all pack the stands to cheer us on. Cheerleaders shout and kick higher than ever. So many fans cannot find seats, they have to stand at the doorways. Almost everyone in Northrup attends, except Renata. She did not come to any game all season, which is okay. She did not attend games in Philadelphia when we lived there, either. Big crowds and noise give her migraines in her eyes and temples. I don't mind who is in the stands, because all I do is play basketball.\n\nCaleb Olson lobs a pass. I dunk so hard and shout and raise my arms above my head like a warrior.\n\nThat morning, a newspaper wrote how I make more dunks than anyone in all of Minnesota. The chemistry teacher, Mr. Burton, taped the article to the door of his room.\n\n\"Did you know you were so good, Adam?\" he asked.\n\n\"No,\" I said. I ducked and looked around because I didn't want people to make shit of me.\n\nNo one I could see made shit.\n\nThe coach from New Ulm screams, \"Watch for thirty-four! Watch out!\" We are on defense and that coach is right: they should watch out for me. As he shouts, I peel off the center and steal the ball from the shooting guard and explode across midcourt. Nobody from New Ulm's team can catch up. I sky into the air and throw the ball down and pound on my chest.\n\nWe are up by fifteen points.\n\nThe wild drummer, Derrick Oppegaard, pounds his drum, and the crowd begins shouts of \"En Vee Pee!\"\n\nCoach high-fives me, brings me off the court so subs can get some minutes. The crowd stands and continues to chant. I try not to look over my shoulder at them, but I don't like them making a chant.\n\nIn the \"good game\" line, the center from New Ulm, who is as tall as me, but not an athlete, says, \"You're too good, dog. _En Vee Pee_ for sure.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say.\n\nThen I leave school fast. Barry Roland waits for me in the parking lot. It is icy and below zero. The wind cuts through my warm-up, but Barry's shit Pontiac, even with the holes in the floor, is warm and toasty.\n\n\"Hey, dude!\" he says. \"Ready for some grub?\"\n\nAt McDonald's, I ask Barry Roland what _En Vee Pee_ means.\n\nHe scrunches up his nose so his fluffy mustache gets small underneath. This is what his face does when he thinks. \"Maybe it's like when people envy your skills so much they have to pee their pants?\"\n\nI do not trust Barry in matters of fact, but this seems like a possible explanation. \"Okay. Maybe,\" I say.\n\n\"Yeah. Uh-huh,\" Barry says, nodding. \"I'd be willing to bet on it.\"\n\nThen I am sure he is wrong.\n\nThe next morning, during breakfast, I forget to ask Renata what she knows about _envy pee_. We always listen to jazz (because Renata's dad, Papa, loves jazz). But Renata is not humming along as she usually does. Barry is there. She is staring at him. He explains to her why he is limping, why he has blood on the shins of his blue jeans.\n\n\"I don't know if that's a good idea, Barry,\" she says to him about his tree kicking. \"You could permanently injure yourself.\"\n\n\"It's worth it, Mrs. Renata,\" he says. \"I can feel the steel growing in my shins already.\" He always calls her Mrs. Renata, even though Renata is her first name.\n\nI forget about _envy pee_.\n\nBut at school, before class begins, a tall girl with thick, shiny brown hair, who walks on crutches, says, \"Look who's here. It's the _envy pee_.\" She smiles as we pass in the hall. I recognize her from being around, but I don't know yet that her name is Carli Anderson. And I don't say nothing in reply. I mean _anything._\n\nFirst hour, I motion to the gym teacher, Ms. Hader, to come speak. She is a very nice woman who doesn't make shit of dumb people. \"Excuse me,\" I say. Other students stand by the volleyball net. They stare at me while I ask my question. I don't want them to hear. \"What does _envy pee_ mean?\" I whisper.\n\nShe smiles very big across her whole face. \" _M_ , Adam. Not _N_.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah?\"\n\n\"The _M_ stands for _Most_. The _V_ stands for _Valuable_. The _P_ stands for _Player_. The crowd was chanting Most Valuable Player at you last night. That's pretty cool, huh?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I say. \"It's okay.\"\n\n\"Just okay?\" she asks.\n\nI shrug. The other students are smiling now.\n\nI don't smile back, because I don't like people and I don't like to be stupid, but inside I am getting warm. I know in my heart it is more than okay to be MVP, because now I know what MVP means, only I never imagined American kids would shout about me like that.\n\nLeBron James is MVP. Steph Curry is MVP. Kevin Durant is MVP. Michael Jordan was MVP before I was even born.\n\nI walk through the halls of the school. There is a bounce in my step. How did I become MVP?\n\nI was not the very best basketball player back in Philadelphia. In fact, I didn't want to play any basketball. Renata made me go. She was worried I didn't make friends at my school.\n\nShe was right to worry. I didn't want friends. I wanted to be home, where there was always food and always the TV and the couch and a blanket.\n\nBut my gym teacher told her I was a natural athlete and that I was a good player in my class. So Renata said, \"Adam, you need to do this. I'd be a bad mother if I didn't encourage you to get involved. Do you want me to feel like a bad mother?\"\n\n\"No,\" I mumbled.\n\n\"That doesn't mean I don't like having you around, okay? I really do.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said.\n\nI didn't believe that she liked having me around, even though she had to work for almost two years to adopt me. I went to basketball because for most of the time I've known her, I do whatever Renata tells me to do. I need a mom.\n\nAnd I knew right away that Renata had made a good parent decision. Although I sucked at first, I loved playing this game.\n\nMy teammates were mostly new from Nigeria, and we ran and ran and ran and I got better at layups and passing and defense and then I worked on basketball all the time and went to three camps at Temple University and did drills in the hallway of our apartment building and on the sidewalk even when there was snow falling and on the park courts in the sun and in lightning and in sleet, and I got much, much better, and me and my team were far superior by the next year, and my growth has taken me from average-size to quite tall over a couple years. By the time the Minnesota kids shouted MVP at me, I was dribbling so well, crossing over, breaking ankles, and dunking like a crazy man. I played killer defense. Even though I didn't shoot great all the time, I knew I was good at this game. And the competition in Northrup was not as good as in Philadelphia. So I seemed very good.\n\nBut MVP? Me? Adam Reed, who was born Sobieski on a small Polish dairy farm a million miles from anyplace? Why would my classmates cheer and call me MVP? Also, don't all these kids hate me?\n\nSome kids do.\n\nI walk past Kase Kinshaw, who leans against his locker. Other students are smiling now, saying \"good game\" to me. But he glares and shakes his head like I am shit on the ground. My heart accelerates. I feel adrenaline rise. Kase Kinshaw has hated my guts from the moment he noticed me. His hate is getting worse.\n\nI go fast to get past him.\n\nI don't understand some things. Kase Kinshaw is a large football player, but he never messes with people big like him, only those smaller or dumber or weaker. This behavior does not make everybody hate him. Most kids act like he is a dope dude. They get quiet and listen when he talks. They smile at him. They laugh at his jokes, which are not jokes but shocking things that no one else would say out loud. He calls Barry Roland the r-word and he calls me \"Duh\" because I have pauses in my speech. When he learned I was from Poland, he started to call me \"the Refugee,\" too. Poland is troubled, maybe, but not at war. His meanness got worse. \"Don't breathe,\" Kase Kinshaw said at his lunch table as I walked by one time. \"You could catch AIDS.\"\n\nHe was talking to Caleb Olson. Caleb laughed. Why would I like Caleb even if he is good at basketball?\n\nIn Philadelphia, there were a million people. I played basketball against boys with tattoos on the playground who liked to shove me.\n\nOkay. Basketball is rough.\n\nI played against a team who were in a juvenile home because they committed violent crimes.\n\nNo problems with those guys.\n\nThe worst were some guys from a public school who called me Forrest Gump and who flipped hand signals at me that my teammate Mobo Bell said were gang signs (I don't know why they would flash gang signs at me). I was thrown from that game because I elbowed a boy in his nose and then we brawled so bad he got a dislocated shoulder. The cops talked to me after and the other boy's coach begged there to be no charges, because that kid had already had bad troubles and he didn't need any new ones. My coach called Renata about the fight, and she was so shocked and scared and troubled. She grabbed my shoulders and yelled at me, and I thought she might throw me out onto the streets. Luckily it was the last game of the season, or I maybe would have a suspension. My Philly coach met with me later and said I have to learn to control my emotions or I will have future suspensions.\n\nWorse, I thought, Renata could abandon me. She doesn't know I had violence problems in Poland, too, and so I try hard to be a good kid, to stay clear of any trouble.\n\nBut Kase is worse than everyone. He insults me not because I am his opponent on the court, but because he hates who I am as a person. I have seen some bad people in my life. My dad was one of them, too. But of all the people I have encountered, Kase Kinshaw is the worst.\n\nKase makes me want to hurt him.\n\nBut after Ms. Hader explained MVP to me, I don't care about Kase. All day long I jog between my classrooms because I am MVP. Other students want to high-five me because I am MVP. In English class, Zachary Hilderbrand says I need a good nickname.\n\n\"How about the Polish Hammer?\" he asks. \"Because of your dunks?\"\n\nI know this nickname has been used before, but I also like it. \"Okay,\" I say. \"That is dope.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it is!\" he says.\n\nYeah, it is. Very dope.\n\nWho cares about Kase Kinshaw?\n\n## FOUR\n\n## HATE VICTORY\n\nIt is the second round of the playoffs. I jog out onto the floor. Caleb Olson is right behind me. \"Let's get after them, Adam. Let's do this,\" he says. Before now he has called me Duh, because, like everyone, he thought that was no problem.\n\n\"Okay,\" I say.\n\nThere is one opposing player who is taller than me on the Blue Earth Spartans. His name is Percy Reynolds. He is well known in Minnesota. He is actually huge, six foot ten. He averages over twenty points a game and six blocks.\n\nI watch him warm up. Nice stroke, but very slow. He dunks the ball and looks at me like he is a warrior. He clenches his fist and glares. But he has barely jumped. Everything about him is slow. In fact, Coach Jenson has said to the team at practice during the week, \"Attack Reynolds! Attack that guy! Make him work on defense. His feet are lead balloons!\"\n\nThe game is at Minnesota State University in Mankato, at the Taylor Center, which is named after the owner of the NBA Timberwolves. It is a big arena that looks like the ones on TV. I breathe deep, and I get goose bumps. Maybe this move to the \"middle of the middle of nowhere,\" as Renata calls Northrup, Minnesota, will work out? Maybe this was the best move? Maybe things are getting better all the time?\n\nNot really.\n\nThe gym is only a twenty-minute trip from Northrup, so the old farmers have driven in their pickups, and so have the dentists and hairdressers and all the city workers. Many, many students from school have made the drive, too, which is okay, except Kase Kinshaw. He sits with two girls behind our bench. One girl is Carli Anderson, the tall one, who has crutches and wears a brace on her leg. She has been very nice to me all week. She has told me she wants to play one-on-one against me when her leg is better. But how can she be sitting with Kase Kinshaw? How can she be laughing at his jokes? As I pass him, I make eye contact. He shakes his head, then looks away like I make him so sick to his stomach.\n\nI hate Kase Kinshaw. Adrenaline grows.\n\nThe whistle blows.\n\nI use this energy to destroy Percy Reynolds. I crush Percy Reynolds, bash away his weak shots, slam the ball through the hoop and onto his stupid face. I play so mad, I am almost scared, almost dangerous. I get whistled. I get warned. I don't hear the crowd. I feel shaky in my insides. I don't hear the coach. I have no fun playing my game, because I hate Kase Kinshaw. His voice comes to me during time-outs. He makes Carli Anderson laugh more behind us. I want to turn and whip the ball into his face and make him bleed, but I can't hurt people. Instead I destroy Percy Reynolds and his lead feet. I leap over him. I run past him. I punch the ball out of his hands whenever he catches it.\n\nAverages twenty a game? No. This game Percy Reynolds scores four points, and all on foul shots (I fouled him).\n\nWe win huge.\n\nCaleb Olson scores twenty-two. He makes six three-pointers.\n\nI score twenty-eight. The gym once again echoes with chants of M-V-P near the end of the game. But I don't care.\n\nCarli Anderson stands, propped up on crutches. \"You're going to get recruited big-time, dude!\" she says. \"Huge!\"\n\nI don't care.\n\nCoach Jenson huddles us up. \"On to the next round! We're going deep!\" he says.\n\nI don't care.\n\nI pull on warm-ups, run off the court and out the gym door, and find the school bus so I can sit in the last row and everyone will leave me alone. There I tremble and shiver and press my eyes shut.\n\nMy anger lasts longer into the night. I think of everything bad. Kase calls Barry retard. Kase punched Barry's kidney at a city park a few years ago. Barry peed blood. Every time I close my eyes, I see the face of Kase Kinshaw and I want to crush it. It won't stop. I feel crazy, and I feel like I'm dangerous. This makes me quiet at McDonald's, which is not too bad for Barry Roland, because Barry Roland likes to talk and talk.\n\n\"I kicked, like, ten different trees today, so the impact zones would be different,\" he says.\n\n\"Oh,\" I reply. \"Okay,\" I say. Barry limped badly into McDonald's.\n\n\"Because you don't want to just kick the same spot on your shin over and over? Because you might just get a really bad contusion or maybe you might break your shin instead of micro-splinter? The impact has to be spread out.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I say.\n\nMaybe it is not so great for Barry that I don't pay attention?\n\n\"Are you even listening, dude?\" he asks.\n\nI exhale. I look down at the table. \"You should use your metal shins to kick Kase Kinshaw in half,\" I say.\n\n\"No,\" Barry says. \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't you? He calls you retard. He punched your kidney.\"\n\nBarry takes a deep breath. \"Self-control,\" he whispers.\n\n\"What?\" I ask.\n\n\"Kase Kinshaw is not a worthy opponent?\" Barry says, his voice drifting up into a question that is not a question. His mustache scrunches underneath his nose. \"Kase Kinshaw is just a bad jerk?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Okay,\" I say. \"But . . .\"\n\n\"You must forget about Kase Kinshaw,\" Barry says.\n\n\"But\u2014\" I say.\n\n\"Indomitable spirit,\" Barry says. He puts his right fist into the palm of his left hand. He drops his head like a nun in Poland praying.\n\n\"Oh,\" I say. \"Okay.\"\n\n## FIVE\n\n## THE INK\n\nSometimes I have bad nightmares about Poland. My first town, Kulesze Ko\u015bcielne, was in the east, near Bialystok and not so far from the country called Belarus. There my grandpa ran his dairy farm. It was a good place to be a little boy. I kicked a soccer ball across big meadows.\n\nIt was a bad place to be for my mom. She is gone.\n\nIt was a bad place to be for my dad. He grew up in Warsaw, in the big city, and he didn't want to pull cow teats (he said this to me many, many times\u2014but I remember the machines, so he never had to milk with his hands\u2014he is a liar). When my mom followed Grandma in cancer, Dad left Grandpa and his farm to die together. Dad took me, age seven, to Warsaw.\n\nMy nightmares are in Warsaw in a tall apartment building with a big window and black darkness outside. It is day, but the air has filled with ink from an octopus. The blackness starts to leak in through cracks in the cinder block. I try to plug the cracks with my hands, but there is no chance to stop the ink. My dad isn't there. He can't help me. The ink flows in.\n\nI wake. It is three a.m. Renata is in my room. She sits on my bed. Her hand is on my forehead. \"You're screaming, Adam,\" she whispers. \"It's just a dream. It's just a bad dream. You're okay.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say. But I toss and turn for the rest of the night. I am awake. I am asleep. I am both awake and asleep. For much of it I'm not sure where I am. Kulesze with meadows outside? Warsaw with broken cement in my park? Philadelphia in the brownstone apartment? Northrup? Does it matter at all?\n\nThere is ink. There is darkness coming for me.\n\n## SIX\n\n## BUT SOMETIMES . . .\n\nI also dream that my real mom and my real grandpa are wearing red tracksuits, like the Polish Olympic team when I was little, and we are on a nice, big white boat with giant windows overlooking the calm blue ocean. Together we just bob along and eat good food and laugh. This is a good dream, except it is weird. Sometimes there are sheep on the boat, too, and I fall asleep and they lie down next to me. It is comfortable, but I wake up thinking, \"Dude, you are a crazy boy.\"\n\n## SEVEN\n\n## PASSPORT\n\n\"You should teach Tiffany how to cook, Mrs. Renata.\" Barry Roland now calls his mom by her first name, Tiffany, like I call Renata, Renata (my dead mom is the only mom I have, so . . .).\n\n\"Maybe I could teach her?\" Renata says, but I know that she doesn't mean it.\n\n\"That'd be sweet,\" Barry says.\n\n\"But if she cooks as well as I do, you won't want to come over, and I'd really hate that,\" Renata says.\n\nBarry's face blushes underneath his thick glasses. \"Oh yeah,\" he mumbles. \"I'd still want to come over.\"\n\nI know Renata tells the truth about wanting Barry here. He talks a lot. In Philadelphia, she had so many friends who were teachers and scholars. In Northrup, she hasn't yet found too many people like her. Everybody at the college where she teaches seems much older. Barry is good entertainment.\n\n\"Tiffany doesn't want to cook, so don't worry, okay?\" Barry says.\n\n\"Deal,\" Renata says.\n\nAt school, Barry disappears to the other side of the building, because he has some classes that are meant to help him get better at reading, except he says the letters get so turned around in his brain he doesn't think that he will ever be able to figure it out. I have no special teachers in Northrup. Philadelphia taught me English well enough. Here there are some Mexican students and two Somali sisters who are brand-new. They receive the special teachers' attention.\n\nI go to my locker. Carli Anderson is standing there propped on her crutches. I stop in place, unable to move. What is she doing?\n\n\"Hey. I've been waiting here for ten minutes, dude.\"\n\n\"I didn't know that,\" I mumble.\n\nShe shakes her head. \"Yeah, I know. How could you know?\"\n\n\"I don't know. So?\" I say.\n\n\"So, I wanted to tell you my dad called some AAU coaches from up in the Cities last night. He doesn't think you should play with the MN Rise.\"\n\n\"Play with who?\" I ask. \"What about your dad? What coaches?\"\n\nShe raises her eyebrows and opens her big eyes, which are green, like the spring fields by Grandpa's farm. \"Maybe this is a longer conversation?\" she says. She looks past me. Her friend, who is short and not as amazing, has stopped and is pouting and waiting and looking crabby. \"Gotta run. But, seriously, Dad is pretty pumped about you.\"\n\nThen she rocks away on her crutches.\n\nI wonder why her dad would spend his time thinking about me. Then I must move fast to make gym on time. As I cross the cafeteria, cheerleaders are hanging a giant banner that says: \"Go, Polar Bears, Beat Austin!\" There is a depiction of the number-thirty-four player (me) hanging on the rim, and it looks like he is shouting the slogan from his mouth.\n\nMy coach in Philadelphia once told me this game, basketball, could be my passport. I already had a passport from coming to America. I didn't understand why I would need another passport, and I never asked anyone what he meant. But as I stare at this banner, I begin to suspect.\n\nA second later, a freshman girl shouts, \"Hi, Adam!\" Then she blushes and runs away from me.\n\nPassport to a good life.\n\nBasketball is everything.\n\nI go to gym.\n\n## EIGHT\n\n## SURPRISE RETURN\n\nThis game is at a community college very close to the Iowa border. We are on a bus for an hour and a half. Snow swirls all over the road, which makes me nervous about falling off a cliff to our death. Lucky that the land is flat.\n\nI listen to Miles Davis, _Kind of Blue._ Then I listen to Jevetta Mitchell, the only great jazz singer I have ever seen in concert. Jevetta performed at the University of Pennsylvania, where Renata got her doctorate. All these songs keep me steady, like I am just on the couch with a blanket instead of all alone in the back of a dark bus in the middle of the frozen lands.\n\nThen I see lights. The college seems to have no town attached. It just rises out of a flat emptiness where snow blows fast.\n\nStill, our fans are here. They cheer for us as we make our way to the door. Carli Anderson and her friend give us a big _whoo-whoo_. There are so many. So many. All the people.\n\nLots of people from Austin, too.\n\nThe gym is warm. Both teams have brought pep bands and the drums from each rattle in my heart and ribs.\n\nI survey our opponent. There is no height like mine on the Austin team. Their tallest guy is more like our Greg Day, a big football player wearing gym shorts. I see no one getting to the rim in their layup drill.\n\nBut they are slick. The ball movement is like cannons firing. And they are fast. Coach Jenson told us that Austin won many games by going very, very fast. They are run-and-gun. Before the whistle, Coach says what he's told me all week. \"Adam, when they get the ball, you sprint back and guard the rim.\"\n\nIt becomes clear from the start they have a big problem. I am just as fast, but I am also tall, and I can see what they are trying to do before they do it.\n\nThe Austin Packers cannot run their style of fast-break offense very well, because as soon as they steal from us or get a rebound from us, I explode downcourt. I beat their own players to the other end. I recognize their break and get to the ball before they can score. I slap away layups and jump to block jumpers. Soon they are misfiring all around the bucket.\n\nThey start to lose their composure. They start to foul me hard. Greg Day and their center get in a tussle right after half. Both are tossed from the game, and then even our bench players score. Austin has fallen to pieces.\n\nCaleb Olson hits his three-pointers. He scores nineteen.\n\nI have five dunks and three short jumpers, and I go to the free-throw line ten times. I hit seven, which is very good for me. This means I score twenty-three points. The rest of our team scores fifteen points.\n\nWe beat those Packers by fourteen.\n\nAt the end of the game, our fans are so hyped. I am hyped, too, but I want to get out of there, away from this crowd, because it's hot and people want to talk to me, but I don't like to talk, because I can't talk right. I jump up and down and look over everyone. No. There is no quick route from the gym. No way. To leave, our team must walk through all the fans.\n\nOkay. Okay. Just walk. Smile. Don't worry.\n\nThe old men from Northrup all shake my hand, pat my back.\n\nAnd it is good. It is okay. \"Thank you. Thank you,\" I say when they tell me I am great. They make jokes I don't understand, and Derrick Oppegaard pounds the drum, and the cheerleaders dance. And it is fun. And then I see Carli Anderson with her shiny brown hair. She waves at me. Her friend, who is another pouty-faced girl like so many in Northrup, also sort of smiles, but not really.\n\n\"You need to talk to my dad!\" Carli shouts.\n\n\"Okay!\" I shout back.\n\nAnd I am okay. I am fine. Maybe I should have stayed in the gym after all our big victories this season? \"M-V-P!\" a few boys from my grade shout. Nate Arndt jumps down from the stands and slaps me a big high five, as big as Barry Roland ever would.\n\nAfter we return from Albert Community College, Greg Day drops me off, because Barry had a tae kwon do class. Greg wishes me good night. I am almost unable to respond. Something is strange. It is late on Thursday, but my usually dark house is not dark. There are lights on in every window. Has Renata died before turning off the lights?\n\n\"Okay, bye,\" I say.\n\nInside, the scene is more strange than I could imagine. There are not dead bodies, but there are bodies. Two little girls are asleep on the floor of the living room. I bend down and stare and I know who they are. I have seen them climbing the college lawn mower shed. I have seen them carrying sticks, chasing a cat across the street. In the fall, I found them halfway up the front yard pine tree spying on me when I was in the driveway completing my dribbling drills. They have messy hair cut at their chins. They look like wild children from anime cartoons.\n\nI stand and smell. Renata has cooked Indian food. She would not do this for herself. I listen. There is quiet conversation in another room. I tiptoe down the hallway. I peek in the door of Renata's study. She wears her black turtleneck sweater. This is what she wears when she wants to look good. She talks to a man, but he is not visible from the crack in the doorway. But I know who he is, because this has been brewing for some time.\n\nI have a hard time breathing. I don't know what to do, so I tiptoe down to my room and I climb into bed, which is gross, because I need to shower, but I'm not going to shower with other people in my house.\n\n## NINE\n\n## I HIDE ME\n\nI do not ever talk about this.\n\nAfter me and my dad moved to Warsaw, after my mom succumbed to her ovary cancer, I went to a lyceum, which is a school, but I didn't go all the time, because my dad didn't make me do anything. One morning, though, he was drinking a lot and he threw me out of the apartment door by the top of my shirt. I fell down in the hallway. He told me I was stupid like a dog who followed him around and I had to go to school or he would get in trouble for my stupidity. He locked the door.\n\nI had on only a T-shirt and tan pants. I wore Spider-Man slippers. There was snow all over the ground. I went to school and my feet were wet and I slept in my desk. They made us go outside for fresh air in the midmorning. They made me wear a girl's coat from the lost and found that was too small for my arms.\n\nA boy made shit of me. I grabbed his hand and twisted it behind his back and bent his fingers, and he screamed and screamed. When the teacher got to us we were both crying, but I wouldn't let go. I broke two of his fingers, so I got kicked out of the school.\n\nAt home, my dad cried, too. He said it was his fault. He said, \"I am walking on my eyelashes. I am making such bad choices for us.\"\n\n\"Walking on my eyelashes\" in Poland means you have been knocked down on your face. My dad walked on his eyelashes because he was drunk every day.\n\nI didn't ever tell Renata this story. I tell no one.\n\n## TEN\n\n## THE PAST LIKE DIRT\n\nBarry Roland comes for breakfast before Renata and me are awake. He is used to just walking in the front door.\n\n\"Adam? Hi? Mrs. Renata? What are you guys doing? I'm here?\"\n\nI groan and roll from bed. Even though it is an extra-long bed, sometimes it feels like I don't fit right. All night I have been uncomfortable. Maybe because I am still wearing my uniform and my warm-ups and I am very sweaty, itchy, and disgusting?\n\n\"Be right there, Barry,\" I hear Renata call.\n\nRenata has turned on Miles Davis and is already rigging up the coffee maker when I get into the kitchen. Barry sits at the table eating a banana.\n\n\"Potassium?\" he says, holding the banana up.\n\n\"Yes, bro,\" I say.\n\n\"You guys won,\" Barry says. \"By a lot. I heard it on the radio.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I say. \"Austin could not run their offense against us.\"\n\nRenata presses go on the machine, then turns to me. \"Did you sneak in when you got home? We didn't hear you.\"\n\n\"We?\" Barry asks.\n\n\"Little girls and some man,\" I say to him.\n\n\"Oh,\" Barry says. \"Okay.\" He nods and smiles like he understands now.\n\n\"You know who he is!\" Renata says. \"He's Regan and Margery's dad.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say, because she is correct. He is not unknown. Our house is on the corner of a large property owned by the college. The little girls live in a bigger house on the other side of this property. Their dad is the professor who grows plants on the land and in a greenhouse attached to their home.\n\n\"His name is Michael,\" Renata says to Barry. \"He's a biology professor.\"\n\n\"He has gray hair,\" I say.\n\n\"He's actually not much older than me,\" Renata says. She smiles.\n\nAnd then I worry. Renata last smiled like this in Philadelphia two years before. Six months later, she was crying and crying because the man named Peter drank \"craft\" beer every night and shouted about how he couldn't handle us, how he couldn't be himself when we were in his space all the time. This was after he played Frisbee with me like a dad and moved his ten thousand smelly books into our apartment and made us watch nothing but public television. For three more months after he left, Renata couldn't act like my mom, because she was too sad. I don't want a repeat. I want Renata happy.\n\n\"I give Tiffany gray hair,\" Barry says. \"Because I eat all the groceries?\"\n\nRenata stares at Barry for a moment, then says, \"I'm going to make you a big breakfast, okay?\"\n\n\"What about me?\" I ask.\n\nRenata gives me a look. \"Of course for you. Basketball stars have big appetites.\"\n\nI slink down at the kitchen table. My big knees slide up and thunk into the table's bottom. \"What do you know about basketball?\" I ask.\n\n\"Nothing. But Michael is good friends with the college coach, and he knows.\"\n\nI don't want to hear the name Michael again. I don't want to feel so itchy in my clothes, either. \"I have to shower,\" I say.\n\n\"I have to shower, too,\" Barry says. \"But I'll wait until after work.\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" Renata says. \"Now?\"\n\n\"I couldn't shower with the man in the house,\" I say.\n\nRenata looks hurt.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I'm okay. I will eat breakfast. I'm fine,\" I say.\n\n\"Okay, good,\" Renata says. She smiles and makes an omelet.\n\nI go to school without having a shower, but it's fine. The day goes by and there is a just a short video session about our scary next opponent and a short basketball practice after. When I get home, I shower for forty-five minutes before the warm water runs out.\n\n## ELEVEN\n\n## LOSING MY MIND TO THE OWENSES\n\nAnd then, the next week, things on the basketball court get bad. I have never even heard of the town called Marshall. It sounds to me like a city that should be in the far west of America, where cowboys ride their horses and shoot up banks and saloons. Maybe because I saw a movie with cowboys and a lawman called marshal? Everyone else on the team knows about Marshall basketball, though, because they are a traditional powerhouse in the state.\n\nMore bad news. The game is being held at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall. \"This is a home game for these guys,\" Coach Jenson says.\n\nThe bus rolls for two hours across frozen prairie lands. Our cheerleaders come. Our pep band comes. But not many fans drive on a windy Tuesday night to someplace near the border of South Dakota.\n\nMarshall's crowd dominates the gym.\n\nDuring the warm-ups, I already know we are in danger.\n\nGreg Day is very good at getting rebounds, but his beef makes him not good at defense. He doesn't swivel his hips quickly or move his feet. To stay with quicker players, he often grabs with his hands and gets into foul trouble.\n\nMarshall has many tall, quick players.\n\nMost of these quick players are named Owens. In practice during the week, Coach Jenson has called them \"the Flying Owenses.\" Caleb Olson nodded. Through the years, many, many Owenses play for Marshall. They are like a dangerous crime family in a gangster movie. When an Owens boy is a senior, Marshall is unstoppable. Coach told me this at practice. He let that statement seep into my mind. Then he said, smiling, \"We've got some weaponry of our own, don't we?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Just play your game, Adam,\" he said.\n\nWhat else would I do?\n\nBut this year there are two senior Owenses, a set of twins who are both six foot five. There is also a little brother from the same family who is a sophomore named Joe. He is already six foot two. And then there is Kyle Owens, who is a big-time college recruit, and a junior, and a cousin of the others. He is six foot seven. I will guard him, because he is the best. All these Owens have sandy-brown hair and eyes that seem too close to their noses. Greg Day will guard one of the twins (the really good one named Tyler), except I know he can't do it. He is simply not good enough.\n\nThe game begins. The Marshall crowd sings epic fight songs in the stands. The Owenses score around me. They all look the same. Can anybody guard these guys? They are an Owens machine, passing and passing and passing until one Owens is clear for a layup, usually Tyler, because Greg Day is not a real baller.\n\nI can leap up over any Owens boy, though. I am faster than any one Owens out there. So there is me and my drives and Caleb's shooting. Even though we are not an army of Owenses from the Marshall nation, we score and we stay in the game.\n\nBut then, the last twenty seconds of the first half, it goes very bad. Greg Day is still on the floor even though he has two fouls (because what is Coach Jenson going to do?). Tyler Owens curls at the key, sprints down the lane, gets to the rim. Another Owens tosses Tyler the ball perfectly. I collapse away from six-foot-seven Kyle Owens to try to help, but it's too late. Greg Day is red in the face. He is so mad about getting beat down the lane. Instead of reaching for the ball, Greg Day tackles Tyler Owens like a football player. Tyler's head bounces off wood. The crowd screams. The ref blows the whistle. Tyler lies on the floor and moans and groans. The crowd boos loudly. The officials bring on medics to treat Tyler, and then they huddle up and start talking about the fate of Greg Day.\n\nThe other Owenses all stand and glare at Greg like they will take off his head and shit down his throat.\n\nCoach Jenson calls us to the bench to get us away from possible trouble.\n\n\"Just relax. Keep calm. We knew these guys would be good. You can't lose your head again, Greg. We're within striking distance,\" Coach Jenson says.\n\nBut then the officials break and the referee assesses a flagrant foul. Greg Day is thrown from the game, and Coach Jenson loses his own head screaming and the crowd boos and shouts nasty words . . .\n\nAir goes from my sail. I am heavy. Greg Day injured Tyler Owens. The refs were right to throw Greg from the game.\n\nExcept then, like a magical elf, Tyler Owens hops up, walks to the free-throw line, and hits two free throws plus a technical foul shot. He was not really hurt. Isn't pretending to be hurt cheating? Then the Marshall Mustangs get the ball again, because of the technical. Tyler Owens scores on Greg Day's replacement, Shane Tinley, who is maybe five foot nine in his mother's high heels.\n\nWhat can I do against this Owens machine that also cheats?\n\nAs the half ends, we are down by eleven points. And there is a bad fire in my belly. I know this is no good. I try to breathe, but I can't.\n\nCoach Jenson talks through halftime, but my fire grows. All I think: the Owenses are cheaters. I barely even hear that we'll play zone defense in the second half. My job is to protect the rim. No dunks, no layups for these Owens cheats. I will crush them first. There is fire.\n\nAnd my fire burns bright. Most of the Owenses are really only good at layups. Yes, okay, with me not guarding him, Kyle Owens, the big-time college recruit, has space to hit jump shots and he does, but their Owens machine is not running so fast. Now I am underneath the basket and no Owens can throw up weak-kneed crap. Every time they get the ball close, I see what they are up to and steal, swat, smash it back in their cheating Owens faces. The crowd becomes mad. They cry, \"Call a foul! Thirty-four is fouling every time, Ref!\" But I know I am not. These Owenses are slow!\n\nKyle Owens becomes more frustrated, and the family play gets worse. He begins to take shots from farther and farther away, without even getting into their family offense. I snarl at him. I get rebounds. I fire outlet passes to Caleb Olson. Caleb streaks down the court. I explode behind him. He shoots or he lobs the ball to me. Bang. Boom. _Sploosh_. I score many times. Caleb fires up three balls. We are both on fire.\n\nAs we hit the middle of the half, we are behind 41\u201344. I am coming for these Owens boys. Yes, I am getting very tired and have not been subbed out the whole game, and Caleb is red in his face and Shane Tinley looks like he might barf out his dinner, but I am coming for these cheating Owens boys anyway.\n\nAnd then the sophomore Owens boy, Joe, does something bad. He dribbles at the three-point line in front of Shane. He looks down to me. Then, like lightning, he cross dribbles Shane. Shane, with his weak ankles, almost falls down, and Joe explodes into the lane. Instead of going for a shot, he lowers his head down and crashes into my chest, which is exposed because I am reaching straight up above my head to block his layup. I fall backward so hard, the wind is crushed from my body. My head hits the wood.\n\nMy sinuses drain. The lights get bright. Ringing comes in my ears. There are cries from Caleb Olson, shouts from Coach Jenson.\n\nBut does the Marshall Mustang crowd boo Joe Owens's dirty play? No. They stand up to see if I am dead.\n\nI'm not. He can't hurt me.\n\nInstead of acting like a man who is dying, I bounce onto my feet and jump around and shout, \"Do it again, bro. Do it! See what happens next!\"\n\nThen the ref blows the whistle. He gives me a technical foul for taunting . . .\n\nMe? I was just knocked to the floor. What about justice?\n\n\"Are you joking?\" I shout.\n\nCoach Jenson shouts, \"No!\"\n\nBut it's too late. The bombs are already going off in my head. If Caleb doesn't restrain me, I might be throwing punches at the ref. He can't stop my mouth, though. My mouth is going on and on. I don't remember what I shout, but Derrick Oppegaard, the pep band drummer who was nearby, later tells me I used every f-word in the book on the ref. I make bad threats.\n\nJust like that, I'm kicked from the game. I deserve it, because I can't control my emotions.\n\nStill, Coach Jenson screams, \"You fixed the game! You are stealing this, Ref!\"\n\nCoach Jenson receives a technical foul.\n\nI slide onto the bench. My anger drains. My fear rises. What happened? What just happened? What if Renata finds out I am insane?\n\nJoe Owens is given four technical foul shot opportunities. The crowd is silent. He hits one. He hits a second. He misses the third. He hits the fourth. Our few fans boo loudly as Marshall gets possession of the ball again. They shouldn't boo. I did this.\n\nThe bottom falls from our team. Without me, the Owenses reign supreme. Within five minutes, Marshall has gone from their three-point lead to a sixteen-point lead. We only score a single basket the rest of the game.\n\nAnd this rings in my head like a bell: The season is going away . . .\n\nThe season is going away . . .\n\nBasketball is going away . . .\n\nNow what? Now what?\n\nAnd then it's gone.\n\nAs time runs out, Coach Jenson gathers us. \"Hold your heads high. You just had the best year in Northrup basketball history. We hung tough against the team that will take our division up at state. I can almost guarantee it. In fact, they could probably beat anyone in any division. That's how good they are. Ten minutes ago, I thought we might take them.\"\n\nGreg Day cries. Caleb Olson cries. Shane Tinley has a towel over his face. I don't cry, but I don't know how to cry anymore. I am dizzy and drained.\n\n\"I love you guys. I love you guys. Heads held high,\" Caleb Olson says.\n\nI want to play more games with Caleb. I do not want him to be a senior. We hug. \"I'm sorry I went crazy,\" I say.\n\n\"That was on the ref, man. You just reacted to the bullshit,\" he says.\n\nI barely remember the \"good game\" line when we shake our opponents' hands. I say no words to the Owenses, but I remember Kyle saying, \"We'll see you again, Thirty-Four.\"\n\n## TWELVE\n\n## I CHOOSE THIS\n\nI get up so early after the loss to Marshall. It has been a bad sleep. I tiptoe down the hall and go into Renata's office. I don't want to wake her up, so I try hard not to bang into anything. This isn't easy, because I have big feet. I turn on her computer.\n\nI have no brothers or sisters. I have no extended family, no aunts and uncles or cousins. In Philadelphia, at the Polish Culture Center Renata took me to each month for a meal and to talk Polish (I don't talk Polish ever, now), everybody said it was crazy for a Polish boy to have no family.\n\nWhat am I supposed to do with that statement? Pretend I have a hundred cousins so I am okay?\n\nThey told me I look Polish, though, because I have dark blond hair and dark blue eyes and a wide face and full lips and I am very white . . . that also describes many kids in Northrup High School. Do they all look Polish?\n\nAn old lady at the center named Magda said I must have lost my Polish part when I came to America, because I'm so quiet and don't smile very much.\n\nBut I never smiled when I lived in Poland, either. My dad left me with nuns and only one small suitcase of clothes and two crinkled photographs, one of him giving the finger and one of my mom playing piano that I left in my pants pocket and it got washed and killed.\n\nWas I not Polish when I lived in Poland?\n\nThis is who I am: my body wants to fight and basketball is as close as I can get to fighting without being taken by the police. And my heart wants to be warm and safe. Maybe I am not courageous, not loud enough to be really Polish? Having a big bed and a giant couch is more important.\n\nBut I feel alone, too. Maybe nobody at Northrup High School really looks Polish. I am awake to google Polish girls in images.\n\nI don't want the sexy poses, but only the regular girls my age who are smiling at festivals or wearing traditional clothes for dancing or maybe taking a walk in the mountains with their families. I stare at one in traditional clothes, with thick brown hair. Green eyes the color of fields.\n\nI think of Carli Anderson . . . Does she look Polish? Anderson does not sound like a Polish name . . . but maybe?\n\nThen I hear footsteps. I hit a bookmark on the browser so it looks like I am just checking assignments at school. The light goes on in the study. Renata stands in the door wearing her nightgown.\n\n\"Wow. You're awake already.\"\n\nI nod.\n\n\"What time did you get home last night?\" she asks. \"It had to have been so late.\"\n\n\"Long bus ride,\" I say.\n\nRenata stares at me for a moment.\n\n\"What?\" I ask.\n\n\"I listened to some of your game,\" she says. \"Michael had it on in his car.\"\n\nI stare at her for a moment now. I swallow. \"Why in his car?\" I ask.\n\n\"We went to dinner,\" she says.\n\n\"Okay. Did little girls go?\"\n\n\"They stayed home,\" Renata says.\n\n\"Here?\" I ask.\n\n\"No, Adam. At their house.\"\n\n\"Oh. Okay.\"\n\nRenata blinks at me, like she's trying to read my thoughts. Then she says, \"The radio announcer called you a once-in-a-generation talent from southern Minnesota.\"\n\nI let this sink in for a moment. \"Huh,\" I say, but I think, _I am not from southern Minnesota. I am Polish._\n\n\"I had no idea you were that good,\" Renata says. \"I'm going to have to come to games next year, even if I hate crowds.\"\n\nNext year. Next year. What can I do with myself without basketball? How can I go to school and see Kase Kinshaw who doesn't see anything but a refugee? How can I make it until next year? This thought almost knocks me out. \"Excuse me,\" I say quietly, \"but maybe, because I lost the game and didn't sleep good . . . well. Maybe I can stay home and get rest today?\"\n\n\"Do you feel sick?\" she asks.\n\n\"My head.\"\n\nWith her migraines, Renata is sensitive to head pain. She lets me stay home.\n\nI call Barry to tell him I'm sick. He's disappointed he can't come for breakfast.\n\nI lie down. Renata leaves. I eat everything in the house. Then I sleep on the couch while ESPN plays in the background. I have my Warsaw apartment dream two times, black ink flooding through the window. Screaming for my dad. The last time I am engulfed. The last time I choke and begin to die but then wake with a start.\n\nI am so happy to find myself on Renata's couch with Renata's TV playing NBA highlights. I choose this over being Polish. When people ask me to talk about my life in Poland, I can't say anything at all, because what I think of is dying. I love Renata's couch and her TV.\n\n## THIRTEEN\n\n## KASE AND CARLI\n\nThursday and Friday morning, Barry comes for breakfast and that is good, but nothing else is good. I leave the house and am drowning in tired. I don't know what to do with myself at school. I try a little in classes, but when I'm so tired readings make no sense and teachers talking make no sense, and class discussions with other kids make no sense, so what's the sense?\n\nThere is no basketball.\n\nI walk down the halls looking at the floor. I become an easy target.\n\nOn Friday afternoon, Kase Kinshaw slides up behind me while I walk. He kicks my right foot into the back of my left ankle. I drop the books I am carrying all over the floor and stumble into a girl I don't know. My elbow hits her ear, and she grabs her head and starts to cry.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I say. I'm not even sure what has happened.\n\nBut then Kase hisses, \"Everybody says you're such a great athlete, Duh. But you can't even walk.\"\n\nI tense. Adrenaline courses in me. I move toward him. The bell rings. I blow out air on his face, which is not much below mine. He is a football player. He is on defense in hockey. He probably weighs more than me by forty pounds. This brawl would be ugly. And I am okay with that, except I can't have a brawl, because . . .\n\nKase whispers, \"Watch out for me, Duh.\"\n\nThe rest of the day, I can't think of anything but Kase Kinshaw. My chemistry teacher, Mr. Burton, asks me to stay after class. He says, \"This material is difficult enough when you're paying attention, Adam. If you let your eyes glaze over like that, you're not going to pass. Do you understand?\"\n\nI nod, but I am not really understanding. I'm thinking how Kase Kinshaw could be hiding anyplace and I can't fight him.\n\nBarry has gone to his job after school. He isn't waiting for me in the parking lot. I creep through the halls, wary of any movement that might tell of an attack.\n\nWhen Carli Anderson comes around the bush outside school, I jump and am ready to punch and run.\n\n\"Dude, did I scare you?\" she asks.\n\n\"No,\" I say.\n\n\"Did you talk to Mayberry Cliff?\" she asks.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"He called my dad last night.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I say. I press myself against the school's wall. I stare at the front door.\n\nThen she raises her arms. She says, \"Check it out. No crutches. I can start to shoot next week. We should shoot. You're about the only person in school who could even hope to compete with me. I mean, after I'm all healed, which is going to be soon if I have anything to do with it.\"\n\nI swivel my head from side to side, scoping for danger.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Carli asks.\n\nGreg Day comes out a side door. He waves at Carli. She waves back.\n\n\"Hey, man,\" she says.\n\nI nod at Greg. I have seen him with Kase many times. But Kase doesn't follow.\n\n\"Do you have a car?\" I ask Carli.\n\n\"Yeah?\" she says.\n\n\"Can I have a ride?\" I ask, looking over her shoulder.\n\n\"I guess,\" she says. \"What's up?\" She looks over her shoulder, too.\n\nIn her car, Carli Anderson talks a million miles per hour. It takes me a few seconds to listen, to stop scoping for trouble. When I do listen, I find out many amazing facts. One, Carli was ranked a top-ten state recruit in basketball after her sophomore year. Two, she would try out for the junior national team this summer, except last September, not long after I moved to Northrup, she tore her ACL playing for fun against college boys at the Trinity College gym. Three, she thinks I am the boy version of her, because Northrup girls' basketball sucked until she was a sophomore and then, because of her, they nearly made it all the way to state. \"The first time I saw you messing around in the gym in the fall, that's what I thought. _He's going to do for the boys' team what I did for the girls',\"_ she says. __ Four, her dad is the men's coach at Trinity College, so that's why he's interested in me. \"Seriously, Mayberry Cliff is going to call you, okay?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I say.\n\nI act like none of this is amazing. I take it all in stride. I don't want to show her that she is making my heart leap in my chest. I don't want her to see that I have no clue who Mayberry Cliff is and have no idea why he would call me.\n\nShe knows more. Her little sister, Caitlin, is friends with Margery and Regan, so she knows that Renata spends time with Professor Michael. \"Do you think they're doing it?\" she asks.\n\n\"What?\" I say.\n\n\"Just joking!\" She laughs. \"He's a great guy. He and my dad are buddies. And, oh man, his ex-wife was a total loon, too. Those girls could use an actual mama figure. Probably a brother. We're all glad you guys are here.\"\n\n\"I think they've been on two dates?\" I say.\n\n\"Mike and your mom? No, more than that,\" she says. \"She's wasting your inheritance on condoms!\"\n\n\"Condoms?\"\n\nCarli is glowing. Her face is red. Her eyes are teary. \"Oh shit. I'm sorry. I'm just joking. It's probably not cool to joke about parent sex, huh?\" Even as she drives, she turns to me and her smile is so big across her face.\n\nAnd I laugh, even though I don't laugh. Not ever. \"Yes. Please shut up about condoms.\"\n\n\"I'll try,\" she says, beaming. She is so pleased with herself.\n\nI am pleased with her, too. We pull in front of my house, and I don't want to get out. But I open the door and step onto the icy pavement, because what else can I do?\n\nCarli leans toward me. She says, \"Adam.\" She doesn't say anything else, but she seems very serious. She stares at me with her green eyes that seem Polish to me.\n\n\"What?\" I ask when I can't take the pressure anymore.\n\n\"Listen,\" she whispers. \"I will beat your ass in one-on-one by the end of this summer.\" Then she talks very fast and louder. \"So you better get in shape, boy! It's not going to be like the weak shit you play in your high school games, either. I'm coming for you!\" She points.\n\nOh boy. Oh man. I like her coming for me. How much better to have Carli Anderson say this than Kase Kinshaw?\n\n\"I'm ready when you are, bro,\" I say.\n\n\"Bro?\"\n\n\"Dude,\" I say.\n\n\"Okay. You better be ready.\" She says this softer.\n\n\"Okay.\" I shut the door.\n\nAnd then she's gone, and I feel a big empty space in the world that she had just filled up.\n\n## FOURTEEN\n\n## THIS NOISE\n\nIt is Saturday afternoon. Some things have happened.\n\nFirst, Professor Michael (he says call him Mike), Regan, and Margery eat Friday dinner with us. Renata makes kielbasas and potatoes and cucumber salad and sernik (a cheesecake), many of my favorite Polish foods. From Carli I am in a good mood. From the food I am even better. After, while Professor Mike and Renata talk in the kitchen, I play that I am a great dragon and Regan and Margery defeat me with magic and violence. Regan leaps from the back of the couch onto my gut when I am lying on the floor, which does hurt, but is so explosive an act it makes me laugh. Margery cups my head and says I am dying honorably.\n\nSecond, Renata, Barry, and I attend the girls' dance recital on Saturday morning. The floors of the studio, in an old brick building downtown, are wood and shiny. The walls have mirrors. The room is filled with families and many little girls in puffy costumes. An old lady plays bad piano to get things started. The little girls run and jump. I have never been at a dance recital, but this is a fine one. By far the best dancers in the whole show are Margery and Regan. They jump the highest and they mess up the dance and they don't seem to care about anything except for the parts where there are kicks and fast spins. When their part is over, Regan slides on her stomach to leave the dance space. Barry whoops and applauds loud. Professor Mike leans and whispers, \"She is too old to behave like that. See what I'm saying?\" But I think she is only eight. Is that too old? I don't care what he thinks, because Regan is excellent. Barry agrees with me.\n\nThird, we eat tacos for Saturday lunch. Tacos are now my favorite food, even more than meat pierogi. We all eat too much. Renata and Professor Mike go to the study to talk. Barry falls asleep on the floor of the living room. The girls fall asleep on the couch. I watch basketball all folded up on our love seat (I am too tall). But these kids? And Barry? All the noise they make?\n\nI am happy. Me.\n\nThen the telephone rings. Regan groans. Barry rolls over on the floor. He is drooling. He goes back to sleep. I hear Renata answer. I hear her say, \"I'm sure Adam will want to talk to him.\"\n\nWho?\n\nBut then Renata doesn't come out of the study to tell me who called, to tell me who I will want to talk with.\n\nWho?\n\nI get off the love seat and walk down the hall to the study and walk in on Renata and Professor Mike kissing like they are teenagers.\n\n## FIFTEEN\n\n## THE FURY\n\nNow it is early Sunday morning.\n\nMayberry Cliff.\n\nOn Friday, Carli had said that Mayberry Cliff would call me. Because I became drunk on Carli, I didn't think again about that name. And he didn't call. But Carli's dad did. Coach Anderson asked Renata for permission to give Mayberry Cliff our phone number.\n\nAfter she stopped kissing Professor Mike, Renata gave me this information: Mayberry Cliff is the director of operations for the D-I Fury, a basketball team that plays AAU and Nike Elite tournaments. He coaches their 17U team, the oldest and best. The D-I Fury are headquartered in Minneapolis and practice either in the Chaska gym (forty-five minutes from Northrup) or in the Minneapolis Academy gyms (an hour's drive, at least). Renata blushed when she talked, not because of basketball. She told me she didn't know anything more, which was good. I wanted to get out of that room. Overnight, I lay awake, and not just from seeing Renata kissing like a teenager, which reminds me of when she fell in stupid love with Peter the dick man of Philadelphia, but also because Renata and I will speak with Mayberry Cliff today.\n\nI don't know yet what this means to me.\n\nAt six a.m., I am at Renata's computer.\n\nThe D-I Fury website is good. There are very colorful graphics. There are flashy videos of good basketball plays. In the history section, there are pictures of boys shooting basketballs, holding trophies, and standing in line to eat at a cafeteria, too.\n\nAlmost every kid on the D-I Fury is black. From being in southern Minnesota for six months, I thought there were very few black kids in the state, but I am wrong.\n\nI lean back in my chair and think of the boy I fought in Philly the year before. I remember his team. I remember them calling me Forrest Gump and making shit out of my play even as I scored on them again and again. But also in Philadelphia, most of my team were Nigerian and they were good people. I ate dinner at Mobo Bell's house twice, even though I couldn't speak English enough to have a good conversation yet. His parents were kind, and they gave me a delicious stew once and then some chicken on sticks that made my mouth too hot the other time. Mobo was funny. Not like Barry is funny. More like Carli.\n\nI click a tab that contains a schedule for the upcoming season and get a big surprise. The Fury doesn't play much around the state of Minnesota. This team plays against teams from large cities all around America. There are games in Chicago, Kansas City, Las Vegas . . . the Fury travels to all of these places? Last year the team played fifty-seven games between March and August.\n\n_Basketball is your passport. Basketball is your passport,_ I repeat.\n\nBut what if I like my warm bed and my couch and my refrigerator? What if I feel at home where I am now?\n\nWhat if Renata has babies with Professor Mike?\n\nWhat if Kase Kinshaw punches my face?\n\nI press a tab that contains the list of Fury alumni. Many are now playing in college. They are in universities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Carolina, California, New York, Michigan, and all over. Some Fury players now play professional basketball\u2014there are two names in the current NBA, but many names that play professional in Europe.\n\nEurope. _Basketball is your passport. Basketball is your passport,_ I repeat.\n\nI spend the next two hours in the basement doing dribble drills.\n\nThen things happen fast. By one p.m., we have spoken to Mayberry Cliff. Renata and I have agreed that I will go to Chaska for the Fury tryouts. Mayberry Cliff says, \"Adam is guaranteed a spot. We scouted him at Marshall. We're just not sure which team yet.\"\n\nAt two p.m., Carli's dad, Coach Anderson, has called back to the house to ask if I will work as part of the Trinity College scout team as Trinity prepares for their playoffs. Renata and I agreed that I will.\n\nAt six p.m., Barry Roland, Regan, and Margery have eaten pizza. They sit at the table drawing a map to the Dragon's Lair. Regan calls Barry \"Shinja.\" Renata and Professor Mike hold hands on the couch.\n\nI go to my bed, where I hope I will stop being dizzy from change.\n\n## SIXTEEN\n\n## PIVOT IN THE POST\n\nIt is the next Tuesday. It is after school. The Fury tryout is ten days away. For now, I will practice with the college team, because they have some injuries and need good players to act as \"warm bodies.\" I am with them in a conference room high above the gym.\n\nHere's something I should remember, because it's almost always true: with basketball, don't be afraid. Close your eyes and go where you're asked. Basketball makes it all better.\n\nMe and the Trinity players watch a large video screen. On it are highlights of a big black guy making post shots. I am watching closely and listening closely. Coach Anderson, who is tall and skinny with a deep gravelly voice, talks about the player: Lawrence Rivers. Coach Anderson's mouth moves fast like Carli's.\n\n\"Lawrence is a transfer from South Dakota. Kid maybe isn't D-I talent, but he's close. He's a heavyset fellow. Big rear end,\" Coach Anderson says. \"Plays in the post every set. Real good footwork, what I'd call refined footwork. Great in isolation. Great one-on-one down there. Reminds me a little of . . . who's that guy, Randy? Used to be on the Timberwolves. Now over at Indiana, I think?\"\n\n\"Al Jefferson,\" a younger coach says.\n\n\"Right. Al Jefferson. Big butt.\" Then Coach Anderson looks at me. \"See what he's doing, Adam? See how he moves his feet, draws defenders in, shoots or passes?\"\n\n\"Uh,\" I say, because I see it but don't understand it.\n\n\"This is what we want you to do for the next few days. Give us a look like Lawrence Rivers does.\"\n\nI squint at the screen. I never play with my back to the basket like that. I don't pivot around like a wheel. \"I don't know . . . I don't do that with my feet. He is too spinny for my style,\" I say.\n\n\"Here's your chance to learn how,\" Coach Anderson says.\n\n\"But that's not my game,\" I say.\n\nThere is a long moment of quiet. No coach speaks. The team stares.\n\n\"Then make it your dang game,\" Coach Anderson says.\n\nI nod, but I am worried, because most people don't know what I know in my heart: I'm not that good. I don't have good ball skills, except dribbling. I don't have good touch on my shots. Other than very fast crossovers (both directions), I don't have many moves.\n\nMaybe Coach Anderson knows all of this? After the players leave, he tells me to watch YouTube highlights of Hakeem \"the Dream\" Olajuwon. \"Watch his hips. Watch his ball fakes. Watch those beautiful big feet. He's so dang crafty down there, guys guarding him nearly fall over.\"\n\n\"I've heard of Hakeem,\" I say.\n\n\"Good. I've watched you, son. You do a lot of running and jumping. Now it's time to hone your craft,\" Coach Anderson tells me. \"We'll work on it together,\" he says.\n\nAfter dinner with Renata, I watch highlights of Hakeem \"the Dream\" Olajuwon. In one way, Hakeem is like me. He is a tall foreigner (Nigerian, like Mobo Bell). In many ways, he is not like me. For instance, he could drop his foot back, shift it forward, pump fake, spin, then drop the ball in the hoop like it floated there on a soft bird, all while double-teamed by six-foot-ten professionals.\n\nI want to do this. Coach Anderson thinks I can do this.\n\nI go to the full-size mirror in Renata's room. She reads in bed and pays no attention. I drop step, spin, pretend to fake, fade away with a jumper . . . and knock over Renata's laundry basket.\n\n\"For gosh sake,\" she says. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nI go into the basement and do all of this footwork with a basketball in my hands. The ball fake is good. I can show the ball like I am about to shoot, but then not shoot. The dribbling out of a spin is not so good. It is hard to keep the ball under control. The jump and jam I can do all night long (not in my basement, because I have no hoop and the ceiling is low, but in real life). The fadeaway I do not know how to do, because I don't have a soft bird. I have a brick cannon. But I think my practice makes me better. I can feel it. This is a big deal, something I didn't know before. While I am learning, I am smashing the ball into the ceiling, which is the floor below Renata's bed.\n\n\"Adam,\" she shouts. \"I will kill you if you don't stop it right now.\"\n\nThen I pivot all night long in bed. I know because I get wound up in my sheets.\n\nFor the next three days I come to the college before their practice begins. Coach Anderson watches what I am doing, plays fake defense, gives me instructions about the angles I should take with my footwork (it makes me think of geometry class), and every day I get better at being like Hakeem. Carli Anderson, who is now off her crutches, takes short shots on another court. She whoops once when I pivot, shot fake, then leap and jam. And even though I don't shoot the ball soft, the Trinity team has a hard time defending me.\n\nOn Saturday morning, Coach Anderson yells at his players for being out of position. But to me he says, \"That's amazing work. Just so good, son. My gosh, you're a natural, aren't you?\"\n\n\"I can't shoot, but my feet can move.\"\n\n\"We can improve that shot. You release at your peak. Carli used to shoot that way, too, and now look at her.\"\n\nI nod, because she shoots like feathers on a breeze. But then we are done, because the playoff game is the next day.\n\n\"We sure appreciate your help,\" Coach Anderson says.\n\nHe does not even know how much I appreciate his help. I hope he invites me back for the next week.\n\nBut maybe I didn't help so much. On Sunday, the Trinity College team goes to Moorhead, Minnesota, to play their game. They lose by ten. Lawrence Rivers doesn't score many, but the rest of Concordia does.\n\nSo there is no practice the next week.\n\n## SEVENTEEN\n\n## BARRY'S DOOR\n\nThere is too much time on my hands. There are too many people in my house. There is Kase Kinshaw in my school. There is no basketball for a week.\n\nWithout basketball, it seems Kase is everywhere. He gives me the evil eye during lunches. He stops across the hall from chemistry to give me the finger and mouth the f-word. He blocks the exit from the commons, and I almost fight him, but breathe and hold back. I can't lose basketball. Worst of all, I see Carli Anderson and her friends walking with him, eating lunch with him, laughing with him, and I get sick deep in my guts. What good person could laugh at his jokes?\n\nAt night, I practice my Hakeem \"the Dream\" post footwork in the basement. Professor Mike and the girls are often upstairs. They are always sitting on my couch.\n\nMonday and Tuesday, Barry Roland comes over for breakfast. He is limping worse every day. On Wednesday, Renata says, \"Barry, maybe you should take a break from breaking your shins all the time. I really don't think you're healing.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm not kicking trees now,\" he says.\n\nI look up from my omelet. \"Why? What about Shinja?\"\n\nHis face turns red. \"I told you yesterday. I have a contusion that turned into an infection and I have to take antibiotics, but Tiffany's insurance is bad, so I have to pay all this money . . .\"\n\n\"Insurance isn't covering everything?\" Renata asks.\n\n\"There was a fifty-dollar deductible, and Tiffany says we don't have fifty dollars, so I have to work extra shifts this week.\"\n\nRenata stares at Barry, then says, \"I'll give you fifty dollars.\"\n\nAt first there is silence. Then Barry speaks. \"No,\" he says. \"Indomitable spirit,\" he whispers.\n\nOn the way to school, I apologize for not listening the day before, but Barry says it's okay, because he talks too much, so people don't listen. \"Tiffany tells me to shut up all the time, so . . . ,\" Barry says. I can see he is unhappy.\n\nThen on Thursday things get better. Carli Anderson walks up to me in the lunch room and says, \"Tonight. Trinity College gym. You and me shooting a game of H-O-R-S-E. Are we on, dude, or what?\"\n\nI look around. No Kase Kinshaw.\n\n\"Uh,\" I say. I smell honey, and I drown in her eyes.\n\n\"Uh?\" she asks.\n\n\"Uh,\" I say.\n\n\"Duh?\" she says.\n\nI have no power against her, even if she laughs at Kase Kinshaw's jokes. \"You bet, bro,\" I say.\n\nShe destroys me in H-O-R-S-E. Her shot is so much better than mine, even though she's not going through her whole shooting motion yet. She wins four games before her knee begins to get too sore. This makes her worried\u2014she pulls off the brace, rubs her knee, talks to it like it's a child that behaves badly. Then she spends a lot of time stretching on the gym floor. I shoot and shoot and miss, which makes her laugh.\n\n\"I will get a better shot and you will be in deep trouble,\" I say.\n\n\"Oh, I am so far out of your league, dude!\" she shouts. She is filled with glee.\n\nBarry is not.\n\nOn the way to school Friday, Barry asks, \"Do you love Carli Anderson, because even if she's really mean, I get it, she's handsome and she's tall, so you match?\"\n\n\"Handsome?\" I say.\n\n\"Yes,\" Barry says, looking at the road, not at me.\n\n\"I don't love,\" I say. \"Also, she's not mean.\"\n\n\"Well, she's not very nice,\" he says. He drives on. His mustache gets small under his nose. \"It's okay, Adam. It's okay if you think she's nice.\"\n\n\"Oh, okay. Thanks for that,\" I say.\n\nWe stop at QuikTrip so Barry can buy some wiper fluid. While he is filling the fluid container, I sit in the passenger seat and wonder what exactly his problem is? I can have another friend, right?\n\nRight as I have this thought, the top hinge on the driver-side door, which is hanging open letting cold air in while he fills his wiper fluid, breaks. The corner of the door hits the pavement.\n\n\"Uh-oh!\" Barry shouts. \"Oh crap!\"\n\nI get out. We try to lift the door back on, but it will not close. Then Barry says we better just go to school.\n\n\"I can hold the door while I drive,\" he says.\n\nBut he's wrong. He drops the door while driving and then the door rips off the car. I turn and watch it spinning on the road behind us. I watch another car swerve so as not to hit it.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" I say.\n\n\"The door caused an accident?\" Barry shouts like a question.\n\n\"Not yet,\" I say.\n\nHe pulls over. We run behind the car into traffic and pick up the door from the street. Cars honk at us. I want to give the finger, but I don't. We jam the door in his trunk, but the trunk won't close. Then we get back in the car. It is very cold. Wind blows in where there should be a door.\n\n\"What do I do?\" Barry asks.\n\n\"Do we go to school?\" I ask.\n\nA cop car pulls up behind us and puts on his lights.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Barry says.\n\nThe cop sits for a few moments, then gets out of his car. I remember my dad in our shit car in Poland and how a cop stopped us and Dad jumped out of the car and tried to run down the street. I watched through the windshield. The cop leapt on Dad's back and pounded his head to the ground. Dad kept fighting. I leapt from the car to fight the cop, too. I was eight years old.\n\nThe Northrup cop doesn't beat us up, but he won't let Barry drive to school. \"You have to get this hunk of crap towed, Barry,\" he says.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Wherever you get it fixed.\"\n\n\"Merle fixes it?\" Barry says.\n\n\"Well, then, get it towed back to your trailer,\" the cop says. \"Let Merle do his magic.\" Small towns are strange. The cop knows Barry and he knows who Merle is, the boyfriend of Tiffany, the loser man who drinks too much and gets in fights downtown or sleeps on the kitchen floor.\n\n\"Okay?\" Barry says.\n\nThe cop then drives me to school. Before I get out, he tells me I should be more choosy about the people I spend time with.\n\n\"No, I don't see Merle ever,\" I say.\n\n\"I'm not talking about Merle.\"\n\nOnly later do I realize the cop means Barry.\n\nWhat's wrong with Barry? I wonder. But I only think about this for a minute. Carli comes up to me in the hall and says, \"Your Fury tryout is tomorrow!\"\n\nWhat if I do love her?\n\n## EIGHTEEN\n\n## ASKING FOR MYSELF, RECEIVING\n\nBarry's car door is a bigger problem than I thought. It is Saturday morning, and I need to go to Chaska for the D-I Fury tryout in an hour. Renata and I sit in the kitchen. Barry has just called with the bad news. Merle won't help him with the door, and he has no car. I am panicking.\n\nRenata exhales hard. \"I can't take you to Chaska, Adam. You know that. We made arrangements,\" she says.\n\nRenata has duties at the college, because it is Trinity Parents' Weekend, where all the parents of students show up and tour classrooms and go to the chapel and go to big concerts by choirs and bands and donate money to the school. Professors are required to attend.\n\n\"Barry's car is dead,\" I say. \"There are no arrangements. He's going to the horse stable now to work to pay for his door.\"\n\nRenata shakes her head. She stares down at her steaming cup of coffee on the kitchen table. \"He can't drive my car?\"\n\n\"He has to work!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Renata shuts her eyes. \"You'll have to skip today. That coach really wants you involved. I'm sure he'll help you get caught up.\"\n\nWhat if I lose this opportunity? What if this ends my passport?\n\n\"Do you know anyone else who could drive you?\" Renata asks.\n\nI take in a short breath. I think. \"Oh,\" I say. \"Yeah, maybe.\"\n\nCarli. I know where Carli lives. I saw her go into a house with a basketball hoop in front of it two days after we moved to Northrup. This is probably her house. I stand and begin to shove my giant shoes in a bag. I put my water bottle in there.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Renata asks.\n\n\"I will go ask for a ride.\"\n\n\"Who? Why don't you just call?\"\n\n\"I don't know her number.\"\n\n\"Her? Do I know this person?\" Renata asks.\n\n\"No,\" I say, even though Renata probably does know her dad.\n\n\"I think I need to get you a cell phone.\"\n\nI stand up straight. \"Why?\" I ask.\n\n\"Because you have people to call,\" she says.\n\nThen I am out the door. I cut across the street and jog across the campus. It is getting mushy, springlike. There is fog in the air. There are puddles from snow melting. I am terrified deep in my heart to knock on Carli's door. But I want to play basketball, basketball is my passport, basketball is my only true desire. I will knock. I will ring.\n\nIt takes me perhaps seven minutes to arrive at the house.\n\nI ring the doorbell.\n\nI ring it again.\n\nThere is no answer. There is no answer.\n\nI ring the doorbell one more time.\n\nThere are creaking noises on the floor and footsteps. Someone is looking through the door's little window! A kid! From inside I hear a little-girl voice say, \"Carli?\"\n\nThere is more creaking. Then Carli looks through the window. \"You?\" she asks.\n\n\"Yes!\" I shout. \"Me!\"\n\nThe door swings open. Carli stands in an old wrinkled tank top and giant pajama pants with crocodiles all over them. She is very sleepy. She has some sort of metal brace thing stuck in her mouth. The little girl, her sister, stares at me from a few steps behind Carli.\n\n\"What are you doing, dude?\" she asks. \"You have to go to Chaska this morning.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I say.\n\n\"So why are you here? Do you want to talk to my dad or something? He's already on campus for Parents' Weekend.\"\n\n\"No. I . . . I . . . Barry Roland's car door fell off.\"\n\n\"What?\" she says, and laughs.\n\n\"It's not funny,\" I say.\n\n\"Did he karate kick it?\"\n\n\"No. The car is a piece of shit.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it is!\" she says. She looks like she is being tickled by little elves in her insides. \"Oh man!\" she says. \"That is so crazy! Was he driving when it happened?\"\n\nI nod. I picture the door spinning on the street behind us. \"That's Barry Roland. He's unlucky at life,\" I say.\n\n\"He is,\" she says. \"So?\"\n\n\"So? He was going to give me a ride to Chaska.\"\n\nShe sniffs and leans toward me. Her eyes become smiling daggers. \"So, I'm next man up? You got no one else? No family? No friends? No acquaintances?\"\n\n\"No,\" I say. Maybe this is what Barry means when he calls Carli mean? \"Nobody.\"\n\n\"That's a sad story, dude.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Guess I'm your girl, then. Come on in.\" She smiles big and lets me in her house.\n\nShe smells so good.\n\nTen minutes later she has received permission from her mom, told her little sister she cannot come along, and we are riding in her SUV, which is much better than Barry's shit show Pontiac (for instance, it has all its doors) and much better than Renata's Toyota (I fit in here without my knees hitting my chest). Like Barry, Carli talks and talks (she asks me once if she talks too much, but I say, \"No way. You talk good,\" which makes me feel dumb). She also sings loudly to pop music.\n\nShe is a very bad singer. But I like her singing. It all makes me happy.\n\n## NINETEEN\n\n## MY REAL HOME\n\nI want to puke like Regan's elementary school friend who puked milk through her nose, which is a gross story Regan told me recently. I am breathing heavy, but no one can know. There is too much noise.\n\nThe gym at Chaska High School is large. The whole place is made of glass and metal like a spaceship in the movies. There are three courts with nets that go from the floor to the ceiling separating each. Carli and I have followed the sound of bouncing balls from the building's entrance to here. And now I am glued in place and must seem in love with staring at these tall nets, because I am staring and staring. I am scared of looking at the basketball players who are all on courts across the gym floor, doing drills, shooting, while old men in basketball warm-ups watch and scribble on clipboards.\n\n\"Where are you supposed to go?\" Carli asks. \"Did they tell you which court?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I mumble.\n\nThe oldest team\u2014I believe they are the top team, because they are filled with boys who look like men\u2014is on the court closest to me. I try not to look.\n\n\"Hey,\" Carli shouts. \"Hey there, Devin Mitchell!\" She waves at a black kid who is easily my height but with many more muscles.\n\n\"What's up, Carli?\" he shouts back. \"What you doing here? Girls don't do tryouts until next week.\"\n\nShe points at me and shrugs. He turns his eyes to me. They land heavy.\n\nI look up and stare at the top of nets. They are some pretty tall nets.\n\n\"Devin used to come down to Dad's camp every summer,\" Carli says. \"He's the best player in the state. Plays for the Junior National Team, too. Bet he goes to Duke.\"\n\n\"No,\" I say quietly.\n\n\"No? You don't think Duke?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Are you okay?\"\n\n\"No,\" I say.\n\n_Basketball is your passport, basketball is your passport, basketball is your passport,_ I repeat in my head.\n\nAn older black guy with a clipboard comes into the gym at that moment. He has big shoulders and wears coaching shorts. He scans the room until his eyes hit me and Carli. A big smile breaks on his face. \"Well, hello, Ms. Carli,\" he says. \"You provide some transportation this morning?\"\n\n\"Yes I did, Coach Cliff,\" she says, also smiling big. They do a little funny handshake. They act like they are old friends. He turns to me. \"So glad you're here, my man. I'm Coach Cliff.\" He extends his hand. We shake.\n\n\"Yes,\" I say. \"Good.\" My heart is thumping hard from nerves.\n\n\"16U is on the middle court,\" he says. \"We think you'll fit there. Coach Kalland is leading the tryouts. They're expecting you.\"\n\n\"Go get 'em, Adam. I'm going to hang with the big boys,\" Carli says.\n\n\"Just have some fun, son,\" Coach Cliff says.\n\nI nod, then run toward the middle court, into the middle of the net where I poke around, then I have to find my way back to the outside, because there is no hole to get through. The boys on the middle court stop bouncing balls and watch me trying to find my way in.\n\n_Basketball is your passport. Basketball is your passport,_ I think.\n\nIt takes me ten seconds that feel more like several days. I look back at Carli, whose face has broken into a giant smile. This, of course, is funny to her. Then I find my way around the side and the boys start running drills. I stand and watch. I already feel better, my feet on the hardwood, my eyes scanning the competition.\n\nThere are two boys at 16U tryouts who are as tall or taller than me. One is a white kid, Sean, who is slow as molasses in January (Coach Jenson used to call Greg Day \"slow as molasses in January\" back in our practices). Sean can't move his big feet and he can't jump, but he has muscles and is good at shooting the ball. The other is kid is skinny. His name is Mohammed. He is long like he's made of rubber bands that can stretch across the floor. He has a good touch when he shoots. Good for him. He is a better shooter than me. Sadly, I would break him in half if I played against him in a game, because I am explosive. I say this not to brag, but only because it's true.\n\nThe other boys are much smaller but are pretty good at basketball.\n\nAfter some time, Coach Kalland, who is running the drills, points to me. He says, \"Adam Reed, right? Come over here. I'd like to test out Sean and Mohammed on defense a little.\"\n\nI would prefer to stretch, shoot some drills to get ready, but what can I do? I pull off the top part of my warm-up and drop it on the floor. I realize I have not even changed into my new shoes (I only wear basketball shoes, but the ones I have on are kind of worn-out). I still have on my pants.\n\nI jog on the court, and the coach tosses me the ball and points me to go to the right wing. Sean lines up in front of me, spreads his long boy arms, and settles back on his heels. I head fake left. His knees lock. I dribble past him on the right and slam-dunk the ball. He has not even moved.\n\n\"Shit,\" he says.\n\nThe smaller boys standing around the baseline all whoop and make a whole bunch of noise.\n\n\"Dang, kid,\" Coach Kalland says. \"That's fast.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I say. \"No. Maybe,\" I say.\n\n\"Yeah, fast,\" Sean says.\n\n\"Mohammed,\" Coach Kalland says. He motions for the other kid to get out on the court. Very long and skinny Mohammed smiles wide and jogs to the right wing. I run back over there, and Coach Kalland bounces me the ball.\n\nI head fake Mohammed. He smiles. I give him another shake.\n\n\"I already saw that move. Don't you got nothing else?\"\n\nBefore, I didn't, but now Hakeem \"the Dream\" and Lawrence Rivers have permanently moved into my feet.\n\nI begin dribbling, turn, and back Mohammed down into the post.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Coach Kalland asks, like he's speaking to himself.\n\nI pivot on my left foot, ball fake. Mohammed leaps into the air. I step underneath his arm and leap up hard, jam the ball in the hoop.\n\nThe little boys on the baseline go crazy, shouting.\n\n\"Cliff!\" Coach Kalland cries. \"Coach Cliff!\"\n\nI stand there staring, not sure what's happening.\n\nCoach Kalland reaches into his pocket and pulls out a whistle. He blows it loud and everyone in the gym stops what they are doing and turns to him. \"Coach Cliff, Adam Reed is coming over to you. He's got no use for us,\" he shouts.\n\n\"No! I do! I don't have to play like Lawrence Rivers!\" I say.\n\nCoach Kalland looks at me and shakes his head. He laughs. He says, \"Boy, that move wasn't any D-III Lawrence Rivers move. That was straight-up D-I, okay?\"\n\n\"Okay?\" I say.\n\n\"Now go talk to Coach Cliff. Thanks for stopping by.\"\n\nPracticed skills are powerful. I learned just a little of the craft from Carli's dad, just a little from studying Hakeem \"the Dream.\"\n\nI don't do too much in the rest of the tryout but watch other boys get schooled by Devin and a smaller point guard. I do play defense on one kid, and he can't score on me. Coach Cliff thanks him and takes him off the court. He does not make the team.\n\nOh, I love being on the court even if I'm not playing. I love watching passing lanes develop. I think about how I'd defend, how I'd use that gap. Everything makes sense to me with basketball. I love the squeaking shoes and the sound of the balls being dribbled on wood.\n\nMan, I just want to play.\n\nBut I've already done my job. My skills have placed me on the top AAU team in Minnesota.\n\n\"Congratulations, son,\" Coach Cliff tells me. \"I thought you might be ready for the bigs.\"\n\n\"Welcome to the show,\" says an old, heavy man who wears big rings, a University of Minnesota shirt, and a Fury baseball cap.\n\nThe only place in the world where I am welcomed is on a basketball court.\n\n## TWENTY\n\n## MORE SKILLS\n\nCarli drives very fast down Highway 169. Maybe I didn't notice that she is a bad driver before because I was nervous for the tryout? Now I am afraid. In Poland, I saw a fiery crash happen close, near my grandpa's farm. This might be my first memory. Bodies being pulled out of a burning car. Carli zigs and zags through traffic on the highway. She sings. She messes with radio stations. She chatters about a girl from a town we pass who Carli hates and would like to stuff a basketball down her throat. I hold on for my dear life.\n\nAfter a while she says, \"You're from Poland, right? That's what my dad said.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"Was your dad a basketball player? Was he big, too?\" she asks.\n\n\"He played soccer. Goalie. Those guys are tall, I guess.\"\n\n\"Was he good at soccer?\" she asked.\n\nThe picture I have of him, he stands in a goal and gives the camera the finger. I don't know if he was good. I shrug.\n\nCarli looks over at me and makes a big show of rolling her eyes. \"Dude, why don't you talk?\"\n\n\"Uh,\" I say, watching the road. \"I talk.\"\n\n\"Not much,\" she says.\n\n\"Don't have anything to say, maybe?\" I reply.\n\n\"That's bad,\" she says.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"People like people who talk.\"\n\n\"What people?\" I ask.\n\n\"Do you know any jokes? That's what I do when I don't have anything to say.\"\n\nThe idea that Carli Anderson would find herself without words makes me laugh. \"You always talk.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I never have anything to actually say! Have you noticed? I'm just making jokes, dude, because it would be pretty boring to sit around staring at the wall saying nothing all the time, like you do! I mean, aren't you bored right now?\"\n\nI don't tell her I'm afraid for my life because of her driving. \"No. I am thinking about basketball. My mind is occupied with this task.\"\n\n\"Your what? Your mind is occupied with this task?\" She laughs. \"See, that's a weird thing to say. You can be funny!\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I say. \"Okay. I'm funny because my English isn't good. But I'm not making a joke, so . . .\"\n\n\"So who cares if you sound funny? Just say what you're going to say and laugh if people laugh. You're not going to get better at English by staring off into space.\"\n\n\"Uh,\" I say. \"But I don't want to get laughed at. Nobody should laugh.\"\n\nCarli is quiet for a moment. Then she says, \"Okay. This is going to sound weird. I mean, I know you're right. Nobody should laugh. But I also know you have no friends and you don't even talk to your own teammates at school and you're about to crash a new team of dudes who have played together for years, so it's not like they're going to want to accept you.\"\n\n\"They don't have to accept. I'll just play.\"\n\n\"Maybe you haven't noticed, but basketball is a team game. If Khalil and Devin don't want you to have the ball, you're not going to get the ball, so you better learn to talk.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"You're an awesome player who belongs with them, right? Mr. Doig wouldn't bring you in if you weren't good enough. So say your weird things in English, dude. Learn a couple jokes, maybe? Don't let it go like it did with Caleb and Greg at our school. They thought you were a stuck-up ass for half the season. They had no idea you were just weird.\"\n\n\"Okay. Maybe,\" I say.\n\nI am processing so much information. Caleb Olson and Greg Day thought I was an ass? Then they thought I was weird?\n\nJust then she passes another car on a curve, and I feel like we are on two wheels and I might scream like Margery when Regan hit her in the eye with a tennis ball. We make it around without flipping into the ditch.\n\nI catch my breath. \"Who is Mr. Doig?\"\n\n\"The old man in the University of Minnesota turtleneck. He's short. Has a round belly?\"\n\n\"Big golden rings and a pointy nose?\" I ask.\n\n\"Yup. He's the man. He and his rich pals fund all the Fury teams. He heads the Fury board of directors. He hires the coaches and helps pick all the players. I'm sure he was at the game in Marshall with Coach Cliff.\"\n\n\"I didn't see nobody at that game.\"\n\n\"Anybody!\" Carli shouts at me. \"Learn real English, fool!\"\n\nCarli is laughing, so I try not to be mad at her. I feel my face go red, though.\n\n\"Anyway, Mr. Doig loves to help poor kids.\" She stops talking for a moment and blinks. \"As long as they kick ass in basketball. That's his version of charity.\"\n\n\"Wait. Am I poor?\" I ask. If he thinks I'm poor now, he doesn't know the meaning of poor. Warsaw with my dad and no food was poor.\n\n\"I don't mean all the kids on the Fury are poor, just lots of them. I'm not poor. Devin isn't.\"\n\nRight then a large truck lays on its horn. It is close behind us. Carli screams, pulls into the slow traffic lane, slows way down and laughs and says holy shit and hoots, then talks a million words every second, all the way home.\n\nI am thankful for many things. One, that Carli slowed down and we didn't die. Two, that she has so much information, so many good things for me to think about. Three, that she drops the subject of my problem with talking.\n\nAlso, her whole SUV smells like honey. I don't want to get out when she pulls in front of my house.\n\n## TWENTY-ONE\n\n## GREAT JOKES\n\nOver the next days I look up many jokes on Renata's computer, because Carli is correct. I am boring, and I make people uncomfortable everywhere I go. I am also Polish, and Polish people are known for good humor and for always talking, so what's my problem? I will learn jokes like I learned to play in the post.\n\nI'm not sure I get American jokes, though. On Tuesday Barry's car door has been put back on his car, so he comes to breakfast with me and Renata. While Stan Getz plays in the background and Barry eats his ham and egg sandwich, I break out this joke: \"What's the difference between a piano and a fish?\" I ask.\n\nHe scrunches up his face and blinks behind his big glasses. \"What do you mean?\" he asks.\n\n\"You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish,\" I say.\n\n\"What?\" Barry asks.\n\n\"Is that a joke?\" Renata asks.\n\nMaybe it's not a good joke, I think.\n\nOn Wednesday night, Renata and I go to Professor Mike's house, because he has decided to try a Polish recipe. He fries pierogi. When they are made right, they are great. But these don't smell right. He has filled them with mushroom and cabbage, and that is something that would be very fine in a pierogi, but they don't have the same flavor of sweet cabbage pierogi my mom made on Grandpa's farm.\n\nThe girls are happy, because they like Chinese food.\n\n\"This tastes like Panda Express at Mall of America,\" Margery says.\n\nShe is right. Panda Express is not Polish.\n\nWhile I chew and swallow big chunks so I don't have to taste too much, Professor Mike says, \"Adam, what was your last name in Poland?\"\n\nI look over to Renata. She flinches.\n\n\"Sobieski?\" I say.\n\nProfessor Mike has not noticed Renata. He nods. \"Oh, isn't that a famous name in Poland? I feel like I know that name.\"\n\n\"It's a famous king's name,\" Renata says quietly. She is a scholar of Slavic literature and history, so she knows a lot about my country. That's what she was doing when she found me, researching at Warsaw University.\n\n\"King?\" Regan says.\n\nI nod. \"Warrior king. He rode in on horses and saved Vienna from the Ottomans,\" I say.\n\n\"That. Is. Awesome,\" Margery says.\n\n\"You should go back to Sobieski as your name!\" Regan says.\n\nI swallow. It's strange to hear my old name. \"My mom is Renata now,\" I say. \"Renata Reed.\"\n\nThere is a moment of silence that is awkward. I think about Carli. I bust out this joke: \"What did the ghost say to the bee?\"\n\n\"What?\" Renata asks. \"Is this another joke?\"\n\n\"Boo bee,\" I say.\n\n\"What?\" Margery says.\n\n\"You know, like boobies?\" I point at my chest.\n\n\"Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha!\" Regan cries. She loves my joke. Regan is now my favorite person next to Barry and Carli.\n\nThe next morning, Thursday, I stop Barry from talking about his bad mom, Tiffany, and how he has no money to pay for tae kwon do lessons and how he owes Bob for three months of tae kwon do already, even though Bob told him not to worry about it, he has to worry about it, and so he has to work all weekend, but has no money for gas, so how can he drive to work? This is the joke I use to ease his troubles: \"What do you call a cow with no arms and no legs? Ground beef.\"\n\n\"Ha-ha,\" Barry says. \"Good one.\"\n\n\"Cows don't have arms, Adam,\" Renata says. Then she gives Barry two twenty-dollar bills. \"I know you don't want to take this, but you need gas money or you can't earn money.\"\n\nBarry looks down at the table. \"Thank you,\" Barry says. \"I'm sorry. But I will pay this all back, okay? I promise.\"\n\n\"That's a good joke, though, right?\" I ask.\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" Renata says to Barry.\n\nThe next morning, I will go to the Fury weekend camp at Minneapolis Academy. Coach Anderson will drive. Carli Anderson will be there, too. Although she can't play, she will hang with her basketball friends and help to coach the 12U girls' team.\n\nI am prepared to tell Carli many, many jokes. I am feeling good.\n\n## TWENTY-TWO\n\n## TO THE CITY\n\nFriday morning, a Lexus SUV pulls in front of our house. Renata follows me out the front door. The corners of her mouth are down-turned. She says, \"You are getting too old, Adam.\"\n\n\"No,\" I say.\n\nShe stares at me like she's expecting more.\n\n\"I'm just right,\" I say. \"I'm the age I am.\"\n\nShe laughs a little, more than when I make my new jokes. We are almost to the Lexus. \"I've been a good mom to you, right?\" she asks.\n\n\"Uh,\" I say. I stop, because Coach Anderson has gotten out of the car and I don't want him to hear this odd conversation. \"You are my mom. That's good.\"\n\nShe nods. \"I wish we had gotten you that cell phone.\"\n\nI nod.\n\n\"You all ready, buddy?\" Coach Anderson says.\n\nRenata hugs me. \"Kick butt, or whatever you jocks like to say.\"\n\nAnd then I am scared. I've never been away from Renata overnight, not since she finally managed to adopt me in Poland nearly five years ago. I did not let myself think about this moment before.\n\nCoach Anderson stands behind the SUV with the back door open. \"Throw your bag in here,\" he says.\n\n\"I call shotgun, dude!\" Carli says from up front.\n\n\"Shotgun?\" I ask.\n\n\"Front seat!\" she says.\n\nRenata is forgotten.\n\n\"I like back seats,\" I say, smiling big. I throw my bag in back, then climb into the door behind Carli. She twists and gives me a smile.\n\n\"I love camp,\" she says. \"It's so fun.\"\n\nCoach Anderson climbs in the driver-side door. \"Don't you even think about playing, Carls. You're here to coach. Your knee is not remotely ready.\"\n\n\"Whatever. I'm just a baller,\" she says.\n\n\"Baller,\" I repeat.\n\n\"My gosh, I hate that word,\" Coach Anderson says, but he laughs.\n\nHe pulls from the curb, and we roll past the college. Maybe Renata stayed in the cold yard and watched me leave? Maybe she waved? I don't know.\n\nWe drive through a glowing Minnesota morning. Spring snow that fell earlier is almost gone and the ditches turn green. Carli sings terribly with the radio until Coach Anderson says, \"Good lord, Carls. Please put a sock in it.\"\n\nI don't want her to put in a sock, because I like her bad music so much.\n\nWe drive far past the exit for Chaska High School. Soon we are on a road of many lanes, filled with cars, getting closer to Minneapolis. Finally, after going so close to the airport I thought two airplanes would land on the SUV (I ducked, which made Carli laugh, because if a plane really landed on the car my ducking would not help), we take an exit. Then we turn into a neighborhood with nice big houses that overlook a river as big as the Vistula River in Warsaw. I know this must be the Mississippi. What else? It's the biggest river in Minnesota. Actually, it's the biggest river in all of America.\n\n\"We could live here, Dad, if you'd get a job at one of the Twin Cities colleges,\" Carli says.\n\n\"No way. I'm happy where I am,\" Coach Anderson says.\n\n\"Blah. Northrup,\" Carli says. \"I want the city, man!\"\n\n## TWENTY-THREE\n\n## YOUNG BLOODY BOY\n\nTwo minutes later, we are in the parking lot of a very fancy school. Buildings are made of blond bricks and glass or red bricks with ivy growing up the sides. It reminds me of an old place in my memory, the center I lived in in Warsaw with the nuns after my dad dumped me off. I have a hard time leaving my seat.\n\nCarli Anderson puts on her backpack, and slides from the front. \"You coming?\" she asks.\n\nI sit.\n\nCoach Anderson leans back in the SUV. \"Ready, buddy?\" he asks.\n\n\"Adam?\" Carli says.\n\n\"Yeah. Okay.\" I open the door and climb from the SUV. I gather my bag from the back seat and pull it over my shoulder.\n\nCarli leans on the SUV. \"They're a bunch of ballers, just like me and you,\" she says quietly. \"Don't worry.\"\n\nBut I'm not worried about basketball. Basketball is a dream come true. The rest of life is the nightmare.\n\nCarli smiles big. \"Time for me to go be a girl,\" she says. She turns and walks slowly away, stiff on her leg.\n\n\"You coach. You don't play,\" Coach Anderson shouts after her.\n\nI am sad the boys and girls aren't together.\n\nCoach Anderson heads toward another building. I follow him to the redbrick boys' dormitory.\n\nIn the lobby area, two ladies sit behind a folding table. They have a stack of folders piled up and a paper with a list of names in front of them.\n\n\"This is Adam Reed,\" Coach Anderson says, before I have a chance to say my name.\n\n\"Yes, Reed,\" I say.\n\n\"What team?\" one woman asks, looking down her list.\n\n\"17U,\" I say.\n\n\"You'll be on the third floor,\" the other woman says, a nice smile spreading across her face. \"Do you have your permissions and your Conduct Contract?\"\n\nI unzip my bag and pull out the permission slips Renata signed and also a long contract that lists all kinds of bad behavior on it that I promise not to do. I can't take drugs or smoke cigarettes or drink liquor or beer or get arrested by the police. I don't want to do any of those things, so I am okay. I hand the papers to her.\n\nThen the first woman says, \"Oh no.\"\n\n\"Oh no?\" Coach Anderson asks.\n\n\"Adam's on floor one. You're with a 14U boy for some reason,\" she says.\n\n\"Wonder why?\" Coach asks.\n\n\"Don't much matter. You'll be with your team plenty, Mr. Reed.\"\n\nThey give me a towel (I brought my own), sheet, and pillow (I have my own), a folder with a map, rules, offensive diagrams, and a schedule. They give me a little envelope with the key to my room.\n\nCoach Anderson then says bye to me. I go to find the room and my fourteen-or-under roommate. His name is Jesse, the lady at the desk tells me.\n\nThe dorm at Minneapolis Academy is very pretty on its outside, but its inside is smelly and dark and the room I will stay in looks like a hospital room in an old Polish horror movie.\n\nMy roommate is only thirteen. Jesse is so white he is like a sickly ghost. He is also as tall as me, but he weighs maybe a hundred and twenty pounds. This boy has the biggest feet I have ever seen\u2014big, floppy dolphin flippers\u2014and he has a nosebleed for the whole first hour we are in the room together.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he says with his voice that sounds like a sad goose honking. \"I have a bad nose.\" He bleeds on his pillow, on the floor, on his own chin, on ten thousand Kleenex, which he drops on the floor after he fills our whole garbage can.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" I say, making my bed. \"But are you dying?\"\n\n\"No. Ha-ha. This happens a lot,\" he says, tipping his head way back to stop the blood. \"Especially with stress.\"\n\n\"But maybe you need to see a doctor?\" I ask.\n\n\"Nobody wants to room with me because they think I'm gross,\" he says.\n\nI look at blood on Kleenex everywhere. \"Oh really?\" I say.\n\n\"How come you got stuck with me?\" he asks.\n\nIt doesn't matter. I will soon be playing basketball and everything will be good. That's what I think.\n\n## ____TWENTY-FOUR\n\n## BAD REACTIONS\n\nVery soon we are due to the first practice. My gut's nervous, but I am ready. I will be a good teammate. No one will think I'm an ass. I have a joke ready about a lonely cookie and his mom, who has been \"a wafer so long.\" Get it, a wafer? Away for?\n\nMy bleeding roommate and I head to the boys' gym together. Girls are practicing in the academy's nice gymnasium. We are in the ice arena, which is made back to a basketball and tennis court area after the first week of March and the end of the high school hockey season. Jesse has twenty-five Kleenex jammed in the left side of his nose.\n\nWe enter and are the last boys to arrive. There are basketballs bouncing everywhere. I love the sound. Cement arches of the arena echo with this beautiful noise. Then the whistle blows. All motion stops. \"Over here, Adam,\" Coach Cliff shouts from the court farthest from door. I jog to Coach Cliff, and the basketballs begin their bouncing once more.\n\nBut not at 17U. No basketballs bouncing.\n\nEleven other boys await me. All of them have crossed arms. I wave, which is my stupid nervousness, like saying, \"Duh.\" And in return, they glare harder, like I am not welcome among them. This is not the right time for my cookie joke.\n\nI slow down my jog. I swallow hard.\n\nCoach Cliff slaps me on the back, then says, \"Glad you're here, buddy.\" He turns to another boy, the one who has muscles like a big man. \"Devin. You lead warm-ups. Paired with Adam.\"\n\n\"Come on, Coach,\" he says. \"I'm with Khalil.\"\n\n\"Not today.\" Coach Cliff turns to me. \"Adam. You remember Devin from last week?\"\n\nI nod.\n\n\"He's your partner. Just do what he does.\"\n\nI nod again.\n\nDevin shakes his head.\n\nWhy? I'm good at basketball. Why would he not want to be paired with me? Heat grows in my heart. Devin dribbles the ball away from me. I follow him to a spot on the floor. Other boys get paired and line up near us.\n\nThen Devin fires passes at me. Hard. Chest, bounce, overhead chucks that hurt my hands to catch them. He doesn't even look like he's trying. The ball pops from his hands. I copy what he does. I can throw hard, too.\n\nAfter a minute, Devin shouts, \"Read and react.\" The smaller, guard-like boys go to the top of the key. Me, Devin, and few others\u2014taller ones\u2014stay down under the basket. \"Just make a move,\" Devin says without looking at me, because I'm nobody to him. \"Like you're committing to defending one side or the other. Like this.\" The guard dribbles down. Devin leaps to his left. The guard reacts to Devin and drops in a layup. \"Then rebound,\" Devin says. He grabs the ball and dribbles up to the top of the key. The shooter remains below the basket waiting to pretend to play defense. I get it (except maybe I don't).\n\nA boy with the ball is coming up to me. I slide left, and the boy makes his move to shoot a layup. But I can't help it. Defense is fun. I leap back and hit the ball out of the air. \"No, dude,\" the kid says. \"Come on. Let me warm up.\"\n\n\"Don't block him, Adam,\" Coach Cliff shouts. \"Not now.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I say. \"Okay.\" I chase the ball and go to the top of the key behind Devin. He shakes his head at me like I'm an idiot. The heat grows more.\n\nDoes he think I care if he is happy to play with me? I am used to all the bad people. I have lived with my dad. I have fought boys in Poland and Philly. I exist with Kase Kinshaw always trying to be in my head. I don't care about this muscle guy!\n\nWe repeat the drill for some time. No defense. The defender rebounds and soon gets a chance to shoot. Teammates keep stopping and popping shots from farther out from the hoop. At the elbow by the side of the free-throw line, I have hit the end of my range. My shots look dumb and dumber, like I am whipping the ball. But Devin, who is big as I am in height and more of a man in muscles, keeps moving backward, farther and farther, beyond the three-point line.\n\nAnd he does not miss. The ball takes wing from his hand and slides through the net silent and perfect.\n\nAnd I see, for the first time since my growth spurt and my arrival in Minnesota, a boy about my age who is far better at this game than me.\n\nMy stomach tightens.\n\nHe doesn't like me? Screw him. I don't like him.\n\nBut, shit, he is too good. He is better. He is bigger. He jumps high easily. He runs light on his feet\u2014I am not even faster. He shoots the ball better than the best of the guys I saw in the playoffs.\n\nDevin Mitchell fires from five feet beyond the three-point line. The ball slides through the net. I fire a brick into the front of the rim. He is not just a tiny bit better than me. Devin Mitchell belongs on a different planet.\n\nHe doesn't like me?\n\nThe heat in my heart grows stronger. I feel it burn down my arms and legs. I am different everywhere. I stick out like a sore thumb. I am the sore thumb. In Northrup, at least I am the best. But here, I am not even the best. I am just different. Weird. Awkward. Fumbling.\n\nThe team moves to a passing drill where the dribbler reacts to a defender by passing to another guy, who crashes to the rim for a layup, and I am a head case, confused. I throw the ball out of bounds. All of these boys laugh and shake their heads like I am stupid. They all hate me, huh? Then we move to what Devin calls back-door cuts and I am lost again, but I end up with Devin slam-dunking over me, bouncing the ball off my shoulder. The whole Fury team shouts and woots.\n\nI burn in every part of my body. This makes me focus.\n\nOn my next back-door cut (I run to the right wing, then quick turn back to basket, fly in), the boy who handles the ball gives me a lob. I leap, take it from the air well above the rim, and smash it through the hole. Then, before I am thinking, I hang on the rim and shout loudly.\n\nWhen I drop to the floor, I am surrounded by the Fury team. They are shouting, not good things.\n\nCoach Cliff blows his whistle.\n\nDevin shoves me. \"You want to show us up, Farmer?\" he spits. \"You get on our team for a minute and you front?\"\n\nCoach Cliff blows his whistle louder and longer.\n\nI know Devin could destroy me. It takes everything I have not to punch his big face. I lean toward him. I remember that I could lose everything if I act . . .\n\nThen Devin shoves me so hard I fall back onto the floor.\n\nThere are suddenly many loud whistles blowing from everywhere. Five coaches come in and surround us.\n\n\"Devin Mitchell, what in the hell are you doing, son?\" Coach Cliff shouts.\n\n\"D-Mitch, you get off my court right now,\" another man yells. It is the short old white man in his Fury baseball cap. Mr. Doig is what Carli called him. \"No brawlers, no thugs!\"\n\nDevin stands over me, swears under his breath, shakes his head, and walks off the court.\n\n\"Everybody go clean yourselves up,\" Coach Cliff says. \"No more practice until we have this issue sorted out. Shower, then a meeting in forty-five at the fourth-floor lounge.\"\n\nI push myself off the floor. Everyone stares at Coach Cliff.\n\n\"Adam Reed, you stay behind. The rest of you, get out of here,\" Coach Cliff says.\n\nAs they leave, Coach Cliff says, \"Now you listen up, son. These guys don't think you belong here. You're not doing yourself any favors by showboating.\"\n\n\"That's right. Show you belong with your play,\" Mr. Doig says.\n\nI nod. But it wasn't my fault. Devin is the ass.\n\nAll the way back to the dorm room, I grumble and mumble. So many people are shit. I don't like bad people in Warsaw or Philadelphia. I don't like them in Northrup. And I don't like these stupid Minneapolis ballers.\n\nI stop walking for a second. That's every place I've lived since I was little.\n\nMaybe I don't like people? Is there something wrong with me?\n\nThen I imagine big Devin busting a dunk on my face and terrible Kase tripping me as I walk by. Why do they all do it?\n\nI don't care about people. I hate people.\n\nI walk fast.\n\n## TWENTY-FIVE\n\n## GUIDANCE, PART I\n\nForty minutes later, I sit on my bed in the dorm room. I have punched the bed many times and am exhausted. It's good that Jesse has not yet returned from his practice to see me crazy. At the end of the punching, it occurs to me once again that I have problems and maybe I myself am one of them.\n\nWhy did I get angry that Devin is better at basketball? Isn't it just a fact, not something he did to me? I can be angry about him being nasty, but what made me slam-dunk the basketball and hang on the rim is that he is better.\n\nJust then, a knock lands on my door. I expect it is Coach Cliff, but it is Carli Anderson.\n\nI am not wearing a shirt.\n\nShe pauses and looks down at my chest. She says, \"Oh. Whoa.\" I fold my arms because I am embarrassed. Her face blushes. Her eyes come back up to mine.\n\n\"Uh?\" I say.\n\n\"Okay. I have to concentrate,\" she whispers.\n\n\"What?\" I say.\n\nShe shuts her eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath, then opens her eyes wide. \"Uh, holy shit, dumbass. You already got in a fight?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I say. \"Okay.\"\n\n\"Well, great job.\"\n\n\"No. Not good.\"\n\nShe shakes her head, and I can smell her shampoo. I become a little drunk in my brain. \"Listen,\" she says, \"I know you only have, like, two minutes before you have to meet with the team, or whatever, but you need to know a couple of things, okay?\"\n\nI nod, still drunk. \"Yeah?\"\n\n\"I'm coming in, which breaks team rules, by the way, so don't let me do it again.\"\n\nI step out of her way. She looks at my chest as she passes, but then she finds many bloody Kleenexes on the floor. \"What's with this mess? Did you get punched?\"\n\n\"The Kleenex is from my bleeding roommate,\" I say.\n\n\"Did you punch him?\" she asks.\n\n\"He bleeds all by himself.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Carli nods. Then she crinkles up her eyes. \"Adam, my dad thinks you have huge potential.\"\n\n\"I know,\" I say.\n\n\"But you aren't that good yet.\"\n\n\"But . . .\"\n\n\"Shut up! You're not that good yet, okay? And Dad thinks you should be on the 16U team. He couldn't believe they moved you up. No way you belong on the same court with Khalil Williams.\"\n\n\"Who?\" I ask.\n\n\"That point guard? He's awesome.\"\n\nI know who she is talking about. \"He's pretty good,\" I say.\n\n\"No, he's really, really good. And Devin Mitchell? Why would you fight him?\"\n\n\"Because,\" I say.\n\n\"Have you watched him at all? Have you looked him up on YouTube? There's, like, hours of Devin Mitchell highlights out there,\" Carli says.\n\nI nod. \"I know. I saw today. Devin is a hundred percent better than me, okay? He jumps as good. He shoots way better. I do not belong on court with him.\"\n\n\"Then why'd you fight him?\" Carli asks.\n\n\"I didn't really fight,\" I say. \"He shoved me.\"\n\n\"Because you tried to show him up.\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nCarli nods slowly. \"Adam . . . I know you're smart.\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"You are. You're actually cool.\"\n\n\"No,\" I say.\n\nShe nods more. \"But you are not easy, okay?\"\n\n\"I know,\" I say. \"But I'm trying. Listen, I learned some jokes.\"\n\nCarli laughs a little. \"Really?\" she asks.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nShe takes another deep breath, then says quietly, \"Man, nobody knows you, but everyone thinks they know you.\"\n\n\"Why do they think that?\"\n\n\"Because you let them make up who you are.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"Everybody in Northrup thinks you're some kind of mute, basketball-playing freak show.\"\n\n\"Not everybody. Kase Kinshaw, yes. But not everybody.\"\n\n\"Yeah, Kase Kinshaw.\"\n\n\"He's a bad jerk.\"\n\n\"He's not. He's my friend.\" Carli pauses for a moment. Then she says, \"Let's just talk about these dudes here.\"\n\n\"What about them?\"\n\n\"They think you're something you're not, too. They think they know exactly who you are. And if you act weird or angry or if you stay silent, they will keep thinking you're just some stuck-up, rich blond kid from southern Minnesota.\"\n\n\"I am not that,\" I say.\n\n\"No,\" she says. \"So you have to speak.\"\n\nI stand back up. \"But I don't speak right when I try.\"\n\n\"You speak fine.\"\n\n\"I got jokes. Should I tell jokes?\"\n\nCarli shakes her head. \"Try this, please. Try, okay?\" She looks at the ceiling for a moment, then back at me. \"In the meeting, tell them you're from a different country. Tell them you're really stressed out about getting moved up to 17U and the dunk was a release. Tell them you cannot believe you're playing with such giants of Minnesota basketball . . . well, you don't have to say that exactly, but let them know that you know they're really, really good and it's a privilege to play with them. And you really want to be a part of their team.\"\n\n\"Then my jokes?\" I ask.\n\n\"No, dude. Jesus!\" Carli says.\n\n\"I was joking about that,\" I say. \"I'm not dumb.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she says.\n\n\"I'm not a mute freak show,\" I say.\n\n\"Dude, I know,\" she says.\n\nThere's a knock on the door.\n\n\"Is it really against the rules for you to be here?\" I say.\n\n\"Coach Cliff sent me to talk to you. It's okay this time,\" she says.\n\n## TWENTY-SIX\n\n## GIANTS OF BASKETBALL\n\nI have seen rooms like this at colleges where Renata has worked. We lived for two months in a graduate student apartment when I first came to America. There are chairs of faded red color that are low to the ground and they look cushy and comfy, but don't be fooled. They are not comfortable. These chairs are strewn about on dirty gray carpet. There is an old TV in the corner and a crusty fridge. This place is a student lounge.\n\nAll the D-I Fury 17U team has once again beaten me to the spot. I enter right before Coach Cliff. All the players are very low in those chairs. No talking. They all glare at me as I enter, and I feel sick and I want to give them the middle finger, but I want to play basketball with them more. _Remember they are giants of basketball._\n\nMr. Doig leans on a table at the front of the room. \"Sit down, Adam,\" he says.\n\nThere is one open chair in the front row. I go and sink into it.\n\nMr. Doig begins walking back and forth in front of us. \"Do you know why I started this organization?\" he asks.\n\nNo one says a word.\n\n\"Because,\" he says, looking at the ceiling, \"I love this game and I believe kids are the future. And so I wanted to merge these loves, basketball and kids, with my personal understanding of what makes an individual successful.\" He stops and looks to me. \"Have you had a chance to read the materials in your folder yet, Adam?\"\n\n\"Not too much,\" I say.\n\nHe shakes his head at me. Glares. \" _No, sir_. That is the appropriate response to my question, son. Show respect.\"\n\nI am confused for a moment, but in Poland there is more respect shown for old guys than there is here usually. I think I understand. \"Okay,\" I say. \"No, sir.\"\n\nThen Mr. Doig looks to Devin Mitchell, who is also in the front row.\n\n\"Stand up,\" Mr. Doig says.\n\nDevin Mitchell pushes himself up from his chair. He makes Mr. Doig look like a little toy fat man.\n\n\"What do we learn on the Fury? What are the six factors of success?\" Mr. Doig asks.\n\nDevin takes in a deep breath, then says in a quiet voice, \"One, work hard. Two, dream big. Three, prep particularly. Four, respect your coaches. Five, no excuses. Six, never give up.\"\n\n\"Good. Now, who brought Adam Reed onto this team?\" Mr. Doig asks.\n\n\"You and Coach Cliff,\" Devin says.\n\nMr. Doig's face turns a shade of red. His voice gets low and gravelly. \"How are you to refer to me, son?\"\n\n\"Sorry, sir. You brought Adam Reed onto this team. Sir.\"\n\nMr. Doig nods. \"And who am I?\"\n\n\"You are a coach. You also lead this organization, sir,\" Devin says.\n\nMr. Doig nods again and returns to his walking. \"Now, if I see any one of you treat Adam Reed in a fashion that is anything but respectful, I'll call it like I see it. And that is that you are disrespecting the wishes of your organization's CEO and the wishes of your coach. Does that violate team rules, Devin?\" Mr. Doig asks.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Devin says.\n\n\"And what happens to boys who violate team rules?\"\n\n\"They are dismissed, sir,\" Devin says.\n\n\"That's right. Terminated. I don't care if your dunks are ESPN highlights, if you can't follow the rules, you are out of here,\" Mr. Doig says. \"But maybe you don't care anymore? Maybe you're too big for this team? Have you talked to your father about how big you've become?\"\n\n\"No, I'm not so big, sir. I love this team,\" Devin says.\n\nThen Mr. Doig turns to me. \"I believe you disrespected your teammates this afternoon, too, didn't you, Mr. Reed?\"\n\nWithout a thought, without a duh, I speak. \"Yes, I did, sir,\" I say.\n\n\"Do you have anything to say for yourself?\"\n\nThere is a short pause. I am thinking he knows what Carli Anderson said to me before in the dorm room. Should I confess I am a poor, troubled Polish boy now? Even if I don't want to talk about Poland to these guys? Mr. Doig lifts an eyebrow. So I stand. I say the thing Carli told me to say, but nothing about Poland.\n\n\"Fury team. I am sorry I dunked and shouted like that. This day gives me a lot of stress, and so I dunked and let out the stress. You boys are giants of basketball in Minnesota, and I am respectful. Please forgive me.\" I sit back down.\n\nFrom the back, someone speaks. \"Giants of basketball?\"\n\n\"Khalil, do you have something to add?\" Coach Cliff asks.\n\nKhalil is the special point guard Carli discussed before.\n\nHe stands. \"Yeah. Yes, sir. I do,\" Khalil says. \"Me and Devin talked through this over the week. We aren't trying to disrespect our leaders or even Adam Reed. Not really. We're just confused, okay? Between the two of us, we know at least five dudes who have skills that exceed this . . .\" He points at me. \"They exceed what Adam Reed can do on the basketball court.\"\n\nThe other players all nod their heads.\n\n\"At least five,\" Devin says from his chair. \"Probably more like six or eight, sir.\"\n\nKhalil nods at him, then turns back to the rest of us. \"So the only reason we can come up with that you, sir, and Mr. Doig, chose him is that he's a farmer boy.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not farmer,\" I say.\n\nDevin stands up again. I look up at him from my chair. He is very unhappy and very nervous. I don't understand what's going on. He talks fast about me. \"Now why we grabbing this farmer boy? Why would coaches go outstate to pick up this farmer? It's not like he's one of those big blond fives you sometimes see around here. He's not six foot ten. He's just blond, right?\"\n\nI begin to understand something that Carli told me. That they see me only as a boy who is blond and blue-eyed from a small town. They don't see my life.\n\n\"Why him, sir?\" Devin asks, pointing at me.\n\n\"Yeah, why?\" Khalil says.\n\nDevin waits for no answers. \"Maybe because it looks better to the press if you can put a token white boy on the team? Was it bad the 17Us were all black last year? Maybe it looks better to the dudes my dad and Mr. Doig hit up for cash to help fund this program? Is that it . . . sir?\" Devin again does not wait for answers. \"But I have to ask this: who is going to benefit more from this program? A farmer who probably lives in a nice house, with a nice old mom and dad, who can afford college no matter what . . .\"\n\nHe doesn't know me. \"No,\" I say.\n\n\"Or maybe Shawn Carter, up at Columbia Heights, who averaged twelve a game this season and has three sisters in that little house of his?\"\n\n\"Hold on, son,\" Coach Cliff says, raising his hand.\n\nMr. Doig makes a fake spit sound. \"First, it is not your role to wonder about my leadership. You do your job. I'll do mine. Do you understand?\"\n\nDevin stares hard at him for a second, then nods. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Yes?\" Mr. Doig asks.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Devin says.\n\n\"Second, I don't give a rat's ass what color hair my players have. What do I care about? Shawn Carter has a juvenile record. Isn't that true?\"\n\n\"Um. Yes, sir,\" Devin says. \"But, come on, it's not real. It's from a stupid fight in seventh grade . . .\"\n\n\"No thugs on this team,\" Mr. Doig spits.\n\n\"He is not a thug, sir,\" Devin almost whispers.\n\n\"'Thug' is not the right word,\" Coach Cliff says. \"But Shawn Carter does not meet eligibility requirements for the Fury. That's the truth.\"\n\n\"The board agrees unanimously on this count,\" Mr. Doig says. \"You must be a good citizen, and you must be the best or have the potential to be the best. That's all we care about. And it is offensive for one of my boys to tell me that black and white matters after all I have done. Race isn't a factor here. Not in my organization. Do you understand, Devin Mitchell?\"\n\nDevin doesn't say anything for moment. Then says, \"Yes, sir.\"\n\nKhalil sits down slowly. Devin stays standing. He gets an odd look on his face, like maybe he swallowed a bad piece of fish.\n\nThere is a long silence. Awkward. I think of Carli. I think how they don't know me and that is causing problems.\n\n\"Listen, please. I'm not a farmer,\" I say.\n\nCoach Cliff shakes his head, says quietly, \"That's just what these boys call any white kid from outstate, isn't that right, Devin?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Devin says.\n\n\"But, okay. My grandpa used to be a farmer, but he's dead. Also, I'm not from outstate,\" I say.\n\n\"Dude, of course you are. That's anyplace outside the city,\" Devin says.\n\nI shake my head. \"No. No way. I'm not from this state at all. I'm from Poland. I just have one adopted mom, who is American, who found me when I was homeless. No 'good old dad,' because he was so poor that he left me with nuns. No 'good old mom,' because my real mom is dead . . .\" All the boys are staring at me with their mouths hanging open. \"Also, I'm just pleased to be here with giants of basketball, and I'm sorry I slam-dunked and shouted, because I have a lot of stresses and I just want to be part of the team,\" I say.\n\nKhalil stands up fast. \"Damn, dude. That's it? You speak so jacked up.\"\n\nCoach Cliff growls, \"Khalil.\"\n\n\"We heard about you from the Owenses. They were like, _who the f_ . . . who the heck is that dude? There was one newspaper article just about how you're some badass dunker. I mean a _very fine_ dunker. But then when we tried to find you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram? You got nothing!\" Khalil says to me.\n\n\"Nope. Not anything. I got no phone,\" I say.\n\n\"Khalil. Sit down,\" Coach Cliff says.\n\n\"But? I just . . . ,\" Khalil says.\n\n\"Sit.\"\n\nThen Khalil does sit, slowly again, like he's scared.\n\nCoach Cliff turns to me. \"Adam, how tall are you?\"\n\n\"Six foot, six inches, maybe six foot seven.\"\n\n\"What is your vertical jump?\"\n\n\"I hit thirty-nine inches.\"\n\n\"Damn,\" another kid says.\n\n\"How many points did you score a game this year, your sophomore year?\"\n\n\"About fifteen,\" I say. \"But a lot more the last half of the season.\"\n\n\"And how long have you been playing basketball?\"\n\n\"Since eighth,\" I say.\n\n\"Since what?\" Devin asks.\n\n\"Eighth grade,\" I say. \"Began two and a half years ago, when I was in Philadelphia.\"\n\nDevin exhales slowly. He sits down.\n\nMr. Doig points at me. \"Now that is what I call potential. You fellas understand me?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Khalil says.\n\n\"Anybody else?\" Coach Cliff asks. There is total quiet. \"Then how about we talk basketball? Any of you have any problems with that?\" There is more silence. \"Okay. Well then. Listen up. We're going to run motion this year.\"\n\nA round kid behind me groans from his gut. \"Oh man, no.\"\n\n\"Charlie, you got something to add, son?\" Coach Cliff asks.\n\n\"No, sir,\" the kid says.\n\n\"Good,\" Coach Cliff says.\n\nEverybody seems sad about \"motion.\" I don't care what offense we play. They talk more. I don't care about our schedule (we will have three warm-up games in Minnesota in the next month, then start traveling for tournaments). I don't even care that we will eat pizza donated from a fancy restaurant for dinner.\n\nI am so tired from speaking.\n\n## TWENTY-SEVEN\n\n## GUIDANCE, PART II\n\nIt is 5:30 in the morning. I am still in bed, although I am awake. My worry is that I will sleep through practice. There can be no more mess-ups.\n\nI've spent much time examining handouts about the motion offense. It is team passing, constant cuts and picks, and a requirement that I not just post or drive, but also stop and pop if the defense sags and takes away scoring lanes. Jump shooting is not good for me.\n\nDuring the meeting, Coach Cliff said the motion offense is the same one the Marshall Mustangs, the Owens family, used to win the state tournament. All these Fury teammates know about the Owenses, know how good they are, but they think the Owenses play like farmers. Even though I was exhausted during the meeting, I heard that.\n\n\"We've run isolation for the last three years, sir,\" Khalil had said. \"Why are we doing this?\"\n\n\"We have no Kenny this year. We don't have height. We have athletes. The motion gets our opponents' bigs out of position. We'll make them run. We'll strand them out on the three-point line if they try to man up on us,\" Coach Cliff said. \"We'll get bad switches. Imagine Devin down there posting up point guards?\"\n\nI would like to post up point guards.\n\nI turn over in my bed.\n\nJesse sleeps. He is not bleeding now, but he snores loudly.\n\nI will not sleep anymore . . .\n\nThen there is a tapping sound. I sit up fast. I listen. For a moment, there is nothing. Then the tapping comes again.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" I say in a whisper.\n\nI roll from bed. My heart pumps hard. I slide across the tile floor to the door in one giant step. What am I thinking? That I am late for practice and don't know it or, maybe, Renata is dead from a car crash and this is the police coming to tell me.\n\nI crack the door open. \"What?\" I whisper.\n\nCarli Anderson is standing in the hall.\n\n\"Can I come in?\"\n\n\"What about the rules?\" I say. \"Mr. Doig will terminate us.\"\n\n\"Just let me,\" she says.\n\nI pause.\n\n\"Now!\" She pushes past me into the room.\n\nJesse sits up, blinking, looking scared.\n\n\"Hey, dude. Don't tell anyone I'm here,\" Carli says to Jesse.\n\n\"Okay,\" he says.\n\n\"Cover your ears,\" she says.\n\nHe lies back and covers his face with his pillow.\n\nThen she leans in really close and whispers in my ear, \"Last night I hung out with Tasha Tolliver and Katy Vargas, and Tasha said that Rashid told her at dinner that he was going to mess you up on the post, because Kyle Owens called you a head case.\"\n\n\"Who is Rashid?\" I ask. \"Who are Tasha and Katy?\"\n\n\"Dude, ballers. Fury players? Do you even know where you are?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say.\n\n\"Listen. Khalil said it was stupid, that you seem like a good dude, but Devin still doesn't want you around and Rashid definitely doesn't.\"\n\nThis news hurt me. \"But I said I'm Polish and not a farmer.\"\n\n\"In the meeting Coach Cliff named you the starter at the five, right?\"\n\nI nod.\n\n\"Rashid is taller than you, and he's waited for his turn to start. I mean, it's his turn, dude! Why can't you come off the bench?\"\n\n\"I didn't ask to start.\"\n\n\"But Rashid blames you anyway.\"\n\n\"Shit,\" I whisper.\n\n\"Anyway, because the Owenses got you to flip out in their game . . .\"\n\n\"I didn't.\"\n\n\"I was there, dude. You lost your mind,\" Carli says.\n\n\"No one got hurt,\" I say. Usually there is more damage when I lose my mind.\n\nCarli raises her eyebrows. Then she says quietly, \"Rashid and Devin are going to rattle your cage. Don't lose your shit. Even if you catch elbows, okay? Mr. Doig will give you the boot if you lose your shit. He's famous for doing stuff like that.\"\n\nI sigh. \"Okay. Okay.\"\n\nCarli reaches her long arm out and puts her hand on the side of my face. It is soft. It makes warm blood fire all over my body. \"I want you to stay on the team. You and I are really good for Northrup basketball,\" she says. \"I don't want to lose you.\"\n\nI nod again.\n\nA half second later, she is gone.\n\n\"Is she your girlfriend?\" Jesse asks.\n\n\"No,\" I say, still standing on the spot where she touched my face.\n\n\"She's pretty hot,\" he says. \"Like, she walks like she's hot.\"\n\n\"Please shut up,\" I say.\n\n## TWENTY-EIGHT\n\n## MR. CALMNESS\n\nMorning practice. I have spent time being calm. I am ready, thanks to Carli Anderson.\n\nRashid throws his elbows into me as he establishes space on offense. He is very strong and rough and pointy, and those elbows hurt my ribs and shoulders and even my neck one time.\n\nWhen he plays defense, he shoves me and slaps at my face and scratches my arms with his long fingers. I am bleeding from a cut on my right arm, which a trainer has to dab and put a pad and tape on. \"Keep it clean, fellas,\" Coach Cliff shouts.\n\nOn rebounds, one hand of Rashid's goes into the air to tip the ball away from me, the other makes a fist and drives into my kidneys, and I am hurting from this big-time, and I have a desire to kill everyone, but instead I just keep smiling at Rashid and telling him that he is a fine player and that he is doing a dope job.\n\nThe other players slowly believe I'm a crazy man. They make faces at me. They make faces at each other. Rashid says, \"Owens doesn't know what he's talking about.\"\n\nThen Devin runs over me to get a loose ball, even though he is on my scrimmaging team. I would like to punch through his head, but I get up and offer my hand for a high five. \"Good hustling, Mr. Basketball!\" I say. This is goofy shit I'd say to Barry, but no one else. I don't mean it, but they will not push me out.\n\nTrey bounces a pass off my face from very close range.\n\nKhalil actually shouts, \"Come on, man,\" at him. Khalil is my favorite.\n\nThen Devin bounces the ball off my face. My sinus passages drain from the pounding. \"Sorry I got in the way,\" I say to him. \"Don't understand this offense yet.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he mumbles.\n\nFinally, Coach Cliff screams at us, \"What in the hell are you boys doing out here? You call this basketball? Run the damn offense. Make good passes. Keep your bodies under control or I'll send you all home!\"\n\n\"Yeah, Coach,\" Devin says. He then gathers us together and says, \"Let's just really play.\"\n\n\"That's what we should've been doing, you fools,\" Khalil says.\n\n\"Kyle Owens is a big shit bag,\" I whisper.\n\nThey hear me. All the boys laugh a bit. \"What?\" Khalil says. \"I thought you weren't on Twitter?\"\n\n\"He wrote tweets about me?\" I ask.\n\n\"Ha-ha. Farmer knows more than he lets on,\" Khalil says.\n\nI shrug because I don't know shit, but I keep smiling.\n\nAnd soon I am smiling for real, because when Devin decides to play real basketball instead of spending his time making me Farmer the Fool, this offense begins to work. Khalil is so good. As he moves, I can feel this offense. I know where to go as defenders hedge. I swing underneath and set picks and pop to the three-point line and take passes that open space for flying Devin, who I hit with lobs, and he jams the basketball like an NBA superstar. \"Good look,\" Devin tells me two times.\n\nRashid soon must work just to keep up with my flow, my fast running. He is not like me, and he gets tired. Devin picks him, and I back-cut to rim. Khalil lobs the ball in the air for me. I leap, grab, smash the ball through the hole. It bounces off Rashid's shoulder.\n\n\"Kyle Owens!\" I shout.\n\nKhalil laughs. Devin smiles a little.\n\nKhalil gives me a high five on the way back for defense. \"You paid Rashid back for all that scratching.\"\n\n\"What scratches?\" I ask, like nothing ever bad happened.\n\nKhalil laughs. \"Oh, no scratching, dude.\"\n\n\"I bleed from my arms all the time,\" I say. \"It's natural.\"\n\nHe nods. He smiles. He fist-bumps me.\n\nA few minutes later, Coach Cliff blows his whistle after I dunk once more. He says, \"Boys. That's it! That's what I'm talking about!\"\n\nAt lunch no one talks much, because we have run very hard all morning. Khalil does say, \"We play the Minne-Kota Stars in our third warm-up game. You can pay Kyle Owens back in person.\"\n\n\"That's his team?\" I ask.\n\n\"Minne-Kota Stars. That's the Owenses' AAU.\"\n\nThat is good. Payback in person. I will do that, I think.\n\nAfter lunch there is a break and more practice and then we will get on a bus to go to dinner at Devin's home, which is also in Minneapolis. I am a little bit scared of this for a few reasons. But the morning was great. I am back where I belong, excelling on the court.\n\nBefore I go to my room to take the post-lunch break, I walk all over the Minneapolis Academy campus looking for Carli's dormitory, because I need to thank her. She is my basketball guardian. She is the best girl. I need to tell her I get to play Kyle Owens again. I find her dorm. I try to go in. A large woman stops me. \"Oh no you don't, child,\" she says.\n\nI go and rest in my room.\n\nThe afternoon practice I am very sore from the beating of the morning, but the balling is so dope. We all work on post moves and dribble drills between little orange cones.\n\nI am not the super king at post, but I am better than all the Fury players other than Devin. He is a real Hakeem \"the Dream\" Olajuwon, patient and baiting the defense like an animal trainer who makes seals stand on their tails. Then, when the defense gets too close, he spins, shoots, scores so easy. I learn from watching how he goes slow and then very fast.\n\nBut I am truly excellent at dribbling, as good as Khalil, maybe. Many dribble drills are the ones I did for hours and hours in the ice and snow of Philadelphia's sidewalks and in the basement of Renata's house, where the floors are a little uneven. These are Steph Curry dribble drills.\n\n\"Farmer! Man!\" Khalil says. \"You got a handle!\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" I say, without stopping my dribble, two basketballs that I make go between my legs one after the other.\n\nThen coach fires passes at us, and we dribble quick between our legs, back and forth, and then fire the ball back out. This drill is like a baby game to me.\n\n\"Farmer has ball skills,\" Rashid says almost so I can't hear.\n\n\"Yes, but I am not a farmer,\" I say.\n\n\"You're a Polish farmer,\" Rashid says. He smiles.\n\nIt's good, I think.\n\n## TWENTY-NINE\n\n## THE F-W-B\n\nThere is a small bus built for twenty people that waits at the entrance of the Minneapolis Academy main door. I'm outside first after I showered fast. These showers remind me of my time with the nuns. The floors had puddles where you soaked your socks, and there was no privacy. Also, Jesse began his nosebleeding once more in the dorm room. I don't want to watch Kleenex making more piles.\n\nJesse does a weird thing before I leave the room. He says, \"If I let you take my phone, will you take a couple pictures inside Devin's house? I want to be an architect.\"\n\n\"Can I watch some videos on the phone?\" I ask.\n\n\"Sure! As long as you take pictures.\"\n\nI agree. And so I carry the phone in my hand as I leave the building. I watch Hakeem highlights while standing outside the bus, waiting for the other 17U Fury players to come out from their rooms. Hakeem is number thirty-four, like I am in my school.\n\nBy the time the other boys have come out, I have watched videos of Steph Curry and Michael Jordan and LeBron James. I think of all of these players, I am more like LeBron James in my speed and my jumping. I do not shoot as good as he does, but I think he had to learn to make jump shots as he got older and that part of his game did not come as easy as his driving and jamming. His jump shots are not as soft as Curry's or even Jordan's.\n\nJames is three inches taller than me, though. He is also one of the greatest of all time, so maybe I am not so good?\n\nBut I am only sixteen. Maybe I can be the greatest? Devin walks past me and goes on the bus. _No, not me_ , I think. Maybe Devin Mitchell can be the greatest.\n\n\"Farmer, why you staring off in space? You getting on the bus?\" Khalil asks. He has come outside and is dressed better than me in my warm-ups. He is wearing black jeans and a shirt buttoned up to the top button.\n\n\"I have a phone,\" I say, and show it to him.\n\nHe shakes his head. \"Okay, dude,\" he says.\n\n\"It's a nice phone, right?\" I say. \"I didn't steal it.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Khalil laughs.\n\nThis is a joke. I made it. During this night Khalil begins to laugh when he looks at me, because I make more dumb jokes. I think I was meant to be funny. I think I remember that I was funny before my mom died. I remember her laughing at me with tears in her eyes. I remember her gathering me in her arms and laughing.\n\nThe neighborhoods we drive through are nice and then they get much nicer and then much more. This is not what I expected to see, but Jesse did give me his phone because of architecture, so maybe.\n\nSoon we drive by a lake with giant homes nestled on tree-lined bluffs. The bus stops in front of one.\n\n\"This is it?\" I ask.\n\n\"Devin's pops is so rich, bro,\" Khalil whispers.\n\nI stare at the white, modern expanse of this house. So many giant windows. So many old, big trees surrounding it. Now I understand why Jesse wants pictures.\n\nWe all leave the bus in a single line. Out in the driveway, Mr. Doig says to us, \"Be on your best behavior. Show Devin's father that you understand what it means to be a member of the Fury.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Khalil and a few others say.\n\nDevin shakes his head and closes his eyes.\n\nWe walk up the drive and then onto stone steps that rise through steep white walls and planters with bushes.\n\n\"How'd his dad get so much money?\" I ask Khalil.\n\n\"He's an inventor or something and owns a business.\"\n\nDevin heard me. \"My grandmother had money. It's not all my father. She built something real by herself.\"\n\n\"What did she do?\" I ask.\n\n\"Famous jazz singer,\" Khalil says. \"For old people.\"\n\n\"Jazz singer?\" I say. They don't know I listen to jazz every morning. They don't know how Renata loves it. \"She sings jazz? Your grandma?\" I ask. Nobody answers me. Devin's father stands at the front door.\n\n\"Come on in, come on in!\" he shouts. \"Welcome D-I Fury basketball! Welcome Coach Cliff. We're so happy to see you boys here.\"\n\n\"I like jazz. Me and Renata listen to it all the time,\" I whisper to Khalil.\n\n\"You're a weird-ass farmer,\" Khalil replies quietly.\n\nWe walk into the front door. I follow Khalil, and Mr. Doig walks in right behind me. Mr. Mitchell pats all the boys on the shoulder and smiles wide. When we get nearby, he looks past me to Mr. Doig and says, \"Hello, Karl! How these boys treating you? They staying in line?\"\n\nMr. Doig glances at Devin. Then he says, \"They're a fine team. We've never had so many athletes, so much speed.\"\n\nThe first room I enter is very big with tall white walls and warm yellow light coming from lamps. I pull out Jesse's phone and take a pic. Then I realize that the black-and-white photos on the wall are the people I eat breakfast with each day. All are famous jazz people. Oh boy. I lose my mind.\n\n\"Dizzy!\" I shout.\n\nYes, I mean very much shout.\n\n\"Are you dizzy, Adam?\" Mr. Doig asks.\n\n\"Dizzy Gillespie!\" I point at the big photo on the wall of a puffy-cheek guy playing a bent trumpet. \"Thelonious!\" I point at another of a man leaning over the keyboard. \"Mahalia!\" I point at a picture of a woman raising her hand, singing. \"Coltrane!\" I shout at a man with a sax.\n\n\"Really?\" Devin says to me. \"You know these people?\"\n\n\"Kid knows his music!\" Mr. Mitchell says.\n\n\"Jevetta!\" I say, pointing at a picture of a very young Jevetta Mitchell with arms spread, singing big. \"I saw her in Philadelphia with Renata. She's so good.\"\n\n\"That's my grandma,\" Devin says.\n\nI turn to Devin. \"What?\"\n\n\"Jevetta Mitchell. She's my dad's mom, man,\" Devin says.\n\n\"Jevetta?\" It's like I have been hit on the head and stunned. I stare at Devin. \"She is grandma?\" I say. I drop the _a_ like I used to when I just learned English.\n\n\"What's that accent?\" Mr. Mitchell asks me.\n\n\"Polish,\" I say.\n\n\"Polish? No kidding? You eat at my table, son. You've got me curious.\"\n\nAs we walk from the big living room with beautiful photos down a long hall, Khalil talks over my shoulder. \"You just made yourself favorite white boy, Farmer.\"\n\n\"FWB?\" I ask.\n\n\"The F-W-B!\" Khalil says. Everyone looks at me.\n\n\"Maybe Farmer is better,\" I say.\n\n## THIRTY\n\n## TELLING NO JOKES\n\nAll of us sit in a dining room that looks out onto a nice, grassy backyard. Ten of the players sit at a big table, and they laugh and eat many lasagnas and breadsticks. Devin and I sit with his parents, Devin's sister, named Saundra, Mr. Doig, and Coach Cliff. I have only had lasagna a few times, but this is as good as anything I have put in my mouth. It's as good as my real mom's bigos, which is lots of meat in cabbage and honey that tastes like heaven. I have four full servings, which makes Devin's mom think I am crazy, but in a good way.\n\nDevin's dad says, \"If you love Caroline's cooking, Caroline will love you right back. Isn't that true?\"\n\n\"I know you have good taste, that's all,\" Mrs. Mitchell says.\n\n\"I do. Also, I am so hungry every day, so this is extra good,\" I say.\n\n\"Devin, bring this child back here anytime. He needs nourishment.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Devin says quietly.\n\nMaybe it's because I'm drunk on food? I keep talking free, like I'm a real Polish kid who likes parties and people.\n\nThere are speakers hung in the corners of the dining area. All the meal, they play songs that I love, songs that Renata and I have listened to throughout our life together.\n\n\"This is a good song. Miles Davis. He's a smart man,\" I say.\n\nWe hear Modern Jazz Quartet and Brubeck and Mingus and Stan Getz and Charlie Parker. Each one I can name and I can hum along. The boys at the other table have their conversations and talk basketball and girls and other sports, too. But I get more from this meal. By dessert, Mr. Mitchell tells me the whole story of Jevetta, how she was born in Chicago in 1939 and got to study opera in New York, but only loved jazz music, and how she toured all over the world, and how she was old enough to be in the South of the United States, performing back when she couldn't drink from white people's water fountains and had to use separate doors to get into concert halls, and all this crazy stuff I have seen on TV but thought was ancient history, not from people who are just grandmas now.\n\nDevin doesn't say a word through any of this talk. He looks down at the table.\n\nMr. Doig does not say anything, either, until the story of Jevetta is complete. Then he talks to Devin, who still does not look up. \"None of that trouble got in the way of your grandmother's success, did it, Devin? She kept working to achieve her goals. Climbed to the top of the ladder. I wish our culture valued those stories instead of focusing on how this country fails your people.\"\n\nThere is a moment of silence.\n\n\"Come on now, Karl. Our culture loves those stories,\" Mr. Mitchell says. \"How much TV time every fall Sunday morning is dedicated to retelling some NFL player's rise against all odds?\"\n\nThen Mrs. Mitchell says, \"Jevetta has a magical talent, Karl. That voice opened doors that would not open for most people of her generation.\"\n\n\"All hard work pays off in some fashion,\" Mr. Doig says.\n\n\"I do think most hard work pays off,\" Mr. Mitchell says. \"The other story happens, though. There is hopelessness, poverty that is too great to overcome without the benefit of great talent, great luck, or more likely both.\"\n\nThis I understand right away. \"Yeah! If I couldn't dunk, I would be eating at McDonald's in Northrup right now,\" I say. \"Just a dumb Polish kid with only one friend who has a fluffy mustache. No one wants to hear this story.\"\n\nDevin turns and looks at me. A small smile creeps on his face.\n\n\"Now how in the world did you get to Minnesota?\" Mr. Mitchell asks me. I think he's happy to change the subject.\n\n\"I'm adopted.\"\n\n\"Don't hear much about Polish adoptees, not like Russian or Ukrainian kids.\"\n\n\"No. Maybe not? Polish people have big families usually, I think. So maybe kids get taken care of? But I saw plenty of orphans when I lived with the nuns. Maybe those kids are from families like my family? Death caught us by surprise, and we fell to pieces.\"\n\nThere is silence for a moment.\n\nNobody wants to say anything. I am in shock these words have fallen from my mouth, and I don't want to say anything more. I think of the black ink coming into the apartment in my dream. But some kids can't stop themselves. It's Devin's twelve-year-old sister, Saundra, who speaks.\n\n\"What do you mean, death caught you by surprise?\"\n\nCarli says I must talk. Okay. I take a heavy breath. I speak slowly. \"My mom\u2014her name is Malwina\u2014got cancer. She probably had it for a long time, because I remember her going from strong to weak when I was smaller, but I don't know, except I know she died.\"\n\nEveryone looks at me wide-eyed, like they are sad, or maybe want more information?\n\n\"My dad was so upset about my mom. We lived on a farm with my grandpa, who was my mom's father. Dad and Grandpa got in a big fight. Dad pushed my grandpa down on the floor of the kitchen and he kicked him and then I tried to fight my dad, but I was seven years old, and we left that night. We went to Warsaw. It's the biggest city in Poland.\"\n\n\"Yes, we know it. We've been there,\" Mr. Mitchell says.\n\n\"You?\" I say. This is surprising. I can't picture the Mitchells in Poland. Also, just saying \"Warsaw\" makes me sick to my stomach. I exhale to get rid of the black ink. Then words fall out of my mouth that have never fallen out. Why here? Why in this home sitting next to a big basketball kid who doesn't seem to like me?\n\nBecause Carli.\n\n\"I don't like Warsaw. My dad said we belong there in the big city, because we're Sobieskis, and Sobieskis are important to Poland. We're supposed to be the greatest Polish family, kings, except at school nobody treated me nice, maybe because my dad drank all our money and I missed so many days when he was angry or asleep and none of my clothes were clean and none fit and then he started hitting me so much I felt ill and then he would feel so sad about hitting me he began to cry all the time, and then he'd get mad about crying and he'd do it all over again and again, and I got kicked out of my school, and I should've gone to another, but I didn't go to it. Then Dad knocked out three of my teeth all at once and he lost his mind and hugged me and cried and soon after took me to a Catholic home, a nun school\u2014it was an orphanage, I guess\u2014and he cried and cried and said sorry, but he just left me standing there. The nun held me, and I watched him walk across the street, light a cigarette, then get in a car driven by a man I never saw before. I don't know what happened to him. They couldn't even find him when Renata adopted me.\"\n\nBy this point, all the players are silent, even the ones at the other table, and they're staring at me.\n\n\"Oh, honey, I'm so sorry,\" Mrs. Mitchell says.\n\n\"Were they baby teeth?\" Saundra asks. \"The ones your dad knocked out?\"\n\n\"What kind of question is that, Saundra?\" Mr. Mitchell asks.\n\n\"If they're baby teeth it's not so bad!\" Saundra says.\n\n\"No. Not baby. Renata got me some new teeth. A bridge?\" I point into the side of my mouth.\n\n\"Who is Renata?\" Devin asks. Even he is looking at me now, maybe for the first time.\n\n\"She's my adopted mom. She teaches college in Northrup at Trinity.\"\n\nMr. Doig nods. \"That's how we found Adam. Ted Anderson down there.\"\n\n\"Well, how did Renata even find you? Is she American?\" Saundra asks.\n\nI sigh. Because I have said more words in a row than maybe I ever have in my entire life, I am already exhausted. But everyone leans toward me. I have to tell the rest or I will seem like a weird kid, right? I take a big breath. I nod.\n\n\"Yeah. Renata is American. She is a Slavic scholar, so . . . I was living with some other kids with the nuns for a couple of years and it was okay, but then I did something. I was ten years old and I had begun to be hungry all the time, because I think I was beginning to grow fast, so I stole some candy bars from the store across the street from the nuns. The store clerk saw me and tried to chase, but I was too fast. I knew he recognized me, because I was in there all the time. I got scared and didn't want to go back to the nuns. I was in trouble with them a lot already and this seemed much worse, so I ran to Lazienki Park. This park is as big as the whole town of Northrup, and it was summer, so I could hide in there, in bushes and trees, and sleep okay on newspapers against this stone wall behind bushes, and there is plenty of water to drink. I just had to stay away from cops, you know? But by the fourth day I was hungry, even though I ate some trash.\"\n\n\"Trash?\" Khalil shouts.\n\n\"What do you mean, trash?\" Mrs. Mitchell says. She has tears in her eyes.\n\n\"It was food, but in the trash, yeah,\" I say. \"I think maybe I began dreaming while I was awake, because I didn't have enough food.\"\n\n\"That's called hallucinating, dude,\" Khalil says.\n\n\"You could've been poisoned from eating trash,\" Saundra says.\n\n\"Let Adam talk,\" Devin says.\n\n\"Okay. Maybe I was hallucinating? It was a hot summer day, and I was lying along the stone wall behind bushes to rest and I heard this music begin to flow from a piano. They have concerts in this park, so that is not weird, except it was Chopin music.\"\n\n\"I play Chopin!\" Saundra says. \"I'm practicing a nocturne for my piano competition.\"\n\n\"Oh. Yeah. The nocturnes. My mom played those. She played piano well, and Chopin was her favorite because he is a Polish guy . . . and because I was a little crazy, maybe, I thought she was the one playing the music in the park.\"\n\n\"Like, her ghost?\" Rashid asks.\n\n\"Yeah. I think so. I left my wall and wandered across a field, right through a soccer match and then to the concert. I sat down in an open chair and saw that the piano player was an old man in a tuxedo, not my mom, and then I just lost it bad. I started crying like a baby.\"\n\n\"Didn't you say you were ten? You were a baby, practically,\" Mrs. Mitchell says.\n\n\"I cried when I couldn't find Mom in the Mall of America two weeks ago. My phone ran out of battery,\" Saundra says.\n\n\"She disappeared for all of five minutes,\" Mrs. Mitchell says.\n\n\"I was lost!\"\n\n\"We know. Could you be quiet?\" Devin says.\n\n\"What happened?\" Khalil asks me.\n\n\"This woman, who was young, who was sitting next to me, leaned over and said in the ugliest foreign-sounding Polish I ever heard, 'What is wrong with you?' It was Renata. She asked, 'Can I help you?' I wanted help pretty bad then, so I said, \"'Yeah, please.'\"\n\n\"It's like the ghost of your mom led you to your new mom,\" Saundra says.\n\nI just nod, because I thought of that many times, and I don't want to think too hard about it now. It might make me cry like a baby again. \"Renata was studying Adam Mickiewicz, a Polish poet, for her PhD dissertation. My name is Adam, which she thought was a sign she was meant to find me. It took her almost two years to get through bureaucracy, but she adopted me and brought me to live with her in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\"Was your grandpa sad?\" Saundra asks.\n\n\"I found out he is dead also. I have nobody, except basketball.\"\n\n\"Except your adopted mother, who sounds like a remarkable woman,\" Mrs. Mitchell says.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I say. \"I have Renata and basketball.\"\n\n\"Man,\" Devin says quietly, shaking his head, \"we didn't know what we were doing when we messed with you.\"\n\n\"Messed with him?\" Mr. Mitchell asks.\n\n\"Not really messed,\" I say. \"Just playing basketball.\"\n\nDevin laughs, but it is not a happy laugh. Maybe it's more like a sigh.\n\n\"Well, Adam Sobieski, you have an incredible story,\" Mrs. Mitchell says.\n\nShe says my name that is not my name, and my chest aches. \"I'm Adam Reed. Renata's last name is Reed.\"\n\n\"Dude, Sobieski is fearsome, though,\" Khalil says.\n\n\"Reed's not,\" Rashid says.\n\n\"You don't remember Willis Reed, then,\" Mr. Mitchell says. \"Great NBA player. Hell of a business executive, too.\"\n\nBut I am not listening. I know Sobieski is badass. I miss my name so much. Renata took it, but she also gave me a life. I miss my real mom. I could fall onto the floor of the Mitchell's house.\n\nIt doesn't help when Saundra plays a recording of the Chopin nocturne I heard in the park that day Renata found me. I have a hard time holding myself together. It's good that Mr. Doig has his sixty-fourth birthday. It's good that we eat cake and ice cream and everybody stops looking at me.\n\nI go and take a few more pics of the big house for Jesse. Then I hide in the bathroom and press my fists into my eyes. Jesse loves the pictures when I get back to the dorm.\n\nI have not thought much about my name in a couple of years. But then Professor Mike brings it up when he cooks for us. Then Regan says it's a better name than Reed. Then Khalil says it's a better name. It is a better name, because it's my name.\n\nI am Adam Sobieski. I am not Adam Reed.\n\nWhat if I didn't sit down next to Renata in the park that day?\n\nI would be dead, maybe.\n\n## THIRTY-ONE\n\n## WE ARE A TEAM\n\nThe next morning, there is a final practice before camp breaks. We spend most of the time scrimmaging and our motion offense looks good. The only time the offense grinds to a halt is when I catch the ball outside the block and the defense gets time to sag away to let me take a jumper. Rashid just smiles and nods, because he knows I hate jumpers. I dribble and look. Dribble and look. Someone must get open.\n\n\"Pull the dang trigger, Adam!\" Coach Cliff shouts.\n\nThen I do, with great hesitance, and the rock is more like a brick crashing against the rim and bouncing away.\n\nIt is rare, though, that I hang on to the ball, that I don't find a good passing lane or drive to the basket very fast.\n\nDuring the final five minutes, all the Fury teams from all the ages, from girls' side and dudes' side, all come to watch us. The presence of this audience makes us all play harder, and I am sad to say that Rashid scores two buckets against me.\n\nHe has long arms, and although I jump higher, it seems he is able to jump sometimes twice when I only jump once, so he is good at tipping the ball out from me on rebounds and then scoring the ball before I can do my second jump to block him. He is so good.\n\nBut I score, too. On the final play, with only a few seconds left on the clock, Khalil drives, then finds Devin swinging to the three-point line on the far left. Rashid hedges and jumps out to defend, and I think Devin will shoot, so I dive behind Rashid to collect the rebound if necessary. Instead of shooting, Devin sees I am wide open and he lofts the ball sweetly into the air. I leap, catch the ball, and slam it home. Rashid, who cannot stop me after overplaying on defense, screams, \"Noooo, Farmer! No way! How do you get so many lobs, dude?\"\n\nI shrug. I smile. We high-five.\n\nMr. Doig uses the air horn to show our game is over, and then Khalil and Rashid come in and hug me tight like I am their long-lost brother. Devin hangs back but fist-bumps me.\n\n\"Warm-up games two and three weeks out, boys. Just a month until the Hampton, Virginia Nike Elite Tournament. And you know what?\"\n\n\"What?\" everybody shouts.\n\n\"I'm feeling good!\" Coach Cliff says. \"Real good! We got ourselves more than a showcase for talent. We got ourselves a team. I bet we hand those Owens boys their butts, isn't that right, Farmer?\"\n\nYes. We are a team.\n\nCarli Anderson is watching. I think she has tears in her eyes. Maybe the beauty of my basketball game has made her cry? Maybe she likes the girls she hangs with here better than the pouty-face girls at home. Those girls seem boring and mean, so I understand. Carli spends a long time hugging these girls here.\n\nThen it is me who wants to cry. The Minneapolis Academy camp was the best. Not just for basketball. Am I Polish? I have been sociable. I have spoken like a Polish guy speaks. I am being me.\n\n## THIRTY-TWO\n\n## I AM KING\n\nCarli is sad on the car ride home. She disobeyed doctor's orders and played a scrimmage with her friends. It was not good. She is weak. She is slow. She was fine shooting when no one guarded her, but she has no lift, no shot when someone has a hand in her face.\n\n\"I suck. It's like I'm broken,\" she says.\n\n\"You are broken. That's what an injury is,\" Coach Anderson says.\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nWe stop so she can get ice. Her knee has swollen up.\n\nI can tell Coach Anderson is not happy with her, so it's good when he changes the subject and talks about motion offense.\n\n\"Motion works best if you're like a close-knit family. You want to know exactly where each of you are going to go.\"\n\n\"Khalil and Devin act like brothers already,\" Carli says. \"You'll be good.\"\n\nI hope they will be my brothers.\n\nWhen the Andersons drop me off at my house, I am deflated like a balloon. I don't want this weekend to be over. I don't want to be home in tiny Northrup. I am not in any mood to tell Renata everything that has happened to me.\n\nI get inside. She asks so many questions. I feel tired. I feel not happy to see her. Maybe because she has taken my name and made me Reed? I answer with yes, no, shrugs.\n\nBut then we go to Professor Mike's for dinner. I don't know why, but I am very happy to see Regan and Margery. There I talk more than I ever do. I review the whole weekend, tell all about the basketball and about Devin's house and Jesse's bleeding nose and even how Carli snuck to my dorm room to give me information to help me survive.\n\nRegan and Margery think Carli would make a good assassin. I agree.\n\nIt's when I report that Devin's grandma is Jevetta Mitchell, famous jazz singer, that Renata finally reacts.\n\n\"What? Are you kidding? Why didn't you tell me that when you got home? I asked you for . . . you said nothing, Adam! I grew up listening to Jevetta! Papa loves her! I took you to see her perform, and you don't tell me that you went to her house?\"\n\n\"Yes, but it wasn't really her house, so I forgot,\" I say.\n\nRenata stands up, looks at me hard, then walks out of the kitchen.\n\nI don't say I'm sorry, even though I feel wounded in my chest.\n\nI maybe don't understand myself at all? The next morning at breakfast, I don't want to talk to Barry, either. He has not taken my name, so what is my problem? I don't know.\n\nHis shin has healed enough that he can go back to his regular workouts in tae kwon do. \"My second-degree black belt test is next month? Will you guys come and see it? It's a pretty big deal. There's a grand master coming over from Mankato to do the judging.\"\n\nRenata smiles. \"Of course. Second-degree? That is a very big deal!\"\n\nRenata doesn't know anything about black belts. I roll my eyes at her.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Barry says. \"I've thought a lot about being Shinja, and it's not a good idea, you know?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I agree,\" Renata says. Then she stares hard at me again. \"Do you have something to say, Adam?\" she asks.\n\n\"Hardening your shins was stupid,\" I say.\n\n\"Well, yeah, I know?\" Barry says.\n\nOn the car ride to school, Barry won't talk to me, which makes me feel bad. \"Renata is pissing me off,\" I say. \"I am in a bad mood with her.\"\n\n\"She's the best mom I ever met,\" Barry says.\n\nBut the truth is, I don't want to hang out with Barry either, and I feel pissed at him for being around so much. I want to be with the Fury. And I want to be with Carli, who knows basketball.\n\nOn Tuesday, I see her in the hall. Even though she is talking to her friends, girls who don't like to look at me, I walk up and say, \"Can we hit the college gym, dude? You have to show me how to shoot a jump shot better.\"\n\n\"Yeah, man,\" she says. \"I'll check with my dad tonight. Maybe tomorrow?\" She looks at her friend. This girl is rolling her eyes in her head. This girl is mad? Why doesn't she like me? I don't know why. Here I am speaking, not acting like a basketball-playing freak show!\n\n\"Dope,\" I say.\n\n\"Yup,\" Carli says. \"Okay.\"\n\nHer other friend looks away from me.\n\nI don't care. I am Adam Sobieski in my heart. I can handle their faces.\n\nBut I am also aware that Carli was not so happy I approached her.\n\nThe next morning, Barry doesn't show up for breakfast. He doesn't call, either. That puts Renata in a bad mood, because she's made food for him. I leave early to walk to school. It's drizzling. I am mad.\n\nBut just as I get to the sidewalk in front of school, Carli pulls into the parking lot. \"Farmer!\" she calls out. \"Wait up!\"\n\nFarmer? I am beginning to like the name Farmer.\n\nShe jogs across the lot, dodges cars, waves at a couple of people.\n\n\"Good jogging,\" I say.\n\n\"Yeah, my knee feels good today!\"\n\n\"No swelling?\"\n\n\"Some swelling. But that's to be expected. Anyway, Dad says we're cool tonight. The gym will be empty with spring break. So you in? Do a little ballin'?\"\n\nOf course I am in.\n\nAfter school, I run all the way home and put on warm-ups. I'm about to leave the house when Renata arrives with groceries.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" she asks.\n\n\"Going to the Trinity gym.\"\n\n\"It's open?\"\n\n\"Coach Anderson is letting me and his daughter in for a workout.\"\n\nRenata takes a deep breath. \"Michael and the girls are coming over for dinner,\" she says. \"I'm cooking. I could use some help.\"\n\n\"Um. No. I have to work out. For the Fury, okay? Because you want me to play for them, right?\"\n\n\"Could you have told me this morning?\" she asks. Her face is red.\n\n\"I didn't know this morning. But I have to go.\"\n\n\"Fine. Okay. Go,\" Renata says.\n\nCarli and I meet outside the gym, and she talks and talks about nothing at all and I am happy. Inside we take warm-up shots.\n\n\"I lifted hard yesterday. I can feel my knee getting stronger underneath me, dude. That crap scrimmage up in Minneapolis is no big deal. I'm going to be fine, okay? I'm totally going to be a beast next year!\" she shouts. \"I'm going to be me again!\"\n\nI don't know what she means by \"beast.\" She is too beautiful. But I do know how basketball can give you back yourself. And it's so good to see her take real shots. She jumps more today. A little, at least. A week ago she shot more from the balls of her feet.\n\n\"I don't feel pain!\" she says. \"This is awesome!\" She tosses another shot from beyond the three-point line. It swishes. She shoots and shoots. Six straight, one after the other, without missing. Finally one bounces off the back of the cylinder. \"Oh my God, I feel good.\" She's not talking to me, just saying the words into the air.\n\n\"My turn?\" I ask.\n\n\"It's going to be over fast, dude. Shoot till you miss.\"\n\nI take a few shots then. Each one rattles off the rim.\n\n\"Shoot till you make?\" She laughs.\n\n\"What's my problem, okay? That I shoot from the top of my jump, right? But I tried shooting from just after, like when I'm coming down, like double pumping? Made me much worse.\"\n\nCarli nods. \"You're so messed up, dude.\"\n\n\"I know. I can feel it. I am unnatural.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She laughs. \"Very unnatural.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"But I can fix you,\" she says, like she is a mad scientist. Carli moves to me. She puts her hands on my shoulders. \"First, square up, man. You're leading with your right side too much.\" She straightens me. \"You do this weird hop thing, too, when you shoot. Just step forward a little bit with your shot-side leg.\" She grabs the back of my right leg, above my knee, and pulls it a few inches toward her. I am naturally lowered to her height. We are so close, and I have stopped breathing. Then she lifts my arms up. The ball is in my hand. \"Your elbow should be shoulder level, ninety-degree angle over your leg.\" She bends my elbow. \"Balance the ball in your right hand. You shoot kind of two-handed now, which doesn't help.\" I put all the ball's weight on my right hand.\n\nShe is wearing a large T-shirt with the sleeves rolled. I am staring at her muscular shoulder. I can smell her deodorant, maybe? It's very fresh. \"Are you paying attention?\" she asks. Then I am staring in her eyes. She is staring in my eyes. She swallows. She blushes. She says quietly, \"Now, without jumping, just extend and follow through. Put the ball in the net.\" I shoot without my eyes leaving hers. The ball arches up and down. It goes through the net soft. I know it has happened, but she doesn't.\n\nExcept she does. \"That sounded like a swish,\" she whispers.\n\nI nod. We stare. We breathe. She swallows.\n\nThen she shoves me away. \"See? I can teach you, dude!\"\n\nI think I am going to fall over on the floor.\n\nShe turns and gets the ball and begins talking in Carli speed. \"Okay. I'm going to feed you the ball. Visualize this. You are going to be square to the basket, have your legs under you, your elbow cocked, and you are going to pull the trigger right before you get to the top of your jump. Not at the top. Not after the top. Before. Dad taught me to do it by bending my knees, lifting, shooting, then hopping with your follow-through. Like all in slow motion. Want to try that?\"\n\nBut I have only half listened. Because I want to try something else. I want to put my arms around Carli and put my face into her neck. I want to breathe her in and then I want to take her for meals and buy her cars and a house and a nice couch and get married and then watch TV and eat some good food on our couch after we come back from our jobs. Then we'll go to sleep together.\n\nA shock of fear goes through me. Is it good for me to like her so much?\n\n\"Hey?\" she says. \"Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say. _Just play basketball._\n\nShe tosses me a bounce pass. I take a deep breath. She instructs. I do what she says, and in forty-five minutes my jump shot has improved by maybe fifty percent. No, I don't make a bunch from behind the three-point line. Not even close. But nearer, midrange, the ball goes in more, and if not in, it arches and bounces so much softer than ever before on the rim.\n\n\"You're getting it! You'll get good at this, dude,\" Carli tells me. \"Now rebound for me. I'm going to hit marks.\"\n\nFor the next twenty minutes, she moves from one _X_ to another _X_ , all of them taped on the floor. She doesn't go fast because she can't cut. But she is light on her feet. I send her a pass and she catches, lifts, and shoots. Oh boy, Carli is a baller.\n\nNo. Baller is too tiny a word. Carli is more than a baller. She is great with the ball and she has swagger, but also she is so much more. She has taken all of this time to help me, even while she needs to be helping herself. She is generous? She is good in her heart? She is a baller plus something.\n\nShe takes a shot from ten feet behind the three-point line. It is a heave, but the ball goes through the air in a perfect arc. It slides onto the side of the rim and rolls around it, like water going down the drain. Hoop. Hoop. Circle. Hooper. Maybe hooper is a better word? The ball drops through.\n\n\"You're a great hooper, okay?\" I say.\n\n\"Yeah?\" Carli stops. The ball bounces on the floor behind me. Her face is red. She glistens with sweat. There are dark patches on her T-shirt.\n\n\"Yes. Great hooper.\"\n\nCarli flexes her knee. \"I'm a very sore hooper, dude. Better go home and ice.\"\n\n\"I don't want you to go home,\" I say.\n\n\"That sounds a little psycho, boy.\"\n\n\"I'm having a good time,\" I say.\n\n\"Yeah.\" She smiles, and her eyes crinkle. \"Me too.\"\n\nWhen I get home, Professor Mike and Renata are slow dancing in one spot in the living room to the song \"Blue Moon\" playing on our record turntable. Renata waves at me, then puts her head on Professor Mike's chest. Professor Mike smiles at me, too.\n\nOkay. Okay. This is fine. But my stomach twists at the sight of them.\n\nMargery and Regan roll dice on the dining room table. They are writing down numbers on a piece of notebook paper.\n\n\"What do you want your cleric to be named?\" Margery asks me.\n\n\"I don't know what you mean,\" I say.\n\n\"For Dungeons and Dragons. Dad and Renata said you'd play,\" Regan says.\n\n\"No, uh-uh. I got homework,\" I say.\n\n\"Well, then for later. What is your name?\" Margery asks.\n\n\"Hooper,\" I say.\n\n\"Bad,\" Margery says.\n\n\"Hooper the Cleric?\" Regan says. \"Boo.\"\n\n\"That's a dragon name,\" Margery says.\n\n\"Fine, I'm a dragon. I don't care about no cleric. I don't even know what one is.\"\n\n\" _No_ _cleric_ is not proper English,\" Margery says.\n\n\"I don't give a shit about English,\" I say.\n\nI go to shower and to think about jump shots and Carli, because that's what matters. I hear Professor Mike and the girls leave before I towel off and get on my Philadelphia 76er pajamas.\n\nI look in the mirror. I wish I was nicer to those girls.\n\n## THIRTY-THREE\n\n## AT PATRICK'S\n\nIt is Saturday morning. The first day of my spring break. I have gone to the Trinity athletic facility with Carli Anderson on Thursday and Friday after school. My jump shot is better still. When you start with bad, improvement can happen so fast. Carli hasn't gotten close to me like she did on Wednesday. If I wasn't afraid of destroying my new form, I may have tried bad form so she would come and adjust my body again. It's okay, though. We're so comfortable together. I am happy.\n\nBut Renata is not so happy. She knocks on my bedroom door, because it's past nine and I'm not a guy who sleeps in. \"Adam?\" she asks through the door. \"Are you in there?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Where else would I be?\" I ask.\n\n\"Can I come in?\" she asks.\n\nI don't want her to, but, \"Okay,\" I say.\n\nShe comes in. \"Sleepy, huh?\" she says.\n\nI'm actually achy, because Carli and I lifted weights after shooting. Although I love to drill, for some reason I've never lifted weights before. Nobody has told me to, or showed me how. Carli warned me I would hurt. I feel like the muscles of my chest and arms are going to pop and fall off my bones. \"I'm sore.\"\n\n\"Maybe you're playing too much . . . sports?\" she asks.\n\n\"No,\" I say.\n\nAlthough I did go and eat dinner with her and Professor Mike's family at their house the night before, I didn't talk much to them, and I left right after eating to come home and lie down.\n\n\"I feel like I haven't seen much of you for the last few weeks. I'm going to run some errands now. Do you want to go?\" Renata asks. \"Like we used to in Philadelphia?\"\n\n\"No thank you,\" I say.\n\n\"Okay,\" she says. \"Well. How about I take you to Patrick's for dinner tonight?\"\n\nCarli is gone for the rest of the weekend for her grandma's birthday in South Dakota. There will be no basketball. I have no excuse to say no. \"Just you and me?\" I ask.\n\n\"Yes. Unless you want to invite Barry, too?\" she asks.\n\n\"Uh. No, maybe not,\" I say. \"Just us.\"\n\nWhile Renata is gone, I dribble in the basement and my body loosens a little. Then I watch NBA games\u2014New York Knicks against Washington and Houston against San Antonio\u2014and I spend time thinking about Carli. Barry calls, but I don't pick up the phone. He leaves a message to see if I want to jog on the Red Jacket Trail, like we did when it was warmer back in the fall, and then to go to Seven Mile Creek to throw rocks at trees.\n\nThrow rocks? I am not a little kid anymore!\n\nPatrick's is in downtown Northrup. It has so many foods I love: pizzas, Reuben sandwiches, onion rings, and seasoned french fries with many kinds of sauces for dipping. Usually it's filled with college kids, but as this is the end of their spring break, it is a bit empty for a Saturday night. This is good, because Renata doesn't enjoy seeing her students, and she doesn't like sitting in big crowds of what she calls _townies._ We sit in a corner booth.\n\nRenata gets her salad. She orders a glass of wine, which surprises me. She knows I get worried when people drink. This fear is not very Polish of me. Magda back in Philly said so during a Constitution Day celebration where all the people got really drunk and I cried and Renata had to take me home. Magda didn't live with my dad, who could drink a whole bottle of vodka in an hour and went from too happy to sad to powerfully angry and violent. I want to be Polish now, a Sobieski, so I don't ask Renata not to drink her wine. I get a patty melt, a hamburger sandwich with some good onions, and also fries and an order of battered cheese curds, something they didn't have in Poland or Philly, but I love.\n\nI eat half my sandwich fast.\n\nRenata barely eats. She sips her wine.\n\n\"Can we talk?\" she says.\n\nI am chewing. \"I don't know.\"\n\nThat makes her smile for some reason. \"You've always been quiet,\" she says.\n\nI nod. I bite my other sandwich half. I chew.\n\n\"But you're more quiet with me than ever,\" she says.\n\nI swallow. \"No. I'm not quiet anymore,\" I say.\n\nShe stares at me for a moment. \"I know you're going through some changes. I get that.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I say.\n\n\"You're meeting new people.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I say.\n\n\"Maybe getting angry, too?\" she asks. \"About what you've been through?\"\n\n\"No,\" I say fast, but I'm not sure if this is true.\n\n\"Really?\" she asks. She waits for me to reply.\n\nThe server comes up and asks if I want a refill on my Coke. I'm relieved this takes the focus off the question. \"Yes. Please,\" I say. She asks if Renata wants another glass of wine.\n\nRenata looks at me for a moment, then says, \"Yes, thanks.\"\n\n\"Why do you need to drink so much wine?\" I ask when the server leaves.\n\n\"It's something I enjoy. I haven't had wine because it makes you uncomfortable, but maybe we're getting to a point that we can start being our normal selves with each other. You've been my son for years, Adam.\"\n\n\"Maybe you drink wine because Professor Mike likes wine and you want to be like him,\" I say.\n\n\"Okay . . . okay,\" Renata says. \"Are you upset with me about Michael?\"\n\n\"No. He's good. He's fine,\" I say.\n\n\"Are we spending too much time with him and the girls?\" she asks.\n\n\"No,\" I say. \"I like Regan and Margery.\"\n\n\"Then what's going on, Adam?\"\n\nI am holding my half sandwich in my hand. I put it down on the plate. I look down into my lap. It is true that I am in a bad mood with Renata, that I have a bad feeling. I have fear about Professor Mike, because of stupid Peter in Philly. I don't want to say that to her. I say the other thing instead. \"Maybe I can be Adam Sobieski and not Adam Reed anymore?\"\n\nRenata nods quickly. Tears come into her eyes. She swallows hard.\n\nBehind her I see a very big man in a baseball cap come in. Behind him is Kase Kinshaw and what must be his two little brothers and a little sister who is preschool age. My heart starts to beat hard. The sight of Kase pumps adrenaline through my body. But Kase doesn't see me. The family begins to slide into a booth nearby. Kase lifts the girl in before he goes. She wriggles. He does a raspberry sound on her cheek. She screams and laughs. I am struck. Maybe Kase is not as bad as I think? Then the big man, who must be Kase's dad, looks directly at me. He pauses for a moment, then walks to our booth.\n\nMy adrenaline grows.\n\n\"Adam Reed?\" he says.\n\n\"Yeah?\" I say, almost unable to breathe.\n\nHe smiles and nods. \"Just wanted to tell you how much me and my wife loved watching you play this past season.\" He turns to Renata, who has just mopped her eyes with a napkin. \"You must be so proud of your boy.\" He extends his hand to her. \"Rick Kinshaw.\"\n\nShe shakes hands. \"Renata,\" she says. \"Renata Reed.\"\n\n\"Sorry to bust in on you. Just wanted to say I've watched a lot of games over the years, and I can tell you we haven't had basketball like that here before you showed up. It's fun, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Fun,\" I say.\n\nHe smiles. Turns and walks to their booth.\n\nKase is looking down and shaking his head.\n\n\"Shit,\" I whisper.\n\n\"You're a local hero,\" Renata says.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I say.\n\nThen she reaches into her purse, I think maybe to get Kleenex for her eyes, but she pulls out an iPhone instead. \"I got this for you,\" she says. \"It's all set and ready to go. You can text your new friends and . . . and do whatever and let me know where you are, okay?\" She hands it to me.\n\n\"Ah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much,\" I say.\n\n\"I want everything to be okay,\" she says. \"I'm going to work on it.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say. I don't know what she has to work on, but what can I do? I look down at this phone. I love it. I can call Carli. I can watch videos of basketball drills out in the driveway.\n\nRenata doesn't eat any of her salad before we leave.\n\nKase Kinshaw doesn't look at me, as far as I know.\n\n## THIRTY-FOUR\n\n## CHASING THE OCEAN\n\nOn Monday morning, Barry calls to say he won't be at breakfast because he had a bad night and couldn't wake up. It's okay. The college is back in session, and Renata has an early morning faculty meeting, so she hasn't made any food. Still, she says, \"Have you and Barry had a falling-out?\"\n\nI don't know about that.\n\nAfter she leaves, I work on dribbles and post footwork in the basement. Then the day spreads out in front of me. The week. The first Fury exhibition game, played in Minneapolis against a team from far in the north of Minnesota, is coming on Saturday, but nothing until then? Can I go and knock on Carli's door? I have my phone, which I used to watch YouTube videos all weekend while Regan and Margery jumped on top of me because I'm the right size for a dragon, but there are no phone numbers yet. I set up a Twitter account, because everyone on the Fury has Twitter. @PolishHooper. I tweet _Kyle Owens is not so great at basketball. He is slow._ It goes to nobody, because there is no one who is following me. Should I follow people? __ Should I go to Carli's house?\n\nAm I lonely?\n\nShould I go play with Regan and Margery?\n\nI don't want to be a dragon.\n\nThe house is empty. It feels like time is a terrible forest all around me.\n\nShould I go walk on the college campus to see people?\n\nThen the landline rings and it is Barry Roland again. I answer.\n\n\"I was thinking, since I missed breakfast, that maybe it would taste good to go to Mankato and eat at Perkins?\" he says.\n\n\"Will your car make it to Mankato?\" I ask.\n\n\"Yeah. I gave Merle all my money and he gave the Pontiac a tune-up. It purrs like a cat now?\"\n\n\"Really?\" I say.\n\n\"Kind of?\" he says.\n\n\"Come get me,\" I say.\n\n\"I have to drop off my sister at work, so it'll be a little bit? But I'll be there pretty soon.\"\n\nI shower, then jump into pants and am about to pull my Joel Embiid Philadelphia 76ers jersey over a T-shirt when the doorbell rings. \"That's fast, Barry,\" I shout. \"What about your sister's job, huh?\"\n\nI go down the hall pulling on the jersey and swing open the door.\n\nCarli Anderson stands outside. \"What's up, man?\" she asks.\n\n\"What's up?\" I ask. \"Why are you here?\"\n\n\"I'm going up to the Y in Minnie to work out with Tasha Tolliver. She was hanging with Khalil last night, and he asked if I'd drive you up, too, because Rashid is in Florida with his dad until Friday and they need a third for three-on-three and it would be cool if it was you\u2014Kyle Owens plays with these giant South Dakota dudes, so you're going to want to be ready!\"\n\n\"What? South Dakota? Owens?\"\n\n\"Do I talk too fast for you, Polish boy?\"\n\n\"Yes. Maybe.\"\n\nShe talks very slowly then. \"Do you want to go play basketball in Minneapolis with Khalil and Devin?\"\n\n\"Shit. Yes. Now?\"\n\n\"Now. I would've called, but you have no phone.\"\n\n\"I have a phone!\" I pull it out of my pocket and show her.\n\n\"That will make things easier in the future. Get your stuff, dude. Let's go.\"\n\nIn two minutes we are out the door and rolling toward the highway. Carli talks about scholarship offers and good fits and different college divisions and all of it seems too far away for me. Even though she missed the whole season with her knee, she has just received a Division I scholarship offer from University of Wisconsin\u2013Green Bay. She is worried. \"It's fine for them to give me a scholarship and everything, but what if I never can run like I used to? What if I end up in Green Bay and I can't even really play ball?\"\n\nI remember Magda saying that in Minnesota I'd be close to Chicago and Green Bay and there would be plenty of Polish people, except it turns out Green Bay is pretty far from Northrup\u2014maybe a five-hour drive\u2014and Chicago is even farther. \"You know, there are lots of Polish people in Green Bay, so there might be dudes that look like me,\" I say.\n\nShe turns, takes her eyes far off the road, and says, \"I would like that.\"\n\nI have trouble thinking for the next twenty minutes. Carli likes how I look. This has now been confirmed.\n\nWe drive into the suburbs and then into the city, into a neighborhood that looks more like Philadelphia than any I've seen so far. There, next to a trolley station built on a platform above the streets, we come to a beautiful Y facility.\n\nKhalil, Tasha, and Devin greet us in the lobby.\n\n\"Farmer in the hood!\" Khalil shouts.\n\n\"This isn't the hood,\" Devin says.\n\nKhalil is happy.\n\nDevin is not ever happy.\n\n\"We're going to drill with some Augsburg College girls upstairs,\" Tasha says.\n\n\"Courts are this way, Farmer,\" Khalil says.\n\nI sign in at the front desk as Devin's guest and then follow the two of them down a long hall.\n\nMany people maybe don't like the smell of a gym, because it contains a lot of sweat from human beings. But it also smells like the rubber of shoes and basketballs and the heat of the large lights that hang from its ceiling. It smells like the ointment Coach Jenson gave me for my quad when I had a strain near the beginning of season. These smells are sacred. They are the smells of hooping, which is the most important aspect of my life.\n\nThere are not quite the normal smells in this Y, though, because the floor in the main area is not made of wood, but is hard rubber. The sounds are different, too. No shoe squeaks. I miss some squeaks. Also, there are so many lines for other kinds of games on this floor, it's hard to tell what is in and what is to be considered out of bounds. At first I am nervous and too aware of how different the space feels, and how Devin doesn't smile or look at me, but then, guess what?\n\nBasketball.\n\nAfter warming up a little, we play three-on-three in the half-court.\n\nThe first team we play are men older than us, and not just a little bit. These guys are probably in their thirties and maybe in their forties? They don't look very quick. They look mostly like old man versions of Lawrence Rivers with their big butts.\n\nWe begin, and in three seconds the fellow Devin is guarding shoots a three-pointer like blowing sawdust off a table. So easy.\n\nThen the shorter old guy strips Khalil, and the first old guy shoots another one from the three-point line.\n\n\"Damn, dudes!\" Khalil shouts.\n\nDevin has had enough. He checks the ball, fakes a pass to me, then from the top of the key rips off five steps, explodes, and dunks.\n\n\"Oh, is that how it's going to be?\" One of the old men laughs.\n\n\"Just so you know,\" Devin says, not smiling.\n\nI will say this: if you haven't played basketball before, this game against the old guys would not be a good place to start. The old farts (Khalil calls them that) are so crafty. The first time I touch the ball, I get picked clean by Mr. Three-Point Shooter Man, who doesn't even seem like he's playing defense on me, but then bump, he has the ball.\n\nThat guy is named Nathaniel. He mostly keeps track of Devin, thankfully. Or maybe not.\n\nThe dude I am supposed to be guarding is named Dwight. He is big and a couple inches taller than I am, and he is bald and he has his T-shirt tucked into gray shorts, even though he has a big basketball-size gut. When I first looked at him, I thought, _Go easy._ But I was wrong, because he has me jumping out of my socks with post moves. He taunts me with jabbering, too. \"Oh, here it goes, white boy! Here it goes, vanilla cream! You ready to slap my weak-ass shit out of here? You ready?\" I keep telling him I'm ready, but I'm not ready. The ball seems on its way up, but then is not. I don't understand how he doesn't let go of the ball on shot fakes, because I swear the ball is leaving his hands, but then it stays.\n\nAfter he gets my undies all tied in bundles, he easily makes layups without even jumping more than an inch off the ground.\n\nHe messes with me in this way twice in a row, saying funny stuff and twisting my undies. Next possession for us, I am a little pissed, so Devin nods and I run, leap up to the perfect lob Devin throws, and bam, boom!\n\n\"Alley-oop,\" I say. \"Lob city.\"\n\n\"Oh, vanilla!\" Dwight shouts at me. \"You got the hops, boy! Would you look at that?\"\n\n\"How about you stop messing with our farmer, Dwight?\" Khalil laughs.\n\n\"No. It's okay. I will learn your ninja moves,\" I say.\n\n\"That's my boy,\" Dwight says.\n\nBut then he makes me look like a clown on ice skates two more times in a row. I don't get it. It is not just his feet and it is not just his hands. Every time there's something new, unexpected. Dwight is a creative genius like Miles or Coltrane.\n\nWhat is lucky for us young men with young legs and young lungs: we can keep going for a long time. I don't mind my legs burning. They will be better in a minute. I don't mind when I bend over to catch my breath. It will come back in a second. I don't even care when my feet get hot and I get blisters. They will heal tomorrow.\n\nBut the old fart men start their huffing and puffing after only ten or fifteen minutes. They go slower and slower and then stop playing defense. They keep laughing, though. And in the game we play, they beat us 11\u20138, mostly because I can't stop Dwight. The effort does them in, and even though they could keep the court, they don't want to.\n\n\"All yours. You all-stars wore us out,\" Dwight says.\n\nFunny that these old men are the hardest team we play in next two hours. We go against other crews of African-American dudes and some Asian kids and Somali kids and three guys from Mexico who are pretty good, but not like the old guys. Each team, we destroy by more and more points. By the end, Khalil seems to know where I will always be. I know that Devin will run his back cut off his screens for me (a very fast pick-and-roll kind of play). Devin attracts so much attention when he gets near the basket, he can always locate an open Khalil at the three-point line. I take and make a few jump shots. And I see how much better and quicker Khalil is than Caleb Olson. Khalil can bounce with the basketball two steps under the three-point line, leap back in a half breath, then fire it up or pass it before you even know what has happened.\n\nDevin Mitchell is the best player I have ever seen in person.\n\nAnd the three of us? We reach what Khalil calls the flow. I've never had this with other players. I'm not me, but part of a larger animal. We're like the Owens family of Marshall, Minnesota. We're like a three-headed Dwight playing jazz in the post. But I like what a Somali boy says after we beat him and his friends, 11\u20132. \"You dudes never stop. It's like chasing the ocean!\"\n\nLike chasing the ocean. That's good to imagine.\n\nAlso impossible to do.\n\n## THIRTY-FIVE\n\n## COOKED IN A HOT TUB\n\nWe sit on benches in the lobby area. Khalil packs up his bag. He has to go babysit his little brother, Lonnie, so his mom can go to work. \"Man, we are going to kill the Pride Saturday. We could take them, just the three of us,\" Khalil says.\n\nDevin leans back against the wall, dabbing his face with a towel. \"I think I'm going to stay, Farmer,\" Devin says. \"Not ready to go home yet. Want to hit the weights?\" Devin has said so few words directly to me. He still doesn't look at me.\n\n\"I'm not a good lifter. Only did it once with Carli,\" I say.\n\n\"Man, you are so raw!\" Khalil says.\n\n\"Like a little baby,\" Devin says. \"I can show you some stuff, though.\"\n\nBefore he leaves, Khalil finds me on Twitter. \"I'm your first follower, bro!\" He says this like he's shocked.\n\n\"I'm a little baby,\" I say.\n\nThen Devin and I go to the weights area upstairs.\n\nUpstairs we find people of every color on the earth. It's like my neighborhood back in Philly. Here there are black grandmas next to Mexican dudes next to white moms in yoga pants, like Renata wears, next to Vietnamese teen boys next to girls with Muslim scarves on their heads and dudes who must be speaking Arabic. Devin and I go to the free-weight section, and I have a big knot stuck in my throat. I love this. All of us up here are striving to improve.\n\n\"What are you doing, dude?\" Devin asks.\n\nI realize I am stuck in one spot, staring out into the treadmills and weight machines. \"I like all these people,\" I say.\n\nDevin giggles. This is not the deep laugh of a giant man, but more like a little kid. \"What?\"\n\n\"They're good people,\" I say. \"They're trying hard.\"\n\nHe smiles and shakes his head. \"You are odd,\" he says.\n\nI nod. \"It's hard to be me.\"\n\nHe giggles again and puts his hand on his forehead. \"I'm trying not to like you,\" he says.\n\n\"What? Why?\" I ask.\n\n\"It's not about you, man . . .\" He takes a big breath. \"Let's just do some lunges, all right?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say, but I would like to know why he shouldn't like me. Instead, I follow him to a place where we put weight on a bar. I copy what he does, load plates.\n\nFor the next forty-five minutes we do more than lunging. We pull and squat and clean and jerk (this sounds disgusting, but is really more painful) and curl and press. Pretty soon I feel like my whole body has become soft rubber. I am sweating and dizzy.\n\nDevin is able to lift almost twice as much weight as I can for every exercise. How do I compete with that? If he doesn't like me, he can break me in half. But during the workout, he has been nice. He has given me good instructions. He has laughed at my jokes and kept me from dropping a weight on my head.\n\nDuring my last set of bench presses, Tasha Tolliver and Carli come up. Devin helps me guide the bar back onto the rack. I sit up and I think I might die. I am so tired, really.\n\n\"How about the hot tub, y'all?\" Tasha asks.\n\n\"I gotta ice,\" Devin says.\n\n\"Come on, they don't got ice baths here, boy,\" Tasha says.\n\n\"Unless you dudes get something we don't,\" Carli says.\n\n\"Nah. I'd have to go home to do it,\" Devin says.\n\n\"Well, we don't want that!\" Tasha says.\n\nI borrow a pair of shorts from Devin. They are big on my butt. Carli and Tasha have both brought swimsuits. We are the only people in a large bubbling hot tub that sits in the shadow of a two-story water slide and next to a kids' wading pool.\n\nI don't like sitting in hot tubs very much. I've only been in one before. When we moved to Minnesota last summer, we stayed in a hotel in Northrup for two days. There was a hot tub. I thought I was being cooked in a soup. How is that relaxing?\n\nBut Tasha and Carli are big, powerful, beautiful girls and I want Devin to like me, so I decide, even if I feel like I'm being made into soup, there is no place in the world I would rather be.\n\nThey all talk Minnesota basketball and about people I don't know and then they talk about recruiting. Tasha has made official visits to Iowa, Iowa State, and someplace called Butler. Devin has visited only Duke and Kentucky, because they're the only schools he thought he was interested in. \"I'm going to check out Howard and Harvard now, though.\"\n\n\"Dude, you are not going to go to one of those schools,\" Tasha says.\n\n\"Why?\" I ask.\n\n\"Harvard doesn't even give athletic scholarships.\"\n\n\"They play good basketball and the coach is black,\" Devin says. \"And I could get the best education in the country.\"\n\n\"So you going to play that system they do at Harvard?\" Tasha says.\n\n\"Sure. Why not?\"\n\n\"You can play tough D, limit possessions? Maybe you average nine points a game?\"\n\n\"Why is that bad if the team wins?\" I ask.\n\n\"Duh, because,\" Carli says.\n\n\"What?\" I ask.\n\n\"Because Devin could be a top-ten NBA pick in two years,\" Carli says.\n\n\"There's more to life than basketball,\" Devin says.\n\n\"No,\" I say.\n\n\"So much more. Why do I want to go to some school that just wants to use me up for basketball?\" Devin asks. \"You think Kentucky cares about my education?\"\n\n\"Go get your Harvard degree after you leave the NBA, dude!\" Tasha shouts.\n\nThere is a moment when no one says anything, but we all just look at the water.\n\nThen Tasha talks. \"Just like Khalil always says, you too rich to even see what you got.\"\n\nDevin shakes his head. He glares at Tasha, then climbs out of the hot tub.\n\n\"Aw, come on, man,\" Tasha says.\n\n\"I'm out,\" Devin says. \"Keep the shorts, Farmer.\" He wraps in a towel and walks away.\n\nI'm not sure what to do, so I stay in my spot. Nobody says anything for a couple of minutes. Carli pulls out her ponytail and shakes her head, so her shiny hair falls on her muscular shoulders. I try not to stare, but I do. She smiles at me and sinks down deep into the tub.\n\n\"Shit,\" Tasha whispers. Then she turns the bubbles up high. \"Devin Mitchell gets on my last nerve,\" she says.\n\nWhen there are a lot of bubbles, Carli puts her foot in my lap.\n\n\"Just need to straighten out my knee,\" she says.\n\nI nod. I hold on to her foot with my hand. I am happier than ever. There is nothing else, not basketball, not Devin . . .\n\nBut Tasha's brain is still with Devin. \"You know what? He might really go to, like, Howard University, right?\"\n\n\"No way,\" Carli says.\n\n\"His dad wanted him at Duke since he was in middle school. Devin has to do everything his dad says or else, okay? He gets grounded, stuck in that house by himself weeks at a time, just for being home late from school. But when he's eighteen, he's free. He can go where he wants. If Howard pays, why shouldn't he go where he wants to be? His daddy can suck it.\"\n\n\"I like his dad,\" I say.\n\n\"You wouldn't if you were his kid,\" Carli says. \"Devin can barely have friends. Definitely no girlfriend. He can't go anywhere after dark by himself, right, Tash?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" Tasha nods. \"And he had to stop playing baseball, because his dad said he messed around too much in the dugout and practice got in the way of his basketball development. Devin loves baseball!\"\n\n\"Why?\" I ask. \"Why is his dad so mean?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't think he's mean,\" Carli says.\n\n\"No way. Daddy's scared!\" Tasha says.\n\n\"Of what? Devin is the toughest-looking boy I ever saw,\" I say.\n\n\"Yeah. Exactly, dude. You got it,\" Tasha says. \"Devin looks like a big man, even if he just a kid. People are scared of him, and these cops don't play. He could end up shot.\"\n\n\"Jesus. Really?\" Carli says. \"I mean, I thought his dad was strict just to keep Devin out of trouble.\"\n\n\"Devin Mitchell wouldn't get in no trouble,\" Tasha says. \"But trouble is looking for him. Trouble is out looking for all black kids right now.\"\n\n\"I'm glad I'm not black,\" I say.\n\nBoth the girls' mouths drop open. They stare at me. \"You still can't say shit like that,\" Tasha says.\n\n\"Seriously, Adam. That sounded terrible.\"\n\n\"Why? I don't want trouble looking for me,\" I say. \"I have enough trouble, okay? Trouble finds me a lot. I don't want to get shot, too.\"\n\n\"Well, you think Devin does?\" Tasha says.\n\n\"He probably wishes he was white,\" I say.\n\n\"That he does not, dude. Not at all.\" Tasha stands and climbs out of the hot tub. She grabs her towel and dries.\n\n\"Farmer's Polish. He doesn't know what he's saying,\" Carli says.\n\n\"I do, too,\" I say, because what does me being Polish have to do with it?\n\n\"See, he do,\" Tasha says. She walks out of the pool area.\n\nCarli leans back and shuts her eyes.\n\n\"I didn't mean to make her pissed,\" I say.\n\n\"Just shut up for a few seconds, okay?\" Carli says. She presses her toes into the inside of my thigh, and I do shut up.\n\n## THIRTY-SIX\n\n## BAD VERSION OF ME\n\nI wasn't trying to be racist or anything. As I dress, I replace black with Polish. \"I'm glad I'm not Polish,\" somebody could say because Poles are unlucky, or maybe they think Poles are dumb, or Poles are poor, or drunk, or whatever the reason. The thing is, whatever the reason, they'd be wrong, because Poles are not one thing, but many different things, so it's a stereotype. I can imagine if I heard someone say those things, I would get mad. But those things are simply opinions. Isn't it a fact that black guys get shot by the cops? I see the news Renata has on. That's not a stereotype, is it? Black guys get shot.\n\n\"That's why I'm glad I'm not black,\" I say to Carli when we meet in the lobby. \"Black is nothing wrong. My favorite basketball players are all black. I just don't want to get shot.\"\n\nThere is a black kid in the lobby, probably waiting for his mom, maybe ten years old, staring at me when I say this.\n\nCarli rolls her eyes at me. She rolls up her swimsuit in a towel. Then she says, \"I think the response Tasha and other actual human beings look for in this situation is more about how Devin walking around worried he's going to get shot just because he's a black guy is totally unacceptable . . .\"\n\nThat makes me think. \"Oh,\" I say. \"Okay. I see.\"\n\nThe kid is still staring at me.\n\n\"It's like you're lost in your own world,\" Carli says.\n\n\"I have problems.\" I nod. \"Will you text Tasha that I am stupid but understand?\"\n\n\"I saw her in the locker room. She's not going to hold it against you, dude, because she's nice and knows you're just trying to figure shit out. But I would think, since you know that an apology is needed, that you'd be the one to do it yourself, right?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I say.\n\n\"Good,\" Carli says.\n\n\"Yes, Mother,\" I say.\n\n\"Ha-ha,\" Carli says.\n\nThe kid is still staring like I am from outer space. \"You're good at basketball,\" he finally says. \"I watched you play.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Okay,\" I say. I don't say anything more. We leave the Y.\n\nBut I'm thinking. Even before we are out of the Minneapolis suburbs, I turn to Carli, who has been quiet, just listening to the pop music on the radio, not even singing along, and I say, \"It's like how Kase Kinshaw makes shit of me just because I'm from a different country. That's totally unacceptable.\"\n\n\"Kase doesn't care that you're from a different country. He just doesn't like it that you're better at sports than him.\"\n\n\"No. He calls me a refugee.\"\n\n\"He makes dumb jokes, that's all.\"\n\n\"No, he doesn't make jokes.\"\n\n\"I know he can be a dick, but he's not a bad guy, I swear. I've known him my whole life. We're buddies.\"\n\n\"He punched Barry Roland.\"\n\n\"What? Is Barry Roland Polish, too?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"So I guess Kase doesn't pick on him because he's Polish?\"\n\n\"Are you joking?\" I ask.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Of course Barry isn't Polish. Barry is just another victim of Kase Kinshaw.\"\n\n\"Barry is not the best example to use here. Sorry.\"\n\n\"Why?\" I ask.\n\n\"You don't even know the story of the dog,\" she says.\n\n\"What dog?\" I say.\n\n\"God. Can we not talk about this?\" she asks. \"I'm not a spokesperson for Kase Kinshaw, okay?\"\n\n\"I'm not a spokesperson for Barry, either . . .\" And then I think for a moment and get a shock of lightning in my veins. Oh shit, Barry Roland. He was on his way over to my house this morning! \"Oh shit, oh shit!\" I say.\n\nI reach down and pull my phone out of my pocket. It never rings. It never buzzes. I am not used to it, so I never look at it. There, on the front screen, are several notifications:\n\nFirst, two texts, Khalil sending over his number and Devin's number.\n\nSecond, a notification from Twitter that I have forty-one new followers. Khalil has retweeted out my only message, _Kyle Owens is not so great . . ._\n\nThird, and worst, a Renata voice mail. When I tap in my code, I find there are a bunch of older texts and voice mails from her. They are asking again and again, _WHERE ARE YOU? BARRY CAN'T FIND YOU._\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" I say. \"I was supposed to hang out with Barry Roland, but I just left with you and didn't tell anyone.\"\n\n\"This morning? You didn't tell your mom?\" Carli asks.\n\n\"She wasn't home.\"\n\n\"That's why you have a phone. For texting!\" she says.\n\n\"Oh no,\" I say. \"No.\"\n\n\"Sorry, dude,\" Carli says.\n\nI fall into despair.\n\n## THIRTY-SEVEN\n\n## HOOPER THE DRAGON\n\nRenata is waiting for me when I come in the door. She is standing, not sitting. Her arms are folded over her chest. \"What are you doing?\" she asks.\n\n\"I went to Minneapolis with Carli Anderson to play basketball.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she says. \"I spoke to Ted Anderson, because I thought you might be with her.\"\n\n\"I made the problem,\" I say. \"I got excited and forgot to tell anyone. That's not Carli's fault.\"\n\n\"I'm not upset with Carli Anderson, Adam, I'm upset with you.\"\n\n\"I should have told you what was happening.\"\n\nRenata closes her eyes tight. She walks across the living room and plunges backward on the couch. \"Yes. You should've told me, but I'm not the injured party here. I would've been fine. I would've told you yes, go to Minneapolis. I would've been happy for you to pursue what you love with people who are as passionate about basketball as you are.\"\n\n\"Okay?\" I say. \"We're okay? I made a mistake and you forgive me?\"\n\nRenata sighs. \"What about Barry?\" she asks. \"What are you going to do about Barry?\"\n\n\"I'll call him and apologize, because it was just . . . it was an accident.\"\n\n\"Your priorities are changing, Adam. Maybe you better tell him that you won't be available to spend time with him like before. Basketball is more important.\"\n\n\"Basketball is more important than Barry? He's a . . . he's a person.\"\n\nRenata sits forward. \"Think about this, okay? Would you choose practicing basketball over spending time with Barry?\" she asks.\n\nI don't say anything, but of course I know the answer.\n\nBarry left so many messages on the home answering machine. I only listen to a few.\n\n10:32 a.m. _\"Did you fall down in the house, dude?\"_\n\n10:44 a.m. _\"Are you dead, because you're not answering the door or the phone?\"_\n\n11:33 a.m. _\"I found out you just left without telling me, so_ __ _that's not a good friend thing to do, Adam? I wouldn't do that to you?\"_\n\nIt is too sad. I lie down on the floor and fall asleep.\n\nMaybe a half hour later, Regan and Margery come busting in from outside. There is no knocking anymore. My home is now their home, it seems. Margery holds on to a large poster-size piece of paper, which is rolled up into a tube.\n\n\"Want to see what we made at art camp?\" Regan asks.\n\nI do not. But they unroll it on the living room floor next to me.\n\nHooper the Dragon. Giant. Green covered in glitter. Shooting out flames from its mouth. Wearing a number thirty-four jersey. A basketball in one claw. Hugging a little brown-haired child in the other arm.\n\n\"This is my favorite picture of all time,\" I say.\n\n@PolishHooper suddenly has 112 followers. @KyOw23 has written: _@PolishHooper is a bad head case with no true skills. Runs and jumps. That is all._\n\nHooper the Dragon will burn you, Owens!\n\nThat's what I think.\n\nI am okay with my new life.\n\n## THIRTY-EIGHT\n\n## I LIKE BARRY\n\nIt is Wednesday morning of spring break.\n\nTuesday Barry didn't show up for breakfast. He didn't answer the phone at his house, either. The whole day, I did nothing but worry about Barry. I called him again and again. Then I sent texts to Khalil, and he sent me YouTube highlights of Kyle Owens being great because Khalil thinks that is funny. I got a text from Carli, who took a picture of Andrew Wiggins's Minnesota Timberwolves jersey at the mall in Mankato, where she was with her pouty friends. She said Wiggins should be my favorite player and not Joel Embiid, since I live in Minnesota and am not a big-butt center.\n\nIt was nice to be in contact with Khalil and Carli on Tuesday, but my mind and heart were with Barry.\n\nThere is no Barry again this morning. Renata gave me a very sad look at breakfast to mark the occasion. After Renata leaves, instead of going to the basement to do my dribbles, I decide to go for a run through cold and foggy Northrup.\n\nI run down the street alongside the college, then take a right and run across the neighborhoods to the downtown area. This is not where I want to be\u2014nobody wants to run in the downtown\u2014but I must cross Highway 169 and then a bridge over the Minnesota River if I am to get on the Red Jacket Trail. Before I had played any basketball in Northrup, back in the fall when I'd just arrived in town, I ran on this trail all the time. It is peaceful. Actually, it's how I met Barry. I found him out running barefoot in his karate uniform. He stopped me and said, \"Hey, you're the big guy? The new one from a different country?\"\n\n\"Uh,\" I answered.\n\n\"You like to run in the woods, too?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I said.\n\nWe ran together for a half hour. He talked and talked, and he made me laugh by saying strange things. Then we ran to his trailer and he took me to McDonald's. The rest is history.\n\nBut I am not at the trail yet.\n\nI get to the highway crossing downtown just as the don't walk light begins to flash. I jog in place, right near the natural food co-op and Taco John's restaurant. Just then a very big pickup truck pulls in next to me. Small towns make it hard to avoid your enemies. The truck has a white sign on its side that says Kinshaw Construction. Kase Kinshaw sits in the passenger seat. His father, Rick, is driving. Kase squints at me, glares, then turns and looks forward.\n\nThe light turns green. \"See you later, dick,\" I say under my breath.\n\nThe truck is gone.\n\nThen I take off sprinting and run all the way to the Red Jacket Trail, too fast. When I get to the access, I suck for air. Fog curls over the bank of the Minnesota River. It looks like there are clouds that blow across the trail.\n\nI watch this amazing thing. Fog tumbles like a movie of waves of the ocean slowed way down. It goes and goes and goes.\n\n_Like chasing the ocean._\n\nOkay. Yes.\n\nI am a different kid now. Not the same as when I met Barry with his bare feet.\n\nBarry is still the same kid. He still has Kase Kinshaw to make shit of him. He's back to having no friends.\n\nI take off and run. Barry has no friends. I have abandoned him. I know what that feels like. Instead of running the whole way down to the Highway 14 bridge, as I would usually do, I cross back to the Northrup side of the river on County Road 13. I run right down Main Street past QuikTrip and Taco John's and past the co-op. I turn on the big, curving Linden Street and go up the river bluff, not toward the college, but toward the big trailer park where Barry lives. I have only been to this place two times, but I think I can remember where his trailer is.\n\nI will not abandon Barry.\n\nI turn on the access road. Shady Crest, the place is called. I run past a boy and a girl in their winter coats who are throwing a spongy football back and forth. The boy lets a pass drop and shouts, \"It's that guy! That basketball guy!\" when he sees me.\n\nBarry's trailer is near the back of the neighborhood, on the edge of a ravine. The second time I visited him, me and Barry found a washing machine crushed at the bottom. On the other side of the ravine are farm fields that smell like pig shit sometimes and other times like cat pee, Barry says.\n\nI see his car first, parked outside the gray-and-white trailer. I slow and begin to walk. I don't want to see Tiffany or Merle. I take big breaths, because I will knock on his door even though I am scared.\n\nI will not abandon my friend.\n\nTurns out there will be no knocking. I come around the car and find Barry sitting in a lawn chair in the muddy yard. He has a short whip made from leather in his hand, and he is, over and over, whipping another lawn chair nearby him.\n\n\"Barry,\" I say.\n\nHe will not look up.\n\n\"Bro, I am sorry,\" I say.\n\nHe shrugs and keeps his whip going, _whack, whack_.\n\n\"I made a bad mistake. It was accident, though. Carli Anderson came to my house when I expected it would be you and . . . she is pretty hot, right? She's good at basketball, too. So I lost my brain, okay?\" I say.\n\nThen Barry looks at me. He says his tae kwon do thing. \"Courtesy, integrity, self-control, indomitable spirit.\"\n\n\"Those are words,\" I say.\n\n\"Courtesy, integrity, self-control, indomitable spirit?\" he says again.\n\n\"Okay, but . . . I'm sorry about what happened.\"\n\n\"Courtesy, integrity, self-control, indomitable spirit!\" he shouts. \"These are the tenets I live by, because I am a warrior, and so I will not kick you or call you curse words, because I am strong!\" Barry shouts. \"Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say. \"That's good. You know what else is good? I promise I will not abandon you.\"\n\n\"You already have,\" he says.\n\n\"No. I made a mistake, but I will not abandon you.\"\n\n\"No?\" he says.\n\n\"No,\" I say.\n\n\"Why should I believe you?\"\n\n\"Because I am very serious,\" I say.\n\nBarry takes in a big breath. \"Have you thought about this decision, or are you just saying it to make me feel better?\" Barry asks.\n\n\"I ran on the Red Jacket Trail just now and thought long and hard about our friendship.\"\n\nBarry nods. \"Okay?\" Barry says.\n\nI nod back. \"Yes. Now I would like to buy you some McDonald's to show you I am sorry.\"\n\nBarry stands up. He places his whip on the chair he has been whipping. \"Really?\" he asks.\n\n\"Yes,\" I say.\n\n\"I am hungry,\" he says.\n\n\"Then let's do this, bro,\" I say.\n\n\"Okay. I will go with you to McDonald's, to accept your meal, and to accept your apology,\" he says. Then he puts his hands together like a fist into palm prayer and bends at his waist to honor my offer.\n\nI do the same back to him.\n\nWe have to stop by Renata's office so I can borrow money. She is happy to have the opportunity to fund our meal.\n\nAt McDonald's, while he puts a lot of french fries in his mouth, I say more to Barry, because Renata is right. My priorities are changing and I owe Barry the truth. \"You need to know something important.\"\n\n\"Okay?\" he says through his french fries.\n\nI talk again in the weird way we talked outside his trailer. \"Because I am pursuing greatness in the sport, I will spend more time than ever practicing basketball. It is true that I am also interested in spending time with Carli Anderson, and not only because of basketball, but because she smells like honey and she's funny and she is interested in the things I love. Even though I won't be around as often, none of this will stop me from being your homeboy. Please come over for breakfast every day. I miss you, and so does Renata when you don't. And nothing will stop us from being friends. Nothing ever. I am always your friend, and I will do a good job telling you if I won't be available and will not break plans we already have together once they are made.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Barry says. \"Sounds good.\" He smiles. He eats more french fries.\n\nWe are good now. I know.\n\nBarry comes to breakfast Thursday and Friday. He eats pancakes and egg sandwiches. Both mornings after breakfast we play dragon catcher with Margery and Regan. After dragon catcher, we all eat lunch in the Trinity dining hall with Renata and Professor Mike.\n\nThe afternoons of spring break belong to Carli Anderson, though.\n\n## THIRTY-NINE\n\n## MAKING OUT WITH A HOT GIRL\n\nIt is Friday afternoon. Because the main gym at Trinity is being used by the college softball and baseball teams, Carli and I go to the recreation center, where her dad is teaching a gym class that is full of his freshmen players from the men's basketball team. The whole floor is reserved for Coach Anderson, but he doesn't need it.\n\nCoach Anderson's boys warm up on one side of a net. Carli and I grab two balls off a rolling rack and begin to fire shots on the other. This is our third day doing the same thing. So far Carli's knee is holding up well. We have gotten into a rhythm of practice together.\n\nCarli doesn't even need to warm up. She starts popping three-pointers from the men's college three line like it's no problem.\n\nI know it's a problem. I know how hard it is to do what she's doing.\n\nIt takes me longer to get a feel. I don't go out to the three-pointer line but practice my jumper at the elbows of the lane. I imagine giving Kyle Owens a head fake, like I'm going to drive, but then rising up and dropping a soft shot into the net, except in reality I miss. I do it again. I miss. I do it again. I make. I do it again. Soon, I hit three in a row from the same spot. That's our cue to move on.\n\nWe lose one of the balls and do a stop-and-pop drill. Carli kills. She only misses one shot. I do the same drill and hit from six of the twelve spots. Usually we do this shooting progression three times before moving on.\n\nBut when I pass the ball over to her, instead of shooting, she throws it back. I hold on to the ball. \"What?\" I ask.\n\n\"Do you know I chose to be here with you instead of going to the Mall of America with my friends?\"\n\n\"You did? What friends?\"\n\n\"All of them,\" she says.\n\n\"That's nice. I'm happy,\" I say.\n\n\"They're super pissed at me. But I don't care.\"\n\n\"Basketball is important, right?\" I throw the ball back to her.\n\nShe throws it back to me. \"I'm not here just for basketball, okay?\"\n\nI stand holding on to to the ball.\n\nShe walks slowly up to me and grabs the ball from my hands. She stands very close. \"Do you know the other reason?\" she asks.\n\n\"No?\" I say, like a question.\n\n\"I'm ready for you.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" I say.\n\n\"Guard me in the post.\" She dribbles toward the basket and beckons me to follow with her left hand. I do. \"Come on, man. Guard me,\" she says.\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nShe dribbles. I guard her but also sort of don't. I place my hand on her hip. She backs into me. She pushes in very close until her shiny ponytail is almost in my face, and then she spins and lays the ball up over the top of me. I raise my arms straight up to act like I am blocking. When she lands we are body to body, chest to chest, legs to legs. We both freeze solid.\n\n\"Hello,\" I say.\n\n\"Hey,\" she says.\n\nWe are stuck together, and my heart explodes.\n\nThen there is a whistle. We jump apart. Her dad shouts from the other court, \"How's your knee feeling, Carls?\"\n\n\"Okay! Great!\"\n\n\"You two want to get in some scrimmaging?\"\n\nAnd then we are jogging toward the other court.\n\nOkay. Here I am. We are here to play basketball?\n\nI follow Carli around the net to where the dudes are, and I'm trying not to look at her legs, because Coach Anderson is standing next to the dudes and they want to play basketball. That's what we're doing here, right? Yeah, but . . . were we about to kiss right on the court?\n\nBasketball. Basketball.\n\n\"Let's do full five-on-five,\" Coach Anderson says. \"But you take it easy, Carls. No hard cuts, soft D for now.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" she says. Her face is bright red.\n\nThen we play. We use the offense I learned when I pretended to be Lawrence Rivers, so I am in the post. I spin and dunk several times. I'm better than the Division III freshmen ballers. Carli jacks two threes and hits them. They give her too much space because of her knee, but what she does is incredible, even if she's not guarded closely. I watch the ball leave her hand. Her follow-through is like the neck of a swan.\n\nShe's so beautiful I want to drink her from a glass.\n\nAfter fifteen minutes, Coach Anderson blows his whistle. He says, \"Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Carls. Great to have you two out here.\"\n\nCarli and I jog off the court, both of us are sweating. We drink at the drinking fountain\u2014so cold and good in the corner. Carli picks up our warm-up tops from the floor. \"Let's go,\" she says. I follow her. For some reason Carli doesn't head for the main doors, the ones we came in through. She goes to a single door in the corner of the gym. We exit into a dark hallway. Carli throws our warm-ups on the ground, backs me into a wall, and kisses me with her cold, drinking-fountain mouth, but I can taste her sweat, too, salty and it tastes so good and it makes my feet feel like they are coming off the ground, like my head is a balloon filled with helium, like my chest is following my head into the clouds.\n\nI almost say to her I love her and we should be married. I don't, because as soon as I think it, I get so terrified that she will leave me. We slide onto the floor. Stop kissing. Sit next to each other. Hold hands. We breathe really hard.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she whispers. \"I had to get that over with right now. I'm ready for you. I made my decision.\"\n\n\"It's a good decision?\" I whisper back.\n\nCarli says, \"Yeah, right? It is, isn't it?\"\n\nI want to ask her if she's going to leave me, but I know that sounds so crazy. Instead I lean and kiss her neck. She breathes in deep.\n\n\"Okay. My dad could come walking through here any second.\"\n\nBut we kiss again. Then we hear the boys running sprints in the gym. Could they come running through this hall? We leap up and sprint out of our spot into the main hall in the building. It is filled with college students.\n\nTen minutes later, I enter the living room at home through the front door. I don't even know where I am. Margery and Regan are watching a movie about a sea monster on my TV. Regan turns and looks at me. She crinkles her brow. \"What's wrong with your face?\" she asks.\n\n_Carli_ , is what I think.\n\n\"I'm a happy boy,\" I whisper.\n\n\"Do you have the flu?\" Margery asks.\n\nI go into my bedroom. I tweet to my 236 @PolishHooper followers: _@KyOw23 throws bricks when pressure is high. #weakballer_\n\nBring it, Kyle Owens. @PolishHoops, the team Twitter of the Polish National Team follows me. I follow back. I am feeling so good!\n\nI made out with a hot girl!\n\nI am Adam Sobieski!\n\nI am Hooper the Dragon!\n\n## FORTY\n\n## EATING TWIN PORTS PRIDE FOR LUNCH\n\nThen it is Saturday. The D-I Fury has our first of three local games. Something special is coming after this game, too. Friday evening Devin called to ask if I would stay overnight at his house. His sister, Saundra, is playing the Polish Chopin music in a recital. \"My pops and Saundra both want you to be there,\" he said.\n\nRenata agreed that I can stay.\n\nCarli will drive me, go to the 17U girls' game in Saint Paul, go to Saundra's concert, then stay overnight at Tasha Tolliver's house.\n\nI am excited about what's coming after the game, although I am a little scared to stay overnight at Devin's house. I have never stayed overnight at anyone's house, and Devin is not quite a friendly guy.\n\nOn the drive up, Carli pulls her SUV off the highway in Belle Plaine. She parks in the parking lot of a restaurant that sells pies. We make out. Then an old grandpa knocks on the driver-side window with his cane and waves and laughs at us.\n\n\"Oh shit, dude,\" Carli says. She blinks. Her lips are so red, and her green eyes are wet.\n\n\"Who is that?\" I ask. I am dizzy on another planet.\n\n\"We better drive,\" she says.\n\nWe go to the University of Saint Thomas then. Carli drops me off at a giant building in the middle of a very pretty campus. The building is called the Anderson Athletic and Recreation Center. \"They named it after me,\" Carli says.\n\n\"Really?\" I ask, because I believe her.\n\n\"Duh!\" she shouts. \"No, you fool! Now go have a good game.\"\n\nI watch her drive away to Saint Catherine University, where Tasha Tolliver and the 17U girls' Fury will go.\n\nThe team we play is called the Twin Ports Pride. They are made up of the best players in Northeastern Minnesota and Northwestern Wisconsin. I recognize some of these guys, because I watched them play in the state tournament on TV. They are mostly all farmers, like me.\n\n\"Run that motion,\" Coach Cliff tells us.\n\nMr. Doig nods.\n\n\"You know what you need to do,\" Coach Cliff says.\n\nThe game begins. Their center, Joe Hunter, outjumps me to start it. I timed my jump badly, or it wouldn't have happened. A fine guard, Evan Pingatore, streaks down the court with the ball. He stops and pops. The Twin Ports Pride is up three to nothing.\n\nThis is the last lead they will have. In fact, it is the last minor victory they have for the whole afternoon.\n\nKhalil and Devin are better than everybody by maybe 50 percent. They run pick and roll that is not really part of our offense, but how can you say no to these guys? They are incredible. Even though Khalil is only five foot eleven, he attacks the rim. He lays it in or dishes to Devin, who doesn't just attack the rim, but destroys it.\n\nRashid gets the start at the four. He and I are better than everybody except Devin and Khalil by maybe 25 percent. Our motion causes many switches. I end up posting guards. Rashid does the same. In the middle of motion, if the defense sags, I put up jump shots. I make two of three.\n\n\"You looking smoother all the time, man,\" Devin says during a time-out.\n\nBut it's not my jump shots that win this game.\n\nBy the next day, there is a highlight video on YouTube, because we dunk so many basketballs. Most are of Devin, but I am in one highlight as well. That's how good this game goes.\n\nCoach Cliff sits down and smiles. Mr. Doig looks very smug, with his arms crossed, leaning back on a folding chair next to the court.\n\nI don't play the last ten minutes. Neither does Khalil or Devin. We win this exhibition by thirty-six points. When the horn blows, I lean over to Khalil and say, \"We are going to kill the Owenses.\"\n\n\"The Owenses are a lot better than these dudes, you know that,\" Khalil says.\n\n\"Still, though,\" I say.\n\nKhalil smiles. \"Yeah, we kill 'em. We kill 'em.\"\n\n## FORTY-ONE\n\n## THE PERFECT LIFE\n\nThere is only an hour for us to clean up. Devin, Khalil, and I all shower at the Anderson Athletic Center. This is not great for me, but what can I do? If I will play more basketball, I will have to shower in places where there are other naked people. I will have to keep in mind that this is not a sign I've been abandoned to nuns by my drunk dad, but is rather a sign that I am pursuing my dream.\n\nDevin, when he called, told me to bring nicer clothes for the concert. That is difficult, because I refuse to wear anything but shorts or warm-ups, usually. In fact, I only have one pair of regular pants and a shirt that is maybe okay. Renata made me wear khakis and a check button-up shirt for my picture day in the fall. This is what I put on after showering in the locker room. The pants are too short by an inch or two, and I only have basketball shoes and white socks and the shirt won't button across my chest, so I have to wear a Philadelphia 76ers T-shirt under it and leave it unbuttoned. When I walk out from behind the locker where I dressed, a big smile explodes on Khalil's face.\n\n\"What?\" I ask.\n\n\"You look like a big-ass third grader,\" he says. \"I like it.\"\n\n\"Okay, thanks,\" I say.\n\n\"Aw, don't be sad, Farmer. How could you know about fashion when you live out on the frozen prairie where you probably got no internet.\"\n\n\"I don't need nice clothes too much.\"\n\nThen Devin walks around the corner. He is wearing blue jeans, but also a black jacket, like he's a professor on TV. He just stops in his tracks when he sees me. His eyes get watery, and he looks happier than I have ever seen him look.\n\n\"You like my clothes?\" I ask.\n\n\"Mmm.\" This sound is very high-pitched.\n\n\"Yeah?\" I ask.\n\n\"Bah-ha!\" he shouts. Then he falls onto the bench, and he and Khalil hoot and laugh and handshake each other, like they were the guys who dressed me up as a joke. This does not make me feel bad, because they are so happy, I am getting happy, too. A few minutes later, Carli and Tasha pick us up.\n\nCarli looks very nice. Tasha looks very nice.\n\nKhalil says, \"You gotta show this young man the way. He's lost!\"\n\n\"Not my responsibility,\" Carli says. Her face also looks like it might break open. \"But, yeah, I think I'll help next time.\"\n\nThe joke is now getting old to me.\n\nThe church we come to for Saundra's recital is more like a cathedral than a little Northrup church. In fact, it reminds me of the Warsaw Cathedral on its inside. This church has giant wood arches the color of chocolate holding up a very high, beautiful ceiling. Warsaw Cathedral is not such a good memory. I sat with a nun who pinched me a lot, because I had a difficult time sitting still. There was also music. The arches were not chocolate wood, but made of stone, and the sound echoed around the place, like ghosts were carrying it on their backs.\n\nHow long has this memory been tucked in my brain without once coming out to remind me it exists? I would like no more memories of Warsaw.\n\nThere is a big difference between then and now. There is no nun. There is Carli, who smells like honey. She doesn't pinch me, but she does put her hand on my leg. On the other side of me is Khalil. He is the one who can't sit still, but it is not due to feeling hungry or sick, like I did in Warsaw, but because he recognizes and wants to greet so many of Devin's family in the audience. \"Hey, Ms. Mitchell! Hey, Mr. Fitzgerald! How you doing, Mr. Phelps?\" He is twisting and waving and standing and shaking hands. I sit calmly in one spot.\n\nSaundra's piano recital is with a group of ten student piano players who are all taught by the same teacher. Of the ten, only one other is black, but maybe half the people in the audience are black. This doesn't make sense to me. \"Who are all these black people?\" I whisper to Khalil.\n\nHe smiles. \"What? You scared of black people?\"\n\n\"No. There's just so many and only one Saundra and one other girl.\"\n\n\"They are the Mitchell entourage, dude,\" Khalil says.\n\n\"If you're part of this family, you better be ready to go to some event just about every night, because that's what everybody expects: full support,\" Devin says.\n\n\"They're all here for Saundra?\"\n\n\"That's why Devin's got no time for friends,\" Khalil says. \"Has to pay all these people back when their kids have something to do. Isn't that right, Devin?\"\n\nDevin nods.\n\nThen Khalil whispers, \"But you think he's ever been up to Brooklyn Center to see one of my little brother's band concerts? His dad wouldn't allow that, would he?\"\n\nThe concert begins. These young kids, none of them any older than me, are so good. They play music I remember from when I was a child. It goes into me, through my heart, into my lungs, and it makes me tremble, not just from being sad, but from the joy of having the tunes reentered into my mind. As much as Renata loves jazz music, my Polish mom must've loved classical. I read in the program that this music comes from Bach and Brahms and Debussy and from my own Polish man, Chopin. When Saundra plays her nocturne, and the music swirls through the church and into me, I find myself in Adam Sobieski heaven.\n\nIt is only later that I recognize Jevetta Mitchell, Renata's favorite jazz singer. I get a picture with her. I send it to Renata, because Renata is my family and family is important.\n\nThis is all I want. It's so simple. Basketball, family, good concerts.\n\nLife is not so simple, though.\n\n## FORTY-TWO\n\n## HERE IT COMES AGAIN\n\nSomehow everything turns upside down. It happens so fast. I should have been ready, because I have lived long enough to know how bad things go. When I feared Carli leaving me, I should have listened to myself. Gotten prepared in my head.\n\nI am at lunch in the cafeteria. Barry chomps on chicken nuggets across from me. It is Wednesday. I can't even make myself eat.\n\nSaturday night was so good. I stayed over with Devin. We watched a documentary film about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Khalil also stayed. He cracked good jokes. We tweeted insults about the Owens boys. They tweeted insults back to us. We ate enchiladas. I passed out happy on a soft couch.\n\nBut my mind knew the truth. Happiness does not last. During the night, for the first time in weeks, I dreamed of Warsaw and the apartment. The black ink of an octopus flowed in, choked me, no one there to save me. In the morning Khalil said I cried out in the night as if I were dying.\n\n\"It's because I was dying,\" I said.\n\nAnd I couldn't shake the bad feeling.\n\nThe Mitchells and Khalil left the house before I did, because they went to church. Carli was supposed to pick me up early. She had plans with her pouty friends in the afternoon. But she was late to get me. We were supposed to go at nine a.m. She didn't answer texts. I paced. I worried. I texted Tasha. Tasha did not reply. Finally, Carli showed up at just before eleven.\n\nHer face was pale. \"Sorry,\" she said when I got in the SUV.\n\n\"What happened?\" I asked.\n\n\"I had a hard time sleeping,\" she said.\n\n\"Couch at Tasha's no good?\" I asked.\n\n\"No. It was fine.\"\n\n\"What's wrong?\" I asked.\n\n\"I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Nothing, okay?\"\n\n\"I don't understand . . . nothing?\"\n\nCarli turned to me, her face red. \"Well, first of all, I tweaked my knee playing Nerf with Tasha's little brother. I can barely walk this morning!\" Her eyes filled with tears.\n\n\"Oh shit. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"That's not even it. Not at all.\"\n\n\"What is?\" I asked.\n\nShe bit her lower lip. Shook her head. \"It's nothing. How can you not understand nothing?\" Her chin quivered. \"Could you just be quiet?\"\n\nMy heart sank so hard. I am good at being quiet. We said nothing all the way home. She said nothing to me as she dropped me at my house.\n\nI texted her later to ask her what I did so wrong. She didn't respond.\n\nI texted Tasha after that to get more information on what might have happened. This time Tasha did respond. She wrote:\n\n_Dude. She got all weird and freaked out. Think her school friends got nasty on her on Snapchat. But she wouldn't talk about it._\n\nSchool friends? The pouty girls? No. Not just the pouty girls.\n\nWhen I dream about the apartment, it's because I have been abandoned.\n\nI sit and feel sick at the lunch table. Carli hasn't talked to me all week. She won't even look at me. This is abandonment.\n\nBarry is happy as can be.\n\n\"I think I have my second-degree form down?\" Barry says, mouth full of chicken. \"But I have to get it so it's, like, part of my body? Otherwise my ego might get in the way and make me fail?\"\n\nI look up. Carli walks past our table with her pouty friends. She limps like her knee won't bend. She hangs her head down. Kase Kinshaw is close behind them. He is with Greg Day, who doesn't acknowledge me, even though we were good teammates. Kase slows down. \"What are you losers looking at?\" he asks.\n\n\"Indomitable spirit,\" Barry says.\n\n\"Man,\" Kase says. \"So messed up.\"\n\nI shake my head and stare at my milk carton.\n\nKase follows Carli, the pouty girls, and Greg to a table. He sits down next to Carli. He puts his arm on the back of her chair.\n\nI get up and go to the bathroom so I won't do anything crazy.\n\n## FORTY-THREE\n\n## NOT OKAY\n\nI lie in bed. It is Wednesday night.\n\nKhalil texts me:\n\n_Dude you can't hope to understand these girls. Carli's ok. She will be fine. Focus on the game._\n\nI don't think Khalil knows about life. I know about life.\n\nI fall asleep and dream of the Warsaw apartment. I am choked by ink. My dad will not save me. He has left me to die. I wake up sweating, cramps in my gut.\n\nThis I remember. The few days before my dad took me to the nuns were the best we had together. We ate in a restaurant and we ate a big dessert, and he ordered no beers and he made good jokes and talked about when he and my mom first met at a music festival outside Warsaw. We played soccer two days, kicking a ball across a field. We went to a movie about a kung fu bear. Then one morning he smoked a thousand cigarettes. He put my few clothes in a small suitcase and put two pictures in there, and then a man drove up in a car. We got in the car. I asked him where we were going. He didn't answer, like Carli doesn't answer my texts. He said good-bye to his son and never said hello again.\n\nCarli is not okay.\n\nThursday, I sit in a chemistry test and I can't do nothing. Anything. The desk is too small. My body doesn't fit in it. I flunk this test, because my mind hurts.\n\nI try to be normal. I tweet about Kyle Owens after school. _Nine days to your defeat @KyOw23._\n\nKhalil does not retweet. I text Khalil. Khalil does not text back. By the time I fall asleep in my bed, I am sure that Khalil has spoken to Carli and found out that he shouldn't be my friend and that he has abandoned me, too.\n\nI text Devin. ___What's up?_\n\nHe texts back. ___Nothing. Golden State game on._\n\nI don't even want to watch NBA.\n\nI don't even want to sit with Renata and Barry at the breakfast table in the morning. Together they make plans for how I'm going to get to my game the next day. Renata and Professor Mike are meeting with local people who want to garden on the big plot of land next to us.\n\n\"You promise to be careful?\" Renata asks Barry, because she has just suggested that he could drive me in her car.\n\n\"I'm a good driver? I never take my eyes off the road. Right, Adam?\"\n\nI stare at my egg sandwich but won't eat it.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Renata asks me.\n\n\"I'm very sick. I have to stay home from school,\" I say.\n\nRenata puts her hand on my forehead. \"You might be a little warm.\"\n\n## FORTY-FOUR\n\n## TRYING TO HANDLE\n\nBasketballs are bouncing. Coach Cliff and Mr. Doig stand to the side, arms crossed, talking quietly. We are in the gyms at Normandale Community College. Not very fancy or new, but bright. There are six teams here. Three on each court. There are plastic chairs surrounding each, with a few spectators sitting here and there, but not many. Barry is one. He gives me a big thumbs-up. He is wearing his karate headband. I dribble the ball with one hand and thumbs-up him back, very quickly. Devin stretches on the floor on the other side of the court. His mom and sister sit very close to Barry. Somehow this makes me nervous.\n\nSpeaking of nervous, there was a moment the night before when I thought I couldn't come to this game, because I had my dream again and again and my stomach was too upset. But two things happened.\n\nFirst, at nearly two a.m., the phone buzzed in my hand. I was only half-asleep, still wearing the clothes I had worn all day. The text was from Carli.\n\n_Good luck tomorrow, dude. You'll do great._\n\nI had two responses at once to this text: I wanted to tell her I love her. I wanted to tell her she can drive her SUV off a cliff and I don't care.\n\nI didn't text back at all. I won't be fooled again, but I'm sorry to say her text makes me feel a little better.\n\nSecond, at seven a.m., Devin texted me.\n\n_Have you heard from Khalil? Can't get a hold of him._\n\nRight away, my anger at Khalil\u2014because I thought he was joining Carli in abandoning me\u2014turned to worry. Khalil and Devin are brothers. There is no way Khalil would ignore him. Has something bad happened to Khalil?\n\nAnd here we are on the court. He has not made it to the game. The coaches have said nothing about his absence.\n\n\"Passing. Passing. Right now,\" Coach Cliff shouts.\n\nThe Fury, without our point guard, move into serious warming up.\n\nRashid and I are together. He looks nervous. As we pass the ball, he says, \"Where's Khalil?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I say.\n\n\"We got no other real points. These dudes are quick, too. Titus Lartey busts ankles.\"\n\nThe team we will play, the TC Tigers, are all boys from northern suburbs. Some big white boys and African kids from Africa. \"Like Liberia and shit,\" Khalil had told me after our first game. I eyeball this team. One of them looks a little like my old friend Mobo Bell. At least he has the same haircut and dribble posture. The team has a couple bigger boys than me and Rashid. They have some small, fast kids, too.\n\nWe run through our shooting progressions. We do our layups.\n\nCoach Cliff blows the whistle. \"Come on in here, fellas. We have to make some lineup changes.\"\n\nWe gather around him and Mr. Doig.\n\nBefore Coach Cliff has a chance to say anything, Devin speaks up. \"Where's Khalil? Do you know?\" he asks.\n\nCoach Cliff takes in a big breath. Mr. Doig makes a big frown with his face.\n\n\"Khalil got into a little hot water on Thursday afternoon. We don't know the particulars, but there are charges pending.\"\n\n\"There's no damn way,\" Devin says.\n\nMr. Doig glares.\n\n\"For now, we have to consider Khalil to be in breach of the team contract. Until we know something more, that's all we have,\" Coach Cliff says.\n\n\"No way,\" Devin says, shaking his head.\n\n\"Show some respect,\" Mr. Doig hisses.\n\nDevin leans in, opens his eyes wide, and says, \"No. Damn. Way. Sir.\"\n\n\"Just cool it,\" Coach Cliff says. \"This will all get figured out. Right now we got a game to play, and we have no point guard. Devin, you're going to be bringing the ball up.\"\n\nDevin doesn't say anything. The ref blows the whistle. Other games begin in other parts of the gym.\n\n\"Once we get into the half-court, we'll just go motion. Don't matter what spot you're playing. Just do motion. Marques, you're at the four. Rashid, you're starting at the five. Farmer, you're our third-best handle. You'll move to two.\"\n\n\"I never played guard.\"\n\n\"Just do the motion,\" Coach Cliff says.\n\nThe ref blows the whistle again. The TC Tigers are waiting at center court.\n\n\"Do I jump?\" I ask as I jog on.\n\n\"Rashid. You,\" Coach Cliff shouts back.\n\nThe game begins with Rashid outjumping a giant fellow for the tip. I see there is nothing to be intimidated about with our opponents' size, because they are very slow. The rest of the TC Tigers are not like those Owens boys, either. They have no team game at all. They run isolation. Although I go to the wrong spot two times in the first minute and Devin has to point me where to stop, I score one basket at the post, Devin scores on a dunk, and Trey, our small forward, hits a three-pointer. We are up 7\u20130.\n\nI relax. I am on a basketball court and nothing else matters.\n\nExcept, as soon as I relax, the boy named Titus Lartey goes crazy. He does not pass. He only drives for layups or he only stops and shoots. He does not miss. The boy is maybe five foot nine, and he is chili peppers on fire. While Devin makes two more baskets and I miss my stupid jump shot and Rashid misses, Titus flies downcourt, drives to the hoop, scores and scores. The TC Tigers pull within one point just five minutes in.\n\nThere is a time-out, and Coach Cliff yells at Trey, who is supposed to guard Titus, to stay in Titus's face.\n\n\"I'm trying!\" Trey shouts back. \"Dude is a half foot shorter than me!\"\n\nMr. Doig nearly jumps out of his fat man shorts. He shouts, \"You do not talk back to your coach!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,\" Trey says.\n\nI do not think Trey was being salty, only telling the truth. We are wrong without Khalil. We are all between six foot three and six foot seven. Titus is too quick. But Rashid knows something. As we jog back on the court, Rashid says to Trey, \"We've seen this before, dude. Titus can't miss until he does, and then he'll miss everything the rest of the game.\"\n\n\"Shut up, man,\" Titus says. He's heard Rashid.\n\n\"I'm just saying,\" Rashid says. He shrugs and smiles.\n\nAnd what he says is true. Titus misses his next shot. He glares at Rashid and shakes his head. Then he misses three more. \"Sorry, little man,\" Rashid says to him.\n\nWe go on a super-fast ten-to-nothing run, rolling through our motion, almost turning into a Khalil-less ocean, except Devin stops shooting. He gets the ball with lanes but won't drive. He gets the ball with open three-pointers but won't pull the trigger. Coach Cliff yells at him, but he doesn't look over at Coach.\n\nIt's okay. We are much better than the TC Tigers. Near the end of the half, Coach Cliff calls time-out and takes Devin from the lineup.\n\n\"Sit down at the end of that bench, son,\" Coach Cliff snarls.\n\nDuring halftime, Coach Cliff asks Devin if he's going to play the game.\n\nDevin shakes his head and looks down. \"I don't feel good,\" he says.\n\n\"What's that, boy?\" Mr. Doig spits.\n\nDevin looks up from his hands. \"I don't feel good. And don't you call me boy, sir.\"\n\nThere is a shocked silence that falls on everybody. Mr. Doig's face turns the color of a plum.\n\nCoach Cliff puts his hands in the air, as if he's an orchestra director asking for calmer music. \"Okay, okay. I understand some of you might be feeling anxious about Khalil. We will address that issue, understand? But not now. Now we focus.\" Coach Cliff turns to Mr. Doig when he says this. Mr. Doig takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes, and nods like he agrees. \"Devin, if you are feeling sick, I won't send you back in. Are you sick?\"\n\nDevin looks at his hands again. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Then next man up. Farmer, you're handling.\"\n\nI'm stunned. I don't understand for a moment. \"Wait? Handling? Bringing up the ball? I don't know how, sir.\"\n\n\"Just do it. You'll learn. Charlie, you get ready to run, because we're thin now.\"\n\nCharlie, who only played five minutes during the Twin Ports Pride game and hasn't yet gotten in this game, nods. He's a good shot but is a little chubby.\n\nI look at Devin, who is folding in on himself. I look to his mom, who is now standing and staring at him.\n\nOkay. Okay. Focus. When I am on the court, I just play.\n\nAt the beginning of the second half, when they see that I am now bringing the ball up, the TC Tigers do much more trapping. I am not sure how to deal with this at first. I pick up my dribble, and Titus and the other guard are both scrappy. They rip the ball right out of my hands. Titus scores on a layup.\n\n\"Farmer, don't seize up!\" Coach Cliff shouts. \"You gotta stay moving, look for an outlet if they close up. Trey, make sure you hang close. Shid, you pay attention, too.\"\n\n\"Yeah, Coach,\" Rashid says.\n\nLike Coach Cliff said, I learn to handle by doing it.\n\nRashid stands out of bounds. He winks at me. \"I'll hang out a second,\" he says. He throws the ball into me and right away back come Titus and the other guard. They surround me. I toss it over the top back to Rashid. They collapse over on him, and I take off. Rashid lobs me the rock over their trap and then it is like the waters part. I explode downcourt, away from Titus and his pal, and the slow bigs cannot react. I leap and jam the ball home.\n\n\"That's how you break the pressure!\" Mr. Doig shouts. \"Great job, my boy! Great job!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, yes, sir,\" Coach Cliff says, clapping.\n\nThe game goes very well\u2014we break the pressure so hard, the Tigers stop. I can sense what the Tigers are going to do on defense right before they do it. I see them hedging, getting out of position, before my own teammate has even made any move. When Charlie, Trey, Rashid, or Marques cuts, I am already delivering the ball. Our motion offense moves so fast, we score so quick, because I can see my teammates' way to the hole, not just my own. I reverse rotation in a blink. I drive when the red sea opens. I am like old man Dwight from the Y playing jazz on the basketball court.\n\nEveryone is excited as the ref blows his whistle to end the game. We have destroyed the TC Tigers. \"They're the best metro AAU team other than us, and check that shit out, dude.\" Rashid points at the scoreboard.\n\n\"Pretty good, pretty good,\" I say.\n\nOff court Coach Cliff gathers us around. \"Fellas,\" he says. \"We may not be as big as we've been in past years, but even with two of our best players out\"\u2014he looks over at Devin\u2014\"don't we have something going on right here? I mean, don't we?\"\n\n\"Yes, we do!\" Trey and others shout.\n\n\"But next week it gets real. We got the Minne-Kota Stars up at Saint Cloud State. That team is filled with those Owenses. They play together the moment they drop out of their mamas. So get ready.\" Coach Cliff turns to Devin. \"You going to be ready, son?\"\n\nDevin stares straight forward. \"I'm going to see about Khalil,\" he says.\n\n\"We all will,\" Coach Cliff says. Then he addresses the rest of us. \"Do some running. Keep yourselves in shape. Keep handling the ball. You especially, Farmer, because no matter what, you'll be playing some point from now on. See you next Saturday, nine a.m. in the Chaska High School lot. We'll take a bus up to the game together.\"\n\nDevin stands quickly. He doesn't look at me. He walks over to his mother and sister. They leave fast.\n\nAs we drive home, Barry says, \"You're even better than you were before? You look like a guy on TV playing basketball?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I say. But I'm not on the court, and the peace that comes with playing is gone. I text Khalil. Ask him what's happening.\n\nThere's no reply.\n\n\"Hey. Let's go to this roast beef place in Mankato? I ate there once with my sister. It was tasty? We can celebrate your victory!\" Barry says.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I say. \"Okay.\" I'm hungry. Food is a fine idea. \"You're a good friend, Barry Roland.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Good!\" he says. \"That's my goal!\"\n\n## FORTY-FIVE\n\n## BAD BEEF\n\nWe stop at my house. I shower and change into my favorite 76ers shirt. Renata, who is covered in dirt, because she helped people dig gardens on Professor Mike's land, gives us forty dollars to celebrate my basketball victory. I believe she is celebrating the fact me and Barry are friends. She asks us not to take her car, though.\n\nThen we are off, back driving in Barry's shit Pontiac that smells like french fries. We get on the highway and head south, along the steep Minnesota River bluffs. Cold wind blows in through the holes. I begin to get achy, maybe from playing a game and not stretching after, maybe from the cold wind, maybe because Khalil doesn't respond to my text, maybe because I thought, just one week before this moment, I had a beautiful hooper girlfriend who loved me?\n\nWe get to Mankato and drive up the opposite bluff, out of the river valley to this mall across the street from the state university. There we find the restaurant Barry loves. It is called Jonny B's. It has a big sign on the window that says \"All Roast Beef\" and \"Great New Menu Items\" and \"Student Discounts.\"\n\n\"We're students,\" Barry says. \"Discounts?\"\n\n\"Do you think they have cheeseburgers?\" I ask.\n\n\"I'd be willing to bet for sure?\" he says.\n\nOnce inside this restaurant, we get seated at a big window that stares out at the grimy parking lot. College kids drink beers in booths all around us. It is only five p.m., but they are loud, drunk, and not nice, shouting shit at each other, and I feel jumpy in my skin. I don't like drinking. I don't like them shouting shit. Worst of all, the restaurant menu only contains various styles of roast beef sandwich.\n\n\"The _B_ in Jonny B's stands for beef,\" the waitress tells us.\n\n\"Cheeseburger is beef,\" I say.\n\n\"Should I come back in a moment?\" the waitress asks.\n\n\"Yes. Maybe,\" I say.\n\nShe leaves, and Barry leans in. \"Beef is what makes burgers. You said it yourself, right? So, you should try a sandwich, because they're so good?\"\n\n\"I know what is roast beef,\" I spit at him.\n\n\"What roast beef is?\" he asks. \"You can get cheese on lots of these sandwiches.\"\n\nI am more and more agitated, like maybe I know what is about to happen deep in my soul. \"Roast beef is hard to chew, and my teeth don't like it,\" I spit.\n\nBut at this point, he is not listening to me. He is turned to his left and is staring out the window. I turn to look. An SUV pulls in. I know this SUV. The driver turns it off. A girl climbs out of the back seat and then another. \"Carli?\" I say.\n\n\"No, that's Sara what's-her-name and Darci,\" Barry says. Then he sucks in air, because a big dude climbs out of the passenger-side door. \"Uh-oh. Do you think we should hide?\" Barry whispers.\n\nKase Kinshaw. Carli has driven with those girls, Kase Kinshaw, and Greg Day. She gets out of the driver's door and laughs, because someone has made a joke. She comes around the front of the van and takes a playful punch at Kase's shoulder. He grabs her and puts her in a headlock, squeezes her head to his chest. She wraps her arms around his middle and lifts him off the ground.\n\n\"Carli is strong?\" Barry says.\n\n\"Uh,\" I say. \"No limp.\"\n\nShe drops Kase on his feet, and he lets go of her head and they laugh.\n\nI know now. I get it. Kase Kinshaw texted her while she was at Tasha Tolliver's house last weekend. Kase Kinshaw wants to be her boyfriend. Carli was just waiting for him. She is ready for him.\n\nI am frozen. And if I get unfrozen I might lose my mind, break the window, scream like a crazy man. I cannot breathe. I cannot see. The five of them all laugh. Kase Kinshaw talks more. The girls laugh and laugh. Carli, of course, is the biggest laugher of all.\n\nAre they coming in Jonny B's? Will I break this booth in half? At the last second they steer right, toward the entrance of the movie theater, which is next door.\n\n\"Oh shit. Oh shit, man,\" I whisper.\n\n\"It's cool. They didn't come in here?\" Barry says.\n\nOur waitress comes over to see if we're ready to order.\n\n\"I'll have the french dip?\" Barry says. \"Does that come with some cheese?\"\n\n\"We can put cheese on it. Cheddar okay?\" she asks.\n\n\"Okay?\" he says. \"That's good cheese?\"\n\nShe shrugs. Then the waitress turns to me, but I don't want a french dip or any other beef. I want the blood of my enemies.\n\n\"I have to go,\" I say.\n\n\"You what?\" Barry asks.\n\nI exhale. I think of the boy's fingers. I broke them. I got kicked from school. I think of the team in Philly, the boy who called me Forrest Gump and his dislocated shoulder. _Stop,_ I think. _You have basketball._ I breathe deep. \"Okay?\" I say. \"No. It's okay. Just some fries, please?\" But then Carli runs out into the parking lot with Kase chasing her. He grabs her again, and then she spins away and runs back out of sight. \"Okay,\" I say. \"I will come back.\"\n\nI stand up.\n\n\"What's happening?\" Barry asks.\n\nMy head pounds. How could she do this? All she could do was kiss me a week ago. Me. Adam.\n\n\"Adam?\" Barry says.\n\n\"I have to go speak to Carli Anderson,\" I say.\n\n\"Now?\"\n\nI am out the door of Jonny B's.\n\nAnd they are there, all five of them. There is a line to buy movie tickets of maybe ten people. Carli and her friends stand against a wall, not yet in line. Kase, Darci, and Greg now all stare at his phone, big stupid smiles on their stupid faces.\n\nMy heart pounds so hard in my throat, in my forehead, in my chest. Carli sees me and I can see the color rise in her, lit by theater lights above. She takes five steps toward me, then stops.\n\n\"Dude,\" she whispers. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"No.\" I can barely talk.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nI point at Kase Kinshaw, who is still on his phone. \"He was touching you.\"\n\nShe grabs my arm. \"Be quiet. Don't talk so loud. This . . . this is no big deal.\" Her breath is heavy.\n\n\"No,\" I say.\n\nCarli's face turns very red. Her eyes water. She shakes her head. \"I'm going to see a movie now. We'll talk tomorrow. We'll play . . .\"\n\n\"No, we won't.\"\n\n\"Just stop, Adam.\"\n\n\"No,\" I say.\n\n\"Please,\" Carli says.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nAnd then . . .\n\n\"Holy shit!\" Kase Kinshaw spits. \"Look who's here.\" He walks toward us. \"You stalking Carli, Duh?\"\n\nCarli spins around. \"Shut up, dude. Come on!\" She is trying to sound light and funny.\n\n\"Aw, Jesus, seriously? Just leave it alone, Kase,\" Greg says from where he is standing. \"Adam can talk to whoever he wants.\"\n\nKase doesn't listen. \"What's up, buddy?\" he says. He pushes past Carli, and his face is right in my face.\n\nI back up, away from him. My body wants to fight. I don't want to lose my mind. I don't want to lose. I want to break him, but I can't break him or I am lost again.\n\n\"Not so cocky outside of school, are you?\"\n\nHe keeps pressing closer into me. His face is so big. I can feel his breath. \"Get away from me,\" I say.\n\n\"I don't think so, pussy. I'm tired of bowing down to you foreign re\u2014\"\n\nI shove him hard in his chest before he can finish his sentence. For a moment he is shocked. He exhales like a horse. His eyes water. He swallows hard. He is back in my face in one second.\n\n\"Do it again. Please. Shove me again,\" he hisses.\n\n\"Stop it,\" Carli cries.\n\nKase looks at her. \"Why do you care about him?\" he shouts.\n\n\"Because he's cool,\" Carli shouts. \"Why won't you listen to me? Why can't I hang out with who I want?\"\n\nKase's eyes water. His chin trembles. \"Everything's been shit since you moved to town,\" he whispers. He grabs the collar of my 76ers shirt with his left hand and pulls on it. It rips. He swings his right fist into my ribs. I twist, pop him in the head with my elbow. He keeps coming.\n\nThen Sara cries, \"Watch out, Kase!\"\n\nThere is a sound, like a whip cutting the air, then a crack. Kase screams out in pain and lets go of me at the same moment. He crumples to the ground. My eyes are filled with tears and I am shaking, trying to regain balance, trying to see what is happening. I blink my eyes clear in time to see Barry Roland lay out Greg Day with a front kick to his chest.\n\nBarry swings back around and stands over Kase. \"You stop it!\" Barry screams. Kase writhes on the ground, groaning. Barry crouches over him, like he might kick Kase's face off.\n\n\"Don't,\" I say.\n\nJust then the big security bouncers from Jonny B's are on Barry. They wrestle him to the ground, pin him on the pavement.\n\n\"Adam! Adam! Help!\" he cries.\n\nI stand, braced against the wall. I hear cop sirens in the distance.\n\n## FORTY-SIX\n\n## BARNEY WAS A DOG\n\nI lie on the floor of my bedroom. Professor Mike, Renata, and both girls came to pick me up from the police station in Mankato. Renata screamed at me. She has only done that one other time, when I fought the kid in Philly and she grabbed my shoulders and shouted, \"I can't have a violent child.\"\n\nHere we are again. She heard I attacked Kase Kinshaw. She heard that Barry had to fight to save me. She cried, \"How could you do this?\"\n\nI can't explain. I am a bad person. I make people hate me. I hurt people I love. Look what I did to Barry. I should be taken back to the nuns or thrown out on the street.\n\nThere are no charges filed against me right away, because the police are still talking to witnesses. There are no charges against Kase, either. I didn't see him at the station at all.\n\nI did see Barry, though. He was in a bad state. The police wouldn't release him to Renata. He had to wait for Tiffany, but Tiffany was not answering her phone. Barry cried when we left. We drove to the trailer in Northrup to find Tiffany, but she wasn't home. Merle said he didn't know where Tiffany had gone, maybe to the bar. We went to Patrick's. She wasn't there. We went to a place called the Logjam. She wasn't there.\n\n\"We can't look in every damn bar in Northrup,\" Professor Mike said. He looked tired, red-eyed.\n\nRenata took us home. I was so tired, too, and unhappy about the world. I went to my bedroom. Renata left again, and she did look in every damn bar in Northrup until she found Tiffany. She drove Tiffany to Mankato to get Barry. She drove Tiffany and Barry back to the trailer. She waited while Tiffany screamed at Barry. She waited while Barry shouted back. She waited while Tiffany threw Barry out of his house. She drove Barry to our house, and he is now out in the living room on the couch. He has so far been unable to talk.\n\nI don't want to talk, either.\n\nWas I arrested? They put no handcuffs on me and they didn't read me any rights, but they put me and Barry in a cop car and we drove back to the station.\n\nWhat if I was arrested? Mr. Doig will find out?\n\nI roll onto my face. Mr. Doig will find out.\n\nThe Conduct Contract I signed with the Fury says I will be immediately terminated from the team if I am arrested. So I lie on my face on the floor of my bedroom.\n\nWhat if no more Fury?\n\nWhat if Renata decides I am violent and she can't have me?\n\nMy anger undoes me. I am the worst boy.\n\nMeanwhile, Carli texts.\n\n_Why did this happen? Why were you even there?_\n\nI don't answer. She texts more.\n\n_I'm sorry. I should've told you what was going on. It's my fault._\n\nI don't respond.\n\n_Listen, please. Sara and Darci got so mad at me because I canceled on going to the Mall of America with them. They spent all night Saturday taking nasty pictures at a party with everyone I know, sending them to me, saying I would never be their friend again._\n\nI don't respond.\n\n_I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. PLEASE. What if you thought you suddenly lost every last friend you ever had in your life?_\n\nI lie on my face.\n\n_And I hurt my knee again Saturday because I was in Minneapolis with you. I freaked out. I decided you were bad luck. I know that's stupid. I feel terrible, man. Please._ __ _I'm sorry._\n\nNo. I am bad luck.\n\n_Are you there? Are you reading these? I see the texts are being delivered._\n\nI don't respond. There is a gap of about ten minutes where Carli writes nothing. And then this:\n\n_You know Barry Roland shot his dog a couple years ago, right?_\n\nWhat? I sit up.\n\nI type into my phone:\n\n_What dog?_\n\n_The Kinshaws' dog. Barney. Barney died._\n\nBarry Roland killed Barney the dog? I cannot believe this.\n\nI stand. I go to the living room. Barry lies on his back and stares at the ceiling. His fluffy mustache face turns to me as I enter the room.\n\n\"Hey,\" I say.\n\nHe shakes his head.\n\n\"Sorry,\" I say.\n\nHe doesn't say anything for a moment but then talks straight up to the ceiling. \"Were you in bad danger today?\" he asks.\n\n\"From Kase?\" I ask. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Did I lose self-control? Maybe I did? I don't like Kase, even if he isn't worth my time and heart. I'm mad at him for my whole life, but I can't kick someone because I'm mad at them. That would go against my spiritual beliefs?\" He turns and looks at me again. He isn't wearing his big glasses. He squints to try to see me better.\n\n\"Kase was trying to hurt me. If it went on another second, I would have really tried to kill him, too. I lose my mind sometimes.\"\n\n\"You do?\" Barry asks.\n\n\"I have twice in my past. It was bad, because I hurt other kids.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" Barry asks.\n\n\"Uh-huh. So you weren't just kicking him because you were mad. You saved me today, from Kase and from myself, too.\"\n\nBarry exhales for a count of ten. He nods. \"Okay, thanks.\" But I don't think he believes what I have said.\n\nI sit down on the big chair next to the couch. I reach and grab the remote control. I put on the TV. There is a very old show on about four old ladies living in a house in Florida. It makes me laugh, because the oldest lady on the show reminds me of a Polish grandma. She is clever and has a dirty vocabulary. We watch until a commercial break. I turn off the sound.\n\nBarry looks at me.\n\n\"Did you shoot Barney the dog?\" I ask.\n\nHe sits up and pushes the big blanket off him. \"I have never shot a gun in my whole life? I told them that already, okay? A thousand times.\"\n\n\"Them? Kase?\"\n\n\"And Greg and those girls and the police and everybody,\" Barry says. \"They don't believe me.\"\n\n\"This was two years ago?\" I ask.\n\n\"Like almost three.\"\n\n\"Why do they think you did it?\" I ask.\n\nBarry shuts his eyes. \"Merle's car.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Merle drove me everywhere for a while, because Tiffany lost her license. A car like Merle had\u2014stupid red Ford Taurus\u2014was seen right by where Barney got shot, right by the Kinshaws' place out in the country, but Merle was at the bar and everyone saw him there and he walked home . . .\"\n\n\"Oh . . . did you drive Merle's car?\" I ask.\n\n\"No,\" Barry says. He breathes out, then talks quietly. \"But maybe Tara did.\"\n\n\"Tara your sister?\" I ask.\n\n\"Yes,\" he says.\n\n\"Were you with her?\" I ask.\n\nBarry shakes his head. \"But Kase picked on me so bad? She doesn't like people picking on me.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" I say.\n\n\"No. No, it is not good. She is not good, okay?\"\n\n\"Did she have a gun?\" I ask.\n\n\"Tara worked at Scheels in Mankato. They have a lot of guns there? She used to go hunting with our dad when I was really little? She knows how to shoot.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I say. \"Tara?\"\n\nBarry nods slowly. \"Another reason why I am in tae kwon do. I don't want to be bad like Tara,\" Barry says. Then he says, \"I don't know if she did it, really.\"\n\nRenata comes out of her room, even though it's late. She wears a University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt and big sweatpants. Her hair is messed up, like she has already been asleep. She smiles but looks sad. \"You guys okay?\" she asks.\n\n\"If you don't throw me out on the street, I'll be okay,\" I say.\n\nRenata shakes her head. \"I would never, never do that, Adam. This is your home . . . wherever I am is your home.\"\n\n\"Because you're the best mom there is,\" Barry says. \"That's why.\"\n\nHe has put no question mark sound at the end of those sentences.\n\n## FORTY-SEVEN\n\n## THE LAST MONDAY\n\nIt is Monday. I don't want to go to school. I almost didn't sleep all night. When I did sleep, I had my bad dream. I worry this will be the day I find out about charges against me. I worry I will join Khalil, get kicked off the Fury.\n\nBarry and I climb into his shit car. I have to go to school. Renata is right, I missed school last week and homework doesn't stop coming just because I am a criminal. \"You have to stay focused on your main job,\" Renata tells me.\n\n\"What is that?\" I ask.\n\n\"Student. Duh,\" she says.\n\nShe isn't calling me names, just reminding me of the truth. There is chemistry to deal with and a book called _The Red Badge of Courage_ in English.\n\nBarry is also a mess. He went home Sunday afternoon, but Tiffany told him to go away. He has caused her too much trouble. \"She's done with me,\" Barry said during Sunday dinner.\n\n\"I think she's legally bound to care for you,\" Professor Mike replied. \"You're sixteen? You're a minor?\"\n\nBarry looked down at the kielbasa sausage on his plate. \"I'll actually be eighteen in May?\" he said.\n\n\"But you're a sophomore?\" Professor Mike said.\n\nBarry nodded.\n\n\"You're not an adult yet. This isn't right,\" Renata said.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" Professor Mike said. \"You're almost an adult.\"\n\n\"You can stay here as long as you need to,\" Renata said.\n\nProfessor Mike stared at her with big eyes.\n\n\"I went to kindergarten a year late?\" Barry tells me as we drive to school. \"And then they wouldn't let me pass first grade because I couldn't recognize letters? I can now, though.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" I say. \"That's dope.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he says. He is nervous like I am. I think he has tied his karate headband on extra tight. Who would want to go back to this school after what happened at Jonny B's?\n\nWhen we enter the school, my biggest worry is seeing Kase Kinshaw. He is not in the entryway and he is not in the commons area, sitting at the table where he often does. He is nowhere to be seen. My second-biggest worry is seeing Carli, because I didn't return her texts after I asked Barry about Barney the dog. I can't deal with her. She is not in the commons. Sara and Darci are there, though, huddled over a table.\n\nI walk faster. Barry keeps up. We turn a corner, to the spot where we have to split up and go to our separate parts of the building. Right then, Derrick Oppegaard, who pounds the drum in the pep band, runs up to us.\n\n\"Dudes,\" he says. \"Holy balls. You kicked Kase Kinshaw's ass!\"\n\nI shake my head, because I know how Barry is feeling.\n\n\"Yeah, you did! My cousin was at the movie theater, and she took a picture of Barry getting tackled by these big guys. It's because you kicked Kase's ass!\"\n\n\"Bouncers tackled Barry,\" I say.\n\n\"I didn't want to kick his ass,\" Barry says. He reaches up and pulls on his karate headband.\n\n\"He deserves it. He's a butt munch.\"\n\n\"A what?\" I ask.\n\nBarry pulls his karate headband off. \"I have to go to my class?\" he says. He scurries away fast, holding his headband in his hand.\n\nAll day, I see no Kase Kinshaw. He isn't at school. Greg Day isn't at school, either. Carli is. I see her between classes in the afternoon. She stops in the hall. Stares at me. Spreads out her arms in a gesture that maybe says, _What are you doing, you dumbass? Because I'm right here . . ._\n\nThe bell rings. I don't see her again.\n\nAnd then at home, there is a big, big relief waiting for us on the voice mail. There will be no charges against me and Barry, because an old man who was with his granddaughter in Jonny B's said the little guy (Barry) was protecting the tall guy (me) from getting beat up by the big guy (Kase). That was all the Mankato police needed. They closed the file.\n\nI'm not sure why there are no charges against Kase, though. Didn't the grandpa say the big guy was beating up the tall guy?\n\nIt doesn't matter. I ask Renata to look at the D-I Fury Conduct Contract. She reads it and says I am clear. I have not broken any stated rule. I didn't smoke. I didn't drink. And I wasn't arrested. Unlike Khalil, I have basketball.\n\nTo celebrate no charges, Barry and I go running on the Red Jacket Trail. It rains, but Barry runs barefoot. He doesn't talk the whole way. He sleeps on our couch. Renata washes his clothes, because he only has one pair of jeans.\n\nBarry doesn't seem like he's in any mood to celebrate.\n\n## FORTY-EIGHT\n\n## 3:17 A.M.\n\n\"I like Barry, but do you really have the resources to take care of him?\"\n\nI hear the voice, a whisper, coming through the wall. I look at the clock on the little table next to my bed. It is 3:17 a.m.\n\nI can hear Renata talking, but her voice is too quiet to understand.\n\n\"I have two daughters, Renata, and so much emotional responsibility already.\"\n\nThe voice is Professor Mike. He is in Renata's room. Renata says something more. She sounds stressed out.\n\n\"I don't know. I don't know. I have to think about this,\" Professor Mike says.\n\nOur house creaks. I hear him leave her room. I hear him walk softly down the hall. I hear the front door shut quietly. _There goes Professor Mike_ , I think. _He is going away from us. There goes Regan and Margery._\n\n## FORTY-NINE\n\n## THE LAST TUESDAY\n\nOn our car ride to school Tuesday, Barry tells me many kids came up to him to congratulate him the day before. This has made him even more sad. He is not wearing his karate headband now. He says he doesn't deserve the honor of wearing his karate headband, because he kicked Kase Kinshaw out of hatred.\n\n\"What about protecting me? Isn't that what you wanted to do?\"\n\nBarry says, \"Yeah, okay, but honestly I really wanted to kick Kase, too, therefore I disgraced my teacher and shamed this holy place.\"\n\n\"We were in Mankato. That's not holy.\"\n\n\"The holy place is a line from an old TV show called _Kung Fu_.\" Barry sighs. \"The holy place is wherever you are.\"\n\nOnce again, the school contains no Greg Day and no Kase Kinshaw. In many ways, this is better. In one way, it is maybe not so good. Barry Roland wants to tell Kase Kinshaw that he's sorry. He wants to ask for his forgiveness. Of course I think this is stupid.\n\nCarli Anderson is at school. I try to avoid her not because I am mad, but because I don't know what to say. We pay for our bad choices. Me and Carli are now broken. Life is hard, and you can't count on people. That's what I said to Renata at breakfast. She shook her head at me like I am crazy.\n\nCarli has different thoughts than I have, too.\n\nDuring chemistry, where I receive an F on the quiz I took the week before, Carli comes in. Mr. Burton stops the class, whispers to her, then motions for me to come to the front of the room. I don't leave my desk. \"Come on, Adam Reed, move,\" Mr. Burton says. So I uncurl and go up front.\n\n\"You know Carli, I imagine,\" Mr. Burton says.\n\nI nod.\n\n\"Carli and I ran into each other at the yearbook bake sale this morning and somehow ended up on the subject of you. You both play for the same college-bound basketball organization?\" he asks.\n\nAgain, I nod. _College-bound?_ I don't know about that.\n\n\"What is it called?\" he asks.\n\nBoth Carli and I say, \"The Fury.\"\n\nI look at her.\n\nShe says, \"D-I Fury, for Division I college prep.\"\n\n\"Aha,\" Mr. Burton says. He turns to me. \"And Carli tutors Division I Fury players in math and science. Isn't that right?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh?\" I say.\n\n\"Yes. That is true,\" Carli says slowly, looking to the side and also blushing. She sounds exactly like she is lying.\n\n\"So why aren't you taking advantage of her services, Adam? She's a very good science student. She knows this material. She could really help you.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I say.\n\n\"Well, how about this?\" Mr. Burton says. \"You have no choice in the matter now. The only way you're going to pass this class is if you get help. I'm going to require you to work on chemistry with Carli for two hours a week for the rest of the semester.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I say.\n\n\"If you do, I'll give you extra-credit points, but my guess is you won't need them. You're smart enough to do this. I think the reading slows you down.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I say.\n\n\"Go out in the hall and make a schedule.\" Mr. Burton points at the door. Carli's face breaks into a big smile.\n\nBut out in the hall the big smile drops from her face. She turns and pokes me in the chest hard.\n\n\"I like you,\" she says. \"I'm sorry I messed up. Do you like me?\" she asks.\n\nI am stunned and words are stuck in my mouth.\n\n\"Do you, Farmer? Do you?\" she asks.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I say.\n\n\"Then accept my stupid apology and get over it,\" she says.\n\nI don't respond. She pokes me hard.\n\nBarry once accepted my apology. Haven't I said I should be more like Barry?\n\n\"Okay?\" I say.\n\n\"Okay,\" she says. \"We'll meet Friday and Sunday for chemistry and whatever other shit we want to go over, because we're buddies and that's what we do. Spend quality time together. Do you understand?\" she says.\n\n\"Okay. Okay. Yeah,\" I say.\n\nShe leans. She whispers, \"I am a person, and I make stupid mistakes sometimes. I'm really, really sorry.\"\n\n\"It's okay.\"\n\n\"Now go tell Burton we have this all figured out, please.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I say.\n\nThen she is gone. There is no limp as she walks. Just big, powerful strides and the lingering smell of honey in the hall.\n\nBefore I go back into the room, I text Khalil:\n\n_You were right. Carli is ok._\n\nI hope he sees it so he knows I am thinking of him.\n\n## FIFTY\n\n## 11:26 P.M.\n\nThe phone buzzes in my hand. It startles me, because I am asleep on the couch. Barry has taken my bedroom for the night. He looked so tired at dinner, Renata suggested he could use some privacy. He said no, but I said yes.\n\nI fall back asleep, but the phone buzzes again. How do people ever sleep enough after they get phones?\n\nI look at the screen. It is Khalil. I sit up fast. I am so happy to hear from him. The phone buzzes again and again. All from Khalil!\n\n_Sorry didn't text back, bro. Mom took phone for few days cuz trouble._\n\n_You hear about trouble? It's bull but bad._\n\n_Mr. Doig won't let me play. Says I'm terminated._\n\nI text as fast as I can, so he knows I am here.\n\n_What happened????_\n\nI can see on my phone that Khalil is typing. It takes a long time for this message to show up.\n\n_Cuz my little bro lonnie got accused of stealing cheetos and it wasn't him but he had on the same hoodie as the kid and of course he black and cop thought it was lonnie so they chased him to the house and when they banged on the door, I said lonnie you gotta talk to them and tell them what you know, but he was shaking and shit and I got scared as shit too so how can I blame the little dude for that? Lonnie wouldn't talk and I opened the door and don't know why but I told the cop lonnie was unavailable to talk but lonnie was lying on the floor crying right behind me and then another cop showed up and he was pissed and they arrested me for obstructing justice dude. Even before we got to the station they got the actual kid for steeling cheetos and they let lonnie go but not me cuz I was obstructing justice even though there was no justice situation at all!! City attorney to decide next week if they pursue the charge against me. Stupid lonnie just had to talk to that cop and it woulda been fine but lonnie what can I say? Mom told us to stay away from cops cuz they will mess with us and maybe worse. Shit, bro. Mr. Doig says I'm just a thug criminal now I guess because I broke the contract. I think I am kicked off for good._\n\nI sit for a moment on the couch and stare at this message. My guts turn and my eyes hurt. I remember what Tasha Tolliver said in the hot tub. _Trouble is out looking for all black kids right now . . ._ but isn't trouble looking for me, too? Isn't trouble looking for Barry? I almost type back about how the cops took me and Barry in on Saturday because we got in a fight, but then two things come into my brain at one time.\n\nFirst, the cops just let us go. No arrest. No nothing. There was a real justice situation, right? Kase Kinshaw grabbed and ripped my 76ers shirt and he punched my ribs. I got a bruise like my dad used to give me. Then Barry Roland kicked two guys. If Khalil gets in trouble for trying to be nice to his little brother, shouldn't me, Barry, and Kase be in much bigger trouble? It makes no sense!\n\nThe second thing that comes into my brain is this: don't tell Khalil, because you don't want Mr. Doig to find out about you and the cops.\n\n_Shit, bro,_ __ I write. _I don't wanna play without you out there._ __ This is only part true, because I would rather play with him, but also, I want to play no matter what. I can't lose basketball.\n\nKhalil types his message back.\n\n_I'm scared schools pull my scholarship offers cuz I'm not like Devin nobody cares that much about a five-foot-eleven dude. I will commit to North Dakota State tomorrow if they promise not to pull my scholarship. If no basketball I don't know if there is a future, bro._\n\nYes. Yes. This I know.\n\nEven though I don't believe what I am writing, I text Khalil:\n\n_You will be out on the court with us soon, bro. Don't worry. It will be dope out there and we will kill Owens boys and this will be a bad dream._\n\nThere is about a minute where it looks like Khalil is writing back, but all he replies is this:\n\n_Don't think I'll be on court so good luck. Better go sleep._\n\n## FIFTY-ONE\n\n## THE LAST WEDNESDAY\n\nAgain on Wednesday, there is no Kase Kinshaw in school. Maybe Barry has done a great favor for everyone? Maybe Kase will stay out of school for the rest of the year? Not that I am happy. How can I be happy with Khalil on my mind?\n\nBarry is not happy, either. Renata had to talk him into going to his second-to-last tae kwon do practice before he tests for his next black belt on Sunday.\n\n\"I'm not honorable enough to be a tae kwon do master?\" he said during breakfast.\n\nRenata stood up so fast her chair tipped over backward. \"That is not true, Barry,\" she said. \"You are a wonderful kid. Wonderful, do you understand? I have never seen you be anything but honorable. And I will be so upset with you if you don't follow through on your test. You will go to your class tonight!\"\n\nBarry then stood up. He placed his right fist in his left palm and bowed to Renata. She bowed back.\n\nI think I have many weird people in my life.\n\nThe school day feels normal, and I begin to think more about Saturday. There will be no Khalil on the floor with us. I have to get over this. There will still be Devin and Rashid and Marques and Trey. There will be Charlie, too. Together we will take on Kyle Owens and his cousins, and we will find our flow. They will chase the ocean. We will destroy them. I try to gather my focus. During study hall in the library I pull out my phone and tweet @KyOw23 that the Fury will crush him to the ground.\n\n@KyOw23 responds: _@PolishHooper not a real baller. #keepyourdayjob_\n\nA few minutes later I receive a text from Devin. It is the first time I have heard from him since we played the TC Tigers. He doesn't know about my drama. He doesn't know about Carli and Kase Kinshaw and Barry.\n\nHe writes:\n\n_Stop the trash talk, Farmer. The game is not what matters right now._\n\nIt matters to me, though. Kyle Owens has disrespected me as a human being. He has called me a head case and says I don't understand basketball because I am a foreigner and that all I do is run and jump. He is Kase Kinshaw, but on the basketball court where I can fight back legally. I will not keep my day job!\n\nI don't know what that last thing means, though.\n\n## FIFTY-TWO\n\n## 7:21 P.M.\n\nProfessor Mike, Regan, and Margery show up at the house with two pizzas from Pagliai's in Mankato. It is the best pizza ever. Professor Mike kisses Renata on the cheek as if he never visited her at 3:17 a.m. Regan and Margery jump on me like I am Hooper the Dragon.\n\nProfessor Mike even high-fives Barry when Barry comes back from his tae kwon do practice saying he has mastered his form and has mastered his board breaks and he will use his final practice just to settle his mind. He is ready for his second-degree black belt testing.\n\nI am surprised by all of this. Professor Mike and Renata fought at 3:17 a.m. I heard them. Why is he here?\n\n## FIFTY-THREE\n\n## THE LAST THURSDAY\n\nAs soon as Barry and I walk in through the front doors and into the commons we are greeted by Mr. Sanders, the vice principal. He jumps a little when he sees me. \"Well, hi, Adam,\" he says.\n\n\"Hi?\" I say.\n\nThen he looks at Barry. \"Uh, Barry, I'm going to have to ask you to come with me right now, because, well, I suppose we all have to talk.\"\n\n\"We?\" Barry asks.\n\n\"Who?\" I ask.\n\n\"Me, Principal McCartney, you Barry . . . your mom, although we haven't been able to reach her.\"\n\n\"Tiffany isn't really my mom,\" Barry says.\n\n\"No?\" Mr. Sanders says.\n\n\"She's not too good,\" I say.\n\n\"Mrs. Renata's sort of my mom?\" Barry says.\n\n\"Mrs. who?\"\n\n\"My mom has been watching him,\" I say.\n\n\"Does she need to come talk?\" Barry asks.\n\n\"Yes,\" Mr. Sanders says. \"If she's taking care of you.\"\n\nBarry pauses. He blinks. He looks at me for a moment, then looks back to Mr. Sanders. \"Why do we have to talk?\"\n\n\"I think you know,\" Mr. Sanders says.\n\n\"Yeah. I think so?\" Barry says. \"Because I kicked Kase?\"\n\nMr. Sanders nods. \"Come with me.\"\n\nI start to follow, too, but Mr. Sanders says I should go to class.\n\nHow can I go to class? What is the point? Do they think I will concentrate?\n\nI don't. Not in English, not in social studies, not even in gym. All I can think about is Barry. I get no news, even though I text Renata, who just texts back, _Not now. In the office. I'll fill you in later._\n\nIt isn't until before lunch when I find Carli standing at my locker that anything becomes clear. \"I heard what's happening,\" she says. \"I'm sorry, dude.\"\n\n\"What? With Barry? How did you hear?\"\n\n\"Darci. I guess Kase doesn't feel safe with Barry here, because of his dog and Barry beating him up. Kase's dad is petitioning the school board to expel Barry.\"\n\n\"Expel?\"\n\n\"Like, when a dude gets two technicals or a flagrant. You know, kicked out of the game.\"\n\nI just drop my head into my hands.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Carli whispers.\n\n## FIFTY-FOUR\n\n## 5:47 P.M.\n\n\"How could they ever believe you'd kill a dog?\" Renata asks.\n\nWe all sit around the big table in Professor Mike's dining room. Barry Roland looks like he will die. His face is pale and his glasses are more bent-looking than normal and they have slid down his nose.\n\n\"I wouldn't hurt anything,\" Barry says so quietly.\n\n\"Except you kicked those boys,\" Margery says.\n\n\"Well, sounds like that was self-defense. Or at least defending your good friend here, right?\" Professor Mike says.\n\nBarry stares at the floor.\n\nRenata smiles at Professor Mike, reaches and holds on to his arm. I am very glad to see this. Then something occurs to me.\n\n\"Why shouldn't Kase get expel?\" I ask.\n\n\"Expelled,\" Renata says.\n\n\"Okay? Expelled. Because he called me and Barry 'fag' and 'retard' and 'refugee' and he tripped me in the halls and he ripped my shirt,\" I say.\n\n\"When did he trip you? Did he really call you those names?\" Renata asks.\n\n\"Uh . . .\" I say. The red sea floods into her face.\n\nShe stands up. \"Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I say.\n\n\"Okay. Okay. Maybe I should petition the school board to expel him, huh? Would you like that, Barry?\"\n\nBarry shrugs. \"Maybe I can go back to the other house and lie down?\" he asks.\n\n\"This isn't a done deal, Barry. We're going to figure out something. We've got until Tuesday to figure this out,\" Renata says.\n\nBarry is suspended from attending his classes until the school board hearing.\n\n\"Meanwhile, you've got to keep your head straight. You've got that big tae kwon do test on Sunday. You stay focused on that,\" Renata says.\n\nRegan jumps out of her chair and shouts, \"Barry the Shinja will break wood with his bare feet!\"\n\nBarry stands up. \"Thank you. I'm going to go back to the house?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Renata says.\n\nTwo hours later, Barry and I jog through the almost total dark of the nighttime Red Jacket Trail. His bare feet slap on the cold pavement. The sliver of moon lights his fluffy face.\n\n\"If I get kicked out of school, do I work at the stables forever?\" Barry asks.\n\nI don't know how to answer this question.\n\n\"I deserve it. I kicked Kase out of hatred,\" Barry says.\n\nThere are no question marks by these sentences. But I say, \"No, bro. You do not deserve this.\"\n\n## FIFTY-FIVE\n\n## THE LAST FRIDAY\n\nI walk to school, because Barry is still asleep in my bed. Renata has early morning conferences with students, and Professor Mike has to take Margery and Regan to the elementary school. I don't want to walk.\n\nIn fact, I don't want to go to school at all.\n\nI step down the steep hill past Trinity, where students are hustling to get to their early morning classes. I turn left and get onto Center Street, which runs between Trinity and Northrup High School. I think of Kase, because he might be at school without Barry there. I don't want to think of Kase. My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out and am very happy to be getting a call, even a call from Devin Mitchell, who is not easy to talk to.\n\n\"Hello. Hi?\" I say.\n\n\"Dude. Farmer. Listen, I have to . . . I want to tell you something I'm planning,\" Devin says.\n\nDevin doesn't sound like himself. He is speaking fast. His voice is higher than normal. I feel nervous hearing him. \"Okay?\" I say.\n\n\"You know that Khalil is a damn good human being, right?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" I say. It's true.\n\n\"What Mr. Doig is doing to him can't stand, man. It just can't. Doig has no idea what it means to grow up without everything getting handed to you. His family is like mine. Rich for generations before him. Plus he's white.\"\n\n\"Okay?\"\n\n\"He doesn't know what it means for Khalil to have this on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9. 'Got kicked off a top AAU squad because of a scrape with the law.' That sound familiar?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"It's the kind of line you hear all the time on ESPN when some poor black boy doesn't get drafted or loses his scholarship offer.\"\n\n\"Oh. Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"It's the curse, dude. The curse.\"\n\n\"Is the curse because racism?\" I ask.\n\n\"So deep in their racism they don't even know it.\"\n\n\"Trouble is looking for black kids.\"\n\nDevin doesn't talk for a moment. Then he says. \"Yeah, which is shit. So, I'm going to do something.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"And I hope you join me.\"\n\n\"What?\" I ask.\n\n\"Me and you can't get hurt like Khalil can. So we have a responsibility.\"\n\n\"What do you want me to do?\"\n\n\"Don't show up tomorrow.\"\n\nI stop walking where I am, which is in the middle of the intersection of Third Avenue and Center Street. A car honks at me. I jump. I run to the other side of the street. \"Don't show up for the bus?\" I ask. \"Don't show up to play our game?\"\n\n\"That's right. That's what I'm doing. Won't tell my dad until the last possible minute, because he's going to bug so bad. But I'm not going to play for Mr. Doig if he treats my brother Khalil like this.\"\n\n\"Oh shit,\" I say. \"Oh no.\" Devin Mitchell doesn't know about me. Devin doesn't know what is happening in my life. He doesn't know how my brother, Barry, is getting his ass kicked out of the building. He doesn't know how I couldn't even read English until basketball started to organize my brain, how I couldn't say full sentences in English until only two years ago. He doesn't know that I am nothing except another boy like Barry if I don't play. \"I'm sorry,\" I whisper. \"I gotta go to school now.\"\n\nI hang up on Devin Mitchell.\n\nI run toward school.\n\nMe and Renata watched so many biographies about her favorite jazz musicians, okay? I saw a lot of stories about bad racism in the old days. Is this the same thing? I can't believe it.\n\nI sprint.\n\nHow can I battle all of history? I have so many troubles of my own!\n\nThere is no Kase at school. I take my test. I tell Carli I can't study chemistry, like she was planning for me in the evening. I need to go to the basement and do my dribbles and practice my footwork. Tomorrow I will face Kyle Owens and the rest of the Minne-Kota Stars. Tomorrow I play basketball.\n\nI walk home from school alone.\n\n## FIFTY-SIX\n\n## I AM NOT ALONE, PART I\n\nCarli follows me in her SUV. I walk on Center Street. She drives maybe five miles per hour behind me. Cars are honking. She doesn't care. They must pass her.\n\n\"Come on!\" she shouts out the open window. \"Get in my car! You want me to get arrested for slow driving?\"\n\nA man in a very big SUV, much bigger than Carli's, pulls up behind her and lays on the horn without stop. The honk pierces the air and continues. It vibrates in my brain.\n\n\"Okay. Fine,\" I say. I run out on the street. She stops. The man honks and shouts the f-word. I leap into the SUV, and then she pulls over and parks. \"What are you doing?\" I shout at her.\n\n\"Hi there, buddy!\" she says. She smiles her Carli smile.\n\n\"No,\" I say, because I won't accept her Carli smile. \"Why are you causing trouble in the street? I have enough trouble!\"\n\nCarli nods. \"Yeah. Okay. I just wanted you to get in my car,\" Carli says.\n\n\"It worked. Can I go home now?\"\n\n\"Well, I guess. I mean I know you have to practice your quote unquote dribbles and everything, but I'm guessing you also haven't practiced your jump shot all week, and you're going need that tomorrow, right? To beat the Owens boys? So I thought maybe you'd want to go up to the gym and shoot?\"\n\nShe looks at me with her eyes wide, like she is an innocent girl, but she is pulling all my levers. She knows how to. \"Okay,\" I say slowly. \"But don't make me talk about nothing.\"\n\n\"Anything. I promise. I won't make you talk about anything,\" she says.\n\n\"When I get upset, I start to forget my English skills.\"\n\n\"Dude,\" she says quietly. \"You're fine. You talk great.\"\n\nThen she drives. We stop by her house, and she gets basketball clothes on. We go to mine and I change. There is no Barry or Renata or nobody . . . anybody for me to talk to, so I text Renata and let her know where I am.\n\nShe texts me back that she and Barry are with a lawyer.\n\nThis is more heavy news.\n\nAt least Carli and I are able to find court space in the Trinity athletic facility. Happy college kids play volleyball and basketball and badminton on other courts. But they are not me. Here, in the gym that should be my home, I have no energy.\n\nCarli warms up. \"The swelling is gone in my knee. That was a bad couple of weeks.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I say.\n\nShe begins to hit three-pointers as always.\n\nMy shots are short. My legs are jellyfishes.\n\nFive minutes in, Carli gives up on me. She picks up the ball and says, \"Hey, man, I'm sorry about Barry. I'm sorry you're in the middle of all the bad blood in my crappy town. I totally caused you to be here. It's my fault.\"\n\nI shake my head. \"Kase messed with me before you.\"\n\n\"No. He started messing with you because I told him you were a baller back in October. I told all my friends I thought you were cute, which pissed him off, too. I guess he has a crush on me, but he's not my type . . . whatever. I guess I put him on you, man.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"And he hates Barry, of course. And you're tight with him.\"\n\nThis is surprising news about Kase, yes. But I don't really care. The heaviness I feel is not only about Barry. I don't know if she knows what's happening to Khalil. She doesn't know about Devin, I'm sure, how he wants me to disobey my coaches, to not show up for the game at all. \"Uh,\" I say.\n\n\"Is something else going on?\" she says more quietly. \"Tell me.\"\n\n\"Do you know about Khalil?\"\n\nShe nods. \"It's not fair. My dad talked to Mr. Doig last night, but he won't budge. Dad seriously might resign from the Fury. He's been on their board for ten years, but this is too much.\"\n\n\"Your dad is not the only one who is mad.\"\n\nShe begins to dribble the ball. She pops it back and forth between her legs but never takes her eyes off me. \"You're mad?\" she asks.\n\n\"I don't know,\" I say. \"So much bad happens, how can I be mad? If I get mad at everything, all I'll do is be mad.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but this?\" she says. She dribbles in a circle around me, so I have to keep turning to see her. \"You know, Khalil doesn't mess around. Like, he actively tries to not mess around, tries to steer clear of any trouble. Plus, he's a great teammate. He's nice to everybody, right?\"\n\n\"He was not so nice when I first met him,\" I say, but I don't even know why I'm saying it. He was much nicer than Devin or Rashid.\n\nCarli stops and dribbles the ball hard into the floor. \"Dude. Come on. Now he's kicked out, and that hurts your team, it hurts him, and he's your friend. It might even hurt his chances for a scholarship, which he's been working for since he was a little kid.\"\n\nI hate to think of Khalil as a little kid who is dreaming of basketball. So I think of Devin instead. \"Devin isn't going to play tomorrow. He wants me not to play.\"\n\nCarli catches the ball. Holds it. \"Whoa. Mr. Doig could kick you off the Fury.\"\n\n\"I can't lose basketball.\"\n\n\"Well . . . you wouldn't be losing basketball. Just the Fury.\"\n\n\"I have to play against Kyle Owens.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" Carli says. \"I want to see you play Kyle Owens, too, but he'll probably kick your ass because Khalil and Devin won't be on the court.\"\n\n\"No. I'll kick his ass,\" I say. \"He's going to pay.\"\n\n\"Pay?\" She smiles. \"Farmer, I think you gotta chill and think straight.\" Then she dribbles in a tight circle right around me. She bumps me with her hip. \"Guard me, man. Come on,\" she says.\n\n## FIFTY-SEVEN\n\n## I AM NOT ALONE, PART II\n\nAgain. Again. Again.\n\nI am me. I am in a tall Warsaw apartment building with a big window and black darkness outside. The window reflects my 76ers jersey back to me, but I am small, maybe eight years old. It is daytime, but the air has filled with this ink from an octopus. The ink has spread and blotted out all light. The ink starts to leak in through cracks in the cinder block. I back away from the window. I back away into the apartment, but the ink knows where to find me. It chases me against a wall. I scream for my dad. He does not answer. The ink envelops me. I fight, but there is nothing to fight, no substance. I am drowning. I am drowning. I am drowning.\n\n\"Adam! Wake up!\"\n\n\"What? Huh?\" I sit. I am on the couch in the living room. It is dark except for the TV. Barry is asleep on the floor. Regan is asleep on the big chair. The TV is playing an episode of _Avatar: The Last Airbender._ The bald boy's head is glowing on the screen. Margery stands over me holding a pillow. \"Did you hit me with that pillow?\" I ask.\n\n\"You were yelling, and I couldn't hear the TV,\" Margery says. \"That's rude. You're not the only person in this room, you know.\"\n\n\"What time is it?\" I ask.\n\n\"I don't know. It's late time. Just stop yelling.\"\n\n\"Okay. Sorry.\"\n\n\"That's okay.\" She pats my forehead, then goes back in front of the TV.\n\nThen I think.\n\nI think more.\n\nMargery is right. I am not the only one in this room. There are more people in Renata's house, too. I can hear Professor Mike's snores coming from down the hall. And guess what? On the other side of campus, Carli sleeps in her bed. Coach Anderson is there, too. I am not alone in Northrup.\n\nI feel light as a feather.\n\nI am not the only one here!\n\n\"I love that bald airbender kid!\" I say to Margery. \"He's so great!\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" she says.\n\n## FIFTY-EIGHT\n\n## I AM NOT ALONE, PART III\n\nIt is Saturday morning. Barry goes to work at the stable. He seems even smaller than normal, like he is a deflating balloon. The lawyer told him and Renata that there's not much they can do about him getting expelled. If there is documentable behavior that repeatedly violates school bullying policies, the school board is able to say good-bye to Barry. Just like that.\n\nProfessor Mike got very angry when he heard this. \"Bullying? This guy?\" He pointed at Barry, who was hunched over dinner, already losing air at the table. \"He's the gentlest kid I've ever met!\" Professor Mike is now a supporter of Barry. Maybe it was a dream when I heard him complaining to Renata at 3:17 a.m.\n\nAnyway, with no Barry available to give me a ride, Renata is to take me to Chaska so I can catch the bus to the game in Saint Cloud.\n\nI have spent the morning listening to jazz on my phone, earbuds in. Regan and Margery have been making art projects, but they hide what they're doing whenever I come in. I find this a little annoying.\n\nI have turned off all notifications. If @KyOw23 makes bad tweets about me, I don't want to know. I have also turned off my ringer and the vibration, because I don't want to hear from Devin pleading with me to disrupt my basketball career. He is the rich guy, not me. He is the muscleman who can dunk from the free-throw line, not me. He is the big-time recruit with touch from the three-point line, not me. I have to play this game against the Owenses. I have to honor basketball, my passport.\n\nWhen the time comes to get in the car, I am very surprised that Margery and Regan are already sitting in the back seat. Both of them are wearing Philadelphia 76er T-shirts, like I like to wear.\n\n\"Where did you get those?\" I ask Margery.\n\n\"We like them because Philadelphia was important in the Revolutionary War,\" Margery says.\n\n\"Not because of you,\" Regan says.\n\n\"What?\" I ask.\n\nProfessor Mike also climbs in the back seat with them. \"Since you're heading north, Adam, we decided to spend the day at the Mall of America,\" he says.\n\n\"Oh, okay,\" I say. I slide into the front seat and pull the chair up so Professor Mike has room. My knees are in my chest, and I am more annoyed. Whatever. I put my earbuds back on and listen to Thelonious Monk, _Monk's Dream_ album.\n\nThelonious takes me away from the drama. He puts me in a different world. The album runs the whole time we are in the car and keeps me from worrying about Regan and Margery when they kick and punch each other near Belle Plaine. It keeps me from worrying about Barry or Khalil or even Devin. I visualize shooting shots, like soft birds flying from my hands, over the top of an outstretched Kyle Owens. I visualize leaping in the air, cramming Kyle Owens's shot back in his ugly face. The Monk album ends just as Renata pulls into the parking lot of Chaska High School.\n\nShe drives to where the small Fury bus is parked. There is also a school bus to carry the 14, 15, and 16U boys' teams to Saint Cloud. The 17U team gets to go on the nice one that has video screens hanging from the ceiling.\n\nWhen I pull out my earbuds, Margery is marveling at how nice the high school is. \"It looks like a spaceship,\" she says. This is true.\n\nThen I stop paying attention to her, because to our left I see Devin Mitchell climb out of a Cadillac that is parked in the lot. I think this is his dad's car. Devin has come to the game. He wears headphones. He doesn't say a word to whoever drove him, but slams the door and walks to the bus. His face is not the kind of face I want to talk to. I am sure he doesn't want to talk to me, or probably anyone.\n\nI get out of the car, say thanks, give the girls a wave.\n\n\"We'll pick you up,\" Renata says.\n\n\"Bye-bye, Mr. Basketballs!\" Regan says.\n\n\"Bye-bye, Hooper the Dragon!\" Margery says.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I say. Then I go to the bus.\n\nDevin is sitting in the last row. He looks up when I climb on board. He motions me back. When I get there, he says, \"Pops says Khalil isn't my business. He says he won't let me go to Saundra's birthday party if I don't 'get my head on straight' and play this game. My head is fine, but I'm not going to do that to my sister.\"\n\nI nod.\n\n\"By the way, thanks for hanging up on me,\" he says. \"I won't forget that.\"\n\nI nod. My heart sinks into my guts. \"Sorry,\" I whisper.\n\nHe puts his headphones on again. I walk back to the middle and slide into a chair. Coach Cliff and Mr. Doig climb on the bus. Rashid, Charlie, Trey, and Marques all sit around me. They listen to their own music. There are no players in back near Devin.\n\nI lean and look out the window. Renata, Professor Mike, and the girls are already gone.\n\nOn the bus ride, Coach Cliff sits and stares forward. He looks unhappy to me. Mr. Doig is doing the coaching. He shows a video about the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. Mr. Doig's voice comes from his big nose. I don't like it. \"Many Spurs players are foreigners, like Adam. Some are four-year college players. Some are one-and-done street players, but they all fall in line with this system that wins championships. See that?\" Mr. Doig says, pointing at the screen. \"Look familiar? That's the motion action we use in our sets.\"\n\nI'm the foreigner. Who are the four-year college players? I wonder. Who are the street players on this bus? Maybe Devin will be a one-and-done NBA guy, but he's no street player. Also, I lived in America before I learned basketball. Maybe I'm not really a foreigner? I don't like Mr. Doig with his names.\n\nThe Spurs run very good offense, though. The ball fires around from dude to dude. Tim Duncan, who is almost seven feet tall, and is now retired from the NBA, was a very good passer. I see that. So what? I'm a dude who hangs up on his friend when he is upset. That's who I am. A selfish guy, Adam Reed.\n\nI put in my earbuds, turn on Dave Brubeck, rest my forehead on the window, and shut my eyes. The drive to Saint Cloud is just about an hour, and I don't want to watch people who are better people than me playing basketball.\n\nAt some point, Rashid sits down in the chair next to mine. He taps my shoulder, and I open my eyes. \"Mr. Doig just said you're playing Khalil's spot, okay?\"\n\n\"Point,\" I say.\n\n\"Running the show,\" Rashid says. \"Make sure I get it down in the post so I can posterize Kyle Owens's ass.\" He smiles.\n\n\"Yeah, okay. Good,\" I say.\n\nYou'd think I'd want to be the one to posterize Kyle Owens, but there's something wrong with me. I shut my eyes again.\n\nRashid stays in the seat next to me, and I fall asleep, only to awake when the bus makes a sharp turn and my head bounces off of Rashid's shoulder.\n\n\"We're here,\" he says.\n\nThe bus pulls into a giant parking lot next to a large coliseum with big parking lots all around. There are several buses like ours parked in big lines. There are teams of basketball players in warm-ups walking in packs. There are white vans with the logo of TV stations from Minneapolis painted on the side.\n\n\"Why is the TV here?\" I ask.\n\n\"Devin and Khalil never get to play against the Owens boys, except in AAU. News covered this game last year, too. We only won by a bucket, so it's important,\" Rashid says.\n\n\"Except no Khalil,\" I say.\n\n\"We got a farmer and we got me!\" Rashid says. Then he shifts his attention out the window past my head. He points. \"Hey, Adam Sobieski. Those kids got a sign with your name on it.\"\n\nAnd then I see a strange sight. I almost can't believe it is real. Two little girls with hair cut short at their chin and big brown eyes hold giant poster board signs. They jump up and down and shout! One sign has a dragon. The other has these words:\n\n**WELCOME TO SAINT CLOUD**\n\n**ADAM**\n\n**HOOPER**\n\n**SOBIESKI!**\n\nYOUR BIGGEST FANS EVER!!\n\nIt's Margery and Regan. Professor Mike and Renata stand behind them. They are smiling and waving at me.\n\n\"They drove fast,\" I whisper.\n\n\"That's cool!\" Rashid says. \"I like their 76ers shirts. That's what you wear all the time!\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I say. And I think I might cry because I am so happy.\n\nI am not alone anywhere.\n\n## FIFTY-NINE\n\n## DEVIN IS NOT ALONE\n\nWe are let off behind a fenced area, so I can't hug these girls I like so much, but I wave at Regan and Margery before we go in. I can't even believe Renata is at a basketball game. The only one she's seen was my first in Philly, when I was pretty bad. I leapt and had my legs taken out from under me and landed on my side hard. She said she couldn't handle it, not the crowd, not the noise, not the violence. That game was in an elementary school gym with kids playing and about twenty people in the stands. This will be different.\n\nThe whole game is different from the other AAU games we have played. There are other courts and other teams warming up, as there were before, but our court is on the side and has bleachers pulled out on one sideline. There are lots of people already sitting in the stands. Tasha and Carli are already here, as is her dad. Renata, the professor, and the girls come in and find chairs. There's a long, tall kid sitting in the front row, too. He's wearing a red T-shirt I recognize. It says \"Fear the Cob\" __ on it and has a picture of a big yellow corncob.\n\nRashid and I warm up. He sees me looking at the kid.\n\n\"You know him?\" Rashid asks. \"He's from down by you, right?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I ask. \"I think he's from Wauzeka. I saw him on the bench at a game. Wauzeka is in my conference.\"\n\n\"Yeah, man. Ben Kowalski. That farmer boy is in seventh grade. He was at the Tommies Baller camp last summer. Best pure shooter I ever saw. Heard he scored like thirty a game for their jayvee, but they wouldn't move him up because he's a little fragile.\"\n\nI stare at this skinny Ben Kowalski. He has a Polish last name, I'm sure. I thought he looked like he could be my little brother last time I saw him. He smiles and waves at me. He's still a little kid. I remember how he cheered when I dunked against his team. Here he is again.\n\n\"He plays on the Heat 16U. Maybe we'll get a chance to see him later. Fun to watch,\" Rashid says.\n\nFear the Cob.\n\nIt's all coming around, like a big circle. When I played Wauzeka back in February, I already had basketball, didn't I? I've gotten much better in a few months, but even then I could jump and jam and I was on my way.\n\nWhat didn't I have the last time I saw Ben Kowalski in his \"Fear the Cob\" __ T-shirt? I had no Carli. I had no Khalil or Devin or Rashid or Tasha. I had no visits to Minneapolis to go against old guys who play basketball like jazz musicians or to sit in a big church, as part of the Mitchells' big family, to watch Saundra play the same classical song that put me on a chair next to Renata in Poland when I was a kid. There wasn't even any Professor Mike when I saw this \"Fear the Cob\" boy. Margery and Regan were two weird little girls who sat in trees. I have so much more now.\n\nI bounce a pass to Rashid. I watch Devin bounce a pass to Trey.\n\nI look up in the stands and see Carli, who told me I had to talk. I look and see Renata, who protected me so I could find basketball and Barry. Wow. Renata has made my life possible. Carli has taught me how to have friends just by being who she is. Barry is my brother. Khalil was becoming my brother. Devin was becoming my brother.\n\nThe Minne-Kota Stars arrive just then. Holy cats, they are so tall. Three are giant blond kids from South Dakota who Carli mentioned and Rashid texted me about during the week. I recognize them. Several boys look like Owenses, but I'm not sure. At first I don't see Kyle. Really, I half expect Kase Kinshaw to jog onto the court, because he and Kyle have become one guy in my head, but I am off base with this expectation. Kyle Owens is the last guy on the court. I remember him, of course. He looks nothing like Kase. Kyle Owens has floppy brown hair, not a short buzz. He is about my height and skinny and not filled with muscles like Kase. He is also bouncy and happy looking. He sees me, smiles, jogs over, and says, \"We are such dicks on Twitter, dude! I'm just joking, okay? Don't kill me on the court. I already told Joe that if he cheap-shots you like he did during our playoff game, I'm going to bench myself!\"\n\n\"Ha-ha,\" I say. \"No worries. I want to play basketball, not have a hockey match out here!\"\n\n\"Good. I like my teeth!\" Kyle Owen says.\n\nI think Carli would like my joke. I look into the stands. She waves at me because she's seen me talking to Kyle. I continue to pass the ball back and forth with Rashid. Kyle is not the kid of my nightmares. But then something else. He stretches nearby.\n\n\"What's up with Khalil Williams?\" Kyle asks. \"Why'd he go to jail?\"\n\nI catch the ball and turn to Kyle. \"No. He didn't go to jail. He's probably not in trouble, really, but . . . but . . .\" I don't know what to call Mr. Doig. A coach? An owner? \"This Fury board member guy is not letting him play.\"\n\n\"That sucks, man,\" Kyle says. \"Khalil is cool. I was surprised when I heard about his gang thing.\"\n\n\"Gang thing?\" I say. \"That's not true.\"\n\n\"No way, man,\" Rashid says, because he's heard. \"He didn't go to jail. He's not in any gang. That's stupid.\"\n\nKyle nods. \"Someone said it on Facebook,\" he says. \"I guess nobody should believe that source, huh? Anyway, I played against Khalil a lot, and he's about the happiest guy on the court, right? I love that guy.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" I say.\n\nI look at Rashid. He shakes his head. We must be thinking the same thing. How would that message get started? Khalil in a gang? Khalil, who tries to keep away from all trouble? He was in his house. His brother was scared. That's all that happened.\n\nJust then Coach Cliff blows the whistle. We move into our shooting warm-ups. For just a moment, Devin and I meet up at the back of a line.\n\n\"Kyle Owens heard Khalil was in jail because of being in a gang,\" I say.\n\nDevin freezes in place, puts his hands on either side of his head, squeezes, then looks up into the stands. His dad, mom, Saundra, and several other friends have just climbed up and taken seats. Devin is almost groaning. Only I can hear. \"If Mr. Doig just . . . if he just supported Khalil instead of punishing him . . .\"\n\nIt's my turn to take a layup. I go, but I can't do it. I miss.\n\nCarli makes a face at me.\n\nThrough all of warm-ups, I don't hit a single shot. Hard life is creeping onto the court. Before, never. Before the court was what made me forget all about it.\n\nThere is a real buzzer here. It sounds. The Fury jog over to our bench. Mr. Doig hugs a clipboard and stares over his glasses at us. Coach Cliff talks quietly. \"Do what we do. Farmer has point. Devin, I want you to jump, but you're in the two. Trey, Charlie, you guys keep moving, keep moving the ball. Don't think any on that side can stay with Rashid down in the post. Keep that in mind. And remember, yeah, they're the Owenses, but we're the Fury. We got this.\"\n\nThe buzzer blows again. Me, Rashid, Trey, and Charlie jump from our chairs and jog onto the court. Devin sits for a second, then stands, too. He walks to the court. He and Kyle Owens bump fists. Then Devin says, \"No.\"\n\nThe ref gets into position for the jump. One of the tall blond South Dakota boys goes to the center circle. Devin should jump, but he's shaking his head. He stands ten feet away. Kyle is next to him, looking confused. The ref blows his whistle, but Devin doesn't move. He stares up at his parents in the stands.\n\nThe ref blows his whistle again. \"Come on, Eight,\" he says to Devin, referring to the number on his jersey. \"Let's get this show on the road.\"\n\nDevin turns to Mr. Doig. He says, \"You don't know anything. You don't care about us. You go ahead and ruin Khalil's whole life just because being white and rich makes you think you have the keys to the damn world. But you don't know anything, man.\" Devin sighs hard, then jogs off the court and into the hallway where we came in.\n\nI look at Rashid. I look at Kyle Owens. I look up at all these people in the stands, some with phones ready to capture the jump, two with TV cameras, everyone stunned silent, because the main dude they came to see just ran off the court. I look at Devin's dad. I look at Devin's mom, who is glaring at Devin's dad. I look at Renata. She is very confused. I love her. I look at Carli. She is smiling like Carli smiles. She knows. Her dad stands next to her. He nods at me.\n\nI look at Mr. Doig and say, \"I've been through a lot. I've been treated unfair. I know what it smells like. This is unfair. I support Khalil.\" I jog off the court toward the hall. Rashid follows me. So do Trey and Charlie and every player left on the Fury bench. And here's the part I will never forget for as long as I am able to dribble a basketball. We are only in the hall for a few seconds when Kyle Owens and his cousin Joe, who ran me over in the playoff game and made me lose my mind, arrive. Then so do another Owens kid and the three blond boys from South Dakota. Everyone from both teams. In just a moment, we are all gathered in the hall next to the gym. We stare at one another. Stunned. We are quiet.\n\n\"What do we do?\" I ask Devin.\n\nDevin's mouth hangs open. His eyes are so wide. Tears start to come up and run down his cheeks. \"Thank you,\" he whispers. \"Thank you, guys. Bring it in.\"\n\nWe move into a huddle. We put our hands together and hold on.\n\n\"We gotta support each other like this our whole lives,\" Devin says. \"This time is for Khalil Williams. We will see him back on the court with us soon. Khalil on three. Farmer, you lead it.\"\n\nI nod. \"One, two, three, Khalil.\"\n\nKhalil.\n\nI say it again: \"Khalil.\"\n\nKhalil.\n\nI say it again: \"Khalil!\"\n\nSoon after, I ride home with Renata, Professor Mike, and the girls. Not a single member of the Fury 17U team takes the bus. We all find different ways. I don't know if we'll ever play together again.\n\nRenata turns to me at the last stoplight before we leave Saint Cloud. \"That is not what I was expecting. I don't even really know what happened. But I think I'm proud of you.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I say. I'm so tired. But I have to talk. \"If you guys didn't come with the Sobieski Hooper signs, I wouldn't have had enough courage. Thank you.\"\n\n\"They are great artists,\" Professor Mike says.\n\n\"You are a good guy, too. I'm glad you don't abandon us because of Barry.\"\n\nHe turns and looks at me. \"No. I won't.\"\n\n\"Renata, Barry is right. You are the best mom around. I like Sobieski back in my name, but I would like to be called Adam Sobieski Reed, because you're my mom and I'm very proud that you're my mom.\"\n\nRenata turns and stares at me. She says, \"You're my son, okay? Forever.\"\n\nI nod, and I am so happy again.\n\n\"Remember when you all shouted 'Khalil' in the hall?\" Regan says. \"It echoed through the whole gym. They stopped all the other games. That was awesome.\"\n\nIt's true. It was awesome. It was in news reports all over Minnesota, too.\n\n## SIXTY\n\n## BARRY IS NOT ALONE\n\nIt is Sunday, about an hour before Barry Roland goes up for his second-degree black belt. Since the \"game\" the day before, all members of the Fury \"community\" received this email from Mr. Doig where he calls himself \"we\":\n\n_Dear members of the D-I Fury Community:_\n\n_Our intent is to help these boys and girls become the best young men and women they can be. Discipline is an important aspect of that training. We have always had a zero-tolerance policy for bad behavior. Each player signs a contract committing himself or herself to being good a citizen while they are members of this community. If they break this contract their position with the team is_ __ _immediately terminated. Until now, we have never had reason to second-guess this policy._\n\n_Before our 17U boys took it upon themselves to walk off the court to protest the way we treated the Khalil Williams situation, we felt sure we handled it the right way, operating in accordance with the written rules, even though several of the team's coaches and advisors suggested this situation might be special._\n\n_Because of the 17U boys' protest, we have reviewed Khalil's situation, and we do believe the police may have overstepped common sense with regard to Khalil. Khalil should not be charged with obstruction due to a case of mistaken identity. No crime was committed involving Khalil or his family as far as the record shows. The police were simply looking for someone else and Khalil was caught in the middle._\n\n_We do want our boys and girls to know that we support them on and off the court. Not only does the Fury reinstate Khalil Williams immediately, we are also providing him with the services of a lawyer to make sure this unfortunate charge does not become a part of his permanent record. We have a long-standing relationship with Khalil, and we welcome him back with open arms._\n\n_Please know that each and every one of our players has a special place in our hearts, and we will always attempt to do right by them._\n\n___Sincerely,_\n\n_Karl J. Doig_\n\n_Executive Director_\n\n_D-I Fury Basketball_\n\nDevin says the letter is bullshit. But I don't think it's bullshit. What Devin did made something that wasn't fair become fair. I am thankful to Mr. Doig for doing right.\n\nKhalil is out of his mind with happiness. He is all over Twitter thanking us and the Owenses and all of the Minne-Kota boys. He is also saying again and again that he was never involved in a gang. Whoever suggested this about him and whoever repeated it should feel sad and ashamed for what they did.\n\nBut now, I am thinking so hard. Look what Devin did. He had some big strength because his family and basketball gave it to him. TV news stations came to record him play! Maybe nobody cares about me like that in the state of Minnesota, but in Northrup? Maybe I can use my passport, my little strength, to save Barry from being expelled?\n\nHow can I help my brother?\n\nRegan and Margery are in the living room with Barry. He looks healthier and happier wearing his karate uniform and his black belt and his headband. This morning, he didn't want to get ready, but Regan and Margery were on him like flies. He could not stop them. The more they buzzed at him and said things like, \"You are going to leap like a leopard, Master Barry,\" the more he smiled and grew bigger and got a better color in his cheeks. Regan and Margery are forces of nature. They can climb the pine tree outside to its tip-top and swing back and forth. They can find a way onto the roofs of the college buildings. And they can grow your spirit and fortitude with their bare-knuckle buzzing. They are great. Now Barry is practicing his second-degree black belt form, which has eighty-two different moves and takes almost four minutes to complete. The girls are cheering for his every turn and kick, and I am back in my bedroom.\n\nHow can I help?\n\nThere is no Northrup game for me to stop, to say, \"I won't play basketball if you don't let my furry pal Barry back in school!\"\n\nThat doesn't seem like a good idea anyway. I want to play, so it's not a real threat.\n\nCould I say I will transfer to Wauzeka to play with Ben Kowalski? \"Fear the Cob! If you do not let Barry in school, I will join forces with the skinny Polish boy, and the Wauzeka Cobbers will beat you stupid for the next two years!\"\n\nI wonder who I am going to say this to? The principal? The school superintendent? The school board? Who is on the school board? I don't even know, but I picture businesspeople like Kase Kinshaw's dad.\n\nWait. What about Kase Kinshaw's dad?\n\nHe said how much he enjoyed watching me play basketball when Renata and I were at Patrick's. If I told him I was leaving school and Northrup basketball would be bad again without me, would he drop his petition to have Barry expelled?\n\nNo. That's stupid.\n\nHe thinks Barry is a dog-shooting boy who beats up his son. Rick Kinshaw wouldn't give up the safety of his Kase in exchange for my good basketball. The real trouble is, Rick Kinshaw doesn't know the truth, the real Barry, the gentle boy.\n\nI wish I could get Kase's dad to meet the real Barry. If he saw how good and pure-hearted Barry is . . .\n\nMaybe I could get Rick Kinshaw to go to Barry's test today? If he saw Barry in action there, he would see the purest form of Barry there is! How could I get Kase Kinshaw's dad to do that?\n\nI will make a threat! \"I won't play basketball in Northrup ever again if you don't come see my boy Barry kick some wood in half!\"\n\nSounds like a crazy idea.\n\nYes. So crazy.\n\nBut what else is there? I take big, deep breath. I will have courage. I will try it.\n\nI call Carli to find out where Kase lives.\n\n\"You're going to go over to Kase's house?\" she asks. \"Seriously?\"\n\nI tell her why. She is not impressed by my logic.\n\n\"Why do you think Mr. Kinshaw gives a crap about your basketball?\"\n\nBecause he said he did at Patrick's!\n\nKase lives outside of town, so I need a ride. Carli offers it. Problem? There is now only forty-five minutes before Barry's test.\n\nOn the way out the front door, I say to Renata and Professor Mike, \"I'm going to see if Kase Kinshaw's dad will come watch Barry do his test.\"\n\n\"Whoa. Wait,\" Renata says.\n\n\"Who?\" Professor Mike says.\n\n\"The father of the kid involved in the incident,\" Renata turns to him and says.\n\n\"Wow,\" Professor Mike says. \"I don't know, pal.\"\n\n\"He doesn't know Barry. This way he might know Barry and see that it is all crazy and wrong.\"\n\nRenata looks sad. \"He's not going to come to Barry's test, Adam. There's no way.\"\n\n\"No. There's a way. He likes my basketball playing, remember?\"\n\nCarli pulls outside in her SUV. Regan shouts, \"That girl is here.\" I run between Barry and Margery and out the front door. Barry's eyes are huge underneath his glasses.\n\n\"You assist me so many times,\" I say to Carli as I climb in.\n\nCarli blinks at me. She shakes her head. \"We're a good team. We're good for each other.\"\n\n\"Dope,\" I say.\n\n\"Why do you say that all the time?\" Carli shouts.\n\nWe drive into the country.\n\nThere is only a half hour to go before Barry's test when we turn down a drive into the woods. There are tall pine trees on either side of the SUV and rocks and ravines heading up to the crest of a river bluff. The woods open into a big yard with a giant stone house in the center. It has large windows and a brick roundabout driveway.\n\n\"This is a lot of money,\" I say.\n\n\"Kinshaw Construction builds a lot of stuff,\" Carli says.\n\nRight then, Kase and his dad walk around the side of the giant house. Each is wearing a baseball cap and a flannel shirt. Each is carrying a big stack of wood in his arms. They both stop and watch as Carli's SUV approaches.\n\nCarli pulls up next to them. \"So?\" she says to me.\n\nMy heart is pounding. \"I better talk, huh?\" I say. I open the door and climb out.\n\nKase blows air out of his mouth and looks to the side. His dad squints his eyes at me. \"I'm surprised to see you here,\" he says.\n\n\"Yeah. Oh boy. I'm surprised to be here,\" I say. \"But it's urgent, okay?\"\n\nKase looks at me. \"What could you possibly want?\" he says.\n\n\"I want you . . . I mean, I want your dad to come to Barry Roland's black belt testing today.\"\n\nMr. Kinshaw turns, walks three steps, and places the wood he was carrying onto a stack of wood next to their garage. Then he turns back to me. \"And why would I do that? Barry Roland used his martial arts training to crack my son's ribs.\"\n\nI look at Kase, who is holding much heavy wood. He can't be so injured, can he? I say, \"If you go . . .\" I want to say I will play basketball for Northrup next year, but it's too ridiculous. Instead I say, \"If you go, you'll see how hard Barry is trying to be a better person. What happened last week was my fault, not his. He was only involved because he thought Kase was hurting me.\"\n\nMr. Kinshaw looks at Kase, cocks his head, shuts his eyes, then looks back at me. \"Was Kase hurting you, Adam?\" he asks.\n\nI take in a breath. Kase looks at the ground. What can I say? I choose not the truth, because I have bigger goals here. \"No. No. Kase was just messing around. Barry misunderstood what was happening.\"\n\nKase looks back up.\n\n\"The police reports said you and Kase were fighting, too,\" Mr. Kinshaw says.\n\n\"No. I think we were more joking, okay?\" I say. \"Witnesses didn't get it.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Mr. Kinshaw says.\n\nI nod. \"Please, Mr. Kinshaw. Barry Roland is a very honorable guy. I want you to see him work. I want you to see how hard he tries. It will only take an hour.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should see what Barry is up to,\" Kase says. He is staring at me.\n\nMr. Kinshaw turns to his side. \"Okay. We'll do it.\"\n\nCarli leans out of the window. \"Hey. We don't have a lot of time.\"\n\nA moment later, I am sitting in the back seat of Carli's SUV. Kase Kinshaw sits next to me. His dad is in the front with Carli. They are making small talk, but I can barely listen. Kase and I just cooperated to get his dad to see Barry do tae kwon do? What the crap?\n\nThe parking lot in front of Bob's Champion Tae Kwon Do Studio is completely full. In fact, there is not much parking nearby on the street. Carli pulls around the block and then we all walk quickly to make it on time.\n\nRegan and Margery both wear their 76ers shirts again. This must be our team shirt. I am wearing one, too. They have saved a seat for me next to Renata. I tell Carli and Mr. Kinshaw that I'll go sit with them. I'm really doing this not because I don't want to be by the Kinshaws, but because I don't want to draw Barry's attention toward Kase. What if Barry looks for me before he starts his pattern, sees Kase, then loses his concentration?\n\nAll the seating around the mats up front is taken. There are people backed against the walls. Barry and the two others who are going for their belts must be warming up in another room. Bob, the owner, comes to the middle and introduces himself and then the grand master from Mankato, who is an old white tubby guy with a white beard like Santa Claus.\n\nBob introduces the first test person. It is a woman who must be Renata's age. She goes and does her pattern, which is like a dance. She bows. Then a couple guys in their karate suits stand and hold boards. The woman breaks these boards with different kicks and punches. One board she can't break, so they swap it out with another board, because maybe it is defective. This next one she breaks, and then she bows, and everyone applauds. The Santa Claus grand master asks her some questions. She ends every answer with sir, just like she is talking to Mr. Doig. She has gained her blue belt. Everyone applauds loudly.\n\nThen a young kid with a pile of floppy hair that gets in his eyes, who is maybe in middle school, does his thing. It is just like what the woman before him did, except he forgets his pattern in the middle and does not recover. He starts. He stops. He starts. He stops. He turns very red and bows and apologizes. The grand master Santa Claus speaks quietly to him and then the boy bows to the audience and leaves the mat. Everyone applauds, because even if he failed this time around, he gave it a good shot.\n\nBob turns down some of the lights.\n\nThe whole place becomes very silent.\n\nBob walks to the center of the mat.\n\nHe speaks.\n\n\"All of you who take classes here know what a great inspiration Barry Roland is to me. Before he started with us, Barry had never done anything athletic in his life. He was just a troubled teen who smoked cigarettes and maybe drank too much beer, isn't that right, Barry?\"\n\nBarry stands on the side of the mat. He bows, which I guess means yes, what Bob said is all true. I never knew the Barry who smoked or drank beers and he never told me he did, so I'm surprised.\n\nBob continues to speak. \"But before Barry came to us, he also watched hours and hours of an old TV show called _Kung Fu_. Most of my young students come here because they've watched those Ninja Turtles or maybe the Power Rangers. They want to kick butt. That old _Kung Fu_ show is more about justice and learning to control one's inner demons. Barry came to us not so he could kick butt, but because he wanted to learn to be a better person. And, oh, what a good guy he's turned out to be. He has done everything we've asked. He's a fine, natural martial arts practitioner. He is so disciplined in his preparations. He never misses a class or an opportunity to get better. And, most important, Barry is a wonderful friend. He volunteers with our kids' classes. He helps me run the elder kicks program. I'm just as proud of him as can be. I know whatever hurdle gets in his way, my buddy Barry Roland is going to succeed. No matter what hurdle, now or in the future.\"\n\nBarry shuts his eyes and nods.\n\n\"I know most of you are here to support him, too. Am I right?\" Bob says.\n\nThere is a lot of whooping and applause.\n\n\"Well then, let's just do this thing. Wait till you see what he's got to show you. Okay, Barry . . .\"\n\nFor the next four minutes, Barry treats us to many kicks and punches and spins and leaps. He shouts (HI!) and holds on to terrifying poses. He crouches. He breathes. He flows like the ocean. Toward the end, he leaps many feet off the ground and swivels in the air, kicking and punching. He looks like a movie, he is so good. Then he puts his fist over his chest.\n\nThe grand master Santa Claus smiles and nods.\n\nBarry puts his right fist in his left palm and bows.\n\nEveryone whoops and applauds more.\n\nThen the board breaks are even crazier, because they involve a whole bunch of those other students holding boards in different spots on the mat. Barry breathes and concentrates for maybe thirty seconds before he punches, kicks, kicks, then leaps off the bent knee of a classmate high into the air and kicks through a board that is maybe seven feet off the ground. The kid who holds this board is standing on a chair, bracing the board at chest level! When Barry lands, everyone jumps out of their chairs and cheers and shouts. Barry is one amazing tae kwon do guy.\n\nAfter the grand master speaks to him and then ties his new belt on him, all the kids in the crowd mob Barry. He high-fives everyone, including Regan and Margery. Finally, I think he will come talk to me and Renata, but he doesn't. Instead he walks quickly past to where Kase and his dad are standing.\n\nI watch. He talks only to Kase.\n\nKase turns red in the face. Is he mad? I can't tell.\n\nHe and Barry shake hands. Barry and Kase's dad shake hands. Kase's dad spots me watching. He nods at me. He, Carli, and Kase leave.\n\nBarry comes over.\n\n\"What happened?\" I ask.\n\n\"I told Kase I was sorry that I kicked him last week? I told him I acted from anger? I told him I deserved to get kicked out of school because I broke my vows when I kicked him? I told him I love dogs and I would never hurt a dog? I told him that what happened with Barney scared me so much and made me so sad that I came to tae kwon do to be a better man and person and that has changed my life forever, then I said I hope he can forgive me for everything I did wrong.\"\n\n\"But . . . but Kase has been a bad bully, bro,\" I whisper.\n\n\"Yeah. He just said in front of me and his dad that he was the real bad guy. Not me. I think Kase Kinshaw cried? It was pretty weird.\"\n\nThen we all go to Patrick's to celebrate Barry. We get the biggest table in the whole place, because my family is now six and if you add Bob, his wife, their daughter, and the grand master Santa Claus\u2014his name is Jerry\u2014there is ten. It's almost like a Polish wedding party going on in Patrick's, because we are so loud and making so many good jokes.\n\nWhile I eat pizza, I get a text from Carli. This is what she says:\n\n_You did it. Mr. Kinshaw called the school board president on the way home. Barry won't hear officially until tomorrow, but it's done. You're a superhero, dude._\n\nBarry Roland may not be Shinja, but he is the real superhero.\n\nBut I do know I am something more than just me. I know what injustice feels like. I know I will fight injustice, and sometimes that means a protest and a battle, like what Devin did, but I think many times that means just being a good, kind person in the world.\n\nFor instance, Barry Roland can fight. He knows how.\n\nBut more, Barry Roland is gentle and kind. I believe that's why so many people came to see him break wood and spin and kick. I believe that's why he will never be abandoned when things get tough for him.\n\nWe should all learn from Barry Roland.\n\nAt home, before I go to sleep in my bed, Renata comes in and says, \"I'm so proud of you, Adam. I always worried that your trouble . . . the trouble you had when you were younger . . . would define you. But look what you've become.\"\n\n\"I have so much advantages,\" I say.\n\n\"You have so _many_ advantages,\" she says.\n\n\"Yes. So I will, I promise. I'll do good.\"\n\nRenata, my mom, kisses me on the forehead.\n\n## SIXTY-ONE\n\n## WE ARE HOOPERS\n\nBut that's not the end. Don't be fooled. Just because I am Polish and a friend and a son and a boyfriend\u2014an official fact in the minds of the school, because we went to the dumb prom together\u2014and a brother, you might get lost about what this is. But don't get lost.\n\nI am a hooper.\n\nDevin, Khalil, and Rashid come with me to the Anderson Center at Saint Thomas University. We have been playing together so well. The D-I Fury 17U team competed in four Nike Elite Tournaments. We played on the coast of Virginia, in Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and guess what? We motion our competition into the floorboards, and then we fly through the air and dunk the ball on their sad heads.\n\nFour total tournament victories.\n\nThese guys and me? I think we can beat anyone in the country.\n\nHere's some reality, though. I am a good part of this team. But I am not Devin. I am not Khalil. They have minds that are connected through the whole game. When one hedges on D, the other helps and destroys any easy lane. When one cuts to the basket, the other has already launched a pass that will land softly in the cutter's hands. Although sometimes I become part of the ocean with them and flow, often they are in a different part of the world from me.\n\nNext year, when I am their age? I will be in that part of the basketball world, I promise.\n\nBut today we aren't playing. We have time off before the Nike Elite Championship Tournament, the Peach Jam, in South Carolina. Right now I am wearing a Minnesota Timberwolves number twenty-two jersey, not my Fury number thirty-four. Today we are fans. I follow Khalil into the stands.\n\nWe climb.\n\nThe game is about to begin. The All Iowa Attack looks like a good team while they warm up. They are quick. They speed to the rim. They leap high for rebounds. Their passes are zipped on a rope. I'm a little afraid.\n\nBut you know what? Katy Vargas and Tasha Tolliver are amazing players. Katy is a point guard with eyes in the back of her head. Tasha has all the smooth moves in the post. And, finally, they get their two-guard back. Carli Anderson received the doctor's permission, and she's going to play her first real game since the AAU season finale eleven months ago. Her hair is in two braids. Her muscles fire as she shoots warm-up threes.\n\nWhoa. I have never seen her in her uniform. She is the most beautiful person to me. I trip on the stands while climbing and have to catch myself because I'm only looking at her, not looking where I'm going. She is perfection. Her stroke is so easy. She almost doesn't miss.\n\nMe and Carli have practiced so much together. Last week her dad ran us through cutting drills, made her go 100 percent, and the next day she wasn't even sore. \"You're ready. Might have something to do with how much time you two spend working out,\" Coach Anderson said.\n\nMe and Carli also train in tae kwon do. We take a weekly class from Barry, who is now the number one employee at Bob's Championship Tae Kwon Do Studio. Maybe I will become Shinja?\n\nDevin, Rashid, and Khalil sit down and watch over the court. I stay standing, so excited to see Carli out there.\n\n\"Dude,\" Devin says, \"Carli should give you some more shooting lessons.\"\n\n\"She's so much better than you,\" Khalil says.\n\n\"She's the best shot ever,\" I say back.\n\n\"I can't hit like that,\" Khalil says.\n\nThe girls huddle. The buzzer sounds. Here I am, Adam Sobieski Reed. My friends stand, too. The girls walk around the center circle. Katy gets in position on one side. Carli gets in position on the other. Tasha moves to the center. She is greeted there by a giant girl with black hair tied back. They bump fists. The ref walks between them holding the ball. Katy and the Iowa girl next to her elbow each other, push against each other. Carli is crouched. The girl next to her seems to hold her breath.\n\nThe ref blows her whistle. She tosses the ball up.\n\nTasha leaps above, swats the ball to Katy. She catches and spins from her defender, dribbles, sprinting toward the basket. Her girl goes with her, bumping against her hip. Carli's defender sprints to protect the basket, too. Carli, so light on her feet, runs unseen to the right wing. She gets to the three-point line as defenders converge on Katy, and Katy leaps and lofts the ball out from under the basket. It lands in Carli's hands.\n\nAnd I know what's coming. I've seen her practice it again and again.\n\nCarli squares, pauses for a breath, jumps, and releases the ball a moment before she reaches the pinnacle. The ball rotates, arches, begins its fall . . . accelerates and _swoosh_ . . . it slides through the net, barely making a ripple.\n\nKhalil and Devin leap and shout. Rashid spreads his arms in victory. I sit down and put my hands on my head. It took her all of five seconds.\n\nCarli jogs back on defense. She points at me. She smiles so wide.\n\nI have never seen anything so beautiful.\n\nYes. We are hoopers.\n\nNow. That's it.\n\nThat's how we end.\n\n## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nFirst of all, thank you to my agent, Jim McCarthy. It feels like I've grown up with you, Jim. Thanks to my editor, Ben Rosenthal. There aren't exactly truckloads of Midwestern sports fans in this business. I'm so, so lucky to be with you. Thank you to Jason Darcy for reading an early draft and for knowing way too much about basketball (someone needs to publish your eighty-page screed on the history and societal implications of moving screens in today's professional game). Thank you to Nicole Overton for reading a draft in the middle of the process, for catching what I couldn't see well. For catching what I should've clearly seen, but didn't. For just generally helping _Hooper_ so much.\n\nThanks to my maternal grandpa, Oscar, for leaving Eastern Europe when people were getting killed. He farmed in Minnesota. Worked in factories in Iowa. He and Grandma Elinor made a good life for their family. They made my amazing, adventurous mom. Thanks to my paternal grandma, Yvonne, for fleeing Belgium right ahead of the Nazis. She went first to Brazil. She ended up in New York, where she made a good life working as a translator for everything from cookbooks to bank contracts. She learned a lot of languages while moving across the globe. Thanks to my dad, Max, who, as a baby, sat in the arms of the SS while my grandparents were interrogated. He got to Brazil, flunked math in eighth grade, went to an American school, and ended up immigrating to the United States when he was eighteen. Thank you to everyone who welcomed my family with open arms.\n\nFor _Hooper_ , I feel especially indebted to the following authors and their books. Sherman Alexie for _The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian_. Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely for _All American Boys_. Tamika Catchings for _Catch a Star_. Alice Goffman for _On the Run_. J. D. Vance for _Hillbilly Elegy_. Ta-Nehisi Coates for _Between the World and Me_.\n\nRead many books and you will see deeply into many lives. You will be a better person for it. That's a pretty good reason to read books.\n\n## ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nPhoto credit Katherine Warde\n\n**GEOFF HERBACH** is the author of the award-winning Stupid Fast series as well as _Fat Boy vs. the Cheerleaders._ His books have been given the Cybils Award for Best Young Adult Fiction and the Minnesota Book Award, selected for the Junior Library Guild, and listed among the year's best by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, and many state library associations. In the past, he produced radio comedy shows and toured rock clubs telling weird stories. Geoff teaches creative writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He lives in a log cabin with a tall wife. You can find him online at www.geoffherbach.com.\n\nDiscover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.\n\n## BOOKS BY GEOFF HERBACH\n\n_Hooper_\n\n## BACK AD\n\nDISCOVER\n\nyour next favorite read\n\nMEET\n\nnew authors to love\n\nWIN\n\nfree books\n\nSHARE\n\ninfographics, playlists, quizzes, and more\n\nWATCH\n\nthe latest videos\n\nwww.epicreads.com\n\n## CREDITS\n\nCover design by David Curtis\n\nBasketball by Francisco Martin Gonzalez \/ 500px  \nSilhouette by romul014 \/ Shutterstock\n\n## COPYRIGHT\n\nKatherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.\n\nHOOPER. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Geoff Herbach. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.\n\nwww.epicreads.com\n\nLibrary of Congress Control Number: 2017943389\n\nISBN 978-0-06-245311-2\n\nEPub Edition \u00a9 February 2018 ISBN 9780062453136\n\n17 18 19 20 21 PC\/LSCH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\nFIRST EDITION\n\n## ABOUT THE PUBLISHER\n\n**Australia**\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.\n\nLevel 13, 201 Elizabeth Street\n\nSydney, NSW 2000, Australia\n\nwww.harpercollins.com.au\n\n**Canada**\n\nHarperCollins Canada\n\n2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor\n\nToronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada\n\nwww.harpercollins.ca\n\n**New Zealand**\n\nHarperCollins Publishers New Zealand\n\nUnit D1, 63 Apollo Drive\n\nRosedale 0632\n\nAuckland, New Zealand\n\nwww.harpercollins.co.nz\n\n**United Kingdom**\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Ltd.\n\n1 London Bridge Street\n\nLondon SE1 9GF, UK\n\nwww.harpercollins.co.uk\n\n**United States**\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Inc.\n\n195 Broadway\n\nNew York, NY 10007\n\nwww.harpercollins.com\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n## Many Bloody Returns\n\n## Many Bloody Returns\n\n## Edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner\n\nTHE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP  \nPublished by the Penguin Group  \nPenguin Group (USA) Inc.  \n375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA  \nPenguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi\u2014110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa\n\nPenguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England\n\nThis book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.\n\nThese are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.\n\nCollection copyright \u00a9 2007 by Charlaine Harris Schulz and Toni L. P. Kelner.\n\nAll rights reserved.  \nNo part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors' rights. Purchase only authorized editions.  \nACE and the \"A\" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nMany bloody returns \/ edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner.\u20141st ed.  \np. cm.\n\nISBN: 978-1-1012-0886-1\n\n1. Vampires\u2014Fiction. I. Harris, Charlaine. II. Kelner, Toni L. P.\n\nPS648.V35M356 2007  \n813'.087308\u2014dc22\nThis is dedicated to  \nJoss Whedon,  \nwho may never read it,  \nand his enthusiastic fans known as the  \nBuffybuds, who will.\nWe thank Marty and John at Tekno Books for their inspiration, encouragement, and full-service smoothing of the way; our agents, Joshua Bilmes (Charlaine) and Joan Brandt (Toni); and finally, Ginjer Buchanan at Ace, who agreed this might be a good idea. We also want to thank the authors who contributed their stories to this anthology though they knew their editors were novices. That's trust for you.\n\n## CONTENTS\n\nA Few Words\n\nCharlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner\n\nDracula Night\n\nCharlaine Harris\n\nThe Mournful Cry of Owls\n\nChristopher Golden\n\nI Was a Teenage Vampire\n\nBill Crider\n\nTwilight\n\nKelley Armstrong\n\nIt's My Birthday, Too\n\nJim Butcher\n\nGrave-Robbed\n\nP. N. Elrod\n\nThe First Day of the Rest of Your Life\n\nRachel Caine\n\nThe Witch and the Wicked\n\nJeanne C. Stein\n\nBlood Wrapped\n\nTanya Huff\n\nThe Wish\n\nCarolyn Haines\n\nFire and Ice and Linguini for Two\n\nTate Hallaway\n\nVampire Hours\n\nElaine Viets\n\nHow Stella Got Her Grave Back\n\nToni L. P. Kelner\n\n## A Few Words\n\nWhen we were approached about editing this anthology, we were like two kids with a new toy. We had some wonderful planning sessions about the theme. We decided to pick two apparently unrelated concepts\u2014vampires (the dead) and birthdays (celebrations of life)\u2014and see what different ways some very talented writers could combine the two.\n\nAfter the great fun of drawing up a dream list of contributors and receiving their stories, we had to buckle down to the actual work of editing. We imagined the work would be tedious, or nerve-wracking, or possibly (horrors) boring. But it wasn't. Every day a new story arrived was like\u2014well, like a birthday.\n\nIt's amazing what creative minds can do with the same theme. None of these stories are the same. Some of them are funny, and some of them are tragic, but all of them are fascinating. Read and enjoy.\n\nCHARLAINE HARRIS  \nTONI L. P. KELNER\n\n## Dracula Night\n\nCharlaine Harris\n\nCharlaine Harris, New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series, also writes books about Harper Connelly, a lightning-struck corpse locator. Charlaine has won the Anthony, the Sapphire, and two Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice awards. She lives in a small town in Arkansas with her husband, a duck, three dogs, and three children. Her website is simply www.charlaineharris.com, and she tries real hard to keep it up-to-date.\n\nI found the invitation in the mailbox at the end of my driveway. I had to lean out of my car window to open it, because I'd paused on my way to work after remembering I hadn't checked my mail in a couple of days. My mail was never interesting. I might get a flyer for Dollar General or Wal-Mart, or one of those ominous mass mailings about pre-need burial plots.\n\nToday, after I'd sighed at my Entergy bill and my cable bill, I had a little treat: a handsome, heavy, buff-colored envelope that clearly contained some kind of invitation. It had been addressed by someone who'd not only taken a calligraphy class but passed the final with flying colors.\n\nI got a little pocketknife out of my glove compartment and slit open the envelope with the care it deserved. I don't get a lot of invitations, and when I do, they're usually more Hallmark than watermark. This was something to be savored. I pulled out the stiff folded paper carefully, and opened it. Something fluttered into my lap: an enclosed sheet of tissue. Without absorbing the revealed words, I ran my finger over the embossing. Wow.\n\nI'd strung out the preliminaries as long as I could. I bent to actually read the italic typeface.\n\nERIC NORTHMAN  \nAND THE STAFF OF FANGTASIA\n\nREQUEST THE HONOR OF YOUR PRESENCE  \nAT FANGTASIA'S ANNUAL PARTY  \nTO CELEBRATE THE BIRTHDAY OF  \nTHE LORD OF DARKNESS\n\nPRINCE DRACULA\n\nON FEBRUARY 8, 10:00 P.M.  \nMUSIC PROVIDED BY THE DUKE OF DEATH  \nDRESS FORMAL RSVP\n\nI read it twice. Then I read it again.\n\nI drove to work in such a thoughtful mood that I'm glad there wasn't any other traffic on Hummingbird Road. I took the left to get to Merlotte's, but then I almost sailed right past the parking lot. At the last moment, I braked and turned in to navigate my way to the parking area behind the bar that was reserved for employees.\n\nSam Merlotte, my boss, was sitting behind his desk when I peeked in to put my purse in the deep drawer in his desk that he let the servers use. He had been running his hands over his hair again, because the tangled red-gold halo was even wilder than usual. He looked up from his tax form and smiled at me.\n\n\"Sookie,\" he said, \"how are you doing?\"\n\n\"Good. Tax season, huh?\" I made sure my white T-shirt was tucked in evenly so the \"Merlotte's\" embroidered over my left breast would be level. I flicked one of my long blond hairs off my black pants. I always bent over to brush my hair out so my ponytail would look smooth. \"You not taking them to the CPA this year?\"\n\n\"I figure if I start this early, I can do them myself.\"\n\nHe said that every year, and he always ended up making an appointment with the CPA, who always had to file for an extension.\n\n\"Listen, did you get one of these?\" I asked, extending the invitation.\n\nHe dropped his pen with some relief and took the sheet from my hand. After scanning the script, he said, \"No. They wouldn't invite many shifters, anyway. Maybe the local packmaster, or some supe who'd done them a significant service...like you.\"\n\n\"I'm not supernatural,\" I said, surprised. \"I just have a...problem.\"\n\n\"Telepathy is a lot more than a problem,\" Sam said. \"Acne is a problem. Shyness is a problem. Reading other peoples' minds is a gift.\"\n\n\"Or a curse,\" I said. I went around the desk to toss my purse in the drawer, and Sam stood up. I'm around five foot six, and Sam tops me by maybe three inches. He's not a big guy, but he's much stronger than a plain human his size, since Sam's a shapeshifter.\n\n\"Are you going to go?\" he asked. \"Halloween and Dracula's birthday are the only holidays vampires observe, and I understand they can throw quite a party.\"\n\n\"I haven't made up my mind,\" I said. \"When I'm on my break later, I might call Pam on my cell.\" Pam, Eric's second-in-command, was as close to a friend as I had among the vampires.\n\nI reached her at Fangtasia pretty soon after the sun went down. \"There really was a Count Dracula? I thought he was made up,\" I said after telling her I'd gotten the invitation.\n\n\"There really was,\" Pam said. \"Vlad Tepes. He was a Wallachian king whose capital city was T\u00e2rgovi\u015fte, I think.\" Pam was quite matter-of-fact about the existence of a creature I'd thought was a joint creation of Bram Stoker and Hollywood. \"Vlad III was more ferocious and bloodthirsty than any vampire, and this was when he was a live human. He enjoyed executing people by impaling them on huge wooden stakes. They might last for hours.\"\n\nI shuddered. Ick.\n\n\"His own people regarded him with fear, of course. But the local vamps admired Vlad so much they actually brought him over when he was dying, thus ushering in the new era of the vampire. After monks buried him on an island called Snagov, he rose on the third night to become the first modern vampire. Up until then, the vampires were like...well, disgusting. Completely secret. Ragged, filthy, living in holes in cemeteries, like animals. But Vlad Dracul had been a ruler, and he wasn't going to dress in rags and live in a hole for any reason.\" Pam sounded proud.\n\nI tried to imagine Eric wearing rags and living in a hole, but it was almost impossible. \"So Stoker didn't just dream the whole thing up based on folktales?\"\n\n\"Just parts of it. Obviously, he didn't know a lot about what Dracula, as he called him, really could or couldn't do, but he was so excited at meeting the prince that he made up a lot of details he thought would give the story zing. It was just like Anne Rice meeting Louis: an early Interview with the Vampire. Dracula really wasn't too happy afterward that Stoker caught him at a weak moment, but he did enjoy the name recognition.\"\n\n\"But he won't actually be there, right? I mean, vampires'll be celebrating this all over the world.\"\n\nPam said, very cautiously, \"Some believe he shows up somewhere every year, makes a surprise appearance. That chance is so remote, his appearance at our party would be like winning the lottery. Though some believe it could happen.\"\n\nI heard Eric's voice in the background saying, \"Pam, who are you talking to?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Pam said, the word sounding very American with her slight British accent. \"Got to go, Sookie. See you then.\"\n\nAs I returned the phone to my purse, Sam said, \"Sookie, if you go to the party, please keep alert and on the watch. Sometimes vamps get carried away with the excitement on Dracula Night.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Sam,\" I said. \"I'll sure be careful.\" No matter how many vamps you claimed as friends, you had to be alert. A few years ago the Japanese had invented a synthetic blood that satisfies the vampires' nutritional requirements, which has enabled the undead to come out of the shadows and take their place at the American table. British vampires had it pretty good, too, and most of the Western European vamps had fared pretty well after the Great Revelation (the day they'd announced their existence, through carefully chosen representatives). However, many South American vamps regretted stepping forward, and the bloodsuckers in the Muslim countries\u2014well, there were mighty few left. Vampires in the inhospitable parts of the world were making efforts to immigrate to countries that tolerated them, with the result that our Congress was considering various bills to limit undead citizens from claiming political asylum. In consequence, we were experiencing an influx of vampires with all kinds of accents as they tried to enter America under the wire. Most of them came in through Louisiana, since it was notably friendly to the Cold Ones, as Fangbanger Xtreme called them.\n\nIt was more fun thinking about vampires than hearing the thoughts of my fellow citizens. Naturally, as I went from table to table, I was doing my job with a big smile, because I like good tips, but I wasn't able to put my heart into it tonight. It had been a warm day for February, way into the fifties, and people's thoughts had turned to spring.\n\nI try not to listen in, but I'm like a radio that picks up a lot of signals. Some days, I can control my reception a lot better than other days. Today, I kept picking up snippets. Hoyt Fortenberry, my brother's best friend, was thinking about his mother's request that he put in about ten new rosebushes in her already extensive garden. Gloomy but obedient, he was trying to figure out how much time the task would take. Arlene, my longtime friend and another waitress, was wondering if she could get her latest boyfriend to pop the question, but that was pretty much a perennial thought for Arlene. Like the roses, it bloomed every season.\n\nAs I mopped up spills and hustled to get chicken strip baskets on the tables (the supper crowd was heavy that night), my own thoughts were centered on how to get a formal gown to wear to the party. Though I did have one ancient prom dress, handmade by my aunt Linda, it was hopelessly outdated. I'm twenty-six, but I didn't have any bridesmaid dresses that might serve. None of my few friends had gotten married except Arlene, who'd been wed so many times that she never even thought of bridesmaids. The few nice clothes I'd bought for vampire events always seemed to get ruined...some in very unpleasant ways.\n\nUsually, I shopped at my friend Tara's store, but she wasn't open after six. So after I got off work, I drove to Monroe to Pecanland Mall. At Dillard's, I got lucky. To tell the truth, I was so pleased with the dress I might have gotten it even if it hadn't been on sale, but it had been marked down to twenty-five dollars from a hundred and fifty, surely a shopping triumph. It was rose pink, with a sequin top and a chiffon bottom, and it was strapless and simple. I'd wear my hair down, and my gran's pearl earrings, and some silver heels that were also on major sale.\n\nThat major item taken care of, I wrote a polite acceptance note and popped it in the mail. I was good to go.\n\nThree nights later, I was knocking on the back door of Fangtasia, my garment bag held high.\n\n\"You're looking a bit informal,\" Pam said as she let me in.\n\n\"Didn't want to wrinkle the dress.\" I came in, making sure the bag didn't trail, and hightailed it for the bathroom.\n\nThere wasn't a lock on the bathroom door. Pam stood outside so I wouldn't be interrupted, and Eric's second-in-command smiled when I came out, a bundle of my more mundane clothes rolled under my arm.\n\n\"You look good, Sookie,\" Pam said. Pam herself had elected to wear a tuxedo made out of silver lam\u00e9. She was a sight. My hair has some curl to it, but Pam's is a paler blond and very straight. We both have blue eyes, but hers are a lighter shade and rounder, and she doesn't blink much. \"Eric will be very pleased.\"\n\nI flushed. Eric and I have a History. But since he had amnesia when we created that history, he doesn't remember it. Pam does. \"Like I care what he thinks,\" I said.\n\nPam smiled at me sideways. \"Right,\" she said. \"You are totally indifferent. So is he.\"\n\nI tried to look like I was accepting her words on their surface level and not seeing through to the sarcasm. To my surprise, Pam gave me a light kiss on the cheek. \"Thanks for coming,\" she said. \"You may perk him up. He's been very hard to work for these past few days.\"\n\n\"Why?\" I asked, though I wasn't real sure I wanted to know.\n\n\"Have you ever seen 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown'?\"\n\nI stopped in my tracks. \"Sure,\" I said. \"Have you?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Pam said calmly. \"Many times.\" She gave me a minute to absorb that. \"Eric is like that on Dracula Night. He thinks, every year, that this time Dracula will pick his party to attend. Eric fusses and plans; he frets and stews. He sent the invitations back to the printer twice so they were late going out. Now that the night is actually here, he's worked himself into a state.\"\n\n\"So this is a case of hero worship gone crazy?\"\n\n\"You have such a way with words,\" Pam said admiringly. We were outside Eric's office, and we could both hear him bellowing inside.\n\n\"He's not happy with the new bartender. He thinks there are not enough bottles of the blood the count is said to prefer, according to an interview in American Vampire.\"\n\nI tried to imagine the Vlad Tepes, impaler of so many of his own countrymen, chatting with a reporter. I sure wouldn't want to be the one holding the pad and pencil. \"What brand would that be?\" I scrambled to catch up with the conversation.\n\n\"The Prince of Darkness is said to prefer Royalty.\"\n\n\"Ew.\" Why was I not surprised?\n\nRoyalty was a very, very rare bottled blood. I'd thought the brand was only a rumor until now. Royalty consisted of part synthetic blood and part real blood\u2014the blood of, you guessed it, people of title. Before you go thinking of enterprising vamps ambushing that cute Prince William, let me reassure you. There were plenty of minor royals in Europe who were glad to give blood for an astronomical sum.\n\n\"After a month's worth of phone calls, we managed to get two bottles.\" Pam was looking quite grim. \"They cost more than we could afford. I've never known my maker to be other than business-wise, but this year Eric seems to be going overboard. Royalty doesn't keep forever, you know, with the real blood in it...and now he's worried that two bottles might not be enough. There is so much legend attached to Dracula, who can say what is true? He has heard that Dracula will only drink Royalty or...the real thing.\"\n\n\"Real blood? But that's illegal, unless you got a willing donor.\"\n\nAny vampire who took a human's blood\u2014against the human's will\u2014was liable to execution\u2014by stake or sunlight, according to the vamp's choice. The execution was usually carried out by another vamp, kept on retainer by the state. I personally thought any vampire who took an unwilling person's blood deserved the execution, because there were enough fangbangers around who were more than willing to donate.\n\n\"And no vampire is allowed to kill Dracula, or even strike him,\" Pam said, chiming right in on my thoughts. \"Not that we'd want to strike our prince, of course,\" she added hastily.\n\nRight, I thought.\n\n\"He is held in such reverence that any vampire who assaults him must meet the sun. And we're also expected to offer our prince financial assistance.\"\n\nI wondered if the other vampires were supposed to floss his fangs for him too.\n\nThe door to Eric's office flew open with such vehemence that it bounced right back. It opened again more gently, and Eric emerged.\n\nI had to gape. He looked positively edible. Eric is very tall, very broad, very blond, and tonight he was dressed in a tuxedo that had not come off any rack. This tux had been made for Eric, and he looked as good as any James Bond in it. Black cloth without a speck of lint, a snowy white shirt, and a hand-tied bow at his throat, and his beautiful hair rippling down his back...\n\n\"James Blond,\" I muttered. Eric's eyes were blazing with excitement. Without a word, he dipped me as though we were dancing and planted a hell of a kiss on me: lips, tongue, the entire osculant assemblage. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. When I was quivering, he assisted me to rise. His brilliant smile revealed glistening fangs. Eric had enjoyed himself.\n\n\"Hello to you too,\" I said tartly, once I was sure I was breathing again.\n\n\"My delicious friend,\" Eric said, and bowed.\n\nI wasn't sure I could be correctly called a friend, and I'd have to take his word for it that I was delicious. \"What's the program for the evening?\" I asked, hoping that my host would calm down very soon.\n\n\"We'll dance, listen to music, drink blood, watch the entertainment, and wait for the count to come,\" Eric said. \"I'm so glad you'll be here tonight. We have a wide array of special guests, but you're the only telepath.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I said faintly.\n\n\"You look especially lovely tonight,\" said Lyle. He'd been standing right behind Eric, and I hadn't even noticed him. Slight and narrow-faced, with spiked black hair, Lyle didn't have the presence Eric had acquired in a thousand years of life. Lyle was a visiting vamp from Alexandria, interning at the very successful Fangtasia because he wanted to open his own vampire bar. Lyle was carrying a small cooler, taking great care to keep it level.\n\n\"The Royalty,\" Pam explained in a neutral voice.\n\n\"Can I see?\" I asked.\n\nEric lifted the lid and showed me the contents: two blue bottles (for the blue blood, I presumed), with labels that bore the logo of a tiara and the single word Royalty in gothic script.\n\n\"Very nice,\" I said, underwhelmed.\n\n\"He'll be so pleased,\" Eric said, sounding as happy as I'd ever heard him.\n\n\"You sound oddly sure that the\u2014that Dracula will be coming,\" I said. The hall was crowded, and we began moving to the public part of the club.\n\n\"I was able to have a business discussion with the Master's handler,\" he said. \"I was able to express how much having the Master's presence would honor me and my establishment.\"\n\nPam rolled her eyes at me.\n\n\"You bribed him,\" I translated. Hence Eric's extra excitement this year, and his purchase of the Royalty.\n\nI had never suspected Eric harbored this depth of hero worship for anyone except himself. I would never have believed Eric would spend good money for such a reason, either. Eric was charming and enterprising, and he took good care of his employees; but the first person on Eric's admiration list was Eric, and his own well-being was Eric's number one priority.\n\n\"Dear Sookie, you're looking less than excited,\" Pam said, grinning at me. Pam loved to make trouble, and she was finding fertile ground tonight. Eric swung his head back to give me a look, and Pam's face relaxed into its usual bland smoothness.\n\n\"Don't you believe it will happen, Sookie?\" he asked. From behind his back, Lyle rolled his eyes. He was clearly fed up with Eric's fantasy.\n\nI'd just wanted to come to a party in a pretty dress and have a good time, and here I was, up a conversational creek.\n\n\"We'll all find out, won't we?\" I said brightly, and Eric seemed satisfied. \"The club looks beautiful.\" Normally, Fangtasia was the plainest place you could imagine, besides the lively gray-and-red paint scheme and the neon. The floors were concrete, the tables and chairs basic metal restaurant furnishings, the booths not much better. I could not believe that Fangtasia had been so transformed. Banners had been hung from the club's ceiling. Each banner was white with a red bear on it: a sort of stylized bear on its hind legs, one paw raised to strike.\n\n\"That's a replica of the Master's personal flag,\" Pam said in answer to my pointed finger. \"Eric paid an historian at LSU to research it.\" Her expression made it clear she thought Eric had been gypped, big-time.\n\nIn the center of Fangtasia's small dance floor stood an actual throne on a small dais. As I neared the throne, I decided Eric had rented it from a theater company. It looked good from thirty feet away, but up close...not so much. However, it had been freshened up with a plump red cushion for the Dark Prince's derriere, and the dais was placed in the exact middle of a square of dark red carpet. All the tables had been covered with white or dark red cloths, and elaborate flower arrangements were in the middle of each table. I had to laugh when I examined one of the arrangements: in the explosion of red carnations and greenery were miniature coffins and full-size stakes. Eric's sense of humor had surfaced, finally.\n\nInstead of WDED, the all-vampire radio station, the sound system was playing some very emotional violin music that was both scratchy and bouncy. \"Transylvanian music,\" said Lyle, his face carefully expressionless. \"Later, the DJ Duke of Death will take us for a musical journey.\" Lyle looked as though he would rather eat snails.\n\nAgainst one wall by the bar, I spied a small buffet for beings who ate food, and a large blood fountain for those who didn't. The red fountain, flowing gently down several tiers of gleaming milky glass bowls, was surrounded by crystal goblets. Just a wee bit over the top.\n\n\"Golly,\" I said weakly as Eric and Lyle went over to the bar.\n\nPam shook her head in despair. \"The money we spent,\" she said.\n\nNot too surprisingly, the room was full of vampires. I recognized a few of the bloodsuckers present: Indira, Thalia, Clancy, Maxwell Lee, and Bill Compton, my ex. There were at least twenty more I had only seen once or twice, vamps who lived in Area Five under Eric's authority. There were a few bloodsuckers I didn't know at all, including a guy behind the bar that must be the new bartender. Fangtasia ran through bartenders pretty quickly.\n\nThere were also some creatures in the bar who were not vamps and not human, members of Louisiana's supernatural community. The head of Shreveport's werewolf pack, Colonel Flood, was sitting at a table with Calvin Norris, the leader of the small community of werepanthers who lived in and around Hot Shot, outside of Bon Temps. Colonel Flood, now retired from the air force, was sitting stiffly erect in a good suit, while Calvin was wearing his own idea of party clothes\u2014a western shirt, new jeans, cowboy boots, and a black cowboy hat. He tipped it to me when he caught my eye, and he gave me a nod that expressed admiration. Colonel Flood's nod was less personal but still friendly.\n\nEric had also invited a short, broad man who strongly reminded me of a goblin I'd met once. I was sure this male was a member of the same race. Goblins are testy and ferociously strong, and when they are angry their touch can burn, so I decided to stay a good distance away from this one. He was deep in conversation with a very thin woman with mad eyes. She was wearing an assemblage of leaves and vines. I wasn't going to ask.\n\nOf course, there weren't any fairies. Fairies are as intoxicating to vampires as sugar water is to hummingbirds.\n\nBehind the bar was the newest member of the Fangtasia staff, a short, burly, man with long, wavy dark hair. He had a prominent nose and large eyes, and he was taking everything in with an air of amusement while he moved around preparing drink orders.\n\n\"Who's that?\" I asked, nodding toward the bar. \"And who are the strange vamps? Is Eric expanding?\"\n\nPam said, \"If you're in transit on Dracula Night, the protocol is to check in at the nearest sheriff's headquarters and share in the celebration there. That's why there are vampires here you haven't met. The new bartender is Milos Griesniki, a recent immigrant from the Old Countries. He is disgusting.\"\n\nI stared at Pam. \"How so?\" I asked.\n\n\"A sneaker. A pryer.\"\n\nI'd never heard Pam express such a strong opinion, and I looked at the vampire with some curiosity.\n\n\"He tries to discover how much money Eric has, and how much the bar makes, and how much our little human barmaids get paid.\"\n\n\"Speaking of whom, where are they?\" The waitresses and the rest of the everyday staff, all vampire groupies (known in some circles as fangbangers), were usually much in evidence, dressed in filmy black and powdered almost as pale as the real vampires.\n\n\"Too dangerous for them on this night,\" Pam said simply. \"You will see that Indira and Clancy are serving the guests.\" Indira was wearing a beautiful sari; she usually wore jeans and T-shirts, so I knew she had made an effort to dress up for the occasion. Clancy, who had rough red hair and bright green eyes, was in a suit. That was also a first. Instead of a regular tie, he wore a scarf tied into a floppy bow, and when I caught his eye he swept his hand from his head to his pants to demand my admiration. I smiled and nodded, though truthfully I liked Clancy better in his usual tough-guy clothes and heavy boots.\n\nEric was buzzing from table to table. He hugged and bowed and talked like a demented thing, and I didn't know if I found this endearing or alarming. I decided it was both. I'd definitely discovered Eric's weak side.\n\nI talked to Colonel Flood and Calvin for a few minutes. Colonel Flood was as polite and distant as he always was; he didn't care much for non-Weres, and now that he had retired, he only dealt with regular people when he had to. Calvin told me that he'd put a new roof on his house himself, and invited me to go fishing with him when the weather was warmer. I smiled but didn't commit to anything. My grandmother had loved fishing, but I was only good for two hours, tops, and then I was ready to do something else. I watched Pam doing her second-in-command job, making sure all the visiting vampires were happy, sharply admonishing the new bartender when he made a mistake with a drink order. Milos Griesniki gave her back a scowl that made me shiver. But if anyone could take care of herself, it was Pam.\n\nClancy, who'd been managing the club for a month, was checking every table to make sure there were clean ashtrays (some of the vampires smoked) and that all dirty glasses and other discarded items were removed promptly. When DJ Duke of Death took over, the music changed to something with a beat. Some of the vampires turned out onto the dance floor, flinging themselves around with the extreme abandon only the undead show.\n\nCalvin and I danced a couple of times, but we were nowhere in the vampire league. Eric claimed me for a slow dance, and though he was clearly distracted by thoughts of what the night might hold\u2014Draculawise\u2014he made my toenails quiver.\n\n\"Some night,\" he whispered, \"there's going to be nothing else but you and me.\"\n\nWhen the song was over, I had to go back to the table and have a long, cold drink. Lots of ice.\n\nAs the time drew closer to midnight, the vampires gathered around the blood fountain and filled the crystal goblets. The non-vamp guests also rose to their feet. I was standing beside the table where I'd been chatting with Calvin and Colonel Flood when Eric brought out a tabletop hand gong and began to strike it. If he'd been human, he'd have been flushed with excitement; as it was, his eyes were blazing. Eric looked both beautiful and scary, because he was so intent.\n\nWhen the last reverberation had shivered into silence, Eric raised his own glass high and said, \"On this most memorable of days, we stand together in awe and hope that the Lord of Darkness will honor us with his presence. O Prince, appear to us!\"\n\nWe actually all stood in hushed silence, waiting for the Great Pumpkin\u2014oh, wait, the Dark Prince. Just when Eric's face began to look downcast, a harsh voice broke the tension.\n\n\"My loyal son, I shall reveal myself!\"\n\nMilos Griesniki leaped from behind the bar, pulling off his tux jacket and pants and his shirt to reveal...an incredible jumpsuit made from black, glittery, stretchy stuff. I would have expected to see it on a girl going to her prom, a girl without much money who was trying to look unconventional and sexy. With his blocky body and dark hair and mustache, the one-piece made Milos look more like an acrobat in a third-rate circus.\n\nThere was an excited babble of low-voiced reaction. Calvin said, \"Well...shit.\" Colonel Flood gave a sharp nod, to say he agreed completely.\n\nThe bartender posed regally before Eric, who after a startled instant bowed before the much shorter vampire. \"My lord,\" Eric said, \"I am humbled. That you should honor us...that you should actually be here...on this day, of all days...I am overcome.\"\n\n\"Fucking poser,\" Pam muttered in my ear. She'd glided up behind me in the hubbub following the bartender's announcement.\n\n\"You think?\" I was watching the spectacle of the confident and regal Eric babbling away, actually sinking down on one knee.\n\nDracula made a hushing gesture, and Eric's mouth snapped shut in midsentence. So did the mouths of every vamp in the place. \"Since I have been here incognito for a week,\" Dracula said grandly, his accent harsh but not unattractive, \"I have become so fond of this place that I propose to stay for a year. I will take your tribute while I am here, to live in the style I enjoyed during life. Though the bottled Royalty is acceptable as a stopgap, I, Dracula, do not care for this modern habit of drinking artificial blood, so I will require one woman a day. This one will do to start with.\" He pointed at me, and Colonel Flood and Calvin moved instantly to flank me, a gesture I appreciated. The vampires looked confused, an expression which didn't sit well on undead faces; except Bill. His face went completely blank.\n\nEric followed Vlad Tepes's stubby finger, identifying me as the future Happy Meal. Then he stared at Dracula, looking up from his kneeling position. I couldn't read his face at all, and I felt a stirring of fear. What would Charlie Brown have done if the Great Pumpkin wanted to eat the little red-haired girl?\n\n\"And as for my financial maintenance, a tithe from your club's income and a house will be sufficient for my needs, with some servants thrown in: your second-in-command, or your club manager, one of them should do....\" Pam actually growled, a low-level sound that made my hair stand up on my neck. Clancy looked as though someone had kicked his dog.\n\nPam was fumbling with the centerpiece of the table, hidden by my body. After a second, I felt something pressed into my hand. I glanced down. \"You're the human,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Come, girl,\" Dracula said, beckoning with a curving of his fingers. \"I hunger. Come to me and be honored before all these assembled.\"\n\nThough Colonel Flood and Calvin both grabbed my arms, I said very softly, \"This isn't worth your lives. They'll kill you if you try to fight. Don't worry,\" and I pulled away from them, meeting their eyes, in turn, as I spoke. I was trying to project confidence. I didn't know what they were getting, but they understood there was a plan.\n\nI tried to glide toward the spangled bartender as if I was entranced. Since that's something vamps can't do to me, and Dracula obviously never doubted his own powers, I got away with it.\n\n\"Master, how did you escape from your tomb at T\u00e2rgovi\u015fte?\" I asked, doing my best to sound admiring and dreamy. I kept my hands down by my sides so the folds of rosy chiffon would conceal them.\n\n\"Many have asked me that,\" the Dark Prince said, inclining his head graciously as Eric's own head jerked up, his brows drawn together. \"But that story must wait. My beautiful one, I am so glad you left your neck bare tonight. Come closer to me...ERRRK!\"\n\n\"That's for the bad dialogue!\" I said, my voice trembling as I tried to shove the stake in even harder.\n\n\"And that's for the embarrassment,\" Eric said, giving the end a tap with his fist, just to help, as the \"Prince\" stared at us in horror. The stake obligingly disappeared into his chest.\n\n\"You dare...you dare,\" the short vampire croaked. \"You shall be executed.\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" I said. His face went blank, and his eyes were empty. Flakes began to drift from his skin as he crumpled.\n\nBut as the self-proclaimed Dracula sank to the floor and I looked around me, I wasn't so sure. Only the presence of Eric at my side kept the assemblage from falling on me and taking care of business. The vampires from out of town were the most dangerous; the vampires that knew me would hesitate.\n\n\"He wasn't Dracula,\" I said as clearly and loudly as I could. \"He was an impostor.\"\n\n\"Kill her!\" said a thin female vamp with short brown hair. \"Kill the murderess!\" She had a heavy accent, I thought Russian. I was about tired of the new wave of vamps.\n\nPot calling the kettle black, I thought briefly. I said, \"You all really think this goober was the Prince of Darkness?\" I pointed to the flaking mess on the floor, held together by the spangled jumpsuit.\n\n\"He is dead. Anyone who kills Dracula must die,\" said Indira quietly, but not like she was going to rush over and rip my throat out.\n\n\"Any vampire who kills Dracula must die,\" Pam corrected. \"But Sookie is not a vampire, and this was not Dracula.\"\n\n\"She killed one impersonating our founder,\" Eric said, making sure he could be heard throughout the club. \"Milos was not the real Dracula. I would have staked him myself if I had had my wits about me.\" But I was standing right by Eric, my hand on his arm, and I knew he was shaking.\n\n\"How do you know that? How could she tell, a human who had only a few moments in his presence? He looked just like the woodcuts!\" This from a tall, heavy man with a French accent.\n\n\"Vlad Tepes was buried at the monastery on Snagov,\" Pam said calmly, and everyone turned to her. \"Sookie asked him how he'd escaped from his tomb at T\u00e2rgovi\u015fte.\"\n\nWell, that hushed them up, at least temporarily. I began to think I might live through this night.\n\n\"Recompense must be made to his maker,\" pointed out the tall, heavy vampire. He'd calmed down quite a bit in the last few minutes.\n\n\"If we can determine his maker,\" Eric said, \"certainly.\"\n\n\"I'll search my database,\" Bill offered. He was standing in the shadows, where he'd lurked all evening. Now he took a step forward, and his dark eyes sought me out like a police helicopter searchlight catches the fleeing felon on Cops. \"I'll find out his real name, if no one here has met him before.\"\n\nAll the vamps present glanced around. No one stepped forward to claim Milos\/Dracula's acquaintance.\n\n\"In the meantime,\" Eric said smoothly, \"let's not forget that this event should be a secret amongst us until we can find out more details.\" He smiled with a great show of fang, making his point quite nicely. \"What happens in Shreveport, stays in Shreveport.\"\n\nThere was a murmur of assent.\n\n\"What do you say, guests?\" Eric asked the non-vamp attendees.\n\nColonel Flood said, \"Vampire business is not pack business. We don't care if you kill each other. We won't meddle in your affairs.\"\n\nCalvin shrugged. \"Panthers don't mind what you do.\"\n\nThe goblin said, \"I've already forgotten the whole thing,\" and the madwoman beside him nodded and laughed. The few other non-vamps hastily agreed.\n\nNo one solicited my answer. I guess they were taking my silence for a given, and they were right.\n\nPam drew me aside. She made an annoyed sound, like \"Tchk,\" and brushed at my dress. I looked down to see a fine spray of blood had misted across the chiffon skirt. I knew immediately that I'd never wear my beloved bargain dress again.\n\n\"Too bad, you look good in pink,\" Pam said.\n\nI started to offer the dress to her, then thought again. I would wear it home and burn it. Vampire blood on my dress? Not a good piece of evidence to leave hanging around someone's closet. If experience has taught me anything, it's to dispose instantly of bloodstained clothing\n\n\"That was a brave thing you did,\" Pam said.\n\n\"Well, he was going to bite me,\" I said. \"To death.\"\n\n\"Still,\" she said.\n\nI didn't like the calculating look in her eyes.\n\n\"Thank you for helping Eric when I couldn't,\" Pam said. \"My maker is a big idiot about the prince.\"\n\n\"I did it because he was going to suck my blood,\" I told her.\n\n\"You did some research on Vlad Tepes.\"\n\n\"Yes, I went to the library after you told me about the original Dracula, and I Googled him.\"\n\nPam's eyes gleamed. \"Legend has it that the original Vlad III was beheaded before he was buried.\"\n\n\"That's just one of the stories surrounding his death,\" I said.\n\n\"True. But you know that not even a vampire can survive a beheading.\"\n\n\"I would think not.\"\n\n\"So you know the whole thing may be a crock of shit.\"\n\n\"Pam,\" I said, mildly shocked. \"Well, it might be. And it might not. After all, Eric talked to someone who said he was the real Dracula's gofer.\"\n\n\"You knew that Milos wasn't the real Dracula the minute he stepped forth.\"\n\nI shrugged.\n\nPam shook her head at me. \"You're too soft, Sookie Stackhouse. It'll be the death of you some day.\"\n\n\"Nah, I don't think so,\" I said. I was watching Eric, his golden hair falling forward as he looked down at the rapidly disintegrating remains of the self-styled Prince of Darkness. The thousand years of his life sat on him heavily, and for a second I saw every one of them. Then, by degrees, his face lightened, and when he looked up at me, it was with the expectancy of a child on Christmas Eve.\n\n\"Maybe next year,\" he said.\n\n## The Mournful Cry of Owls\n\nChristopher Golden\n\nChristopher Golden is the author of novels including The Myth Hunters, Wildwood Road, and Of Saints and Shadows, and the Body of Evidence series of teen thrillers. With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the coauthor of the dark fantasy series The Menagerie, the young readers fantasy series OutCast, and the comic book miniseries Talent. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. He is currently collaborating with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola to write Baltimore, or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.\n\nOn a warm, late summer's night, Donika Ristani sat on the roof outside her open window\u2014fat-bellied acoustic guitar in her hands\u2014and searched for the chords that would bring life to the music she knew lay within her. The shingles were warm from the sun, though an hour had passed since dusk, and the smell of tar and cut grass filled her with a pleasant summery feeling that kept her normally flighty spirit from drifting into fancy.\n\nThe radio played in her room, competing with the music of the woods around the house\u2014the crickets and owls and rustling things\u2014which grew to a crescendo as though attempting to draw her down amongst the trees. Her fingers plucked and strummed, for she despised the use of a pick, and she discovered a third melody that created a kind of balance between the radio and the woods, the inside and outside.\n\nJoe Jackson sang \"Is She Really Going Out with Him?\" Donika liked the song well enough, but her thoughts were elsewhere, thinking about inside and outside\u2014about the person she was for her mother's sake, and the person that all of her instincts told her she ought to be. She found herself strumming Harry Chapin's \"Taxi,\" lost in her head, and singing along to the weird bridge in the middle of the tune.\n\nI've been letting my outside tide me over 'til my time runs out.\n\nThe truth frustrated the hell out of her and she brought her right hand down on the strings to stop herself playing another note of that song. Her gaze drifted down her driveway to the darkened ribbon of Blackberry Lane, searching for headlights, for some sign of her mother's return. Without so much as a glimmer from the road, she looked out across the thick woods north of the house, impatient to be down there, following the path to Josh Orton's house. He'd be waiting already, and she could practically feel his arms around her, his face nuzzling her throat.\n\nDonika laughed softly at herself; or perhaps she sighed. She couldn't tell the difference sometimes.\n\nThe DJ did his cool voice and introduced the next tune. Donika smiled and started playing the first notes on her acoustic before it even started on the radio. Bad Company. \"Rock and Roll Fantasy.\" Good song. Her bedroom walls were covered with posters for Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, and Sabbath, but she liked a little bit of everything. Most of her girlfriends would have laughed at some of the stuff she sang along to on the radio. Or maybe not. Hell, most of them thought Donna Summer the pinnacle of musical achievement.\n\nNow she wished she'd listened more closely to the Joe Jackson tune. She might have to break into her babysitting stash to buy that album.\n\nHer fingers moved up and down the frets, playing Bad Company by ear. She'd never played the song before, but the guitar was like an extension of herself and picking out the notes presented no greater difficulty than singing along. The crickets had gotten louder, but she managed not to hear them. The radio crackled a bit; some kind of interference, maybe the weather or a passing jet. She didn't understand such things very well. Turn on the box, the music came out. What else did she need to know?\n\nThe heat of the day still lingered in her skin the same way it did in the shingles. No more sticky humidity, so that was nice. She felt comfortably warm up there in her spaghetti strap tank top and cutoff jeans, as if the sun had gotten down inside her instead of setting over the horizon, and it would hide there until morning.\n\nOwls cried out in the woods, and Donika glanced up, searching the trees as though she might spot one, the strings of her guitar momentarily forgotten. Other people thought they were funny birds, but she had always heard something else in their hooting, a terrible sadness that she wanted to answer with her own frustrations.\n\nA flash of light came from the road. She watched the headlights move along Blackberry Lane and her breath caught as she thought of Josh again. When the car drove by without slowing, she sighed and lay against the slanted roof, the shingles rough and hot against her back. She hugged the guitar and wondered if Josh was sitting outside, waiting for her, or if he was up in his room listening to music on his bed. Both images had their appeal.\n\nSomehow she missed the sound of an approaching engine and looked up only as light washed across the trees and she heard tires rolling up the driveway. Donika sat forward as her mother's ancient Dodge Dart putted up to the house. When she turned off the engine, it ticked and popped, and then the door creaked open.\n\n\"Get off that roof, 'Nika!\"\n\nThe girl laughed. The woman had eyes like a hawk, even in the dark.\n\nShe slipped in through her bedroom window and put away her guitar before going downstairs. Her mother stood in the kitchen, looking through the day's mail. Qendressa Ristani had lush black hair like her daughter, but streaked with gray. She wore it pulled back tightly. Though her mother was nearly fifty, Donika thought her hairstyle too severe, more appropriate for a grandmother. Her clothes reflected the same sensibility, which probably explained why she never dated. Though she'd given up wearing black a decade or so back, Donika's mother still saw herself as a widow. Men might flirt with her\u2014she was prettier than most women her age\u2014but Qendressa would not encourage them. She'd been widowed young, and had no desire to replace the only man she had ever loved.\n\nHer life was the seamstress shop where she worked in downtown Jameson, and the home she'd made for herself and her daughter upon coming to America a dozen years before. But her Old World upbringing still persisted in many ways, not the least of which was her insistence on using herbs and oils as homegrown remedies for all sorts of ills, both physical and spiritual.\n\n\"How was your day, Ma?\"\n\n\"Eh,\" the woman said, \"is the same.\"\n\nDonika grabbed her sandals and sat down at the table, slipping one on. Her mother dropped the mail on the table. As she slipped on her sandals, she looked up to find her mother staring at her.\n\n\"Where you going?\"\n\n\"Josh's. Sue and Carrie and a couple of Josh's friends are there already waiting for me. We're going to walk into town for pizza.\"\n\n\"You going to hang around those boys dressed like that?\"\n\nDonika flushed with anger and stood up, the chair scraping backward on the floor.\n\n\"Look, Ma, you need to get off this stuff. This is 1979, not 1950, and we're in Massachusetts, not Albania. You want me to be home when you get back from work so you won't worry about me? Okay, I sort of understand that. I don't like it, but I get it. But look around. I don't dress differently from other girls. Turn on the TV once in a while\u2014\"\n\n\"TV,\" her mother muttered in disgust, averting her eyes.\n\n\"I'm going to be sixteen tomorrow,\" Donika protested.\n\nQendressa Ristani sniffed. \"This is supposed to make me less worried? This is why I worry!\"\n\n\"Well, don't! I'm fine. Just let me enjoy being sixteen, okay?\"\n\nThe woman hesitated, taking a long breath, and then she nodded slowly and waved her daughter away. \"Go. Be a good girl, 'Nika. Don't make me shamed.\"\n\n\"Have I ever?\"\n\nFinally, her mother smiled. \"No. Never.\" Her expression turned serious. \"Tomorrow, we celebrate, though. Yes? Just the two of us, all the things you love for dinner. You can have your friends over on Friday and we have a cake. But, tomorrow, just us girls.\"\n\nDonika smiled. \"Just us girls.\"\n\nThe path emerged from the woods in the backyard of an older couple who were known to shout at trespassers from their screened-in back porch. Donika had never experienced their wrath and wondered if they didn't mind so much when a girl crossed their yard\u2014maybe thinking girls didn't cause as much trouble as boys\u2014or if they simply didn't see her. As she left the comfortable quiet of the woods and strolled across the back lawn and then alongside the house, she watched the windows, wondering if either of the old folks were looking out. Nothing stirred inside there. It hadn't been dark for long, but she wondered if they were already asleep, and thought how sad it must be to get old.\n\nWhen she reached the street, she saw Josh sitting on the granite curb at the corner, smoking a cigarette. Her sandals slapped the pavement as she walked and he looked up at the sound. One corner of his mouth lifted in a little smile that made her heart flutter. He flicked his cigarette away and stood to meet her, cool as hell in his faded jeans and Jimi Hendrix T-shirt.\n\n\"Hey,\" he said.\n\nDonika smiled, feeling strangely shy. \"Hey.\"\n\nJosh pushed his shoulder-length blond hair away from his eyes. \"Your mom kept you waiting.\"\n\n\"Sorry. Sometimes I think she stays late on purpose. Maybe she figures if she keeps me waiting long enough, I won't go out.\"\n\n\"So much for that plan.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you didn't give up on me,\" Donika said.\n\nThey'd been standing a couple of feet apart, just feeling the static energy of the distance between them. Now Josh reached out and touched her face.\n\n\"Never happen.\"\n\nA shiver went through her. Josh did that to her, just by standing there, and the way he looked at her.\n\nHis hand slipped around to the back of her neck and he bent to kiss her. Donika tilted her head back and closed her eyes, letting the details of the moment wash over her, the feel of him so near, the softness of his lips, the strange, burnt taste of nicotine as his tongue sought hers.\n\nOnly when they broke apart, a giddy little thrill rushing through her, did she look around and remember where they were. Lights were on in some of the houses along Rolling Lane, and anyone could be watching them.\n\nShe felt pleasantly buzzed, as though she'd had a few beers, but she slid her hand along his arm and tangled her fingers in his.\n\n\"We shouldn't be doing this out here. I told my mother Sue and Carrie and those guys were gonna be here and we were going to get pizza. If anyone ever saw us and told her, she'd have a fit.\"\n\n\"She doesn't think you've ever kissed me?\"\n\n\"I don't know, and I don't plan to ask,\" Donika said. \"God, she already thinks I'm slutty just for wearing cutoffs and hanging around with boys.\"\n\nJosh arched an eyebrow and took out another cigarette. \"Boys? Are there others?\"\n\nShe hit him. \"You know what I mean.\"\n\n\"Your mom's pretty Old World.\"\n\nDonika rolled her eyes. \"You have no idea. She burns candles for me and puts little bunches of dried herbs and stuff under my bed, tied in little ribbons. Pretty sure they're supposed to ward off boys.\"\n\n\"How's that going?\"\n\nDonika only smiled.\n\nJosh kissed her forehead. \"So, do you want to go get pizza?\"\n\n\"Only if you're hungry.\"\n\nJosh laughed softly, unlit cigarette in his hand. His blue eyes were almost gray in the nighttime. \"I could eat. I could always eat. But I'm good. We could just hang out. Why don't we walk downtown, get an ice cream or something?\"\n\n\"Or we could just go for a walk in the woods. I love those paths. Especially at night.\"\n\n\"You're not afraid?\" Josh asked as he thumbed his lighter, the little flame igniting the tip of his cigarette. He drew a lungful of smoke and stared at her.\n\n\"Why would I be?\" Donika said. \"I've got you with me.\"\n\nShe led him by the hand back across the street and through the yard of the belligerent old couple. Josh's cigarette glowed orange in the dark. The moon and stars were bright, but as they passed alongside the house and into the backyard of that old split-level house, with the canopy of the woods reaching out above them, the darkness thickened and little of the celestial light filtered through.\n\n\"Goddamn you kids!\" a screechy voice shouted from the porch. \"You're gonna burn the whole damn forest down with those cigarettes!\"\n\nDonika started and looked at the darkened porch anxiously. Josh put a hand up to try to keep himself from laughing, and that started Donika grinning as well. The voice was faintly ridiculous, like something out of a cartoon or a movie. On the porch, in the dark, another pinprick of burning orange glowed. The old man was smoking, too.\n\nJosh paused to drop the butt and grind it out with his heel. Then, laughing, they ran into the trees, following the path that had been worn there by generations.\n\nHand in hand, they followed the gently curving path through the woods and talked about their friends and families, and about music.\n\n\"I love talking about music with you,\" Josh told her. \"The way your eyes light up...I don't know, it's like you feel it inside you more than most people because you can make music with your guitar.\"\n\nDonika shuddered at that. No one had ever understood that part of her the way that Josh did. He liked the sad songs best, the tragic ones, just as she did. Their conversation meandered, but she didn't mind. All she wanted was his company. Mostly, they just walked.\n\nThe paths had been there forever, or so it seemed. There were low stone walls, centuries-old property markers that had been built up by hand and ran for miles. Old, thick roots crossed the path and small animals rustled in the branches above them and in the underbrush on either side. An entire system of paths ran through the woods. They reached a fork and followed the right-hand path. The left would have taken them up the hill toward her house, and that was the last place she wanted to go.\n\n\"You seem far away,\" Josh said as they passed through a small clearing where someone had built a fire pit. Charred logs lay in the pit and the stones around it had been blackened by flames.\n\nDonika squeezed his hand and looked up at him. \"Nope. Just happy. I love the woods. Being out here...it's so peaceful. So far away from other people. I walk through here all the time, but having you here with me makes it so much better.\"\n\nJosh stopped walking and gazed down at her. The moon and stars illuminated the clearing, and she saw the mischief in his eyes.\n\n\"Better how?\" he asked.\n\nShe gave him a shy little shrug. \"Just feels right.\"\n\nHe kissed her again and she could hear music in her head. Or maybe it was her heart. His hands slid down her back, pulling her close, so that their bodies pressed together. She liked the feel of him against her, his strong arms wrapped around her. Through his jeans she could feel his hardness pressing into her, and she liked that very much. Just knowing that she had that effect on him made her catch her breath.\n\nHis hands roamed, fingers tracing along her arms, and then he stepped back just slightly so that he could reach up and touch her breasts through the thin cotton of her tank top.\n\n\"Josh,\" she rasped, enjoying it far too much.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nDonika took his hands in hers and kissed him quickly. \"I think maybe I want ice cream after all.\"\n\n\"But it's beautiful right here.\"\n\nHe grinned and ducked his head, kissing her again. Their fingers were still intertwined and he made no attempt to pull his hands away, to touch her again. Donika felt her body yearning toward him, missing the weight and warmth of him.\n\nThis is it, she thought. This is what frightens Ma so much.\n\nDonika pulled her hands from his and slid her arms around him, breaking off the kiss. She lay her head on his chest and just held herself against him, nuzzling there. Josh stroked her hair.\n\nDeep in the woods, she heard an owl hoot sadly, and then another joined in. A chorus.\n\n\"I am far away,\" she confessed. \"But you're with me. I wish we could be even farther away, together. I love feeling lost in the woods, like something wild. When I'm out here alone, I like to just run. You'll laugh, but sometimes I imagine I'm running naked through the forest, like I'm some kind of fairy queen or something.\"\n\nJosh didn't laugh. \"Hmm. I like the sound of that,\" he said. \"What's stopping you?\"\n\nShe blushed deeply and stepped back, trying not to smile. One hip outthrust, she pointed at him.\n\n\"You are bad.\"\n\n\"Only in good ways. Seriously, I dare you.\"\n\nDonika's breath came in shallow sips as she regarded him, lips pressed together, corners of her mouth upturned. The mischief in his eyes seemed to have gotten inside of her somehow. Her skin tingled all over. Nodding her head, she crossed her arms.\n\n\"You first.\"\n\nWithout hesitation, he stripped off his T-shirt and dropped it at the edge of the path. He arched an eyebrow and looked at her expectantly.\n\nA rush went through her, a kind of freedom she'd never felt before. It was as though she had just woken from some strange slumber. She grabbed the bottom hem of her tank top and slid it up over her head, then unhooked her bra and let it drop to the ground. The night breeze brushed warmly against her, but she shivered.\n\nJosh stared at her, all the mischief and archness gone from his face, replaced by sheer wonderment. He'd never seen her breasts before\u2014Donika didn't know if he'd ever seen this much of any girl.\n\nShe didn't wait for him to make the next move. Their gazes locked as she kicked her sandals off and then moved her hand down, unbuttoning her cutoffs. She slid them and her panties down together and stepped out of them, tossing them on top of her tank.\n\n\"Jesus, you're beautiful,\" he whispered.\n\nThe breeze picked up, rustling leaves. Somewhere close by, the owls cried again. For once, the sound did not seem sad. Josh stepped toward her and she knew how badly he wanted to touch her. She could already imagine his hands on her, the way she had so many times at home in her bed.\n\nShe shook her head, smiling, and stepped backward. \"Uh-uh. Not so fast, mister. We're going to run, remember. And you're not quite ready.\"\n\nFor a moment he only stared at her, his mouth hanging open. Donika laughed at how silly he looked, but thrilled to know that she'd beguiled him so completely.\n\nStaggering around, hopping on one foot, Josh pulled off one sneaker and then the other. He shucked his jeans and then paused for a second before slipping off his underwear.\n\nDonika trembled at the sight of him. She'd seen an older boy from the neighborhood skinny-dipping in Bowditch Pond one time, but this was something else entirely.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said.\n\nJosh walked toward her. Donika backed up and then turned, giggling, and began to run as swiftly as she dared, watching the roots and rocks and fallen branches in her path. Josh pursued her, laughing even as he called for her to wait for him. As she ran, the thrill of it all rushed through her\u2014her nakedness, his nakedness and nearness, and the forest around them. In her whole life, she had never felt as wonderful as she did there in the woods, running wild, full of passion and laughter.\n\nThe heat rose from deep inside her, desire unlike anything she'd ever known. Flushed with abandon, she slowed her pace, and let Josh catch up. He nearly crashed into her and they slid together on the path. His lips were on hers and their tongues met. His hands were rough and caressing in equal turns, touching her everywhere, and she let him.\n\nA small part of her\u2014the part that remained her mother's daughter\u2014knew that she would not let him make love to her. But, oh, how she wanted to. Anything else he wished would be his, only not that.\n\nIn the branches above them, the owls sighed.\n\nTangled in her sheets, drifting in that limbo between sleep and wakefulness, Donika knew morning had come. She loved how long the summer days lasted; she just wished they didn't start so damned early. Dimly aware of the bedroom around her, she squeezed her eyes tightly closed and admonished herself for not having drawn the shades the night before. She rolled over to face the other direction, twisting the sheets even more. For a moment she remembered her walk in the woods with Josh the night before and the way his hands had felt on her. A contented moan escaped her lips as she slipped back into blissful oblivion.\n\nDrifting.\n\nSomewhere, lost in sleep, she sensed a presence enter the room and began to stir. Then someone started to sing, loudly and horribly, and Donika sat up in bed, drawing a sharp breath, eyes wide.\n\nHer mother sang \"Happy Birthday\" in a silly, overly dramatic fashion, gesturing with her hands as though onstage. She wore an enormous grin and Donika couldn't help laughing. Her mother always seemed so grim, and seeing her like this gave the girl such pleasure.\n\nWhen the song finished, Qendressa bowed deeply. Donika applauded, shaking her head. During her childhood, it had not been quite so uncommon for her mother to clown around for Donika's amusement. They'd shared so many wonderful times together. Now that she was older and their desires and morals clashed so often, it had become hard for Donika to remember those times.\n\nNot this morning, however. This morning, all the laughter came back to her. Her mother would be off to work in moments, decked out in her usual sensible skirt and blouse and dark shoes, and her hair was tied back severely, but for a few minutes, it felt like Donika was a little girl again.\n\n\"Thank you, thank you,\" Qendressa said, her accent almost unnoticeable as she mimicked performers she had seen on television. \"And for my next trick, I leave work early to come home and make all your favorites.\"\n\nShe ticked the parts of the birthday meal off on her fingers. \"Tav\u00eb kosi, Tirana furghes with peppers, and kadaif for dessert. With candles and more bad singing.\"\n\nDonika's stomach rumbled just thinking about dinner. The main course was baked lamb and yogurt, which she'd always loved. But the dessert\u2014she could practically taste the walnuts and cinnamon of the kadaif now.\n\n\"Can we have dinner for breakfast instead?\" she asked, stretching, extricating herself from her sheets.\n\nHer mother shook a finger at her. \"The birthday girl gets what she wants, but not until tonight. Breakfast, you make your own. Toast, I bet. You going out today?\"\n\n\"Maybe to the mall if Gina can borrow her mom's car.\"\n\n\"All right. Back by three o'clock, please. We'll cook together?\"\n\nDonika smiled. \"Wouldn't miss it.\"\n\nThat was the truth, too. There were times her mother drove her crazy with all her Old World stodginess, but on her birthday and on holidays, she loved nothing better than to spend hours in the kitchen, cooking with her mom. She could practically smell all the wonderful aromas that would fill the house later.\n\n\"What about the girls? You talk to them?\" Qendressa asked.\n\n\"Tomorrow night. They're going to come by to celebrate. We can just have pizza, though.\"\n\n\"Pizza, again?\" her mother said. \"You going to turn into pizza.\"\n\nDonika didn't argue. She wasn't about to confess that she and Josh had never gotten around to having pizza last night. Maybe that was the reason she felt so hungry this morning. Her belly growled and she felt a gnawing there, as if she hadn't eaten in weeks instead of half a day.\n\n\"We love pizza,\" she said, shrugging.\n\n\"I promised birthday cake tomorrow night, too. And if you are lucky, maybe some good singing.\"\n\n\"Chocolate cake?\" Donika asked, propping herself up on one arm, head still muzzy with sleep.\n\n\"Of course,\" her mother replied, as though any other kind would be unthinkable.\n\n\"Excellent!\"\n\nA flutter of wings came from the open window and a scratching upon the screen. Mother and daughter turned together to see a dark-eyed owl perched on the ledge outside the window, imperious and wise. Brown and white feathers cloaked the owl and it tucked its wings behind it.\n\n\"What the...? That's freaky,\" Donika said, sitting up in bed. \"I hear them in the woods all the time, but I've never seen one during the day. Do you think it's sick or some\u2014\"\n\n\"Away!\" her mother shouted. She rushed at the window and banged her open palm against the screen. A string of curses in her native tongue followed.\n\nThe owl cocked its head as if to let them know it wasn't troubled by Qendressa's attack, then spread its wings and took flight again. Through the window, Donika caught a glimpse of it gliding back toward the woods.\n\nShe stared at her mother. The woman had completely wigged out and now she stood by the window, arms around herself as though a frigid wind had just blown through the room. She had her back to her daughter.\n\n\"Ma?\"\n\nQendressa turned, a wan smile on her face. Donika studied her mother and realized that the birthday morning silliness was over. A strange sadness had come over her, as though the bird's arrival had forced her to drop some happy mask she'd been wearing. \"I should go to work,\" she said, but she seemed torn.\n\n\"What is it, Ma?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" she said with a wave of her hand, averting her gaze. \"Just...sixteen. You're not a girl anymore, 'Nika. Soon, you leave me.\"\n\nDonika kicked aside the sheet that still covered the bottom of her legs and climbed out of bed. She went to her mother. Even with no shoes on, she was the taller of the Ristani women.\n\n\"I'm not going anywhere, Ma.\"\n\nIt didn't sound true, even when she said it. There had been many days when Donika had dreamed of nothing but leaving Jameson, finding a life of her own, making her own decisions, and not having to live in the shadow of the old country anymore. Her body still weighted down by some secret sadness, Qendressa reached out and brushed Donika's unruly hair away from her eyes.\n\n\"Tonight, we talk about the future. And the past.\"\n\nDonika blinked. What did that mean? She would have asked but saw her mother stiffen. The woman's eyes narrowed as she stared at her daughter's bed.\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\nThe girl turned. Specks of dirt, a small leaf, and a few pine needles were scattered at the foot of the bed, revealed when Donika had whipped the sheet off of her. A shiver went through her, some terrible combination of elation and guilt. She tried to stifle it as best she could.\n\n\"We cut through the woods to get downtown. I always go that way. I took off my sandals. I like going barefoot out there. It's nice. It's all...it's wild.\"\n\nDonika couldn't read the look on her mother's face. If the woman suspected anything, she would have been angry or disappointed. Maybe those emotions were there\u2014maybe Donika read her mother's expression wrong\u2014but the look in her eyes and the way she took a harsh little breath seemed like something else. Weird as it was, in that moment, Donika thought her mother seemed afraid.\n\nThe woman turned, all grim seriousness now. At Donika's bedroom door she paused and looked back at her daughter, taking in the whole room\u2014the guitar, the stereo, the records and posters, and the clothes she would never approve of that were hung from the back of her chair and over the end of her bed.\n\n\"No boys here while I'm gone. No boys, 'Nika.\"\n\n\"I know, Ma. You think I'm stupid?\"\n\n\"No,\" her mother said, shaking her head, the sadness returning to her gaze. \"No, you my baby girl, 'Nika. I don't think you are stupid.\"\n\nWith that, Qendressa left. Donika stood and listened to her go down the stairs and out the door. She heard the car start up outside and the sound of tires on the driveway, and then all was silent again except for the birds singing outside the window and the drone of a plane flying somewhere high above the house.\n\nShe wasn't sure what her mother suspected or feared, didn't know what had caused her to behave so oddly or why she'd freaked out so completely at the sight of the owl. But Donika had the feeling it was going to be a very weird birthday.\n\nGina couldn't get the car, so the trip to the mall was off. Donika knew that she ought to have been bummed out, but she couldn't muster up much disappointment. She'd be seeing her friends tomorrow night, and today she wasn't in the mood to window-shop at the mall. The idea of wandering around Jordan Marsh or going to Orange Julius for a nasty cheese dog for lunch didn't have much appeal. If it had been raining, maybe she would have felt differently. But the day was beautiful, and in truth, she wanted to be on her own for a while.\n\nAll kinds of different thoughts were swirling in her head, and she wanted to make sense of them if she could. Her mother's strange behavior that morning troubled her, but she was still looking forward to the afternoon of them cooking together. The lamb in the fridge was fresh, not frozen. It had come from the butcher the day before. They'd put some music on\u2014something her mother liked, the Carpenters, maybe, or Neil Diamond\u2014and work side by side at the counter. Normally, that kind of music made Donika want to stick pencils in her eyes, but somehow with her mother whipping up the yogurt sauce for the lamb or slicing peppers as she hummed along, it seemed perfect.\n\nAt lunchtime she sat on the front porch with a glass of iced tea and a salami sandwich. A fly buzzed around the plate and then sat on the lip of her glass. Donika ignored it, more interested in the droplets of moisture that slid down the sides of the cup. She stared at them as she strummed her acoustic, singing a Harry Chapin song. Harry was one of the only musicians she and her mother could agree on.\n\n\"All my life's a circle,\" she sang softly, \"sunrise and sundown.\"\n\nHer fingers kept playing, but she faltered with the words and then stopped singing altogether. Despite her concerns about her mother, she could not focus on anything for very long without her thoughts returning to the previous night.\n\nPausing for a moment in the song, she leaned over to pick up the iced tea, pressing the glass against the back of her neck. The icy condensation felt wonderful on her skin. Donika took a long sip, liking the sound the melting ice made as it clinked together. Then she set the glass down and grabbed half of the salami sandwich. All morning she had been ravenously hungry, yet when she'd eaten breakfast\u2014Trix cereal, an indulgence left over from when she'd been very small\u2014it hadn't filled her at all. Later in the morning she'd had a nectarine and some grapes, and that hadn't done anything for her either.\n\nNow, even though she still felt as hungry as before\u2014hungrier, in fact, if that was possible\u2014the idea of eating her sandwich held very little appeal. She took an experimental bite, and then another. The salami tasted just as good as it always did, salty and a little spicy. But for some reason she simply did not want it.\n\nShe set the sandwich down and took another swig of iced tea to wash away the salt. Her fingers returned to the guitar and started playing chords she wasn't even paying attention to. Whatever song she might be drawing from her instrument, it came from her subconscious. Her conscious mind was otherwise occupied.\n\n\"You're a crazy girl,\" she said aloud, and then she smiled. Talking to herself sort of proved the point, didn't it? Her mother had always been a little crazy, and now Donika knew she shared the trait.\n\nHer hunger didn't come only from her stomach. Her whole body felt ravenous. Her skin tingled with the memory of Josh's hands\u2014on her belly, her breasts, the small of her back, the soft insides of her thighs\u2014and of his kisses, which touched nearly all of the places his hands had gone.\n\nShe squeezed her legs together and trembled at the thought of stripping off her clothes, of running through the woods, and then Josh, his body outlined in moonlight, catching up to her. She'd felt, in those moments when she raced along the rutted path and he pursued her, as though she could spread her arms and take wing...as though she could have flown, and taken Josh with her.\n\nTouching him, kissing him, that had been a little like flying.\n\n\"God,\" she whispered to herself. \"What's wrong with you?\"\n\nHer fingers fumbled on the strings and she stopped playing, a sly smile touching her lips. Nothing was wrong with her. It all felt so amazingly good. How could anything be wrong with that?\n\nBut that was a lie. There was one thing wrong.\n\nHer hunger. She yearned for Josh so badly that it gnawed at her insides. She wondered if her mother had seen it in her eyes this morning, had sensed it, had smelled it on her.\n\nDonika needed to have his hands on her again, to taste his lips and the salty sweat on his fingers and his neck. She felt as though she couldn't get enough of him. She wanted him completely, yearned to consume him, and the only way to do that was to do the one thing she promised herself she would not do.\n\nShe had to have him inside her.\n\nOnly that could satisfy her hunger.\n\nHer certainty thrilled and terrified her all at once.\n\nWith the smell of cinnamon filling the kitchen, her mother leaned back in her chair, hands over her stomach as though she had some voluminous belly.\n\n\"I don't think I ever eat again.\"\n\nDonika smiled, but it felt forced. They had followed the same recipes they had always used, brought over from Albania with her mother years ago, passed down for generations. Somehow, though, the food had tasted bland. Even the cinnamon had seemed stale in her mouth. The smell of dessert had been tantalizing, but its taste had not delivered on that promise. She had eaten as much as she did mainly because she hadn't wanted to hurt her mother's feelings. And the hunger remained.\n\nHow she could still feel hungry after such a meal\u2014particularly when nothing seemed to taste good to her\u2014Donika didn't know. She chalked it up to hormones. Today was her sixteenth birthday. According to her mother, she had become a woman all of a sudden, like flipping a switch. She had never believed it really worked that way, but given the way she felt, maybe it did. Maybe that was exactly how it worked. She always craved chocolate right before she got her period\u2014could have eaten gallons of ice cream if she'd given in\u2014so this might be similar.\n\nOr maybe it's love. The thought skittered across her mind. She'd heard of people not being able to eat when they were in love. It occurred to her that this could be another symptom.\n\nShe tasted the idea on the back of her tongue. Did she love Josh?\n\nMaybe.\n\nShe hungered for him, certainly. Longed for him. Could that be love? No. Donika had seen enough movies and read enough books to know that desire and love might not be mutually exclusive, but they weren't the same thing either.\n\nBut desire like this? It hurts. It burns.\n\n\"\u2014you listening to me, 'Nika?\"\n\n\"What?\" she asked, blinking.\n\nHer mother studied her, concern etched upon her face. \"You okay? You feel sick?\"\n\n\"No. Sorry, Ma. Just tired, I guess.\"\n\nA lame excuse. She expected her mother to call her on it, maybe to make some insinuating comment about her walk in the woods the night before, about how maybe if she wasn't always out talking to boys and running around with her friends, she wouldn't be so tired. Her mother didn't let her do very much, and she'd been hanging around the house all day playing guitar, and then cooking, but logic never stopped her mother from suspicion or judgment.\n\nBut Qendressa didn't say anything like that.\n\n\"You like dinner, though, right?\" she asked, and just then it seemed the most important question in the world to her. \"Your sixteenth birthday the sweetest. You should be happy today. Celebrate.\"\n\nDonika felt such love for her mother then. Sometimes she became so angry and frustrated with the woman's Old World traditions, but always she knew that beneath all of that lay nothing but adoration and worry, a mother's constant companions. She thought she understood fairly well for a fifteen-year-old girl.\n\nSixteen, she reminded herself. Sixteen, today.\n\n\"I love you, Ma.\"\n\nThey both seemed surprised she'd said it out loud. It had never been common to speak of love, though they both felt it all the time.\n\nHer mother smiled, took a long, shuddering breath, and then began to cry. Donika stared at her in confusion. Qendressa turned her face away to hide her tears and raised a hand to forestall any questions.\n\nAfter a moment, she wiped her eyes. \"You all grown, now, 'Nika. Walk with me. Tonight, I tell you the story of how you were born.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, how I was born?\"\n\nHer mother smiled and slid her chair back. It squeaked on the kitchen floor. \"Walk with me,\" she said as she stood. \"In the woods. How you like. And maybe you learn why you like it so much.\"\n\nDonika got up, dropping her napkin on the table. Bewildered, she tried to make sense of her mother's words and behavior, doing her best to push away the hunger inside her and to not think about the fact that Josh had said he'd be out on the corner later, waiting for her if she could manage to get out tonight.\n\nHer mother took her hand. \"Come.\"\n\nTogether they left the house. The screen door slammed shut behind them as if in emphasis, the house happy to have them gone. The porch steps creaked underfoot. When her mother led her across the driveway toward the path, Donika hesitated a moment. The woods were hers. She might see other people in there, but something about going into the forest with her mother troubled her. Much as Donika loved her, she didn't want to share.\n\n\"Ma,\" she said, hesitating.\n\n\"It won't take long,\" Qendressa said. \"But you need to know the story. Should have told you long time ago. I am selfish.\"\n\nDonika shook her head. What the hell was her mother talking about?\n\nThey walked into the trees. The summer sun had fallen low on the horizon. Soon dusk would arrive. For now, wan daylight still filtered through the thick trees, slanted and pale, shadows long.\n\n\"My mother, she knew things,\" Qendressa began. Her grip on Donika's hand tightened. \"How to make two people love. How to heal sickness in body and heart. How to keep spirits away.\"\n\nDonika tried not to smile. This was what their big talk was about? Old World superstition?\n\n\"She was a witch?\"\n\nHer mother scowled. \"Witch. Stupid word. She was smart. Clever woman. She used herbs and oils\u2014\"\n\n\"So she was the village wise woman or whatever,\" Donika said, and it wasn't a question this time. She thought it was kind of adorable the way her mother said herbs\u2014with a hard H, like the man's name. But this talk of potions and evil spirits made her impatient, too. \"I get that she taught you all of that stuff, but how can you still believe it after living in America so long?\"\n\nHer mother stopped and pulled her hand away. \"Will you be quiet and listen?\"\n\nThe anguish in her mother's voice stopped her cold. Donika had never heard her mother speak that way. The daylight had waned further and now the slices of sky that could be seen through the thatch of branches had grown a deeper blue. Not dusk yet, but soon. It seemed to be coming on fast.\n\n\"I'll listen,\" she said.\n\nHer mother nodded, then turned and continued along the path. Donika watched the ground, stepped over roots and rocks. The woods were strangely quiet as the dusk approached, with the night birds and nocturnal animals not yet active and the other beasts of the forest already making their beds for the evening.\n\n\"She knew things, my mother. And so she taught me these things, just as I teach you to cook the old way. When I married, I made a good wife. Even then, I made money as a seamstress, just like now. But always my husband knew that one day the people in our town would start to come to me with their troubles the way they came to my mother. The ones who believed in superstitions.\"\n\nDonika couldn't help but hear the admonishment in those words. Her mother wanted her to know she wasn't the only one who still believed in such things.\n\n\"There were spirits there, in the hills and the forest. Always, there were spirits, some of them good and some terrible. Other things, too. Believe if you want, or don't believe. But still I will tell you.\n\n\"I loved my husband. He had strong hands, but always gentle with me. Some people, they acted strange around my mother and me, but not him. He was so kind and smiled always, and when he laughed, all the women in our town wanted to take him home. But it was me he loved. We talked all the time about babies, about having a little boy to look just like him, or a little girl with my eyes.\n\n\"And then he dies. Such a stupid death. Fixing the roof, he slips and falls and breaks his neck. No herbs or oils could raise the dead. He was gone, Donika. Always his face lit up when he talked of babies and now he was dead and the worst part was there wouldn't be any babies.\"\n\nThe patches of sky visible up through the branches had turned indigo. The dusk had come on, and full darkness was only a heartbeat away. It had happened almost without Donika realizing, and now she heard rustling in the underbrush and in the branches above. A light breeze caressed her bare arms and legs and only then did she realize how warm she'd been.\n\nShe halted on the path and stared at her mother, eyes narrowed. \"What are you talking about, Ma? What the hell are you...you had me.\"\n\nQendressa slid her hands into the pockets of her skirt as though fighting the urge to reach out and take her daughter's hand. Her features were lost in the gathering darkness.\n\n\"No, 'Nika. You came later.\"\n\n\"How could I\u2014\"\n\n\"Hush now,\" her mother said. \"Just hush. You want to know. You need to know. So hush.\"\n\nSomething shifted in the branches right above them and an owl hooted softly, sadly. Her mother glanced up sharply and scanned the trees as though the mournful cry of that night bird presented some threat.\n\nDonika shook her head, more confused than ever. \"Ma?\"\n\nQendressa narrowed her eyes and took a step away from her daughter, casting herself in shadows again. \"You know the word shtriga?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"No.\" Her mother sighed, and the sound was enough to break Donika's heart. \"I was so much like you, 'Nika. Still very young, though already I was a widow. So many questions in my head. I walked in the forest always, cold and grieving and alone. I knew I had to have a baby, to be a mother. I would never love another, but a child I could love. I could have what my husband and I dreamed of...even if part of it is only a dream.\n\n\"One night I am in the forest, walking and dreaming, and I hear voices. Some men and some women. I hear a laugh, and I do not like the way it sounds, that laugh. So I walk quietly, slowly, and go through the trees, following the voices. I walked in the forest so much that I learned to make almost no noise at all. From the trees, I see them, two women and three men, all with no clothes. I felt ashamed to spy on them like that. I would have gone, but could not look away.\n\n\"They looked up at the sky and reached up to their mouths and they slipped off their skins, like they were only jackets. Inside were shtriga. They looked like owls, but they were not. I could not breathe and just watched, praying not to be seen. They flew away. I stood there until I could not hear the wings anymore and then I could breathe again.\"\n\nQendressa paused. Donika realized that she had been holding her breath, just the way her mother had described. As the story unfolded, she had pictured it all in her mind, so simple to imagine because of all of the hours she had spent walking these woods by herself and because, just last night, she and Josh had been naked beneath the trees and the night sky. But this...her imagination could only go so far.\n\n\"Ma, you must have been dreaming. You said you were dreaming, right? You fell asleep. That couldn't have been real.\"\n\nHer mother approached her, stepping into the moonlight, and Donika saw the tears streaking her face. Sorrow weighed on her and made her look like an old woman.\n\n\"No?\" Qendressa said.\n\nSomewhere in the trees, an owl hooted. Donika flinched and looked up, searching the branches, just as her mother had done. A second owl replied, sharing the sad song.\n\n\"Even when they were gone, I could not go away. I should have run. I did not know when they would be back for their skins, the shtriga, but I knew that they would be back. The shtriga went 'round the town and through the forest and they hunted the lustful and licentious. They had the scent of those whose lust was strongest, and the shtriga drank their blood to sate their own hungers.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a vampire,\" Donika said.\n\nQendressa frowned, shaking her head. \"No, 'Nika. Vampires are make-believe. The shtriga are real. But the power they have, it has rules. The shtriga must come back to its skin by morning.\n\n\"My mother had told me many stories of them. How they grow. How to stop them. And I dreamed of a baby, 'Nika. It hurt my heart, I wanted it so much.\n\n\"I knew I only had till morning, and maybe not even that long. I ran into the clearing and I took the skin of one of the women, with her beautiful black hair. I carried it home, hurrying and falling, and I locked the door behind me. I took my scissors and sat at my worktable and I cut the skin of the shtriga. I cut away large pieces and later I burned them.\n\n\"And then I started to sew. With the shtriga's black hair for my thread, I patched the skin back together, only now it was not the skin of a grown woman, but the skin of a baby girl.\"\n\nDonika shivered and hugged herself, staring at her mother's eyes shining in the moonlight, tears glistening on her face.\n\n\"No,\" the girl said.\n\nWhen her mother spoke again, her voice had fallen to the whisper of confession.\n\n\"I sat and waited in the corner of the room, in a chair that my husband had loved so much. A little before dawn, the shtriga came looking for her skin. I left the window open and the owl flew in and landed on my worktable. It spread its wings and ducked its head down to pick at the skin it had left behind. The owl pushed itself into the skin.\n\n\"When the sun rose, a baby girl lay on my worktable and she cried, so sad, so lonely. I took her in my arms and rocked her and I sang to her an old song that my mother loved, and my baby loved it, too. She didn't cry anymore.\"\n\nQendressa bit her lip and gazed forlornly at her daughter. Through her tears, she began to sing that same old song, a lullaby that Donika knew so well. Her mother had been singing it to her all her life.\n\n\"I don't believe you.\"\n\nBut then the owls began to cry their mournful song again, hooting softly, not only one or two but four or five of them now. Donika saw the fear in her mother's eyes as the woman searched the trees. Qendressa put out a hand to her.\n\n\"Come, 'Nika. We go home.\"\n\nDonika stared at her.\n\n\"I don't believe you,\" she said again.\n\nBut she could taste the salt of her own tears and feel them warm upon her cheeks. She backed away from her mother's outstretched hand, shaking her head. Denials rose up in her heart and mind but somehow would not reach her lips.\n\nShe knew. The hunger churned in her gut, gnawing at her, and she knew.\n\n\"Why did you tell me?\"\n\nQendressa sobbed. \"Because you are not my baby anymore, 'Nika. You're sixteen. Sixteen years since that night. I know the stories. You are shtriga now.\"\n\nDonika felt something break inside her. She spun on one heel and ran. Low branches whipped at her face and she raised her arms to protect herself. She stumbled over roots and rocks that she'd always avoided before. The owls hooted above her, and now she could hear their wings flapping as they moved through the trees, keeping pace.\n\nIn her life, she had never felt so cold. No matter how fast she ran, no matter how her pulse quickened, she could not get warm. Her sobs were words, denials that felt as hollow as her own stomach. The hunger clutched at her belly and a yearning burned in her. Desire.\n\nJosh. She summoned an image of him in her mind and focused on it. They could run together. He would hold her. He could touch her, and maybe, for a little while, the madness and hunger would fade.\n\nA numbness came over her, but Donika began to get control of herself. She still wept, but silently now. Her feet were surer on the path. She saw the stone wall to one side and the fire pit ahead and the memory of last night gave her something to hold on to.\n\nSoon, she found herself at the end of the path, stepping out into the backyard of the bitter old couple. An owl hooted, back in the woods, and she hurried away from the trees, wanting to leave the forest behind for the first time in her life.\n\nShe strode across the back lawn unnoticed. A dog barked nearby, the angry yip of a canine scenting the presence of an enemy. Donika made her way between houses, but as she came in sight of the corner where Josh would be waiting, she paused.\n\nHidden in the night-black shadows of those homes, she watched him. Josh sat on the curb, smoking a cigarette, content to be by himself. He waited for her and didn't mind. In the golden glow of a nearby streetlamp, he was beautiful to her. They would run through the dark woods together once again, but this time she would give herself to him.\n\nDesire clawed at her insides. She ran her tongue out to wet her lips. She could almost taste the salt of his skin, and the urge to do so, to taste him, tugged at her.\n\nA smile touched her lips and she almost called out.\n\nDonika's smile faded.\n\nNo, she thought. It isn't love. Desire isn't love. Hunger isn't.\n\nShe understood hunger now. Donika fled silently back into the woods, where she belonged. The owls cried and flew with her. Loneliness clutched at her until she realized that she wasn't alone at all. She had never been alone.\n\nThe woods received her with love. She could never go back to her mother's house. Not now.\n\nShe hurtled along the path and then left the trail, breaking off into rough terrain. She raced through the woods, leaped fallen branches, and exulted in the night wind whispering around her. Her tears continued to fall but they were no longer merely tears of sorrow. Her mind whirled in a storm of emotions, but beneath them all, the hunger remained.\n\nSurrendering to the forest and the night, she stripped her clothes off as she ran, paying no attention to where she left them. The moonlight and the breeze caressed her naked flesh and now the warmth returned to her at last. She felt herself burning with want. With need. And then she could feel her skin hanging on her the same way that clothes did, and she reached up to the edges of her mouth and pulled it wide like a hood, slipping it back over her head.\n\nDonika slid from her skin and, at last, took flight, returning to the night sky after sixteen very long years. Reborn.\n\nShe flew through the trees, thinking again of the boy she desired, thinking that maybe he would be inside her tonight after all, and they would both get what they wanted.\n\nHer mouth opened in a low, mournful cry. It was a tune she'd always known, a night song that had been in her heart all along.\n\n## I Was a Teenage Vampire\n\nBill Crider\n\nBill Crider is the author of fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die and was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel for Dead on the Island. He won the Golden Duck award for best juvenile science fiction novel for Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror. He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story \"Chocolate Moose.\" His latest novel is Murder Among the OWLS. Check out his home page at www.billcrider.com.\n\nIf you really want to hear about it, which a lot of people do, being naturally curious, you probably want to know where I was born, and what I was like as a kid, and how I wound up living (in a manner of speaking) under a bridge, and all that Catcher in the Rye kind of crap, but I just don't feel like talking about any of that right now, and anyway it's not all that interesting, to tell you the truth.\n\nI'll tell you how I got to be a goddam vampire, though. That's pretty interesting. It was all because of my sister, Kate, who you'd think would know better, for Crissake, because she was practically a high school graduate, but then there aren't a lot of geniuses in my family, including me, although I did make a pretty good grade in a civics class one year.\n\nKate can't take all the blame. If she'd never seen those movies, it might have been different. It wasn't my fault, though. I was just an innocent bystander.\n\nAnyway, being a vampire isn't as much fun as you might think it is. I mean, you probably think it's all about the cape and the gleaming white fangs and the ripping good times you could have after the goddam sun goes down. Or maybe you don't think that, but that's what I thought, which shows how much I knew because I was wrong. Dead wrong, just to throw in a little vampire humor there.\n\nWhat happened is that my sister was planning this big party for her eighteenth birthday, which happened to be on Halloween, and she wanted it to be really special. My crummy parents said she could do whatever she pleased, which is what they always said when she asked for anything because they liked her best. You probably think that's just sour grapes, but it's not that. It's just the way it was, and it never bothered me because I was used to it, after all.\n\nWhat she wanted was a vampire.\n\n\"Like Christopher Lee,\" Kate said. She has this way of brushing her hair back out of her eyes when she talks, which is frankly pretty irritating, but she thinks it's cute and that the boys like it. I don't know about other boys, but it just seems phony to me. \"Like that movie we saw last year, Horror of Dracula.\"\n\nShe went to a lot of movies like that. I Was a Teenage Werewolf. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. But she liked stuff with vampires best. They'd never made one called I Was a Teenage Vampire or she would have been first in line.\n\n\"You know,\" Kate said. \"Remember what the ads said? 'The chill of the tomb won't leave your blood for hours.'\"\n\nShe tried to say the last part in a deep, creepy voice but it wasn't deep, and it wasn't creepy. It was just phony.\n\n\"You don't have to laugh,\" she said, because I couldn't help it. \"It's your stupid friend Binky who says he knows a real vampire.\"\n\n\"Binky wouldn't know a vampire if it bit him in the ass,\" I said, which I knew was a pretty crude thing to say, even to my sister, but I was getting tired of the way she was brushing at her hair. Besides, I was wrong, as it turned out. \"And he's not my friend.\"\n\n\"Well, he's certainly not my friend,\" she said. \"And you don't have to use that kind of language.\"\n\nBinky wasn't really anybody's friend. He was just this guy that was always coming around, wanting to be somebody's friend and making cracks like he thought they were jokes, but nobody ever laughed at them. He had a pointy nose that was always dripping, and big sad eyes, and hair that he needed to wash a whole lot more often than he did. He hardly ever smiled because he had pretty dingy teeth and he didn't use his tube of Ipana any too regularly, at least as far as I could tell.\n\nHe'd told me about this vampire that he'd met. It was supposed to be this big hairy secret just between me and him because we were such good friends. That's what he thought, anyway. But Kate had wormed it out of me. She has a way of doing that. I never should have told her, but I did, and there was nothing I could do to change that.\n\n\"I guess if anybody knows a real vampire, it's Binky,\" Kate said. Her name's really Katherine, but she thinks Kate is sophisticated or something. \"Anyway, he says he does, and that's what I need to make the party perfect.\"\n\nShe should never have gone to see that movie, is what I think. Now she had the idea that a party with the girls dressed up in filmy nightgowns and guys looking like Igor or whatever his name was would be just the ticket. But she said it just wouldn't work unless she had a vampire to liven things up.\n\n\"Maybe Dad could be the vampire,\" I said. \"He likes to dress up and stuff. He even has a tuxedo.\"\n\n\"That's so pass\u00e9,\" she said, brushing back her hair. I thought what she ought to do was cut off her bangs, but nobody ever asked me about stuff like that. \"And Dad would make a terrible vampire.\"\n\nShe was right about that. He was more the Mr. Peepers type, and he seemed to be getting more that way all the time, which might have been because our mother was a lot like Rip Van Winkle's wife in that story we had to read at school.\n\n\"So that's why you have to talk to Binky,\" Kate said. This time she flipped her hair out of her eyes by tossing her head, which was even more irritating than if she'd used her hand. \"If there's a real vampire around, it would make the party just perfect. Will you do it?\"\n\n\"A real vampire would be pretty dangerous,\" I said. I didn't even believe in vampires, and I thought Binky was full of crap. I was just trying to get her to shut up. I should have known better. Nobody could get Kate to shut up.\n\n\"We'll have garlic and crosses and holy water,\" she said. \"It won't be dangerous.\"\n\n\"That stuff never works in the movies.\"\n\n\"You don't know anything. You don't really like those movies. You think they're not intellectual.\"\n\n\"I never said that,\" I told her, and it was the truth, even if she was right about what I thought.\n\n\"You didn't have to say it. You sit around and observe everybody, like you think you're better than us. But you're not. You just like to think so.\"\n\nI couldn't remember ever winning an argument with Kate, and I knew she'd never let up (she was a lot like our mother that way) so I finally said I'd talk to Binky if she'd do my geometry problems for a week. Not that I couldn't do them myself, which I could, but I had to get something from her or she'd think she had the upper hand on me, which she didn't, not really.\n\nShe thought she was a whiz at geometry, so she said she'd do the problems, and of course that meant I had to talk to Binky whether I wanted to or not.\n\nOur high school was a big redbrick two-story building, and it smelled like that red stuff the janitors throw on the wooden floors before they sweep them. I've never figured out how that stuff is supposed to clean the floors, but I kind of liked the smell of it. I actually even liked the school. It's just most of the students and faculty that I couldn't stand.\n\nWhen I went to school the next morning, not long before the first bell, the girls were all talking about how they'd seen Frankie Avalon sing \"Venus\" on American Bandstand the day before. That was their intellectual level, for Crissake, watching American Bandstand and liking Frankie Avalon. The guys were mostly farting and picking their noses, which was about their intellectual level. They didn't like Frankie Avalon any more than I did, though; I'll say that for them.\n\nI couldn't find Binky until Fred Burley told me that he was shut in his locker. Binky was small and weak, so some wit was always doing that to him.\n\n\"Who did it this time?\" I asked. \"Harry Larrimore?\"\n\nHarry was usually the one who did it. He'd done a few things to me, too, including giving me a terrific wedgie just before geometry class one day. Harry was a lot bigger than I was, so there was nothing I could do to him. I just went on into the class. I had trouble walking into the room, and everybody got a big laugh out of it, even Mrs. Delaney, the teacher, though she tried to hide it.\n\n\"I don't think anybody put Binky in his locker,\" Fred told me. \"I think he just likes it in there.\"\n\nI didn't see how that was possible. Who could like being closed up in a little dark space like that? There was no use in trying to explain that to Fred, though. If it didn't have something to do with a ball, Fred had trouble figuring it out.\n\nI eluded the teachers and sneaked up to the second floor where the sophomore lockers were lined up along the wall across from the study hall. The lockers were about four feet tall and painted gunmetal gray. They had little louvers at the top. I think the louvers were put there as a safety measure in case somebody left his stinky gym shoes inside but those vents were a lifesaver for some of the kids who got locked inside.\n\nNobody else was in the hall because we weren't supposed to go up on the second floor before the bell. We might get into all kinds of unsupervised trouble. Anyway, it was very quiet in the hall, but I heard a noise coming from locker number 146, which was Binky's. It wasn't loud. It sounded as if someone might be reading a book in there and flipping the pages. That couldn't be it, though. Binky was weird, but not weird enough to try to read in the dark.\n\nI stood in front of the locker for a few seconds and listened. \"Binky?\" I said.\n\n\"Carleton?\"\n\nThat's my crummy name, Carleton, and I try to get people to call me Carl, which isn't so bad, but nobody will do it, the bastards. They'll call my sister Kate, but they won't even give me the time of day.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I said. \"It's me.\" I know I should have said, \"It is I,\" because old Mrs. Shanklin, our English teacher, keeps telling us how we should use correct grammar at all times if we want people to respect us, but I think it sounds phony as hell to tell you the truth, so I never do it. \"Were you expecting somebody else?\"\n\nHe couldn't have been because nobody else ever came by to let him out of his locker. I didn't come by because he was my friend, though, because he wasn't. It's just that I couldn't treat anybody like the rest of the morons did him.\n\n\"What do you want?\" he said.\n\n\"I need to ask you a favor.\"\n\n\"I'm busy right now, Carleton. I have a test in first period.\"\n\n\"You're studying in the locker?\"\n\n\"That's right. Go away and leave me alone.\"\n\nThat's the thanks I got for being the one who tried to look out for him. I started to tell him what an ungrateful bastard he was, but I thought better of it.\n\n\"It's about the vampire,\" I said. I figured that would get his attention.\n\nThere was a dull thud, like a book being slammed shut. \"You know I can't talk about him, Carleton. I told you that. Now go away. I need to study, and I can't be late for class. If I get another tardy, Old Man Harkness will give me detention for a month.\"\n\nBinky got a lot of tardies, mainly because he was shut up in his locker so much. I did my best to help, but I couldn't remember to go by and let him out every single day.\n\n\"I'm going to open the door, Binky. Just don't run off.\"\n\n\"I wish you'd just go away.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not going anywhere. And you better not, either.\"\n\nI'd let Binky out so many times that he didn't even have to tell me the combination to his lock. I'd memorized it long ago. But this time, I didn't need the combination because the lock was missing. All anybody needed to do was lift up on the handle and the door would come open. Binky could have jiggled it from inside easily enough. He must have been dumber than I thought.\n\nI opened the door and Binky stepped out into the hall. He was so short and so skinny that he hadn't even been very cramped. For a change his nose wasn't dripping, which I have to admit was an improvement. He was holding his civics book in one hand with his finger in it like he was marking his place.\n\nHe ran the other scrawny hand, the one without the book, through his lank blondish hair and said, \"I have to go to class, Carleton.\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" I said.\n\nHe looked at me like I was nuts. \"Very funny. I didn't ask you to let me out.\"\n\nHe tried to edge to the side and slip around me, but I moved in front of him.\n\n\"The vampire,\" I said.\n\n\"What about the vampire?\"\n\n\"I need to talk to him.\"\n\nThe first bell rang, and people started coming up the stairs and milling around. I could tell that Binky was going to make a run for it, so I grabbed the front of his shirt. He looked up at me with his sad black eyes and said, \"I don't think that would be a good idea, Carleton.\"\n\n\"I know it's not a good idea,\" I told him. \"It's my sister's idea, so it's obviously pretty stupid.\"\n\nI explained the situation in a low voice so nobody could hear me talking about a vampire in the hall. They'd think I was as crazy as Binky if they did.\n\nI told Binky about the party. While I was talking, I held on to Binky's shirt. He might make a break at any second, even though there was plenty of time for him to get to class before the second bell.\n\n\"That's really dumb, Carleton,\" he said when I was finished telling him Kate's plan. \"Even for your sister, it's dumb. You shouldn't mess with a vampire. It's dangerous.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but she's going to do my geometry problems for a week, so we have to talk to the vampire.\"\n\n\"That wasn't the deal you made with Kate.\"\n\nI asked him what he meant by that. I was the one who made the deal, after all, so I should know what it was.\n\n\"She said she'd do the problems if you talked to me. Well, you talked to me. Case closed.\"\n\nI thought about it, and he was right, technically speaking. Except that Kate's mind didn't work that way. She didn't go in for loopholes and technicalities. She'd never do the geometry problems if I didn't try to get the vampire for the party. Not that I needed her help. I can do geometry. It was just the principle of the thing.\n\nI was still trying to explain that to Binky when he noticed that the hall had just about cleared out. He gave a sudden jerk and pulled away from me. I guess he wasn't as weak as I thought, and he was quicker than I'd have guessed. Before I could do anything about it, he was gone, escaping into Mr. Harkness's classroom. The ungrateful little bastard would be lucky if I ever let him out of his locker again.\n\nBinky tried to make things right during lunch period by offering me his pudding, as if anybody would want pudding that he'd been sniffling over for ten minutes, not that he was sniffling today. Nobody would have wanted it anyway because there were lumps in it. I knew that for sure because there were always lumps in the pudding they served in the cafeteria. There were plenty of rumors that explained what the lumps were, and all of them were unpleasant, to say the least.\n\n\"I've been thinking things over,\" he said. \"I'm sorry I ran off this morning.\"\n\nHe put a couple of thin cafeteria napkins on top of his chili to soak up the grease. He's probably the only one who does that. For that matter, he's probably the only one who actually eats the chili. He kills me; he really does.\n\nI wished he hadn't come to sit at my table, but I couldn't do anything about it, and the fact was that there was plenty of room there, and he knew nobody else was likely to be joining me. To tell you the truth, I wasn't a whole lot more popular than Binky was, but at least I was too big to be stuffed into a locker.\n\n\"That's okay,\" I said, hoping he wouldn't say anything else. \"I know you had to get to class.\" But I was pretty cheesed off at him if you want to know the truth.\n\n\"I should never have told you about the vampire,\" he said. \"That was a mistake.\"\n\n\"Too late,\" I said.\n\n\"Yeah. So I guess I'll take you to him.\"\n\nI stopped stirring my chili. That's what I do: I stir it. But I never eat more than a couple of bites. If I do, I'll have gas all during fourth period. I don't eat much of the pudding, either. I just stick the spoon in it and stir that around, too, checking for lumps.\n\n\"So now you'll take me to him?\"\n\nBinky nodded.\n\n\"What do you want from me, Binky?\"\n\n\"Who says I want anything?\"\n\nI didn't bother to answer that. Everybody wants something, and Binky was no different. After a couple of seconds he said, \"I want to come to the party.\"\n\nWell, there it was. He was just a goddam sophomore, and he wanted to go to a party thrown by a senior.\n\n\"Binky,\" I said, \"even I might not be invited to the party.\"\n\n\"No party, no vampire.\"\n\n\"Okay, I'll ask my sister. But no guarantees.\"\n\nHe thought it over. \"I guess that'll have to do.\"\n\n\"So we'll go invite the vampire?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"You better not be kidding me, Binky,\" I said.\n\nHe gave me a hurt look. \"Meet me outside the north door after sixth period.\"\n\n\"I'll be there,\" I said.\n\n\"You want my chili?\" he said. \"I soaked the grease off.\"\n\nFirst it was the pudding, and now the chili.\n\n\"What's the matter with you?\" I said.\n\n\"I guess I'm not hungry.\"\n\nI looked down at my own chili, and I couldn't really blame him.\n\nSee, the fact of the matter is that like I said, I didn't really believe in vampires. Now, it's a different story. Boy, do I believe in vampires now. But this was then.\n\nAnyway, I need to tell you about the house where the vampire lived. Back in the nineteenth century sometime, a guy who had more dollars than sense, as my father liked to say, had an old manor house dismantled over in England. The workers numbered the pieces and rebuilt the place outside our little town.\n\nI wasn't around in those days, of course, and neither was my father, but he knew about stuff like that, local history and all. He said they put the house together like some kind of 3-D jigsaw puzzle. The guy even had the plans for the grounds, and he had gardens and all that kind of thing fixed just the way they'd been over in England.\n\nThat's the way the story went, anyway. I never saw any of that myself because after a while, the guy died. He didn't have any kin that anybody knew about except some cousins in New York. They inherited the house and property, and they kept right on paying the taxes year after year, but they never even came to visit. The house was abandoned, and vines grew up all over the walls. The gardens and the shrubbery overgrew the grounds, and then the trees closed in.\n\nEventually the place got a kind of a reputation. You probably know the kind of thing I'm talking about: funny lights, strange noises, ghosts. I didn't believe in any of that kind of crap myself, but I didn't ever go out there to see if any of it was true. It wasn't that I was scared. I just didn't want to go. Hardly anybody else ever went out that way, either.\n\nExcept for Binky, who was, as I think I've said already, weird. He liked hanging around places like that. That's how he found the vampire.\n\nI met Binky after school, and we rode our bikes out of town for about two miles and turned down a little dirt road for another half mile. It's hard going on dirt, and I was hot and sweaty. Binky didn't seem bothered. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a cap pulled down low. I could hardly even see his eyes.\n\n\"I hope this guy's not a real vampire,\" I said when we stopped to rest. \"I think it would be a big mistake to invite some guy to a party and have him rip open our throats and drink the blood of virgins and stuff. I don't think it's what Kate has in mind. That wouldn't be any fun at all.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself,\" Binky said. \"All that sounds pretty good to me.\"\n\nHe sounded almost wistful, like he really believed it. He was weird, all right, but I didn't think he meant it. He'd nearly passed out in biology class when we were dissecting the frogs.\n\n\"It sounds messy,\" I said, trying to make a joke of it. I did that sometimes when things made me nervous. \"My parents would have a snit fit if the house got all messed up.\"\n\nBinky took me seriously, though. \"It wouldn't be like that. Vampires are pretty fastidious.\"\n\nI wasn't surprised that Binky knew a word like fastidious. He read a lot, and besides being weird he had what you might call a well-developed imagination. He read magazines with titles like Amazing and Astounding and Fantastic, the kind that had stuff like flying saucers and giant bugs on the covers. Sometimes on the same cover. Vampires, too, probably.\n\n\"How well do you know this vampire?\" I asked.\n\nBinky ducked his head. \"I didn't say I knew him.\"\n\nI'd figured as much.\n\n\"I just said I thought he was a vampire. You're the one who wanted to come out here.\"\n\nI looked up the road. The trees grew right up to both sides, and their branches hung over it and joined in the middle, so it looked like a green and gold and orange tunnel. It was so shady that it was almost dark under there. The house was at the end of the road, and it looked kind of spooky, to tell you the truth, like one of those houses you see in the posters for my sister's favorite movies. Maybe it even looked like the house in the Dracula movie she liked so much. I wasn't at all sure going to the house was a good idea now that I'd had a better look at it, but we'd come this far. I pushed my bike on down the dirt road. Binky followed along.\n\nWhen we got closer to the house, something flew out of an upstairs window. It looked a little like a bat, but I didn't really know what it was. It was too early for bats to be flying around, I thought, not that it mattered. I got this kind of a chill on the back of my neck like somebody had touched me there with a cold hand. I looked at my watch. It was only four-thirty, but it got dark kind of early at that time of year. The dirt road was covered with fallen leaves, and a little breeze came up from somewhere and blew them along in front of us.\n\n\"Probably nobody's home,\" I said. \"Maybe we should just go on back.\"\n\n\"We're already here,\" Binky said. \"You might as well see if anybody's home.\"\n\nThat sounded like a bad idea to me, but I didn't want to chicken out. My crummy sister would never let up if she found out. Neither would Binky, probably, and he was just the type to spread it all around school. If that happened, I'd get crammed into a locker more often than even Binky did. So I kept on going.\n\nThe house didn't look any better when we got to what had once been the front yard. It looked worse, to tell you the truth. There was no glass in any of the windows that I could see, and I think there were holes in the roof. I for sure saw a couple of holes in the stone walls where they weren't covered by the vines and bushes. Trees grew all over the place, but they weren't very tall.\n\nThe front door of the house didn't look too bad. It was made of heavy wood, and it didn't look as old as the rest of the house, which looked older than a hundred years. It even smelled old and moldy. If there was ever a place a vampire might pick to hide out, this would be it, all right.\n\nThe breeze had brought some clouds from somewhere, not storm clouds, but big puffy ones with black bottoms, and they blocked out most of the late afternoon sun. We might as well have been standing out on some old English moor somewhere.\n\nNeither one of us made a move to get any closer to the house. I thought Binky should go knock on the door. He didn't agree.\n\n\"You're the one with the invitation,\" he said.\n\n\"He wouldn't answer, anyway,\" I said. \"Not if he's a vampire. It's not nighttime yet.\"\n\nBinky gave me a disgusted look. \"You don't know much about vampires, do you?\"\n\n\"I saw Horror of Dracula,\" I said, which was a lie, but Binky didn't know that.\n\n\"Big deal. So did I. Have you ever read Dracula? The book, I mean.\"\n\n\"I've read a lot of stuff,\" I said.\n\n\"But not Dracula. If you had, you'd know the difference between the movies and real life.\"\n\n\"You're going to tell me that some made-up book is real life?\"\n\n\"Bram Stoker knew what he was talking about,\" Binky said, as positive as if he had a clue, which I was pretty sure he didn't. \"Anyway, his Dracula could come out in the daylight.\" He pointed at the house. \"I saw this guy in the daylight. So are you going to knock?\"\n\n\"Why don't you do it?\"\n\n\"You have to give him the invitation. It's your party, and it's your house you're inviting him to.\"\n\nIt was my sister's crummy party, and it was my parents' house, but I had a feeling Binky wasn't interested in fine distinctions like that. I laid my bike down on the ground and went up to the door. I didn't exactly rush. I wasn't feeling too good about things if you really want to know the truth about it. I mean, if the guy was really a goddam vampire, I could be in big trouble.\n\nThe wood of the door was dark and old, but solid. There was no bell, not even a knocker. Maybe whoever lived there wasn't expecting any guests. Or maybe nobody lived there. Binky might not have even seen anybody. He could have just made it all up to get attention.\n\nWhile I stood there trying to bring myself to knock, I heard something shriek up above me. It was the bat, or whatever it was, and it flew back into the house through one of the windows on the second story.\n\nI got that chill again, and I almost turned around and went back. I didn't, though. I wish I had, but I didn't. I knocked on the door. Nobody came, so I knocked again. Nobody came that time, either. Maybe the vampire was shut up in his coffin and couldn't hear me. Or maybe he was flying around the attic like a bat. I looked over my shoulder at Binky, who shrugged. I was about to leave, and I'd turned halfway around when I heard something. I turned back. The door started to open.\n\nIt didn't open very much, just a crack, but there was somebody there, all right. Or I thought there was. I couldn't hear anybody breathing, and I couldn't see into the dark interior of the house.\n\nI didn't know what to say. I mean, I couldn't just say, \"Are you the vampire?\" So I just stood there, feeling like an idiot.\n\nFinally whoever was behind the door got tired of waiting for me to say something and decided he'd go first. He said, \"Yes?\" Except he didn't say it quite like that. It was more like \"Yessssss?\"\n\nI didn't jump when he said it, but that was just because I was kind of paralyzed and could hardly move at all. I tried to talk, but my mouth was too dry. I swallowed a couple of times and said, \"I wanted to invite you to a party.\"\n\nThere was no answer for a while. Then, \"You are quite sssure?\" Like he couldn't believe anybody would actually invite him somewhere.\n\nI couldn't believe it, either. I wished I was at home, even if it meant watching Frankie Avalon pantomiming to a song on American Bandstand or something just as lame. But I stayed right where I was and got the invitation out of my pocket. I'd written it out in study hall while old Mr. Garber sat at his desk in the front of the room and pulled on the hairs growing out of his ears while he pretended to read something in his history text. The invitation said, \"You are invited to a Birthday Party!\", and it had the date and time and address and everything on it.\n\nI held it out, and a hand reached out from behind the door and took it. It wasn't a hand like any I'd ever seen before. It was pale white, and the nails were thick and long and yellow and sharp. That was what bothered me, how sharp they were.\n\nThe hand disappeared with the invitation in it, and after a second or two the voice said, \"Thisss isss very nissse. I will be there. Will you be at the door to invite me in?\"\n\nHe already had the invitation, so I didn't see why I had to do any more inviting, but I said, \"If I'm not, my sister will be.\"\n\n\"That isss sssatisssfactory.\"\n\nAnd then the door closed. I stood there a minute, blinking like I'd just come out of a dream, and then I walked back to where Binky stood waiting.\n\n\"What about my invitation?\" he said.\n\n\"I'll ask my sister.\"\n\n\"She'd better invite me.\"\n\n\"We'll see,\" I said, because knowing my sister, I was sure she wouldn't want Binky hanging around the way he did. She only liked the popular kids, who were all a bunch of phonies. Binky was weird, but at least he wasn't phony, which was about all I could say for him.\n\nA funny thing happened at school the next day. Somebody stuffed Harry Larrimore into a locker. I wasn't the one who let him out, but I heard about it from Fred Burley, who did. He said he asked Harry who put him in there, but Harry didn't want to talk about it, like he was scared or something. I didn't think that was right since Harry wasn't scared of anybody, not even the teachers.\n\nHarry and Fred both got tardy slips because it took awhile to get Harry out of the locker. He was a lot bigger than Binky, and nobody would have believed you could get him into a locker if Fred hadn't seen it himself and described it.\n\nI told Binky about it at lunch, but he didn't seem to think it was funny. All he said was, \"Sometimes things come back on you.\"\n\nI had a feeling he wasn't talking about the cafeteria food. We had fish that day because it was Friday, but Binky wouldn't eat any. He looked interested when I poured ketchup all over mine, and I thought for a minute he'd give it a try, but he said he just wasn't hungry.\n\nMy sister surprised me when I told her that Binky had demanded an invitation to the party. She didn't even argue. She pushed her hair back and said, \"All right, Binky can come, as long as he stays out of the way.\"\n\nShe meant, \"as long as he stays out of sight of my phony friends,\" which also meant that he'd be hanging out in my room, since that's where I'd be staying. I didn't like Binky any better than she did. I just put up with him because I felt sorry for him, but I didn't want him in my room during the party. There wasn't anything I could do about it, though.\n\n\"Did you see the vampire?\" Kate said. \"Is he the real thing?\"\n\nLike I would know a vampire if I saw one, and I hadn't really seen this one, mostly just his hand, which I have to admit looked real enough to satisfy me, so I said, \"He's the real thing, all right, and if I were you, I wouldn't want him coming to the party.\"\n\nShe just laughed. \"You don't have to worry about a thing. We'll take plenty of precautions, and there aren't any real vampires, anyway, no matter what you think.\"\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\nShe could believe it was all a big joke if she wanted to, but it so happened that I didn't agree with her, not that it made any difference.\n\n\"I do say so, and I want you and your pal Binky to stay out of the way.\"\n\nI didn't bother to remind her that Binky wasn't my pal. I asked if she'd told our parents about the vampire, and she gave me this condescending look.\n\n\"I don't tell them a lot of things,\" she said, as if she had these big secrets to keep, but I knew she didn't because I'd sneaked into her room and read her diary one day. \"And you'd better not tell them, either, if you know what's good for you, buster.\"\n\nI told her I wouldn't cause any trouble and handed her my geometry book.\n\n\"Oh, no, you don't,\" she said. \"I'm not doing any problems until after the party and after the vampire shows up.\"\n\nI wished I'd never said anything to her about the vampire. Binky had warned me not to, but I had. There was nothing I could do about it. I took my geometry book upstairs and got to work.\n\nHalloween was pretty dreary. It rained most of the day, and the thick clouds stayed dark and low all afternoon. By the time of the party, it was inky black outside, with no sign of the moon or stars.\n\nKate's friends started to arrive, and our parents went next door to play canasta with our neighbors. Our parents were very liberal that way, not pushing in where they weren't wanted. My mother said to be sure to call if there were any problems, and Kate told her not to worry about a thing. I wasn't so sure, myself, but I kept my mouth shut. I knew what was good for me, buster.\n\nWhen Binky got there, Kate invited him in. He had on a black plastic rain jacket with the hood pulled over his head, like it might've still been raining, and he didn't seem to like the wreath of garlic hanging around Kate's neck. I couldn't blame him. It smelled pretty bad, but Kate thought it was just the right touch. She had a crucifix, too, not just a cross but the real thing with an image of Jesus on it, which was pretty funny considering nobody in our family had been to church in the last ten or fifteen years as far as I knew.\n\nAfter Binky got inside, he wanted to hang around the way he always does, but I told him we had to go up to my room.\n\n\"I want to be here when he comes,\" Binky said, and I didn't have to ask who he meant. I told him we could slip back down later, and he said he guessed that would have to do.\n\n\"That crucifix won't do any good,\" Binky said when we got to the top of the stairs. \"You have to believe in it.\"\n\n\"I don't guess it matters,\" I said. \"There's all that garlic.\"\n\n\"Yeah. That might help.\"\n\nI didn't like it that he said might, but I didn't believe in the vampire anyway, or that's what I kept telling myself.\n\nThe doorbell rang exactly at eight-thirty, which is when the invitation I gave the vampire had said for him to come. Kate wanted all her friends to be there first.\n\nBinky and I slipped to the head of the stairs and looked down. Binky still had that dumb hood over his head, but I guess he could see all right. Kate went to the front door and opened it. She said something, and then the vampire stepped inside.\n\nHe was tall and pale, and his hair was slicked back. From where I was standing, it looked as if he had pointed ears and red eyes. A bunch of Kate's friends came into the room and stared.\n\nThe vampire looked them over like they were buffet items at the smorgasbord restaurant downtown. They all took a step back, even Kate, who usually didn't back away from anything.\n\nI looked at Binky. He pushed the hood of the rain jacket off his head, and I saw the tips of his ears.\n\n\"Binky,\" I said.\n\nHe smiled. I wished he hadn't. His teeth weren't bad anymore. They were white and shiny, and his incisors were pointed and sharp.\n\n\"Binky,\" I said.\n\nHis eyes looked as if they were lit from the inside with red lanterns.\n\n\"Binky,\" I said.\n\nI thought of a lot of things all at once: Binky studying in the dark locker, wearing long sleeves when it was so warm, Harry Larrimore. I remembered a lot of other things, too, things that I should have thought about before.\n\n\"Binky,\" I said.\n\nThere was some screaming from downstairs now, but I didn't look to see what was happening. I couldn't take my eyes off those red eyes, Binky's eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't.\n\n\"Binky,\" I said.\n\nThe screaming was louder, and I wondered if anybody had called next door, but I was pretty sure they hadn't been able to get to a phone.\n\n\"Binky,\" I said. \"For Crissakes, Binky.\"\n\nAnd then he was on me.\n\nI never went back to school after that. Somehow I couldn't see trying to fit in with a bunch of people whose blood I wanted to suck. After what must have happened downstairs at my house, they probably wouldn't have been real glad to see me, anyway.\n\nBinky didn't go back, either, now that he had a \"friend\" to keep him company. That just goes to show what can happen if you let somebody sit with you at lunch. They start thinking you like them, and then they turn you into a vampire.\n\nBinky says he and the other vampire never did get friendly. Binky had found him out at the old house, where he'd moved after having a close call with some Van Helsing type in the Boston area. He'd told Binky that he was trying to kick the bloodsucking habit, but Binky had pleaded to be turned into a vampire. I blame all those nutty magazines that Binky read. Anyway the guy finally gave in.\n\n\"Nobody liked me anyway,\" Binky said. \"I'm still not with the in-crowd, but at least this way I get to live forever, or at least until somebody stakes me. So do you.\"\n\nIf you could call it living. It wasn't anything I wanted to thank him for.\n\n\"Too bad the Master had to leave town,\" Binky said. \"You would have liked him.\"\n\nAs if I could ever like anybody called \"the Master.\" If there was ever a phony name, that was it. I'd rather be called Carleton than \"the Master.\" I'd have liked him about as much as I liked living in that broken-down old house, which is where Binky and I had gone after we left the party by the back door. I never knew much about what happened in my own house that night, and never tried to find out. I guess I didn't want to know. You probably think that's hard-hearted of me, since my sister was there and all, but she wasn't my sister anymore, not now that I'd been changed.\n\n\"I don't think he made any of them into vampires,\" Binky said. \"He thinks it would be a bad idea to have too many of us around, and he prefers just to drink the blood.\"\n\nI said I thought he was trying to break the goddam habit.\n\n\"He was,\" Binky said. \"But living on mice and rabbits and stuff like that got pretty boring after a while, I guess.\"\n\nCome to think of it, it was getting pretty boring to me, too. I mean, they were all right if you couldn't get anything else, but before long I was going to have to go for something bigger and more substantial. More nourishing.\n\n\"Even blood from a mouse beats that cafeteria chili, though, right?\" Binky said.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I said, \"I guess it does, at that.\"\n\nAll that was a long time ago. For the last few years Binky and I have been hanging out (a little more vampire humor there) under a bridge in Austin, Texas. When you're surrounded by thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats, nobody's going to notice you, not if you're a bat, too, even if you're a lot bigger than they are. Being bigger works out fine, since they don't try to push us around.\n\nIt's a pretty boring way to have to spend your time, though, to tell you the truth. Like I said at the beginning, being a vampire's not all capes and fangs and ripping times. When the highlight of your day is flying out from under a bridge and seeing how many tourists' mouths you can crap into before they get wise and shut their mouths, you can be pretty sure you're not living the high life.\n\nIt's actually even worse than that. Bats have parasites. Maybe you didn't know that. Fleas, mites, ticks. They can be pretty irritating sometimes. I don't know how living on me affects them. I don't even care. All I know is that they make me itch.\n\nI think about the old days now and then, and sometimes around her birthday I wonder if Kate survived her party, and if she did, whether she got married to one of her phony friends and had a bunch of kids who were just as phony as their parents. And I wonder if she ever thought about any of those crummy movies she used to like so much. They were pretty much to blame for the whole thing, after all.\n\n\"It's nearly sundown,\" Binky squeaked.\n\nThe children of the night, such music they make. You probably couldn't understand Binky even if you heard him, but I could.\n\n\"Time to give the tourists a thrill,\" he said. \"I'll bet I can hit more open mouths this evening than you can!\"\n\n\"Sure, Binky,\" I said.\n\n\"Some fun!\" he said.\n\n\"Sure, Binky,\" I said. \"Some fun.\"\n\nThere's nothing like being a teenage vampire. I should know. I've been one for forty-five years now, so I figured it was time to let the world know.\n\nMaybe somebody will make a movie.\n\n## Twilight\n\nKelley Armstrong\n\nKelley Armstrong is the author of the Women of the Otherworld paranormal suspense series. A former computer programmer, she's now escaped her corporate cubicle, but she puts her old skills to work on her website at www.KelleyArmstrong.com.\n\nAnother life taken. Another year to live.\n\nThat is the bargain that rules our existence. We feed off blood, but for three hundred and sixty-four days a year, it is merely that: feeding. Yet on that last day\u2014or sometime before the anniversary of our rebirth as vampires\u2014we must drain the lifeblood of one person. Fail and we begin the rapid descent into death.\n\nAs I sipped white wine on the outdoor patio, I watched the steady stream of passersby. Although there was a chill in the air\u2014late autumn coming fast and sharp\u2014the patio was crowded, no one willing to surrender the dream of summer quite yet. Leaves fluttering onto the tables were lauded as decorations. The scent of a distant wood fire was willfully mistaken for candles. The sun, almost gone despite the still early hour, only added romance to the meal. All embellishments to the night, not signs of impending winter.\n\nI sipped my wine and watched night fall. At the next table, a lone businessman eyed me. He was the sort of man I often had the misfortune to attract: middle-aged and prosperous, laboring under the delusion that success and wealth were such irresistible lures that he could allow his waistband and jowls to thicken unchecked.\n\nUnder other circumstances, I might have returned the attention, let him lead me to some tawdry motel, then taken my dinner. He would survive, of course, waking weakened, blaming it on too much wine. A meal without guilt. Any man who took such a chance with a stranger\u2014particularly when he bore a wedding band\u2014deserved an occasional bout of morning-after discomfort.\n\nHe did not, however, deserve to serve as my annual kill. I can justify many things, but not that. Yet I found myself toying with the idea more than I should have, prodded by a niggling voice that told me I was already late.\n\nI stared at the glow over the horizon. The sun had set on the anniversary of my rebirth, and I hadn't taken a life. Yet there was no need for panic. I would hardly explode into dust at midnight. I would weaken as I began the descent into death, but I could avoid that simply by fulfilling my bargain tonight.\n\nI measured the darkness, deemed it enough for hunting, then laid a twenty on the table and left.\n\nA bell tolled ten. Two hours left. I chastised myself for being so dramatic. I loathe vampires given to theatrics\u2014those who have read too many horror novels and labor under the delusion that that's how they're supposed to behave. I despise any sign of it in myself and yet, under the circumstances, perhaps it could be forgiven.\n\nIn all the years that came before this, I had never reached this date without fulfilling my obligation. I had chosen this vampiric life and would not risk losing it through carelessness.\n\nOnly once had I ever neared my rebirth day, and then only due to circumstances beyond my control. It had been 1867...or perhaps 1869. I'd been hunting for my annual victim when I'd found myself tossed into a Hungarian prison. I hadn't been caught at my kill\u2014I'd never made so amateurish a mistake even when I'd been an amateur.\n\nThe prison sojourn had been Aaron's fault, as such things usually were. We'd been hunting my victim when he'd come across a nobleman whipping a servant in the street. Naturally, Aaron couldn't leave well enough alone. In the ensuing confusion of the brawl, I'd been rousted with him and thrown into a pest-infested cell that wouldn't pass any modern health code.\n\nAaron had worked himself into a full-frothing frenzy, seeing my rebirth anniversary only days away while I languished in prison, waiting for justice that seemed unlikely to come swiftly. I hadn't been concerned. When one partakes of Aaron's company, one learns to expect such inconveniences. While he plotted, schemed, and swore he'd get us out on time, I simply waited. There was time yet and no need to panic until panic was warranted.\n\nThe day before my rebirth anniversary, as I'd begun to suspect that a more strenuous course of action might be required, we'd been released. I'd compensated for the trouble and delay by taking the life of a prison guard who'd enjoyed his work far more than was necessary.\n\nThis year, my only excuse for not taking a victim yet was that I hadn't gotten around to it. As for why, I was somewhat...baffled. I am nothing if not conscientious about my obligations. Yet, this year, delays had arisen, and somehow I'd been content to watch the days slip past and tell myself I would get around to it, as if it was no more momentous than a missed salon appointment.\n\nThe week had passed and I'd been unable to work up any sense of urgency until today, and even now, it was only an oddly cerebral concern. No matter. I would take care of it tonight.\n\nAs I walked, an old drunkard drew my gaze. I watched him totter into the shadows of an alley and thought: \"There's a possibility....\" Perhaps I could get this chore over with sooner than expected. I could be quite finicky\u2014refusing to feed off sleeping vagrants\u2014yet as my annual kill, this one was a choice I could make.\n\nEvery vampire deals with our \"bargain\" in the way that best suits his temperament and capacity for guilt and remorse. I cull from the edges\u2014the sick, the elderly, those already nearing their end. I do not fool myself into thinking this is a just choice. There's no way to know whether that cancer-wracked woman might have been on the brink of remission or if that elderly man had been enjoying his last days to the fullest. I make the choice because it is one I can live with.\n\nThis old drunkard would do. As I watched him, I felt the gnawing in the pit of my stomach, telling me I'd already waited too long. I should follow him into that alley, and get this over with. I wanted to get it over with\u2014there was no question of that, no possibility I was conflicted on this point. Other vampires may struggle with our bargain. I do not.\n\nYet even as I visualized myself following the drunk into the alley, my legs didn't follow through. I stood there, watching him disappear into the darkness. Then I moved on.\n\nA block farther, a crowd poured from a movie theater. As it passed, its life force enveloped me. I wasn't hungry, yet I could still feel that tingle of anticipation, of hunger. I could smell their blood, hear the rush of it through their veins. The scent and sound of life.\n\nTwenty steps later, and they were still passing, an endless stream of humanity disgorged by a packed theater. How many seats were inside? Three hundred, three fifty? As many years as had passed since my rebirth?\n\nOne life per year. It seems so moderate a price...until you looked back and realized you could fill a movie theater with your victims. A sobering thought, even for one not inclined to dwell on such things. No matter. There wouldn't be hundreds more. Not from this vampire.\n\nContrary to legend, our gift of longevity comes with an expiry date. Mine was drawing near. I'd felt the signs, the disconnect from the world, a growing disinterest in all around me. For me, that was nothing new. I'd long since learned to keep my distance from a world that changed while I didn't.\n\nAfter some struggle with denial, I'd accepted that I had begun the decline toward death. But it would be slow, and I still had years left, decades even. Or I would if I could get past this silly bout of ennui and make my rebirth kill.\n\nAs the crowd dwindled, I looked over my shoulder to watch them go and considered taking a life from them. A random kill. I'd done it once before, more than a century ago, during a particularly bleak time when I hadn't been able to rouse enough feeling to care. Yet later I'd regretted it, having let myself indulge my darkest inclinations simply because I'd been in a dark place myself. Unacceptable. I wouldn't do it again.\n\nI wrenched my gaze from the dispersing crowd. This was ridiculous. I was no angst-ridden cinema vampire, bemoaning the choices she'd made in life. I was no flighty youngster, easily distracted from duty, abhorring responsibility. I was Cassandra DuCharme, senior vampire delegate to the interracial council. If any vampire had come to me with this problem\u2014\"I'm having trouble making my annual kill\"\u2014I'd have shown her the sharp side of my tongue, hauled her into the alley with that drunk, and told her, as Aaron might say, to \"piss or get off the pot.\"\n\nI turned around and headed back to the alley.\n\nI'd gone only a few steps when I picked up a sense of the drunkard. Excitement swept through me. I closed my eyes and smiled. That was more like it.\n\nThe quickening accelerated as I slid into the shadows. My stride smoothed out, each step taken with care, rolling heel to toe, making no sound.\n\nThat sense of my prey grew stronger with each step, telling me he was near. I could see a recessed emergency exit a dozen feet ahead. A shoe protruded from the darkness. I crept forward until I spotted a dark form crumpled inside.\n\nThe rush of his blood vibrated through the air. My canines lengthened and I allowed myself one shudder of anticipation, then shook it off and focused on the sound of his breathing.\n\nA gust whipped along the alley, scattering candy wrappers and leaflets, and the stink of alcohol washed over me. I caught the extra notes in his breathing\u2014the deep, almost determined rhythm. Passed out drunk. He'd probably stumbled into the first semi-sheltered place he'd seen and collapsed.\n\nThat would make it easier.\n\nStill, I hesitated, telling myself I needed to be sure. But the rhythm of his breathing stayed steady. He was clearly asleep and unlikely to awake even if I bounded over there and shouted in his ear.\n\nSo what was I waiting for? I should be in that doorway already, reveling in the luck of finding so easy a victim.\n\nI shook the lead from my bones and crossed the alley.\n\nThe drunkard wore an army jacket, a real one if I was any judge. I resisted the fanciful urge to speculate, to imagine him as some shell-shocked soldier turned to drink by the horrors of war. More likely, he'd bought the jacket at a thrift shop. Or stolen it.\n\nHis hair was matted, so filthy it was impossible to tell the original color. Above the scraggly beard, though, his face was unlined. Younger than I'd first imagined. Significantly younger.\n\nThat gave me pause, but while he was not the old drunkard I'd first imagined, he was certainly no healthy young man. I could sense disease and wasting, most likely cirrhosis. Not my ideal target, but he would do.\n\nAnd yet...\n\nAlmost before I realized it, I was striding toward the road.\n\nHe wasn't right. I was succumbing to panic, and that was unnecessary, even dangerous. If I made the wrong choice, I'd regret it. Better to let the pressure of this ominous date pass and find a better choice tomorrow.\n\nI slid into the park and stepped off the path. The ground was hard, so I could walk swiftly and silently.\n\nAs I stepped from the wooded patch, my exit startled two young men huddled together. Their gazes tripped over me, eyes glittering under the shadows of their hoods, like jackals spotting easy prey. I met the stronger one's gaze. He broke first, grumbling deep in his throat. Then he shuffled back and waved his friend away as he muttered some excuse for moving on.\n\nI watched them go, considering...then dismissing.\n\nIt was easy to separate one victim from a group. Not nearly so simple when the \"group\" consisted of only two people. As the young men disappeared, I resumed my silent trek across the park.\n\nMy goal lay twenty paces away. Had I not sensed him, I likely would have passed by. He'd ignored a park bench under the light and instead had stretched along the top of a raised garden, hidden under the bushes and amidst the dying flowers.\n\nHe lay on his back with his eyes closed. His face was peaceful, relaxed. A handsome face, broad and tanned. He had thick blond hair and the healthy vitality of a young man in his prime. A big man, too, tall and solid, his muscular arms crossed behind his head, his slim hips and long denim-clad legs ending in work boots crossed at the ankles.\n\nI circled north to sneak up behind his head. He lay completely motionless, even his chest still, not rising and falling with the slow rhythm of breathing. I crossed the last few feet between us and stopped just behind his head. Then I leaned over.\n\nHis eyes opened. Deep brown eyes, the color of rich earth. He snarled a yawn.\n\n\"'Bout time, Cass,\" he said. \"Couple of punks been circling to see if I'm still conscious. Another few minutes, and I'd have had to teach them to let sleeping vamps lie.\"\n\n\"Shall I go away then? Let you have your fun?\"\n\nAaron grinned. \"Nah. They come back? We can both have fun.\" He heaved his legs over the side of the garden wall and sat up, shaking off sleep. Then, catching a glimpse of my face, his grin dropped into a frown. \"You didn't do it, did you?\"\n\n\"I couldn't find anyone.\"\n\n\"Couldn't find\u2014?\" He pushed to his feet, towering over me. \"Goddamn it, what are you playing at? First you let it go until the last minute, then you 'can't find anyone'?\"\n\nI checked my watch. \"It's not the last minute. I still have ten left. I trust that if I explode at midnight, you'll be kind enough to sweep up the bits. I would like to be scattered over the Atlantic but, if you're pressed for time, the Charleston River will do.\"\n\nHe glowered at me. \"A hundred and twenty years together, and you never got within a week of your rebirth day without making your kill.\"\n\n\"Hungary. 1867.\"\n\n\"Sixty-eight. And I don't see any bars this time. So what was your excuse?\"\n\n\"Among others, I was busy researching that council matter Paige brought to my attention. I admit I let things creep up on me this year, and a century ago that would never have happened, but while we were apart, I changed\u2014\"\n\n\"Bullshit. You never change. Except to get more imperious, more pigheaded, and more cranky.\"\n\n\"The word is 'crankier.'\"\n\nHe muttered a few more descriptors under his breath. I started down the path.\n\n\"You'd better be going off to find someone,\" he called after me.\n\n\"No, I'm heading home to bed. I'm tired.\"\n\n\"Tired?\" He strode up beside me. \"You don't get tired. You're\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped, mouth closing so fast his teeth clicked.\n\n\"The word is 'dying,'\" I said. \"And, while that is true, and it is equally true that my recent inability to sleep is a symptom of that, tonight I am, indeed, tired.\"\n\n\"Because you're late for your kill. You can't pull this shit, Cassandra, not in your condition.\"\n\nI gave an unladylike snort and kept walking.\n\nHis fingers closed around my arm. \"Let's go find those punks. Have some fun.\" A broad, boyish grin. \"I think one has a gun. Been a long time since I got shot.\"\n\n\"Another day.\"\n\n\"A hunt then.\"\n\n\"I'm not hungry.\"\n\n\"Well, I am. Maybe you couldn't find someone suitable, but I can. I know what you look for. We'll hunt together. I'll get a snack; you'll get another year. Fair enough?\"\n\nHe tried to grin, but I could see a hint of panic behind his eyes. I felt an answering prickle of worry, but told myself I was being ridiculous. I'd simply had too much on my mind lately. I was tired and easily distracted. I needed to snap out of this embarrassing lethargy and make this kill, and I would do so tomorrow, once Aaron had gone back to Atlanta.\n\n\"It's not the end of the world\u2014or my world\u2014if I don't take a life tonight, Aaron. You've been late yourself when you couldn't find someone suitable. I haven't\u2014and perhaps I'd simply like to know what that's like.\" I touched his arm. \"At my age, new experiences are few and far between. I take them where I can.\"\n\nHe hesitated, then nodded, mollified, and accompanied me from the park.\n\nAaron followed me home. That wasn't nearly as exciting a prospect as it sounds. These days we were simply friends. His choice. If I had my way, tired or not, I would have found the energy to accommodate him.\n\nWhen I first met Aaron, less than a year after his rebirth, he'd accused me of helping him in his new life because he looked like something to \"decorate my bed with.\" True enough.\n\nEven as a human, I had never been able to rouse more than a passing interest in men of my own class. Too well mannered, too gently spoken, too soft. My tastes had run to stable boys and, later, to discreet working men.\n\nFinding Aaron as a newly reborn vampire, a big strapping farm boy with hands as rough as his manners, I will admit that my first thought was indeed carnal. He was younger than I liked, but I'd decided I could live with that.\n\nSo I'd trained him in the life of a vampire. In return, I'd received friendship, protection...and endless nights alone, frustrated beyond reason. It was preposterous, of course. I'd never had any trouble leading men to my bed and there I'd been, reduced to chasing a virile young man who strung me along as if he were some coy maiden. I told myself it wasn't his fault\u2014he was English. Thankfully, when he finally capitulated, I discovered he wasn't nearly as repressed as I'd feared.\n\nOver a hundred years together. It was no grand romance. The word \"love\" never passed between us. We were partners in every sense\u2014best friends, hunting allies, and faithful lovers. Then came the morning I woke, looked over at him, and imagined not seeing him there, tried to picture life without him. I'd gone cold at the thought.\n\nI had told myself I'd never allow that again. When you've lost everyone, you learn the danger of attachments. As a vampire, you must accept that every person you ever know will die, and you are the only constant in your life, the only person you can\u2014and should\u2014rely on. So I made a decision.\n\nI betrayed Aaron. Not with another man. Had I done that, he'd simply have flown into a rage and, once past it, demanded to know what was really bothering me. What I did instead was a deeper betrayal, one that said, more coldly than I could ever speak the words, \"I don't want you anymore.\"\n\nAfter over half a century apart, happenstance had brought us together again. We'd resisted the pull of that past bond, reminded ourselves of what had happened the last time and yet, gradually, we'd drifted back into friendship. Only friendship. Sex was not allowed\u2014Aaron's way of keeping his distance. Given the choice between having him as a friend and not having him in my life at all, I'd gladly choose the former...though that didn't keep me from hoping to change his mind.\n\nThat night I slept. It was the first time I'd done more than catnapped in over a year. While I longed to seize on this as some sign that I wasn't dying, I knew Aaron's assessment was far more likely\u2014I was tired because I'd missed my annual kill.\n\nWas this what happened, then, when we didn't hold up our end of the bargain? An increasing lethargy that would lead to death? I shook it off. I had no intention of exploring the phenomenon further. Come sunset, I would end this foolishness and take a life.\n\nAs I entered my living room that morning, I heard a dull slapping from the open patio doors. Aaron was in the yard, building a new retaining wall for my garden.\n\nWhen he'd been here in the spring, he'd commented on the crumbling wall and said, \"I could fix that for you.\" I'd nodded and said, \"Yes, I suppose you could.\" Three more intervening visits. Three more hints about the wall. Yet I refused to ask for his help. I had lost that right when I betrayed him. So yesterday, he'd shown up on my doorstep, masonry tools in one hand, suitcase in the other, and announced he was building a new wall for my rebirth day.\n\nThat meant he had a reason to stay until he'd finished it. Had he simply decided my rebirth day made a good excuse? Or was there more than that? When I'd spoken to him this week, had something in my voice told him I had yet to take my annual victim? I watched Aaron through the patio doors. The breeze was chilly, but the sun beat down and he had his shirt off as he worked, oblivious to all around him. This was what he did for a living\u2014masonry, the latest in a string of \"careers.\" I chided him that, after two hundred years, one should have a healthy retirement savings plan. He only pointed the finger back at me, declaring that I too worked when I didn't need to. But I was self-employed, and selling art and antiques was certainly not in the same category as the physically demanding jobs he undertook. Yet another matter on which we disagreed\u2014with vigor and enthusiasm.\n\nI watched him for another minute, then headed for the kitchen to make him an iced tea.\n\nI went out later to check a new shipment at an antique shop. When I got home, Aaron was sitting on the couch, a pile of newspapers on the table and one spread in his hands.\n\n\"I hope you didn't take those from my trash.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't have had to if you'd recycle.\" He peered around the side of the paper. \"That blue box in the garage? That's what it's for, not holding garden tools.\"\n\nI waved him off. \"Three hundred and fifty years and I have never been deprived of a newspaper or book by want of paper. I'm not going to start recycling now. I'm too old.\"\n\n\"Too stubborn.\" He gave a sly grin. \"Or too lazy.\"\n\nHe earned a glare for that one. I walked over and snatched up a stray paper from the carpet before it stained.\n\n\"If you're that desperate for reading material, just tell me, and I'll walk to the store and buy you a magazine.\"\n\nHe folded the paper and laid it on the coffee table, then patted the spot next to him. I hesitated, sensing trouble, and took a place at the opposite end, perched on the edge. He reached over, his hand going around my waist, and dragged me until I was sitting against him.\n\n\"Remember when we met, Cass?\"\n\n\"Vaguely.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Your memory isn't that bad. Remember what you did for me? My first rebirth day was coming, and I'd decided I wasn't doing it. You found me a victim, a choice I could live with.\" With his free hand, he picked up a paper separated from the rest and dropped it onto my lap. \"Found you a victim.\"\n\nI sighed. \"Aaron, I don't need you to\u2014\"\n\n\"Too late.\" He poked a calloused finger at the top article. \"Right there.\"\n\nThe week-old story told of a terminally ill patient fighting for the right to die. When I looked over at Aaron, he was grinning, pleased with himself.\n\n\"Perfect, isn't it?\" he said. \"Exactly what you look for. She wants to die. She's in pain.\"\n\n\"She's in a palliative-care ward. How would I even get in there, let alone kill her?\"\n\n\"Is that a challenge?\" His arm tightened around my waist. \"Because if it is, I'm up for it. You know I am.\"\n\nHe was still smiling, but behind it lurked a shadow of desperation. Again, his worry ignited mine. Perhaps this added incentive was exactly what I needed. It wouldn't be easy, but it could be interesting, particularly with Aaron's help.\n\nAny other time, I'd have pounced on the idea, but now, even as I envisioned it, I felt only a spark of interest, buried under an inexplicable layer of lethargy, even antipathy, and all I could think was \"Oh, but it would just be so much work.\"\n\nMy hackles rose at such indolence, but I squelched my indignation. I was determined to take a life tonight. I would allow nothing to stand in the way of that. Therefore, I could not enter into a plan that might prove too difficult. Better to keep this simple, so I would have no excuse for failure.\n\nI set the paper aside. \"Are you hungry?\"\n\nA faint frown.\n\n\"Last night, you said you were hungry,\" I continued. \"If you were telling the truth, then I presume you still need to feed, unless you slipped out last night.\"\n\n\"I thought we'd be hunting together later. So I waited.\"\n\n\"Then we'll hunt tonight. But not\u2014\" A wave at the paper. \"\u2014in a hospital.\"\n\nWe strolled along the sidewalk. It was almost dark now, the sun only a red-tinged memory along the horizon. As I watched a flower seller clear her outdoor stock for the night, Aaron snapped his fingers.\n\n\"Flowers. That's what's missing in your house. You always have flowers.\"\n\n\"The last arrangement wilted early. I was going to pick up more when I was out today, but I didn't get the chance.\"\n\nHe seemed to cheer at that, as if reading some hidden message in my words.\n\n\"Here then,\" he said. \"I'll get some for you now.\"\n\nI arched my brows. \"And carry bouquets on a hunt?\"\n\n\"Think I can't? Sounds like a challenge.\"\n\nI laughed and laid my fingers on his forearm. \"We'll get some tomorrow.\"\n\nHe took my hand and looped it through his arm as we resumed walking.\n\n\"We're going to Paris this spring,\" he said after a moment.\n\n\"Are we? Dare I ask what prompted that?\"\n\n\"Flowers. Spring. Paris.\"\n\n\"Ah. A thoughtful gesture, but Paris in the spring is highly overrated. And overpriced.\"\n\n\"Too bad. I'm taking you. I'll book the time off when I get home and call you with the dates.\"\n\nWhen I didn't argue, he glanced over at me, then grinned and quickened his pace, launching into a \"remember when\" story of our last spring in Paris.\n\nWe bickered over the choice of victim. Aaron wanted to find one to suit my preference, but I insisted we select his type. Finally, he capitulated.\n\nThe fight dampened the evening's mood, but only temporarily. Once Aaron found a target, he forgot everything else.\n\nIn the early years, Aaron had struggled with vampiric life. He'd died rescuing a stranger from a petty thug. And his reward? After a life spent thinking of others, he'd been reborn as one who fed off them. Ironic and cruel.\n\nYet we'd found a way for him to justify\u2014even relish\u2014the harder facts of our survival. He fed from the dregs of society, punks and criminals like those youths in the park. For his annual kill, he condemned those whose crimes he deemed worthy of the harshest punishment. And so he could feel he did some good in this parasitic life.\n\nAs he said, I'd found his first victim. Now, two hundred years later, he no longer scoured newspapers or tracked down rumors but seemed able to locate victims by intuition alone, as I could find the dying. The predatory instinct will adapt to anything that ensures the survival of the host.\n\nTonight's choice was a drug dealer with feral eyes and a quick switchblade. We watched from the shadows as the man threatened a young runner. Aaron rocked on the balls at his feet, his gaze fixed on that waving knife, but I laid my hand on his arm. As the runner loped toward the street, Aaron's lips curved, happy to see him go, but even happier with what the boy's safe departure portended\u2014not a quick intervention but a true hunt.\n\nWe tracked the man for over an hour before Aaron's hunger won out. With no small amount of regret, he stopped toying with his dinner and I lured the drug dealer into an alleyway. An easy maneuver, as such things usually were with men like this, too greedy and cocksure to feel threatened by a middle-aged woman.\n\nAs Aaron's fangs sank into the drug dealer's throat, the man's eyes bugged in horror, unable to believe what was happening. This was the most dangerous point of feeding, that split second where they felt our fangs and felt a nightmare come to life. It is but a moment, then the sedative in our saliva takes hold and they pass out, those last few seconds wiped from memory when they wake.\n\nThe man lashed out once, then slumped in Aaron's grasp. Still gripping the man's shirtfront, Aaron began to drink, gulping the blood. His eyes were closed, face rapturous, and I watched him, enjoying the sight of his pleasure, his appetite.\n\nHe'd been hungrier than he'd let on. Typical for Aaron, waiting that extra day or two, not to practice control or avoid feeding, but to drink heartily. Delayed gratification for heightened pleasure. I shivered.\n\n\"Cass?\"\n\nHe licked a fallen drop from the corner of his mouth as he held the man out for me.\n\nThis was how we hunted\u2014how Aaron liked it, not taking separate victims but sharing. He always made the disabling bite, drank some, then let me feed to satiation. If I took too much for him to continue feeding safely, he'd find a second victim. There was no sense arguing that I could find my own food\u2014he knew that, but continued, compelled by a need to protect and provide.\n\n\"You go on,\" I said softly. \"You're still hungry.\"\n\nHe thrust the man to me. \"Yours.\"\n\nHis jaw set and I knew his insistence had nothing to do with providing sustenance.\n\nAs Aaron held the man up for me, I moved forward. My canines lengthened, throat tightening, and I allowed myself a shudder of anticipation.\n\nI lowered my mouth to the man's throat, scraped my canines over the skin, tasting, preparing. Then, with one swift bite, my mouth filled with\u2014\n\nI jerked back, almost choking. I resisted the urge to spit, and forced\u2014with effort\u2014the mouthful down, my stomach revolting in disgust.\n\nIt tasted like...blood.\n\nWhen I became a vampire, I thought this would be the most unbearable part: drinking blood. But the moment that first drop of blood touched my tongue, I'd realized my worries had been for naught. There was no word for the taste; no human memory that came close. I can only say that it was so perfect a food that I could never tire of it nor wish for something else.\n\nBut this tasted like blood, like my human memory of it. Once, before I'd completed the transition to vampire, I'd filled a goblet with cow's blood and forced it down, preparing for my new life. I could still taste the thick, metallic fluid that had coated my mouth and tongue, then sat in my stomach for no more than a minute before returning the way it had gone down.\n\nNow, after only a mouthful of this man's blood, I had to clamp my mouth shut to keep from gagging. Aaron dropped the man and grabbed for me. I waved him aside.\n\n\"I swallowed wrong.\"\n\nI rubbed my throat, lips curving in a moue of annoyance, then looked around and found the man at my feet. I steeled myself and bent. Aaron crouched to lift the man for me, but I motioned him back and shielded my face, so he wouldn't see my reaction. Then I forced my mouth to the man's throat.\n\nThe bleeding had already stopped. I bit his neck again, my nails digging into my palms, eyes closed, letting the disgusting taste fill my mouth, then swallowing. Drink. Swallow. Drink. Swallow. My nails broke my skin, but I felt no pain. I wished I could, if only to give me something else to think about.\n\nIt wasn't just the taste. That I could struggle past. But my whole body rebelled at the very sensation of the blood filling my stomach, screaming at me to stop, as if what I was doing was unnatural, even dangerous.\n\nI managed one last swallow. And then...I couldn't. I simply couldn't. I hung there, fangs still in the man's neck, willing myself to suck, to fill my mouth, to finish this, mentally screaming, raging against the preposterousness of it. I was a vampire; I drank blood. And even if I didn't want to, by God, I would force every drop down my throat\u2014\n\nMy stomach heaved. I swallowed hard.\n\nI could sense Aaron behind me. Hovering. Watching. Worrying.\n\nAnother heave. If I took one more sip, I'd vomit and give Aaron reason to worry, to panic, and give myself reason to panic.\n\nIt was the victim. God only knew what poisons this drug dealer had swimming through his veins and, while such things don't affect vampires, I am a delicate feeder, too sensitive to anomalies in the blood. I've gone hungry rather than drink anything that tastes \"off.\" There was no sense asking Aaron to confirm it\u2014he could swill week-old blood and not notice.\n\nThat was it, then. The victim. Just the victim.\n\nI sealed the wound with my tongue and stepped back.\n\n\"Cass...\" Aaron's voice was low with warning. \"You need to finish him.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\" The word \"can't\" rose to my lips, but I swallowed it back. I couldn't say that. Wouldn't. This was just another temporary hurdle. I'd rest tonight and find a victim of my own choosing tomorrow.\n\n\"He isn't right,\" I said, then turned and headed down the alley.\n\nAfter a moment, I heard Aaron pitch the unconscious man into a heap of trash bags and storm off in the opposite direction.\n\nAny other man would have thrown up his hands and left me there. I arrived at my car to find Aaron waiting by the driver's door. I handed him the keys and got in the passenger's side.\n\nAt home, as I headed toward my room, Aaron called after me. \"I hope you're not going to tell me you're tired again.\"\n\n\"No, I'm taking a bath to scrub off the filth of that alley. Then, if you aren't ready to retire, we could have a glass of wine, perhaps light the fire. It's getting cool.\"\n\nHe paused, still ready for a fight, but finding no excuse in my words.\n\n\"I'll start the fire,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nNo more than ten minutes after I got into the tub, the door banged open with such a crash that I started, sloshing bubbles over the side. Aaron barreled in and shoved a small book at me. My appointment book.\n\n\"I found this in your desk.\"\n\n\"Keen detective work. Practicing for your next council investigation?\"\n\n\"Our next council investigation.\"\n\nI reached for my loofah brush. \"My mistake. That's what I meant.\"\n\n\"Is it?\"\n\nI looked up, trying to understand his meaning, but seeing only rage in his eyes. He was determined to find out what had happened in that alley, and somehow this was his route there. My stomach clenched, as if the blood was still pooled in it, curdling. I wouldn't have this conversation. I wouldn't.\n\nOstensibly reaching for the loofah brush, I rose, letting the bubbles slide from me. Aaron's gaze dropped from my face. I tucked my legs under, took hold of the side of the tub and started to rise. He let me get halfway up, then put his hand on my head and firmly pushed me down.\n\nI reclined into the tub again, then leaned my head back, floating, breasts and belly peeking from the water. Aaron watched for a moment before tearing his gaze away with a growl.\n\n\"Stop that, Cass. I'm not going to run off and I'm not going to be distracted. I want to talk to you.\"\n\nI sighed. \"About my appointment book, I presume.\"\n\nHe lifted it. \"Last week. On the day marked 'birthday.' The date you must have planned to make your kill. There's nothing else scheduled.\"\n\n\"Of course not. I keep that day open\u2014\"\n\n\"But you said you were busy. That's why you didn't do it.\"\n\n\"I don't believe I said that. I said things came up.\"\n\n\"Such as...?\"\n\nI raised a leg onto the rim and ran the loofah brush down it. Aaron's eyes followed, but after a second, he forced his gaze back to mine and repeated the question.\n\nI sighed. \"Very well. Let's see. On that particular day, it was a midnight end-of-season designer clothing sale. As I was driving out of the city to make my kill, I saw the sign and stopped. By the time I left, it was too late to hunt.\"\n\nHe glowered at me. \"That's not funny.\"\n\n\"I didn't say it was.\"\n\nThe glower deepened to a scowl. \"You postponed your annual kill to shop? Bullshit. Yeah, you like your fancy clothes, and you're cheap as hell. But getting distracted by a clothing sale?\" He snorted. \"That's like a cop stopping a high speed chase to grab doughnuts.\"\n\nI went quiet for a moment, then said, as evenly as I could, \"Perhaps. But I did.\"\n\nHe searched my eyes, finding the truth there. \"Then something's wrong. Very wrong. And you know it.\"\n\nI shuttered my gaze. \"All I know is that you're making too big a deal of this, as always. You take the smallest\u2014\"\n\n\"Cassandra DuCharme skips her annual kill to go shopping? That's not small. That's apocalyptic.\"\n\n\"Oh, please, spare me the\u2014\"\n\nHe shoved the open book in my face. \"Forget the sale. Explain the rest of it. You had nothing scheduled all week. You had no excuse. You didn't forget. You didn't get distracted.\" His voice dropped as he lowered himself to the edge of the tub. \"You have no intention of taking a life.\"\n\n\"You...you think I'm trying to kill myself?\" I laughed, the sound almost bitter. \"Do you forget how I became what I am, Aaron? I chose it. I risked everything to get this life, and if you think I'd throw away one minute before my time is up\u2014\"\n\n\"How you came into this life is exactly why you're hell-bent on leaving it like this.\" He snagged my gaze and held it. \"You cheated death. No, you beat it\u2014by sheer goddamned force of will. You said 'I won't die.' And now, when it's coming around again, you're damned well not going to sit back and let it happen. You chose once. You'll choose again.\"\n\nI paused, looked away, then back at him. \"Why are you here, Aaron?\"\n\n\"I came to fix your wall\u2014\"\n\n\"At no prompting from me. No hints from me. You came of your own accord, correct?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Then, if I'd planned to let myself die, presumably you wouldn't have seen me again.\" I met his gaze. \"Do you think I would do that? Of everyone I know in this world, would I leave you without saying good-bye?\"\n\nHis jaw worked, but he said nothing. After a moment, he pushed to his feet and walked out.\n\nI lay in bed, propped on my pillows, staring at the wall. Aaron was right. When the time came, I would leave this vampiric life as I'd come into it: by choice. But this was not that time. There was no doubt of that, no possibility that I was subconsciously trying to end my life. That was preposterous. I had no qualms about suicide. Fears...perhaps. Yet no different than my fear of death itself.\n\nWhen the time came, yes. But I would never be so irresponsible as to end my life before my affairs were in order. My estate would need to be disposed of in advance, given to those I wished to see benefit. Of equal concern was the discovery and disposal of my body. To leave that to chance would be unforgivably irresponsible.\n\nI would make my peace with Aaron and make amends for my betrayal or, at the very least, ensure he understood that whatever I had done to him, the reason for it, the failing behind it, had been mine.\n\nThen there was the council. Aaron was already my co-delegate, but I had to ready him to take my senior position and ready the vampire community to accept that change. Moreover, as the senior overall council member, it was my duty to pass on all I knew to Paige, the keeper of records, something I'd been postponing, unwilling to accept that my time was ending.\n\nEnding.\n\nMy stomach clenched at the thought. I closed my eyes and shuddered.\n\nI had never lacked for backbone and never stood for the lack of it in others. Now I needed to face and accept this reality. I was dying. Not beginning a lengthy descent, but at the end of the slope.\n\nI now knew how a vampire died. A rebirth date came and we discovered, without warning, that we could not fulfill our end of the bargain. Not would not, but could not.\n\nIf I couldn't overcome this, I would die. Not in decades, but days.\n\nPanic surged, coupled with an overwhelming wave of raw rage. Of all the ways to die, could any be more humiliating in its sublime ridiculousness? Not to die suddenly, existence snuffed out as my time ended. Not to die, beheaded, at the hands of an enemy. Not to grow ill and fade away. Not even to pass in my sleep. Such deaths couldn't be helped, and while I would have raged against that, the injustice of it, such a fate was nothing compared to this\u2014to die because I inexplicably lacked the will to do something I'd done hundreds of times before.\n\nNo, that wasn't possible. I wouldn't let it be possible.\n\nI would get out of this bed, find a victim, and force myself to drain his blood if I vomited up every mouthful.\n\nI envisioned myself standing, yanking on clothing, striding from the room....\n\nYet I didn't move.\n\nMy limbs felt leaden. Inside, I was spitting mad, snarling and cursing, but my body lay as still and calm as if I'd already passed.\n\nI pushed down the burbling panic.\n\nConsider the matter with care and logic. I should have taken Aaron's victim, while I still had the strength, but now that I'd missed my opportunity, I couldn't chance waiting another day. I'd rest for an hour or so, until Aaron had retired.\n\nBetter for him not to know. I wouldn't let him pity and coddle me simply because it was in his nature to help the sick, the weak, the needy. I would not be needy.\n\nI'd stay awake and wait until the house grew quiet. Then I'd do this\u2014alone.\n\nI fixed my gaze on the light, staring at it to keep myself awake. Minutes ticked past, each feeling like an hour. My eyes burned. My body begged for sleep. I refused. It threatened to pull me under even with my eyes wide. I compromised. I'd close them for a moment's rest and then I'd leave.\n\nI shut my eyes and all went dark.\n\nI awoke to the smell of flowers. I usually had some in the house, so the smell came as no surprise, and I drowsily stretched, rested and refreshed.\n\nThen I remembered I hadn't replaced my last flowers, and I was seized by the sudden vision of my corpse lying on my bed, surrounded by funeral wreaths. I bolted upright and found myself staring in horror at a room of flowers...before realizing that the fact I was sitting upright would suggest I was not dead.\n\nWith a deep sigh, I looked around. Flowers did indeed fill my room. There were at least a dozen bouquets, each a riot of blooms, with no unifying theme of color, shape, or type. I smiled. Aaron.\n\nMy feet lit on the cool hardwood as I crossed to a piece of paper propped against the nearest bouquet. An advertisement for flights to France. Beside another was a list of hotels. A picture of the Eiffel Tower adorned a third. Random images of Parisian travel littered the room, again with no obvious theme, simply pages hurriedly printed from websites. Typically Aaron. Making his point with all the finesse of a sledgehammer wielded with equal parts enthusiasm and determination.\n\nShould I still fail to be swayed, he'd scrawled a note with letters two inches high, the paper thrust into a bouquet of roses. Paige had called. She was still working on that case and needed my help. In smaller letters below, he informed me that today's paper carried another article on the palliative-care patient who wanted to die.\n\nI dressed, then tucked two of the pages into my pocket, and slipped out the side door.\n\nI didn't go to the hospital Aaron had suggested. It was too late for that. If I was having difficulty making this kill, I could not compound that by choosing one that would itself be difficult.\n\nSo I returned to the alley where I'd found\u2014and dismissed\u2014my first choice two nights ago. The drunkard wasn't there, of course. No one was. But I traversed the maze of alleys and back roads in search of another victim. I couldn't wait for nightfall. I couldn't risk falling asleep again or I might not wake up.\n\nWhen an exit door swung open, I darted into an alley to avoid detection and spotted my victim. A woman, sitting in an alcove, surrounded by grocery bags stuffed with what looked like trash but, I presumed, encompassed the sum of her worldly belongings. Behind me, whoever opened that door tossed trash into the alley and slammed the door shut again. The woman didn't move. She stared straight ahead, gaze vacant. Resting before someone told her to move on.\n\nEven as I watched her, evaluated her, and decided she would do, something deep in me threw up excuses. Not old enough. Not sick enough. Too dangerous a location. Too dangerous a time of day. Keep looking. Find someone better, someplace safer. But if I left here, left her, I would grow more tired, more distracted, and more disinterested with every passing hour.\n\nShe would do. She had to. For once, not a choice I could live with, but the choice that would let me live.\n\nThere was no way to approach without the woman seeing me. Unlike Aaron, I didn't like to let my victims see the specter of death approach, but today I had no choice. So I straightened and started toward her, as if it was perfectly natural for a well-dressed middle-aged woman to cut through alleyways.\n\nOut of the corner of my eye, I saw her look up as I passed. She tensed, then relaxed, seeing no threat. I turned, as if just noticing her. Then with a brisk nod, I took a twenty from my wallet.\n\nA cruel ruse? Or making her last memory a pleasant one? Perhaps both. As expected, she smiled, her guard lowering even more. I reached down, but let go of the bill too soon. As it fluttered to the ground, I murmured an apology and bent, as if to retrieve it, but she was already snatching it up. I kept bending, still apologizing...and sank my fangs into the back of her neck.\n\nShe gave one gasp before the sedative took effect and she fell forward. I tugged her into the alcove, propped her against the wall, and crouched beside her still form.\n\nAs my fangs pierced her jugular, I braced myself. The blood filled my mouth, as thick, hot, and horrible as the drug dealer's the night before. My throat tried to seize up, rejecting it, but I swallowed hard. Another mouthful. Another swallow. Drink. Swallow. Drink. Swallow.\n\nMy stomach heaved. I pulled back from the woman, closed my eyes, lifted my chin, and swallowed the blood. Another heave, and my mouth filled, the taste too horrible to describe. I gritted my teeth and swallowed.\n\nWith every mouthful now, some came back up. I swallowed it again. Soon my whole body was shaking, my brain screaming that this wasn't right, that I was killing myself, drowning.\n\nMy stomach gave one violent heave, my throat refilling. I clamped my hand to my mouth, eyes squeezed shut as I forced myself to swallow the regurgitated blood.\n\nBody shaking, I crouched over her again. I opened my eyes and saw the woman lying there. I couldn't do this. I couldn't\u2014\n\nOne hand still pressed to my mouth, I tugged the pages from my pocket. I unfolded them and forced myself to look. Paris. Aaron. Paige. The council. I wasn't done yet. Soon...but not yet.\n\nI squeezed my eyes shut, then slammed my fangs into the woman's throat and drank.\n\nHer pulse started to fade. My stomach was convulsing now, body trembling so hard I could barely keep my mouth locked on her neck. Even as I pushed on, seeing the end in sight, I knew this wasn't success. I'd won only the first round of a match I was doomed to lose.\n\nThe last drops of blood filled my mouth. Her heart beat slower, and slower, then...stopped.\n\nAnother life taken. Another year to live.\n\n## It's My Birthday, Too\n\nJim Butcher\n\nJim Butcher is the author of The Dresden Files and the Codex Alera series. A martial arts enthusiast, Jim enjoys fencing, singing, bad science fiction movies, and live-action gaming. He lives in Missouri with his wife, son, and a vicious guard dog.\n\n\"Hey, Miyagi-san,\" my apprentice said. Her jeans still dripped with purple-brown mucus. \"You think the dry cleaners can get this out?\"\n\nI threw my car keys down on my kitchen counter, leaned my slimed, rune-carved wooden staff next to them, and said, \"The last time I took something stained by a slime golem to a cleaner, the owner burned his place down the next day and tried to collect on the insurance.\"\n\nMolly, my apprentice, was just barely out of her teens, and it was impossible not to notice what great legs she had when she stripped out of her trendily mangled jeans. She wrinkled her nose as she tossed them into the kitchen trash can. \"Have I told you how much I love the wizard business, Harry?\"\n\n\"Neither of us is in the hospital, kid. This was a good day at work.\" I took my mantled leather duster off. It was generously covered in splatters of the sticky, smelly mucus as well. I toted it over to the fireplace in my basement apartment, which I keep going during the winter. Given that I have to live without the benefits of electricity, it's necessary. I made sure the fire was burning strongly and tossed the coat in.\n\n\"Hey!\" Molly said. \"Not the coat!\"\n\n\"Relax,\" I told her. \"The spells on it should protect it. They'll bake the slime hard and I'll chisel it off tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Oh, good. I like the coat.\" The girl subsided as she tossed her secondhand combat boots and socks into my trash after her ruined jeans. She was tall for a woman and built like a schoolboy's fantasy of the Scandinavian exchange student. Her hair was shoulder length and the color of white gold, except for the tips, which had been dyed in a blend of blue, red, and purple. She'd lost a couple of the piercings she'd previously worn on her face, and was now down to only one eyebrow, one nostril, her tongue, and her lower lip. She went over to the throw rug in the middle of my living room floor, hauled it to one side, and opened the trapdoor leading down to my lab in the subbasement. She lit a candle in the fire, wrinkling her nose at the stink from the greasy smoke coming up from my coat, and padded down the stepladder stairs into the lab.\n\nMouse, my pet Sabertoothed Retriever, padded out of my bedroom and spread his doggy jaws in a big yawn, wagging his shaggy gray tail. He took one step toward me, then froze as the smell of the mucus hit his nose. The big gray dog turned around at once and padded back into the bedroom.\n\n\"Coward!\" I called after him. I glanced up at Mister, my tomcat, who drowsed upon the top of my heaviest bookshelf, catching the updraft from the fireplace. \"At least you haven't deserted me.\"\n\nMister glanced at me, and then gave his head a little shake as the pungent smoke from the fireplace rose to him. He flicked his ears at me, obviously annoyed, and descended from the bookshelf with gracefully offended dignity to follow Mouse into the relative aromatic safety of my bedroom.\n\n\"Wimp,\" I muttered. I eyed my staff. It was crusty with the ichor. I'd have to take it off with sandpaper and repair the carvings. I'd probably have to do the blasting rod, too. Stupid freaking amateurs, playing with things they didn't understand. Slime golems are just disgusting.\n\nMolly thumped back up the stairs, now dressed in her backup clothes. Her experiences in training with me had taught her that lesson about six months in, and she had a second set of clothing stored in a gym bag underneath the little desk I let her keep in the lab. She came up in one of those black broomstick skirts that's supposed to look wrinkled and Doc Martens, inappropriate for the winter weather but way less inappropriate than black athletic panties. \"Harry, are you going to be able to drive me home?\"\n\nI frowned and checked the clock. After nine. Too late for a young woman to trust herself to Chicago's public transportation. Given Molly's skills, she probably wouldn't be in any real danger, but it's best not to tempt fate. \"Could you call your folks?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"On Valentine's Day, are you kidding? They'll have barricaded themselves upstairs and forced the older kids to wear the little ones out so that they'll sleep through the noise.\" Molly shuddered. \"I'm not interrupting them. Way too disturbing.\"\n\n\"Valentine's Day,\" I groaned. \"Dammit.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Oh, I forgot, what with the excitement. It's, uh, someone's birthday. I got them a present and wanted to get it to them today.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Molly chirped. \"Who?\"\n\nI hesitated for a minute, but Molly had earned a certain amount of candor\u2014and trust. \"Thomas,\" I said.\n\n\"The vampire?\" Molly asked.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I said.\n\n\"Wow, Harry,\" she said, blue eyes sparkling. \"That's odd. I mean, why would you get him a birthday present?\" She frowned prettily. \"I mean, you didn't get my dad one, and you're friends with him, and he's a Knight of the Sword and one of the good guys, and he's saved your life about twenty times and all.\"\n\n\"More like four times,\" I said testily. \"And I do Christmas for hi\u2014\"\n\nMolly was looking at me, a smug smile on her face.\n\n\"You figured it out,\" I said.\n\n\"That Thomas was your brother?\" Molly asked innocently. \"Yep.\"\n\nI blinked at her. \"How?\"\n\n\"I've seen you two fight.\" She lifted both pale eyebrows. \"What? Have you seen how many brothers and sisters I have? I know my sibling conflicts.\"\n\n\"Hell's bells,\" I sighed. \"Molly\u2014\"\n\nShe lifted a hand. \"I know, boss. I know. Big secret; safe with me.\" Her expression turned serious, and she gave me a look that was very knowing for someone so young. \"Family is important.\"\n\nI'd grown up in a succession of orphanages and foster homes. \"Yeah,\" I said, \"it is.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"So you haven't given family presents much. And your brother doesn't exactly have a ton of people bringing him presents on his birthday, does he?\"\n\nI just looked at her for a second. Molly was growing up into a person I thought I was going to like.\n\n\"No,\" I said, quietly. \"I haven't and he doesn't.\"\n\n\"Well then,\" she said, smiling. \"Let's go give him one.\"\n\nI frowned at the intercom outside Thomas's apartment building and said, \"I don't get it. He's always home this time of night.\"\n\n\"Maybe he's out to dinner,\" Molly said, shivering in the cold\u2014after all, her backup clothing had been summer wear.\n\nI shook my head. \"He limits himself pretty drastically when it comes to exposing himself to the public.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"He's a White Court vampire, an incubus,\" I said. \"Pretty much every woman who looks at him gets ideas.\"\n\nMolly coughed delicately. \"Oh. It's not just me, then.\"\n\n\"No. I followed him around town once. It was like watching one of those campy cologne commercials.\"\n\n\"But he does go out, right?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nShe nodded and immediately started digging into her backpack. \"Then maybe we could use a tracking spell and run him down. I think I've got some materials we can use.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" I said, and produced two quarters from my pocket, holding them up between my fingers with slow, ominous flair, like David Blaine.\n\nThen I took two steps to the pay phone next to the apartment building's entrance, plugged the coins in, and called Thomas's cell phone.\n\nMolly gave me a level look and folded her arms.\n\n\"Hey,\" I told her as it rang. \"We're wizards, kid. We have trouble using technology. Doesn't mean we can't be smart about it.\"\n\nMolly rolled her eyes and muttered to herself, and I paid attention to the phone call.\n\n\"'Allo,\" Thomas answered, the word thick with the French accent he used in his public persona.\n\n\"Hello, France?\" I responded. \"I found a dead mouse in my can of French roast coffee, and I've called to complain. I'm an American, and I refuse to stand for that kind of thing from you people.\"\n\nMy half brother sighed. \"A moment, please,\" he said in his accent. I could hear music playing and people talking behind him. A party? A door clicked shut and he said, without any accent, \"Hey, Harry.\"\n\n\"I'm standing outside your apartment in the freaking snow with your birthday present.\"\n\n\"That won't do you much good,\" he said. \"I'm not there.\"\n\n\"Being a professional detective, I had deduced that much,\" I said.\n\n\"A birthday present, huh?\" he said.\n\n\"I get much colder and I'm going to burn it for warmth.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I'm at the Woodfield Mall in Schamburg.\"\n\nI glanced at my watch. \"This late?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. I'm doing a favor for one of my employees. I'll be here until midnight or so. Look, just come back tomorrow evening.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said stubbornly. \"Your birthday is today. I'll drive there.\"\n\n\"Uh,\" Thomas said. \"Yeah. I guess, uh. Okay.\"\n\nI frowned. \"What are you doing out there?\"\n\n\"Gotta go.\" He hung up on me.\n\nI traded a look with Molly. \"Huh.\"\n\nShe tilted her head. \"What's going on?\"\n\nI turned and headed back for the car. \"Let's find out.\"\n\nWoodfield Mall is the largest such establishment in the state, but its parking lots were all but entirely empty. The mall had been closed for more than an hour.\n\n\"How are we supposed to find him?\" Molly asked.\n\nI drove my car, the beat-up old Volkswagen Bug I had dubbed the Blue Beetle, around for a few minutes. \"There,\" I said, nodding at a white sedan parked among a dozen other vehicles, the largest concentration of such transport left at the mall. \"That's his car.\" I started to say something else but stopped myself before I wasted an opportunity to Yoda the trainee. \"Molly, tell me what you see.\"\n\nShe scrunched up her nose, frowning, as I drove through the lot to park next to Thomas's car. The tires crunched over the thin dusting of snow that had frosted itself over scraped asphalt, streaks of salt and ice melt, and stubborn patches of ice. I killed the engine. It ticked for a few seconds, and then the car filled with the kind of soft, heavy silence you only get on a winter night with snow on the ground.\n\n\"The mall is closed,\" Molly said. \"But there are cars at this entrance. There is a single section of lights on inside when the rest of them are out. I think one of the shops is lit inside. There's no curtain down over it, even though the rest of the shops have them.\"\n\n\"So what should we be asking?\" I prompted.\n\n\"What is Thomas doing, in a group, in a closed mall, on Valentine's Day night?\" Her tone rose at the end, questioning.\n\n\"Good; the significance of the date might mean something,\" I said. \"But the real question is this: Is it a coincidence that the exterior security camera facing that door is broken?\"\n\nMolly blinked at me, then frowned, looking around.\n\nI pointed a finger up. \"Remember to look in all three dimensions. Human instincts don't tend toward checking up above us or directly at our own feet, in general. You have to make yourself pick up the habit.\"\n\nMolly frowned and then leaned over, peering up through the Beetle's window to the tall streetlamp pole above us.\n\nMaybe ten feet up, there was the square, black metal housing of a security camera. Several bare wires dangled beneath it, their ends connected to nothing. I'd seen it as I pulled the car in.\n\nMy apprentice drew in a nervous breath. \"You think something is happening?\"\n\n\"I think that we don't have enough information to make any assumptions,\" I said. \"It's probably nothing. But let's keep our eyes open.\"\n\nNo sooner had the words left my mouth than two figures stepped out of the night, walking briskly down the sidewalk outside the mall toward the lighted entrance.\n\nThey both wore long black capes with hoods.\n\nNot your standard wear for Chicago shoppers.\n\nMolly opened her mouth to stammer something.\n\n\"Quiet,\" I hissed. \"Do not move.\"\n\nThe two figures went by only thirty or forty feet away. I caught a glimpse of a very, very pale face within one of the figure's hoods, eyes sunken into the skull like pits. They both turned to the door without so much as glancing at us, opened it as though they expected it to be unlocked, and proceeded inside.\n\n\"All right,\" I said quietly. \"It might be something.\"\n\n\"Um,\" Molly said. \"W-were those v-vampires?\"\n\n\"Deep breaths, kid,\" I told her. \"Fear isn't stupid, but don't let it control you. I have no idea what they were.\" I made sure my old fleece-lined heavy denim coat was buttoned up and got out of the car.\n\n\"Uh. Then where are you going?\" she asked.\n\n\"Inside,\" I said, walking around to the Beetle's trunk. I unwrapped the wire that had held it closed ever since a dozen vehicular mishaps ago. \"Whatever they are, Thomas doesn't know about them. He'd have said something.\"\n\nI couldn't see her through the lifted hood, but Molly rolled down the window enough to talk to me. \"B-but you don't have your staff or blasting rod or coat or anything. They're all back at your apartment.\"\n\nI opened the case that held my .44 revolver and the box that held my ammunition, slipped shells into the weapon, and put it in my coat pocket. I dropped some extra rounds into the front pocket of my jeans and shut the hood. \"They're only toys, Padawan.\" Familiar, capable, proven toys that I felt naked without, but a true wizard shouldn't absolutely rely on them\u2014or teach his apprentice to do so. \"Stay here, start up the car, and be ready to roll if we need to leave in a hurry.\"\n\n\"Right,\" she said, and wriggled over into the driver's seat. Give Molly credit, she might be nervous, but she had learned the job of wheelman\u2014sorry, political correctioners, wheelperson\u2014fairly well.\n\nI kept my right hand in my coat pocket, on the handle of my gun, hunched my shoulders against a small breath of frozen wind, and hurried to the mall entrance, my shoes crunching and squeaking on the little coating of snow. I walked toward the doors like I owned them, shoved them open like any shopper, and got a quick look around.\n\nThe mall was dark, except for the entrance and that single open shop\u2014a little bistro with tinted windows that would have been dimly lit even when all the lights were on. I could see figures seated at tables inside and at a long dining counter and bar. They wore lots of black, and none of them looked much older than Molly, though the dim lights revealed few details.\n\nI narrowed my eyes a bit, debating. Vampires gave off a certain amount of energy that someone like me could sense, but depending on which breed you were talking about, that energy could vary. Sometimes my sense of an approaching vampire was as overtly creepy as a child's giggle coming from an open grave. Other times there was barely anything at all, and it registered on my senses as something as subtle as a simple, instinctive dislike for the creature in question. For White Court vamps like my half brother, there was nothing at all, unless they were doing something overtly vampiric. From outside the shop, I couldn't tell anything.\n\nAssuming they were vampires at all\u2014which was a fairly large assumption. They didn't meet up in the open like this. Vampires don't apologize to the normal world for existing, but they don't exactly run around auditioning for the latest reality TV shows, either.\n\nOne way to find out. I opened the door to the bistro, hand on my gun, took a step inside, holding the door open in case I needed to flee, and peered around warily at the occupants. The nearest was a pair of young men, speaking earnestly at a table over two cups of what looked like coffee and...\n\nAnd they had acne. Not like disfiguring acne, or anything, just a few zits.\n\nIn case no one's told you, here's a monster-hunting tip for free: vampires have little to no need for Clearasil.\n\nSeen in that light, the two young men's costumes looked like exactly that. Costumes. They had two big cloaks, dripping a little meltwater, hung over the backs of their chairs, and I caught the distinctive aroma of weed coming from their general direction. Two kids, slipping out from the gathering to toke up and come back inside. One of them produced a candy bar from a pocket and tore into it, to the reassurance of the people who make Clearasil, I'm sure.\n\nI looked around the room. More people. Mostly young, mostly with the thinness that goes with youth, as opposed to the leanly cadaverous kind that goes with being a bloodsucking fiend. They were mostly dressed in similar costume-style clothing, unless there had been a big sale at Goth-R-Us.\n\nI felt my shoulders sag in relief, and I slipped my hand out of my pocket. Any time one of my bouts of constructive paranoia didn't pan out was a good time.\n\n\"Sir,\" said a gruff voice from behind me. \"The mall is closed. You want to tell me what you're doing here?\"\n\nI turned to face a squat, blocky man with watery blue eyes and no chin. He'd grown a thick, brown gold walrus mustache that emphasized rather than distracted from the lack. He had a high hairline, a brown uniform, and what looked like a cop's weapon belt until you saw that he had a walkie-talkie where the sidearm would be, next to a tiny can of mace. His name tag read: Raymond.\n\n\"Observing suspicious activity, Raymond,\" I said, and hooked my chin vaguely back at the bistro. \"See that? People hanging around in the mall after hours. Weird.\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. \"Wait. Don't I know you?\"\n\nI pursed my lips and thought. \"Oh, right. Six, seven years ago, at Shoegasm.\"\n\nHe grunted in recognition. \"The phony psychic.\"\n\n\"Consultant,\" I responded. \"And from what I hear, their inventory stopped shrinking. Which hadn't happened before I showed up.\"\n\nRaymond gave me a look that would have cowed lesser men. Much, much lesser men. Like maybe fourth graders. \"If you aren't with the group, you're gone. You want to leave, or would you rather I took care of it for you?\"\n\n\"Stop,\" I said, \"you're scaring me.\"\n\nRaymond's mustache quivered. He apparently wasn't used to people who didn't take him seriously. Plus, I was much, much bigger than he was.\n\n\"'Allo, 'Ah-ree,\" came my brother's voice from behind me.\n\nI turned to find Thomas there, dressed in tight black pants and a blousy red silk shirt. His shoulder-length hair was tied back in a tail with a matching red ribbon. His face didn't look much like mine, except around the eyes and maybe the chin. Thomas was good looking the way Mozart was talented. There were people on the covers of magazines and on television and on movie screens who despaired of ever looking as good as Thomas.\n\nOn his arm was a slim young girl, quite pretty and wholesome-looking, wearing leather pants that rode low on her hips and a red bikini top, her silky brown hair artfully mussed. I recognized her from Thomas's shop, a young woman named Sarah.\n\n\"Harry!\" she said. \"Oh, it's nice to see you again.\" She nudged Thomas with her hip. \"Isn't it?\"\n\n\"Always,\" Thomas said in his French accent, smiling.\n\n\"Hello, Mr. Raymond!\" Sarah said, brightly.\n\nRaymond scowled at me and asked Sarah, \"He with you?\"\n\n\"But of course,\" Thomas said, in that annoying French way, giving Raymond his most brilliant smile.\n\nRaymond grunted and took his hand away from the radio. Lucky me. I had evidently been dismissed from Raymond's world. \"I was going to tell you that I'm going to be in the parking lot, replacing a camera we've got down, if you need me.\"\n\n\"Merci,\" Thomas said, still smiling.\n\nRaymond grunted. He gave me a sour look, picked up a toolbox from where he'd set it aside, along with his coat and a stepladder, and headed out to the parking lot.\n\n\"'Ah-ree, you know Say-rah,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"Never had the pleasure of an introduction,\" I said, and offered Sarah my hand.\n\nShe took it, smiling. \"I take it you aren't here to play Evernight?\"\n\nI looked from her to the costumed people. \"Oh,\" I said. \"Oh, it's a...game of some kind, I take it?\"\n\n\"A larp,\" she said.\n\nI looked blank for a second. \"Is that like a lark?\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Larp,\" she repeated. \"Live action role play.\"\n\n\"Live action...vampire role play, I guess,\" I said. I looked at Thomas. \"And this is why you are here?\"\n\nThomas gave me a sunny smile and nodded. \"She asked me to pretend to be a vampire, just for tonight,\" he said. \"And straight.\"\n\nNo wonder he was having a good time.\n\nSarah beamed at me. \"Thomas never talks about his, ah, personal life. So you're quite the man of mystery at the shop. We all speculate about you, all the time.\"\n\nI'll just bet they did. There were times when my brother's cover as a flamingly gay hairdresser really grated. And it wasn't like I could go around telling people we were related\u2014not with the White Council of Wizards at war with the Vampire Courts.\n\n\"How nice,\" I told Sarah. I was never getting out of the role people had assumed for me around Thomas. \"Thomas, can we talk for a moment?\"\n\n\"Mais oui,\" he said. He smiled at Sarah, took her hand, and gave her a little bow over it. She beamed fondly at him, and then hurried back inside.\n\nI watched her go, in her tight pants and skimpy top, and sighed. She had an awfully appealing curve of back and hip, and just enough bounce to make the motion pleasant, and there was no way I could ever even think about flirting with her.\n\n\"Roll your tongue back up into your mouth before someone notices,\" Thomas said, sotto voce. \"I've got a cover to keep.\"\n\n\"Tell them I'm larping like I'm straight,\" I said, and we turned to walk down the entry hall, a little away from the bistro. \"Pretending to be a vampire, huh?\"\n\n\"It's fun,\" Thomas said. \"I'm like a guest star on the season finale.\"\n\nI eyed him. \"Vampires aren't fun and games.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" Thomas said. \"You know that. But they don't know that.\"\n\n\"You aren't doing them any favors,\" I said.\n\n\"Lighten up,\" Thomas said. The words were teasing, but there were serious undertones to his voice. \"They're having fun, and I'm helping. I don't get a chance to do that very often.\"\n\n\"By making light of something that is a very real danger.\"\n\nHe stopped and faced me. \"They're innocent, Harry. They don't know any better. They've never been hurt by a vampire, lost loved ones to a vampire.\" He lifted his eyebrows. \"I thought that was what your people were fighting for in the first place.\"\n\nI gave him a sour look. \"If you weren't my brother, I'd probably tell you that you have some awfully nerdy hobbies.\"\n\nWe reached the front doors. Thomas studied himself in the glass and struck a pose. \"True. But I look gorgeous doing them. Besides, Sarah worked eleven Friday to Mondays in a row without a complaint. She earned a favor.\"\n\nOutside, the snow was thickening. Raymond was atop his ladder, fiddling with the camera. Molly was watching him. I waved until I got her attention, then made a little outline figure of a box with my fingers, and beckoned her. She nodded and killed the engine.\n\n\"I came in here expecting trouble. We're lucky I didn't bounce a few of these kids off the ceiling before I realized they weren't something from the dark side.\"\n\n\"Bah,\" Thomas said. \"Never happen. You're careful.\"\n\nI snorted. \"I hope you won't mind if I just give you your present and run.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" Thomas said. \"Gracious much?\"\n\n\"Up yours,\" I said, as Molly grabbed the present and hurried in through the cold, shivering all the way. \"And Happy Birthday.\"\n\nHe turned to me and gave me a small, genuinely pleased smile. \"Thank you.\"\n\nThere was a click of high heels in the hall behind us, and a young woman appeared. She was pretty enough, I suspected, but in the tight black dress, black hose, and with her hair slicked back like that, it was sort of threatening. She gave me a slow, cold look and said, \"So. I see that you're keeping low company after all, Ravenius.\"\n\nEver suave, I replied, \"Uh. What?\"\n\n\"'Ah-ree,\" Thomas said.\n\nI glanced at him.\n\nHe put his hand flat on the top of his head and said, \"Do this.\"\n\nI peered at him.\n\nHe gave me a look.\n\nI sighed and put my hand on the top of my head.\n\nThe girl in the black dress promptly did the same thing and gave me a smile. \"Oh, right, sorry. I didn't realize.\"\n\n\"I will be back in one moment,\" Thomas said, his accent back. \"Personal business.\"\n\n\"Right,\" she said, \"sorry. I figured Ennui had stumbled onto a subplot.\" She smiled again, then took her hand off the top of her head, reassumed that cold, haughty expression, and stalked clickety-clack back to the bistro.\n\nI watched her go, turned to my brother while we both stood there with our hands flat on top of our heads, elbows sticking out like chicken wings, and said, \"What does this mean?\"\n\n\"We're out of character,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"Oh,\" I said. \"And not a subplot.\"\n\n\"If we had our hands crossed over our chests,\" Thomas said, \"we'd be invisible.\"\n\n\"I missed dinner,\" I said. I put my other hand on my stomach. Then, just to prove that I could, I patted my head and rubbed my stomach. \"Now I'm out of character\u2014and hungry.\"\n\n\"You're always hungry. How is that out of character?\"\n\n\"True,\" I said. I frowned, and looked back. \"What's taking Molly\u2014\"\n\nMy apprentice stood with her back pressed to the glass doors, faced away from me. She stood rigid, one hand pressed to her mouth. Thomas's birthday present, in its pink and red Valentine's Day wrapping paper, lay on its side among grains of snowmelt on the sidewalk. Molly trembled violently.\n\nThomas was a beat slow to catch on to what was happening. \"Isn't that skirt a little light for the weather? Look, she's freezing.\"\n\nBefore he got to \"skirt,\" I was out the door. I seized Molly and dragged her inside, eyes on the parking lot. I noticed two things.\n\nFirst, that Raymond's ladder was tipped over and lay on its side in the parking lot. Flakes of snow were already gathering upon it. In fact, the snow was coming down more and more heavily, despite the weather forecast that had called for clearing skies.\n\nSecond, there were droplets of blood on my car and the cars immediately around it, the ones closest to Raymond's ladder. They were rapidly freezing and glittered under the parking lot's lamps like tiny, brilliant rubies.\n\n\"What?\" Thomas asked, as I brought Molly back in. \"What is\u2014\" He stared out the windows for a second and answered the question for himself. \"Crap.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I said. \"Molly?\"\n\nShe gave me a wild-eyed glance, shook her head once, and then bowed it and closed her eyes, speaking in a low, repetitive whisper.\n\n\"What the hell?\" Thomas said.\n\n\"She's in psychic shock,\" I said quietly.\n\n\"Never seen you in psychic shock,\" my brother said.\n\n\"Different talents. I blow things up. Molly's a sensitive, and getting more so,\" I told him. \"She'll snap herself out of it, but she needs a minute.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" Thomas said quietly. He stared intently at the shuddering young woman, his eyes shifting colors slightly, from deep gray to something paler.\n\n\"Hey,\" I said to him. \"Focus.\"\n\nHe gave his head a little shake, his eyes gradually darkening again. \"Right. Come on. Let's get her a chair and some coffee and stop standing around in front of big glass windows making targets of ourselves.\"\n\nWe did, dragging her into the bistro and to the table nearest the door, where Thomas could stand watching the darkness while I grabbed the girl some coffee from a dispenser, holding my hand on top of my silly head the whole while.\n\nMolly got her act together within a couple of minutes after I sat down. It surprised me: despite my casual words to Thomas, I hadn't seen her that badly shaken up before. She grabbed at the coffee, shaking, and slurped some.\n\n\"Okay, grasshopper,\" I said. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"I was on the way in,\" she replied, her voice distant and oddly flat. \"The security man. S-something killed him.\" A hint of something desperate crept into her voice. \"I f-felt him die. It was horrible.\"\n\n\"What?\" I asked her. \"Give me some details to work with.\"\n\nMolly shook her head rapidly. \"D-didn't see. It was too fast. I sensed something moving behind me\u2014m-maybe a footstep. Then there was a quiet sound and h-he died....\" Her breaths started coming rapidly again.\n\n\"Easy,\" I told her, keeping my voice in the steady cadence I'd used when teaching her how to maintain self-control under stress. \"Breathe. Focus. Remember who you are.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" she said, several breaths later. \"Okay.\"\n\n\"This sound. What was it?\"\n\nShe stared down at the steam coming up off her coffee. \"I...a thump, maybe. Lighter.\"\n\n\"A snap?\" I asked.\n\nShe grimaced but nodded. \"And I turned around, fast as I could. But he was gone. I didn't see anything there, Harry.\"\n\nThomas, ten feet away, could hear our quiet conversation as clearly as if he'd been sitting with us. \"Something grabbed Raymond,\" he said. \"Something moving fast enough to cross her whole field of vision in a second or two. It didn't stop moving when it took him. She probably heard his neck breaking from the whiplash.\"\n\nNot much to say to that. The whole concept was disturbing as hell.\n\nThomas glanced back at me and said, \"It's a great way to do a grab and snatch if you're fast enough. My father showed me how it was done once.\" His head whipped around toward the parking lot.\n\nI felt myself tense. \"What?\"\n\n\"The streetlights just went out.\"\n\nI sat back in my chair, thinking furiously. \"Only one reason to do that.\"\n\n\"To blind us,\" Thomas said. \"Prevent anyone from reaching the vehicles.\"\n\n\"Also keeps anyone outside from seeing what is happening here,\" I said. \"How are you guys using this place after hours?\"\n\n\"Sarah's uncle owns it,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"Get her,\" I said, rising to take up watching the door. \"Hurry.\"\n\nThomas brought her over to me a moment later. By the time he did, the larpers had become aware that something was wrong, and their awkwardly sinister role-playing dwindled into an uncertain silence as Sarah hurried over. Before, I had watched her and her scarlet bikini top in appraisal. Now I couldn't help but think how slender and vulnerable it made her neck look.\n\n\"What is it?\" Sarah asked me.\n\n\"Trouble,\" I said. \"We may be in danger, and I need you to answer a few questions for me, right now.\"\n\nShe opened her mouth and started to ask me something.\n\n\"First,\" I said, interrupting her, \"do you know how many security men are present at night?\"\n\nShe blinked at me for a second. Then she said, \"Uh, four before closing, two after. But the two who leave are usually here until midnight, doing maintenance and some of the cleaning.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"The security office, in administration.\"\n\n\"Right,\" I said. \"This place have a phone?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Take me to it.\"\n\nShe did, back in the little place's tiny kitchen. I picked it up, got a dial tone, and slammed Murphy's phone number across the numbers. If the bad guys, whoever or whatever they were, were afraid of attracting attention from the outside world, I might be able to avoid the entire situation by calling in lots of police cars and flashy lights.\n\nThe phone rang once, twice.\n\nAnd then it went dead, along with the lights, the music playing on the speakers, and the constant blowing sigh of the heating system.\n\nSeveral short, breathy screams came from the front of the bistro, and I heard Thomas shout for silence and call, \"Harry?\"\n\n\"The security office,\" I said to Sarah. \"Where is it?\"\n\n\"Um. It's at the far end of the mall from here.\"\n\n\"Easy to find?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, shaking her head. \"You have to go through the administrative hall and\u2014\"\n\nI shook my head. \"You can show me. Come on.\" I stalked out to the front room of the bistro. \"Thomas? Anything?\"\n\nAll the larpers had gathered in close, herd instinct kicking in under the tension. Thomas stepped closer to me so that he could answer me under his breath.\n\n\"Nothing yet,\" Thomas said. \"But I saw something moving out there.\"\n\nI grunted. \"Here's the plan. Molly, Sarah, and me are going to go down to the security office and try to reach someone.\"\n\n\"Bad idea,\" Thomas said. \"We need to get out of here.\"\n\n\"We're too vulnerable. They're between us and the cars,\" I said. \"Whatever they are. We'll never make it out all the way across the parking lot without getting caught.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he said. \"You fort up here and I'll go.\"\n\n\"No. Once we're gone, you'll try to get through to the cops on a cell phone. There's not a prayer of getting one to work if Molly and me are anywhere nearby\u2014not with both of us this nervous.\"\n\nHe didn't like that answer, but he couldn't refute it. \"All right,\" he said, grimacing. \"Watch your back.\"\n\nI nodded to him and raised my voice. \"All right, everyone. I'm not sure exactly what is going on here, but I'm going to go find security. I want everyone to stay here until I get back and we're sure it's safe.\"\n\nThere was a round of halfhearted protests at that, but Thomas quelled them with a look. It wasn't an angry or threatening look. It was simply a steady gaze.\n\nEveryone shut up.\n\nI headed out with Molly and Sarah in tow, and as we stepped out of the bistro, there was an enormous crashing sound, and a car came flying sideways through the glass wall of the entranceway about eight feet off the ground. It hit the ground, broken glass and steel foaming around it like crashing surf, bounced with a shockingly loud crunch, and tumbled ponderously toward us, heralded by a rush of freezing air.\n\nMolly was already moving, but Sarah only stood there staring incredulously as the car came toward us. I grabbed her around the waist and all but hauled her off her feet, dragging her away. I ran straight away from the oncoming missile, which was not the smartest way to go\u2014but since a little perfume kiosk was blocking my path, it was the only way.\n\nI was fast, and we got a little bit lucky. I pulled Sarah past the kiosk just as the car hit it. Its momentum was almost gone by the time it hit, and it crashed to a halt, a small wave of safety glass washing past our shoes. Sarah wobbled and nearly fell. I caught her and kept going. She started to scream or shout or ask a question\u2014but I clapped my hand over her mouth and hissed, \"Quiet!\"\n\nI didn't stop until we were around the corner and the crashing racket was coming to a halt. Then I stopped with my back against the wall and got Sarah's attention.\n\nI didn't speak. I raised one finger to my lips with as much physical emphasis as I could manage. Sarah, trembling violently, nodded at me. I turned to give the same signal to Molly, who looked pale but in control of herself. She nodded as well, and we turned and slipped away from that arm of the mall.\n\nI listened as hard as I could, which is actually quite hard. It's a talent I seem to have developed, maybe because I'm a wizard, and maybe just because some people can hear really well. It was difficult to make out anything at all, much less any kind of detail, but I was sure I heard one thing\u2014footsteps, coming in the crushed door of the mall, crunching on broken glass and debris.\n\nSomething fast enough to snap a man's neck with the whiplash of its passage and strong enough to throw that car through a wall of glass had just walked into the mall behind us. I figured it was a very, very good idea not to let it know we were there and sneaking away.\n\nWe got away with it, walking slowly and silently out through the mall, which yawned all around us, three levels of darkened stores, deserted shops, and closed metal grates and doors. I stopped a dozen shops later, after we'd gone past the central plaza of the mall and were far enough away for the space to swallow up quiet conversation.\n\n\"Oh my God,\" Sarah whimpered, her voice a strangled little whisper. \"Oh my God. What is happening? Is it terrorists?\"\n\nI probably would have had a more suave answer if she hadn't been pressed up against my side, mostly naked from the hips up, warm and lithe and trembling. The adrenaline rush that had hit me when the car nearly smashed us caught up to me, and it was suddenly difficult to keep from shivering, myself. I had a sudden, insanely intense need to rip off the strings on that red bikini top and kiss her, purely for the sake of how good it would feel. All things considered, though, it would have been less than appropriate. \"Uh,\" I mumbled, forcing myself to look back the way we'd come. \"They're...bad guys of some kind, yeah. Are you hurt?\"\n\n\"No,\" Sarah said.\n\n\"Molly?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" my apprentice answered.\n\n\"The security office,\" I said.\n\nSarah stared at me for a second, her eyes still wide. \"But...but I don't understand why\u2014\"\n\nI put my hand firmly over her mouth. \"Sarah,\" I said, meeting her eyes for as long as I dared. \"I've been in trouble before, and I know what I'm doing. I need you to trust me. All right?\"\n\nHer eyes widened for a second. She reached up to lightly touch my wrist, and I let her push my hand gently away from her mouth. She swallowed and nodded once.\n\n\"There's no time. We have to find the security office now.\"\n\n\"A-all right,\" she said. \"This way.\"\n\nShe led us off and we followed her, creeping through the cavernous dimness of the unlit mall. Molly leaned in close to me to whisper, \"Even if we get the security guards, what are they going to do against something that can do that?\"\n\n\"They'll have radios,\" I whispered back. \"Cell phones. They'll know all the ways out. If we can't call in help, they'll give us the best shot of getting these people out of here in one\u2014\"\n\nLights began flickering on and off. Not blinking, not starting up and shutting down in rhythm, but irregularly. First they came on over a section of the third floor for a few seconds. Then they went out. A few seconds later, it was a far section of the second floor. Then they went out. Then light shone from one of the distant wings for a moment and vanished again. It was like watching a child experiment with the switches.\n\nThen the PA system let out a crackle and a little squeal of feedback. It shut off again and came back on. \"Testing,\" said a dry, rasping voice over the speakers. \"Testing one, two, three.\"\n\nSarah froze in place, and then backed up warily, looking at me. I stepped up next to her, and she pressed in close to me, shivering.\n\n\"There,\" said the voice. It was a horrible thing to listen to\u2014like Linda Blair's impression of a demon-possessed victim, only less melodious. \"I'm sure you all can hear me now.\"\n\nAnd I'd heard such a voice before. \"Oh, hell,\" I breathed.\n\n\"This is Constance,\" continued the voice. \"Constance Bushnell. I'm sure you all remember me.\"\n\nI glanced at Molly, who shook her head. Sarah looked frightened and confused, but when she caught my look, she shook her head, too.\n\n\"You might also remember me,\" she continued, \"As Drulinda.\" And then the voice started singing \"Happy Birthday.\" The tune wasn't even vaguely close to the actual song, but the lyrics, sung \"to me,\" were unmistakable.\n\nSarah's eyes had widened. \"Drulinda?\"\n\n\"Who the hell is Drulinda?\" I asked.\n\nSarah shook her head. \"One of our characters. But her player ran away from home or something.\"\n\n\"And you didn't recognize her actual name?\"\n\nSarah gave me a slightly guilty glance. \"Well. I never played with her much. She wasn't really very, you know. Popular.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" I said. \"Tell me whatever you can about her.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Um. About five four, sort of...plain. You know, not ugly or anything, but not really pretty. Maybe a little heavy.\"\n\n\"Not that,\" I sighed. \"Tell me something important about her. People make fun of her?\"\n\n\"Some did,\" she said. \"I never liked it, but...\"\n\n\"Crap.\" I looked at Molly and said, \"Code Carrie. We're in trouble.\"\n\nThe horrible, dusty song came to an end. \"It's been a year since I left you,\" Drulinda's voice said. \"A year since I found what all you whining losers were looking for. And I decided to give myself a present.\" There was a horrible pause and then the voice said, \"You. All of you.\"\n\n\"Code what?\" Molly asked me.\n\nI shook my head. \"Sarah, do you know where the announcement system is?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Sarah said. \"Administration. Right by\u2014\"\n\n\"The security office,\" I sighed.\n\nDrulinda's voice continued. \"The entrances are closed and watched. But you should feel free to run for them. You all taste so much better when you've had time to be properly terrified. I've so been looking forward to seeing your reaction to the new me.\"\n\nWith that, the PA system shut off, but a second later, it started playing music: \"Only You,\" by the Platters.\n\n\"Molly,\" I hissed, suddenly realizing the danger. \"Veil us, now.\"\n\nShe blinked at me, then nodded, bowed her head with a frown of concentration, and folded her arms across her chest. I felt her gather up her will and release it with a word and a surge of energy that made the air sparkle like diamond dust for a half second.\n\nInside the veil, the air suddenly turned a few degrees cooler, and the area outside it seemed to become even more dim than it had been a second before. I could sense the delicate tracery of the veil's magic in the air around us, though I knew that, from the other side, none of that would be detectable\u2014assuming Molly had done it correctly, of course. Veils were one of her strongest areas, and I was gambling our lives that she had gotten it right.\n\nNot more than a breath or two later, there was a swift pattering sound and a dim blur in the shadows\u2014which ceased moving abruptly maybe twenty feet away and revealed the presence of a vampire of the Black Court.\n\nDrulinda, or so I presumed her to be, was dressed in dark jeans, a red knit sweater, and a long black leather coat. If she'd been heavy in life, death had taken care of that problem for her. She was sunken and shriveled, as bony and dried up as the year-old corpse she now was. Unlike the older vamps of her breed, she still had most of her hair, though it had clearly not been washed or styled. Most of the Black Court that I'd run into had never been terribly body conscious. I suppose once you'd seen it rot, there just wasn't much more that could happen to sway your opinion of it, either way.\n\nUnlike the older vampires I'd faced, she stank. I don't mean that she carried a little whiff of the grave along with her. I mean she smelled like a year-old corpse that still had a few juicy corners left and wasn't entirely done returning to the earth. It was noxious enough to make me gag\u2014and I'd spent my day tracking down and dismantling a freaking slime golem.\n\nShe stood there for a moment, while the Platters went through the first verse, looking all around her. She'd sensed something, but she wasn't sure what. The vampire turned a slow circle, her shriveled lips moving in time with the music coming over the PA system, and as she did, two more of the creatures, slower than Drulinda, appeared out of the darkness.\n\nThey were freshly made vampires\u2014so much so that for a second, I thought them human. Both men wore brown uniforms identical to Raymond's. Both were stained with blood, and both of them had narrow scoops of flesh missing from the sides of their throats\u2014at the jugular and carotid, specifically. They moved stiffly, making many little twitching motions of their arms and legs, as if struggling against the onset of rigor mortis.\n\n\"What is it?\" slurred one of them. His voice was ragged but not the horrible parody Drulinda's was.\n\nHer hand blurred, too fast to see. The newborn vampire reacted with inhuman speed, but not nearly enough of it, and the blow threw him from his feet to land on the floor, shattered teeth scattering out from him like coins from a dropped purse. \"You can talk,\" Drulinda rasped, \"when I say you can talk. Speak again and I will rip you apart and throw you into Lake Michigan. You can spend eternity down there with no arms, no legs, no light, and no blood.\"\n\nThe vampire, his nose smashed into shapelessness, rose as if he'd just slipped and fallen on his ass. He nodded, his body language twitchy and cringing.\n\nDrulinda's leathery lips peeled back from yellow teeth stained with drying, brownish blood. Then she turned and darted ahead, her footsteps making that light, swift patter on the tiles of the floor. She was gone and around the corner, heading for the bistro, in maybe two or three seconds. The two newbie vampires went after her, if far more slowly.\n\n\"Crap,\" I whispered as they vanished. \"Dammit, dammit, dammit.\"\n\n\"What was that, Harry?\" Molly whispered.\n\n\"Black Court vampires,\" I replied, trying not to inhale too deeply. The stench was fading, but it wasn't gone. \"Some of the fastest, strongest, meanest things out there.\"\n\n\"Vampires?\" Sarah hissed, incredulous. She didn't look so good. Her face was turning green. \"No, this is, no, no, no\u2014\" She broke off and was violently sick. I avoided joining in by the narrowest of margins. Molly had an easier time of it than me, focused as she was on maintaining the veil over us, but I saw her swallow very carefully.\n\n\"Okay, Molly,\" I said quietly. \"Listen to me.\"\n\nShe nodded, turning abstracted eyes to me.\n\n\"Black Court vampires,\" I told her. \"The ones Stoker's book outed. All their weaknesses\u2014sunlight, garlic, holy water, symbols of faith. Remember?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Most of the strengths, too. Strong, fast. Don't look them in the eyes.\" I swallowed. \"Don't let them take you alive.\"\n\nMy apprentice's eyes flickered with both apprehension and a sudden, fierce fire. \"I understand. What do you want me to do?\"\n\n\"Keep the veil up. Take Sarah here. Find a shady spot and lay low. This should be over in half an hour, maybe less. By then, there's going to be a ruckus getting people's attention, one way or another.\"\n\n\"But I can\u2014\"\n\n\"Get me killed trying to cover you,\" I said firmly. \"You aren't in this league, grasshopper. Not yet. I have to move fast. And I have friends here. I won't be alone.\"\n\nMolly stared at me for a moment, her eyes shining with brief, frustrated tears. Then she nodded once and said, \"Isn't there anything I can do?\"\n\nI peered at her, then down at her Birkenstocks. \"Yeah. Give me your shoes.\"\n\nMolly hadn't been my apprentice in the bizarre for a year and a half for nothing. She didn't even blink, much less ask questions. She just took off her shoes and handed them to me.\n\nI put a gentle hand on her shoulder, then touched Sarah's face until she lifted her eyes to me. \"I don't understand what's happening,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Stay with Molly,\" I told Sarah. \"She's going to take care of you. Do whatever she says. All right?\" I frowned down at her expensive black heels. \"Gucci?\"\n\n\"Prada,\" she said in a numb voice.\n\nBeing all manly, I know dick about shoes, but hopefully it wouldn't blow my cover as Thomas's mystery man. \"Give them to me.\"\n\n\"All right,\" she said, and did, too shocked to argue.\n\nThomas had been right about the larpers. The corpse of Sarah's innocence lay on the floor along with her last meal, and she was taking it pretty hard.\n\nI fought down a surge of anger and rose without another word, padding out from the protection of Molly's veil, shoes gripped in one hand, my gun in the other. The .44 might as well have been Linus's security blanket. It wouldn't do a thing to help me against a vampire of the Black Court\u2014it just made me feel better.\n\nI went as fast as I could without making an enormous racket and stalked up the nearest stairs\u2014a deactivated escalator. Once I'd reached the second level, I took a right and hurried toward Shoegasm.\n\nIt was a fairly spacious shop that had originally occupied only a tiny spot, but after ironing out some early troubles, the prosperous little store had expanded into the space beside it. Now, behind a steel mesh security curtain, the store was arranged in an oh-so-trendy fashion and sported several huge signs that went on with a thematically appropriate orgasmic enthusiasm about the store's quality money-back guarantee.\n\n\"I am totally underappreciated,\" I muttered. Then I raised my voice a little, forcing a very slight effort of will, of magic, into the words as I spoke. \"Keef! Hey, Keef! It's Harry Dresden!\"\n\nI waited for a long moment, peering through the grating, but I couldn't see anything in the dim shadows of the store. I took a chance, slipping the silver pentacle amulet from its chain around my neck, and with a murmur willed a whisper of magic through the piece of jewelry. A soft blue radiance began to emanate from the silver, though I tried to keep the light it let out to a minimum. If Drulinda or her vampire buddies were looking even vaguely in my direction, I was going to stand out like a freaking moron holding the only light in an entire darkened shopping mall.\n\n\"Keef!\" I called again.\n\nThe cobb appeared from an expensive handbag hung over the arm of a dressing dummy wearing a pair of six-hundred-dollar Italian boots. He was a tiny thing, maybe ten inches tall, with a big puff of fine white hair like Albert Einstein. He was dressed in something vaguely approximating nineteenth-century urban European wear\u2014dark trousers, boots, a white shirt, and suspenders. He also wore a leather work belt thick with tiny tools and had a pair of odd-looking goggles pushed up over his forehead.\n\nKeef hopped down from the dressing dummy and hurried across the floor to the security grate. He put on a pair of gloves, pulled out a couple of straps from his work belt, and climbed up the metal grate using a pair of carabiners, nearly as nimble as a squirrel, being very careful not to touch the metal with his bare skin. Keef was a faerie, one of the little folk who dwelled within the shadows and hidden places of our own world, and the touch of steel was painful to him.\n\n\"Wizard Dresden,\" he greeted me in a Germanic accent as he came level with my head. The cobb's voice was pitched low, even for someone as tiny as he. \"The market this night danger roams. Here you should not be.\"\n\n\"Don't I know it,\" I replied. \"But there are people in danger.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Keef said. \"The mortals whom you insist to defend. Unwise that battle is.\"\n\n\"I need your help,\" I said.\n\nKeef eyed me and gave me a firm shake of his head. \"The walking dead very dangerous are. My people's blood it could cost. That I will risk not.\"\n\n\"You owe me, Keef,\" I growled.\n\n\"Our living. Not our lives.\"\n\n\"Have it your way,\" I said. Then I lifted up one of Sarah's shoes and, without looking away from the little cobb, snapped the heel off.\n\n\"Ach!\" Keef cried in horror, his little feet slipping off the metal grate. \"Nein!\"\n\nThere was a chorus of similar gasps and cries from inside Shoegasm.\n\nI held up the other shoe and did it again.\n\nKeef wailed in protest. All of a sudden, thirty of the little cobbs, male and female, pressed up to the security mesh. All of them had the same frizzy white hair, all of them dressed like something from Oktoberfest, and all of them were horrified.\n\n\"Nein!\" Keef wailed again. \"Those are Italian leather! Handmade! What are you doing?\"\n\nI took a step to my left and held the broken shoes over a trash can.\n\nThe cobbler elves gasped, all together, and froze in place.\n\n\"Do not do this,\" Keef begged me. \"Lost all is not. Repaired they can be. Good as new we can fix them. Good as new! Do not throw them away.\"\n\nI didn't waver. \"I know things have been hard for your people since cobblers have gone out of business,\" I said. \"I got you permission for your clan to work here, fixing shoes, in exchange for taking what you need from the vending machine. True?\"\n\n\"True,\" Keef said, his eyes on the broken shoes in my hand. \"Wizard, over the trash you need not hold them. If dropped they are, trash they become, and touch them we may not. Lost to all will they be. Anything we both will regret let us not do.\"\n\nAnxious murmurs of agreement rose from the other cobbs.\n\nEnough of the stick. Time to show them the carrot. I held up Molly's battered old Birkenstocks. The sight made several of the more matronly cobbs cluck their tongues in disapproval.\n\n\"I helped set you up with a good deal here at Shoegasm,\" I said. \"But I can see you're getting a little crowded. I can get you another good setup\u2014a family, seven kids, mom and dad, all of them active.\"\n\nThe cobbs murmured in sudden excitement.\n\nKeef coughed delicately and said, staring anxiously at the broken heels in my hand, \"And the shoes?\"\n\n\"I'll turn them over to you,\" I said. \"If you help me.\"\n\nKeef narrowed his eyes. \"Slaves to you we are,\" he snapped. \"Threatened and bribed.\"\n\n\"You know the cause I fight for,\" I said. \"I protect mortals. I've never tried to hide that, and I've never lied to you. I need your help, Keef. I'll do what it takes to get it\u2014but you know my reputation by now. I deal fairly with the little folk, and I always show gratitude for their help.\"\n\nThe leader of the cobbs regarded me steadily for a moment. Nobody likes being strong-armed, not even the little folk, who are used to getting walked on, but I didn't have time for diplomacy.\n\nKeef's gaze kept getting distracted by the shoes, dangling over the trash can, and he made no answer. The other cobbs all waited, clearly taking their cue from Keef.\n\n\"Show of good faith, Keef,\" I said quietly. I took the broken shoes and set them gently on the ground in front of the shop. \"I'll trust you and your people to repair them and return them. And I'll pay in pizza.\"\n\nThe cobbs gasped, staring at me as if I'd just offered them a map to El Dorado. I heard one of the younger cobbs exclaim, \"True, it is!\"\n\n\"Fleeting, pizza is,\" Keef said sternly. \"Eternal are shoes and leather goods.\"\n\n\"Shoes and leather goods,\" the rest of the cobbs intoned, tiny voices solemn.\n\n\"Few mortals to the little folk show respect, these days,\" Keef said quietly. \"Or trust. True it is that beneath this roof we are crowded. And unto the wizard, debt is owed.\" He gave the shoes a professional glance and nodded once. \"Under your terms, and within our means, our aid is given. Your need unto us speak.\"\n\n\"Scouts,\" I said at once. \"I know there are Black Court vampires in the mall. I need to know exactly how many and exactly where they are.\"\n\n\"Done it will be,\" Keef barked. \"Cobbs!\"\n\nThere was a little gust of wind, and I was suddenly alone. Oh, and both Sarah's expensive heels and Molly's clunky sandals were gone, the latter right out of my hands and so smoothly that I hadn't even noticed them being taken. I checked, just to be careful, but my own shoes remained safely on my feet, which was a relief. You can't ever be certain with cobbs. The little faeries, at times, could get awfully fixated upon whatever their particular area of concern might be, and messing around with it was more dangerous than most realized. Despite the metal screen between the cobbs and me, I'd been playing with fire when I held those Pradas over the trash can.\n\nAnother thing that most folks don't realize is just how much the little folk can learn, and how fast they can do it\u2014especially when things are happening on their own turf. It took Keef and his people about thirty seconds to go and return.\n\n\"Four, there are,\" Keef reported. \"Three lesser, who of late this place did guard. One greater, who gave them not-life.\"\n\n\"Four,\" I breathed. \"Where?\"\n\n\"One outside near the group of cars waits and watches,\" Keef said. \"One outside the bistro where the mortals hide stands watch. One beside his mistress stands within.\"\n\nI got a sick little feeling in my stomach. \"Has anyone been hurt?\"\n\nKeef shook his head. \"Taunt them, she does. Frighten them.\" He shrugged. \"It is not as their kind often is.\"\n\n\"No. She's there for vengeance, not food.\" I frowned. \"I need you to get me something. Can you?\"\n\nI told him what I needed, and Keef gave me a mildly offended look. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"Good. Now, the one outside,\" I said. \"Can you show me a way I could get close to him without being seen?\"\n\nKeef's eyes glittered with a sudden ferocity that was wholly at odds with his size and appearance. \"This way, wizard.\"\n\nI went at what was practically a run, but the tiny cobb had no trouble staying ahead of me. He led me through a service access door that required a key to open\u2014until it suddenly swung open from the other side, a dozen young male cobbs dangling from the security bar and cheering. My amulet cast the only light as Keef led me down a flight of stairs and through a long, low tunnel.\n\n\"Access to the drains and watering system, this passage is,\" Keef called to me. We stopped at a ladder leading up. A small paper sack sat on the floor by the ladder. \"Your weapons,\" he said, nodding at the bag. He pointed at the ladder. \"Behind the vampire, this opens.\"\n\nI opened the bag and found two plastic cylinders. I didn't want the crinkling paper, so I put one of them in my jacket pocket, kept the other in hand, and crept up the ladder. At the top was a hatch made out of some kind of heavy synthetic, rather than wood or steel, and it opened without a sound. I poked my head up and looked cautiously around the parking lot.\n\nThe lights were out, but there was enough snow on the ground to bounce around plenty of light, giving the outdoors an oddly close, quiet quality, almost as if someone had put a roof overhead, just barely out of sight. Over by the last group of cars in the mall parking lot, next to the Blue Beetle in fact, stood the vampire.\n\nIt was little more than a black form, and though it was human in shape, it was inhumanly still, every bit as motionless as the other inanimate objects in the parking lot. Snow had begun to gather on its head and shoulders, just as it had on the roofs and hoods of the parked cars. It stood facing the darkened mall, where snow blew into the hole left by the thrown car. It was watching, I supposed, for anyone who might come running out, screaming.\n\nA newborn vampire might not be anywhere near as dangerous as an older one, but that was like saying a Mack truck was nowhere near as dangerous as a main battle tank. If you happened to be the guy standing in the road in front of one, it wouldn't much matter to you which of them crushed you to pulp. If I'd had my staff and rod with me, I might have chanced a stand-up fight. But I didn't have my gear, and even if I had, my usual magic would have made plenty of noise and warned the vampire's companions.\n\nVampires are tough. They take a lot of killing. I had to take this one out suddenly and with tremendous violence without making any noise. If I had to face it openly, I'd have no chance.\n\nWhich is why I had used the cobbs' intelligence to get sneaky.\n\nI drew in my will, the magic I had been born with and that I had spent a lifetime exercising, practicing, and focusing. As the power came into me, it made the skin of my arms ripple with goose bumps, and I could feel a strange pressure at the back of my head and pressing against the inside of my forehead. Once I had the power ready, I started shaping it with my thoughts, focusing my will and intent on the desired outcome.\n\nThe spell I worked up wasn't one of my better evocations. It took me more than twenty seconds to get it together. For fast and dirty combat magic, that's the next best thing to forever.\n\nFor treacherous, backstabbing, sucker-punch magic, though, it's just fine.\n\nAt the very last second, the vampire seemed to sense something. It turned its head toward me.\n\nI clenched my fist as I released my will and snarled, \"Gravitus!\"\n\nThe magic lashed out into the ground beneath the vampire's feet, and the steady, slow, immovable power of the earth suddenly stirred, concentrating, reaching up for the vampire standing upon it. In technical terms, I didn't actually increase the gravity of the earth beneath it. I only concentrated it a little. In a circle fifty yards across, for just a fraction of a second, gravity vanished. The cars all surged up against their shock absorbers and settled again. The thin coat of snow leapt several inches off the parking lot and fell back.\n\nIn that same fraction of a second, all of that gravity from all of that area concentrated itself into a circle, maybe eighteen inches across, directly at the vampire's feet.\n\nThere was no explosion, no flash of light\u2014and no scream. The vampire just went down, slammed to the earth as suddenly and violently as if I'd dropped an anvil on him. There was a rippling, crackling sound as hundreds of bones shattered all together, and a splatter of sludgy liquid that splashed all over the cars around the vampire\u2014mostly upon the Beetle, really.\n\nThe effort of gathering and releasing so much energy left me gasping. I was out of shape when it came to earth magic. It had never been my strongest suit\u2014too slow, most of the time, to seem like it would have been worth the bother. As I hauled myself out of the ground, though, I had to admit that when there was enough time to actually use it, it sure as hell was impressive.\n\nI padded to the car, watching the mall entrance, but there was no outcry and no sudden appearance of Drulinda or the other vampires of her scourge.\n\nThe vampire was still alive.\n\nUn-alive. Whatever. The thing was still trying to move.\n\nIt was mostly just a mass of pulped, squishy meat. In the cold, at least, it hadn't begun to rot, so that cut down on the smell. One eye rolled around in its mashed skull. Muscles twitched, but without a solid framework of bone to work with, they didn't accomplish much beyond an odd, pulsing motion. It could probably put itself back together, given blood and time, but I didn't feel like letting it have either. I held the plastic cylinder over it.\n\n\"Nothing personal,\" I told the vampire. Then I dumped powdered garlic from the pizzeria in the mall's food court all over it.\n\nI can't say that the vampire screamed, really. It died the way a salted slug does, in silent, pulsing agony. I had to fight to keep my stomach from emptying itself, but only for a second. Absolutely disgusting demises are par for the course when fighting vampires. A few wisps of smoke rose up, and after a few seconds, the mass of undead flesh became simple dead flesh again.\n\nOne down.\n\nThree to go.\n\nI stalked toward the mall, moving with all the silence I could manage. After years working as a private investigator, and more years fighting a magical war against the vampires in the shadows, I know how to be quiet. I slipped up to within thirty feet of the entrance and spotted the second vampire before he noticed me, right where Keef's people said he was.\n\nHe stood facing the door of the bistro, apparently intent on what was happening within. I could hear voices inside, though I could make out no details over the continued, repeated playing of \"Only You,\" beyond that one of the voices was Drulinda's leathery rasp. There were no sounds of fighting, which wasn't good. Thomas certainly wouldn't have allowed them to hurt anyone without putting up a struggle, and given the mutual capabilities of everyone involved, it would have been noticeable.\n\nA second's thought told me that it might also be a good sign. If they'd killed him, they would have made a big mess doing it. Assuming he hadn't gone down without getting to put up much of a fight\u2014and I refused to assume anything else: I knew my brother too well\u2014something else had to be happening.\n\nMy brother could go toe to toe with a vampire of the Black Court, if he had to, but the last time he'd done it the effort had nearly killed both him and the woman he'd had to feed from in order to recover. There were two of them inside, and though Thomas was as combat-capable as any of the White Court's best, he wasn't going to start a slugfest if he thought he could get a better fight by biding his time, doing what the White Court did\u2014looking human and using guile. My instincts told me that Thomas was stalling, choosing his moment. Hell, he was probably waiting for me to show up and help.\n\nI looked down and found his birthday present, untouched by the flying debris, lying in its bright red and pink paper where Molly had dropped it on the sidewalk outside the doors.\n\nI found myself smiling.\n\nTwenty seconds or so later, I tossed the present underhand. It tumbled through the air and landed on the floor directly outside the bistro's entrance. The head of the vampire on guard jerked around, focusing on the present. It tilted its head to one side. Then it whipped around toward me, baring its teeth in a snarl.\n\n\"Gravitus!\" I thundered, releasing a second earthcrafting.\n\nOnce again, everything jumped up\u2014but this time, it wasn't quiet. The circle of nullified gravity embraced every shop nearby in the mall, sending merchandise and shelves and dishes and furniture and cash registers and dressing dummies and God knew what other sundry objects flying up, to come crashing back down to the floor again. A great crashing rose up from the floors above us as well.\n\nOnce again, the circle of supergravity crushed a brown-shirted vampire flat to the floor\u2014only I'd forgotten about the levels above. There was a shriek of tortured metal and a great crashing rain of debris came down in a nearly solid column as floors and ceilings gave way under the sudden, enormous stress. It all thundered down on the pulped vampire.\n\nThere was a second of shocked silence, while objects continued falling from their shelves and bins and who knew what else. Evidently, the damage to the ceiling had torn through some plumbing; a steady stream of water began to patter down from overhead onto the mound of rubble, along with occasional bits of still-falling material.\n\nThen two things happened, almost at the same time.\n\nFirst, my brother chose his moment.\n\nThe front wall of the bistro exploded outward. I saw the flying form of another vampire security guard hurtle across the hallway into the opposite wall with no detectable loss of altitude, and it smashed against a metal security grate with terrifying force.\n\nSecond, Drulinda let out an eerie howl of fury. It was a horrible sound, nasty and rasping and somehow spidery, for all that it was of inhuman volume. There was a crash from inside the bistro. Young men and women started screaming.\n\nThere wasn't any time to waste. I ran for the vampire my brother had thrown from the bistro. It had bounced off and fallen on the ground and was still gathering itself up. I had hoped it would take it a moment to recover from the blow, to give me time to get close enough to act.\n\nIt didn't work out that way.\n\nThe vampire was on its feet again before I could get halfway there, one of its shoulders twisted and deformed by the impact, one arm hanging loosely. It spun toward me with no sense of discomfort evident in its expression or posture, and it let out a very human-sounding scream of fury and flung itself at me.\n\nI reacted with instant instinct, raising my right hand, with my will, and calling, \"Fuego!\"\n\nFire kindled from my open palm and rushed out in a furious torrent, spewing raggedly across the tile floor in a great, slewing cone. It splashed against the floor, up onto the metal grate, and all over the vampire in question, a sudden, if clumsy, immolation.\n\nBut without my blasting rod to help me focus the attack, it was diffused; the heat was spread out over a broad area instead of focused into a single, searing beam. Though I'm sure it hurt like hell, and though it set the security guard vampire's uniform on fire, it didn't cripple him. It might have sent up an older, more withered vampire like a torch, but the newbie was still too...juicy. It didn't burn him up so much as broil him a bit.\n\nPretty much, it just pissed him off.\n\nThe vampire came at me with another, higher-pitched scream, and swung a flaming arm at me. Maybe the fire had disoriented him a little, because I was able to get out of the way of the blow\u2014sort of. It missed my head and neck and instead slammed into my left shoulder like a train wreck.\n\nPain flooded through me, and the canister of garlic went flying. The force of the blow spun me around, and I fell to the floor. The vampire came down on top of me, teeth bared, still on freaking fire as he leaned in with his non-pointy, still-white teeth, which were plenty strong enough to rip my throat open.\n\n\"Harry!\" Thomas screamed. There was a rushing sound, and a tremendous force pulled the vampire off me. I sat up in time to see my brother drive his shoulder into the vampire's chest, slamming the undead thing back against the concrete wall between two stalls. Then Thomas whipped out what looked like a broken chair leg and drove the shattered end of the wood directly into the vampire's chest, a couple of inches below the gold, metallic security badge on his left breast, slightly off center.\n\nThe vampire's mouth opened, too-dark blood exploding from it in a gasp. The creature reached for the chair leg with its remaining arm.\n\nThomas solved that problem in the most brutal way imaginable. His face set in fury, my brother ignored the flames of the vampire's burning clothing, seized the remaining arm with both of his hands, and with a twist of his hips and shoulders ripped it out of the socket.\n\nMore blood splashed out, if only for a second\u2014without a heartbeat to keep pumping it, blood loss is mostly about leakage\u2014and then the mortally crippled vampire fell, twitching and dying as the stake of wood through its heart put an end to its unlife.\n\nI felt Drulinda coming, more than I saw it happen, the cold presence of a Black Court vampire in a fury rubbing abrasively against my wizard's senses. \"Thomas!\"\n\nMy brother turned in time to duck a blow so swift I didn't even see it. He returned it with one of his own, but Drulinda, though new to the trade, was a master vampire, a creature with its own terrible will and power. Thomas had fought other Black Court vamps before\u2014but not a master.\n\nHe was on the defensive from the outset. Though my brother was unthinkably strong and swift when drawing upon his vampiric nature, he wasn't strong or swift enough. I lay sprawled on the ground, still half-paralyzed by the pain in the left half of my body, and tried to think of what to do next.\n\n\"Get out!\" I screamed at the bistro. \"Get out of here, people! Get the hell out now!\"\n\nWhile I screamed, Drulinda slammed my brother's back into a metal security grate so hard that it left a broad smear of his pale red blood on its bars.\n\nPeople started hurrying out of the bistro, running for the parking lot.\n\nDrulinda looked over her shoulder and let out another hissing squall of rage. At this opening, Thomas managed to get a grip on her arm, set his feet, and swing her into the wall, sending cracks streaking through the concrete. On the rebound, he swung her up and around and then down, smashing her down onto the floor, then up from that and into a security mesh again, crushing tile and bending metal with every impact.\n\nI heard a scream and looked up to see Ennui fall from her impossibly high black heels in her tiny, tight black dress, as she tried to flee the bistro.\n\nA horribly disfigured hand had reached out from the rubble over the crushed vampire, and now held her.\n\nI ran for the girl as my brother laid into Drulinda. My left arm wasn't talking to me, and I fumbled the second canister out of my left jacket pocket with my right arm, then dumped garlic over the outstretched vampire's hand.\n\nIt began smoking and spasming. Ennui screamed as the crushing grip broke her ankle. I stood up in frustration and started stomping down on the vampire's arm. Supernaturally strong it might be, but its bones were made of bone, and it couldn't maintain its grip on the girl without them.\n\nIt took a lot of stomping, but I was finally able to pull the girl free. I tried to get her to her feet, but her weight came down on her broken ankle, and from there it came down on my wounded shoulder. I went down to one knee, and it was all I could do not to fall.\n\nI almost didn't notice when my brother flew through the air just over my head, smashed out what had to be the last remaining pane of glass at the mall entrance, and landed limply in the parking lot.\n\nI felt Drulinda's presence coming up behind me.\n\nThe vampire let out a dusty laugh. \"I thought it was just some poor pretty boy to play with. Silly me.\"\n\nI fumbled with the canister for a second, and then whirled, flinging its contents at Drulinda in a slewing arc.\n\nThe vampire blurred to one side, dodging the garlic with ease. She looked battered and was covered with dust. Her undead flesh was approximately the consistency of wood, and so it wasn't cut and damaged so much as chipped and crushed. Her clothes were torn and ruined\u2014and none of that mattered. She was just as functional, just as deadly as she had been before the fight.\n\nI dropped the canister and drew forth my pentacle amulet, lifting it as a talisman against her.\n\nThe old bit with the crucifix works on the Black Court\u2014but it isn't purely about Christianity. They are repelled not by the holy symbol itself, but by the faith of the one holding it up against them. I'd seen vampires repulsed by crosses, crucifixes, strips of paper written with holy symbols by a Shinto priest\u2014once even a Star of David.\n\nMe, I used the pentacle, because that's what I believed in. The five-pointed star, to me, represented the five elements of earth, air, water, fire, and spirit, bound within the solid circle of mortal will. I believed that magic was a force intended to be used to create, to protect, and to preserve. I believed that magic was a gift that had to be used responsibly and wisely\u2014and that it especially had to be used against creatures like Drulinda, against literal, personified evil, to protect those who couldn't protect themselves. That's what I thought, and I'd spent my life acting in accordance with it.\n\nI believed.\n\nPale blue light began to spill from the symbol\u2014and Drulinda stopped with a hiss of sudden rage.\n\n\"You,\" she said after a few seconds. \"I have heard of you. The wizard. Dresden.\"\n\nI nodded slowly. Behind her, the fire from my earlier spell was spreading. The power was out, and I had no doubt that Drulinda and her former security-guard lackeys had disabled the alarms. It wouldn't take long for a fire to go insane in this place, once it got its teeth sunk in. We needed to get out.\n\n\"Go,\" I mumbled at Ennui.\n\nShe sobbed and started crawling for the exit, while I held Drulinda off with the amulet.\n\nThe vampire stared steadily at me for a second, her eyes all milky white, corpse cataracts glinting in the reflected light of the fire. Then she smiled and moved.\n\nShe was just too damned fast. I tried to turn to keep up with her, but by the time I did, Ennui screamed, and Drulinda had seized her hair and dragged her back, out of the immediate circle of light cast by the amulet.\n\nShe lifted the struggling girl with ease, so that I could see her mascara-streaked face. \"Wizard,\" Drulinda said. Ennui had been cut by flying glass or the fall at some point, and some blood had streaked out of her slicked-back hair, over her ear, and down one side of her throat. The vampire leaned in, extending a tongue like a strip of beef jerky, and licked blood from the girl's skin. \"You can hide behind your light. But you can't save her.\"\n\nI ground my teeth and said nothing.\n\n\"But your death will profit me, grant me standing with others of my kind. The feared and vaunted Wizard Dresden.\" She bared yellowed teeth in a smile. \"So I offer you this bargain. Throw away the amulet. I will let the girl go. You have my word.\" She leaned her teeth in close and brushed them over the girl's neck. \"Otherwise...well. All of my new friends are gone. I'll have to make more.\"\n\nThat made me shudder. Dying was one thing. Dying and being made into one of those...\n\nI lowered the amulet. I hesitated for a second, and then dropped it.\n\nDrulinda let out a low, eager sound and tossed Ennui aside like an empty candy wrapper. Then she was on me, letting out rasping giggles, for God's sake, pressing me down. \"I can smell your fear, wizard,\" she rasped. \"I think I'm going to enjoy this.\"\n\nShe leaned closer, slowly, as she bared her teeth, her face only inches from mine.\n\nWhich is where I wanted her to be.\n\nI reared up my head and spat out a gooey mouthful of powdered garlic directly into those cataract eyes.\n\nDrulinda let out a scream, bounding away in a violent rush, clawing at her eyes with her fingers\u2014and getting them burned, too. She thrashed in wild agony, swinging randomly at anything she touched or bumped into, tearing great, gaping gashes in metal fences, smashing holes in concrete walls.\n\n\"Couple words of advice,\" I growled, my mouth burning with the remains of the garlic I'd stuffed it with as she'd come sneaking up on me. \"First, any time I'm not shooting my mouth off to a clich\u00e9d, two-bit creature of the night like you, it's because I'm up to something.\"\n\nDrulinda howled more and rushed toward me\u2014tripping on some rubble and sprawling on the ground, only to rush about on all fours like some kind of ungainly and horrible insect.\n\nI checked behind me. Ennui was already out, and Thomas was beginning to stir, maybe roused by the snow now falling on him. I turned back to the blinded, pain-maddened vampire. We were the only ones left in that wing of the mall.\n\n\"Second,\" I spat. \"Never touch my brother on his fucking birthday.\"\n\nI reached for my will, lifted my hand, and snarled, \"Fuego!\"\n\nFire roared out to eagerly engulf the vampire.\n\nWhat the hell. The building was burning down anyway.\n\n\"Freaking amateur villains,\" I muttered, glowering down at the splatters on my car.\n\nThomas leaned against it with one hand pressed to his head, a grimace of pain on his face. \"You okay?\"\n\nI waved my left arm a little. \"Feeling's coming back. I'll have Butters check me out later. Thanks for loaning Molly your car.\"\n\n\"Least I could do. Let her drive Sarah and Ennui to the hospital.\" He squinted at the rising smoke from the mall. \"Think the whole thing will go?\"\n\n\"Nah,\" I said. \"This wing, maybe. They'll get here before too much more goes up. Keef and his folk should be all right.\"\n\nMy brother grunted. \"How they going to explain this one?\"\n\n\"Who knows,\" I said. \"Meteor, maybe. Smashed holes in the roof, crushed some poor security guard, set the place on fire.\"\n\n\"My vote is for terrorists,\" Thomas said. \"Terrorists are real popular these days.\" He shook his head. \"But I meant the larpers, not the cops.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said. \"Probably, they won't talk to anyone about what they saw. Afraid people would think they were crazy.\"\n\n\"And they would,\" Thomas said.\n\n\"And they would,\" I agreed. \"Come tomorrow, it will seem very unreal. A few months from now, they'll wonder if they didn't imagine some of it or if there wasn't some kind of gas leak or something that made them hallucinate. Give it a few more years, and they'll remember that Drulinda and some rough-looking types showed up to give them a hard time. They drove a car through the front of the mall. Maybe they were crazy people dressed in costumes who had been to a few too many larps themselves.\" I shook my head. \"It's human nature to try to understand and explain everything. The world is less scary that way. But I don't think they'll be in any danger, really. No more so than anyone else.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" Thomas said quietly. \"I guess.\"\n\n\"It's the way it is.\" In the distance, sirens were starting up and coming closer. I grunted and said, \"We'd better go.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nWe got into the Beetle. I started it up and we headed out. I left the lights off. No sense attracting attention.\n\n\"You going to be all right?\" I asked him.\n\nHe nodded. \"Take me a few days to get enough back into me to feel normal, but...\" He shrugged. \"I'll make it.\"\n\n\"Thanks for the backup,\" I said.\n\n\"Kicked their freaky asses,\" he said, and held out his fist.\n\nI rapped my knuckles lightly against it.\n\n\"Nice signal. The birthday present.\"\n\n\"I figured you'd get it,\" I said. Then I frowned. \"Crap,\" I said. \"Your present.\"\n\n\"You didn't remember to bring it?\"\n\n\"I was a little busy,\" I said.\n\nHe was quiet for a minute. Then he asked, \"What was it?\"\n\n\"Rock'em Sock'em Robots,\" I said.\n\nHe blinked at me. \"What?\"\n\nI repeated myself. \"The little plastic robots you make fight.\"\n\n\"I know what they are, Harry,\" he responded. \"I'm trying to figure out why you'd give me them.\"\n\nI pursed my lips for a minute. Then I said, \"Right after my dad died, they put me in an orphanage. It was Christmastime. On television, they had commercials for Rock'em Sock'em Robots. Two kids playing with them, you know? Two brothers.\" I shrugged. \"That was a year when I really, really wanted to give those stupid plastic robots to my brother.\"\n\n\"Because it would mean you weren't alone,\" Thomas said quietly.\n\n\"Yeah,\" I said. \"Sorry I forgot them. And happy birthday.\"\n\nHe glanced back at the burning mall. \"Well,\" my brother said. \"I suppose it's the thought that counts.\"\n\n## Grave-Robbed\n\nP. N. Elrod\n\nP. N. Elrod has sold more than twenty novels and as many short stories and is best known for The Vampire Files series, featuring undead detective Jack Fleming. She's cowritten three novels with actor\/director Nigel Bennett, has edited and coedited several genre collections, and is an incurable chocoholic. More news on her toothy titles may be found at www.vampwriter.com.\n\nCHICAGO, FEBRUARY 1937\n\nWhen the girl draped in black stepped in to ask if I could help her with a s\u00e9ance, Hal Kemp's version of \"Gloomy Sunday\" began to murmur sadly from the office radio.\n\nCoincidences annoy me. A mournful song for a dead sweetheart put together with a ceremony that's supposed to help the dead speak with the living made me uneasy\u2014and I was annoyed it made me uneasy.\n\nI should know better, being dead myself.\n\n\"You sure you're in the right place?\" I asked, taking in her outfit. Black overcoat, pocketbook, gloves, heels, and stockings\u2014she was a walking funeral. Along with the mourning weeds she wore a brimmed hat with a chin-brushing veil even I couldn't see past.\n\n\"The Escott Agency\u2014that's what's on the door,\" she said, sitting on the client chair in front of the desk without an invitation. \"You're Mr. Escott?\"\n\n\"I'm Mr. Fleming. I fill in for Mr. Escott when he's elsewhere.\" He was visiting his girlfriend tonight. I'd come over to his office to work on his books since I was better at accounting.\n\n\"It was Mr. Escott who was recommended to me.\"\n\n\"By who?\"\n\n\"A friend.\"\n\nI waited, but she left it at that. Much of Escott's business as a private agent came by word of mouth. Call him a private eye and you'd get a pained look and perhaps an acerbic declaration that he did not undertake divorce cases. His specialty as an agent was carrying out unpleasant errands for the unable or unwilling, not peeking through keyholes, but did a s\u00e9ance qualify? He was interested in that kind of thing, but mostly from a skeptic's point of view. I had to say mostly since he couldn't be a complete skeptic what with his partner\u2014me\u2014being a vampire.\n\nAnd nice to meet you, too.\n\nHal Kemp played on in the little office until the girl stood, went to the radio, and shut it off.\n\n\"I hate that song,\" she stated, turning around, the veil swirling lightly. Faceless women annoy me as well, but she had good legs.\n\n\"Me, too. You got any particular reason?\"\n\n\"My sister plays it all the time. It gets on my nerves.\"\n\n\"Does it have to do with this s\u00e9ance?\"\n\n\"Can't you call Mr. Escott?\"\n\n\"I could, but you didn't make an appointment for this late or he'd be here.\"\n\n\"My appointment is for tomorrow, but something's happened since I made it, and I need to speak with him tonight. I came by just in case he worked late. The light was on and a car was out front....\"\n\nI checked his appointment book. In his precise hand he'd written 10 am, Abigail Saeger. \"Spell that name again?\"\n\nShe did so, correct for both.\n\n\"What's the big emergency?\" I asked. \"If this is something I can't handle, I'll let him know, but otherwise you'll find I'm ready, able, and willing.\"\n\n\"I don't mean to offend, but you look rather young for such work. Over the phone I thought Mr. Escott to be...more mature.\"\n\nEscott and I were the same age but I did look younger by over a decade. On the other hand if she thought a man in his midthirties was old, then she'd be something of a kid herself. Her light voice told me as much, though you couldn't tell by her mannerisms and speech, which bore a finishing school's not so subtle polish.\n\n\"Miss Saeger, would you mind raising your blinds? I like to see who's hiring before I take a job.\"\n\nShe went still a moment, then lifted her veil. As I thought, a fresh-faced kid who should be home studying, but her eyes were red-rimmed, her expression serious.\n\n\"That's better. What can I do for you?\"\n\n\"My older sister, Flora, is holding a s\u00e9ance tonight. She's crazy to talk with her dead husband, and there's a medium taking advantage of her. He wants her money, and more.\"\n\n\"A fake medium?\"\n\n\"Is there any other kind?\"\n\nI smiled, liking her. \"Give me the whole story, same as you'd have told to Mr. Escott.\"\n\n\"You'll help me?\"\n\n\"I need to know more first.\" I said it in a tone to indicate I was interested.\n\nShe plunged in, talking fast, but I had good shorthand and scribbled notes.\n\nMiss Saeger and her older sister, Flora, were alone; their parents long dead. But Flora had money in trust and married into more money by getting hitched to James Weisinger Jr., who inherited a tidy fortune some years ago. The Depression had little effect on them. Flora became a widow last August when her still-young husband died in a sailing accident on Lake Michigan.\n\nI'd been killed on that lake. \"Sure it was an accident?\"\n\n\"A wind shift caused the boom to swing around. It caught him on the side of the head and over he went. I still have nightmares about the awful thud when it hit him and the splash, but it's worse for Flora\u2014she was at the wheel at the time. She blames herself. No one else does. There were half a dozen people aboard who knew sailing. That kind of thing can happen out of the blue.\"\n\nI vaguely remembered reading about it in the paper. Nothing like some rich guy getting killed while doing rich-guy stuff to generate copy.\n\n\"Poor James never knew what hit him; it was just that fast. Flora was in hysterics and had to be drugged for a week. Then she kept to her bed nearly a month, then she read some stupid article in a magazine about using a Ouija board to talk to spirits and got it into her head that she had to contact James, to apologize to him.\"\n\n\"That opened the door?\"\n\n\"James is dead, and if he did things right, he's in heaven and should stay there\u2014in peace.\" Miss Saeger growled in disgust. \"I've gotten Flora's pastor to talk to her, but she won't listen to him. I've talked to her until we both end up screaming and crying, and she won't see sense. I'm just her little sister and don't know anything, you see.\"\n\n\"What's so objectionable?\"\n\n\"Her obsession. It's not healthy. I thought after all this time she'd lose interest, but she's gotten worse. Every week she has a gaggle of those creeps from the Society over, they set up the board, light candles, and ask questions while looking at James's picture. It's pointless and sad and unnatural and\u2014and...just plain disrespectful.\"\n\nI was really liking her now. \"Society?\"\n\n\"The Psychical Society of Chicago.\"\n\nThough briefly tempted to ask her to say it three times fast, I kept my yap shut. The group investigated haunted houses and held sittings\u2014their word for s\u00e9ances\u2014writing their experiences up for their archives. Escott was a member. For a buck a year to cover mailing costs, he'd get a pamphlet every month and read the more oddball pieces out to me.\n\n\"The odious thing is,\" said Miss Saeger, \"they're absolutely sincere. When one has that kind of belief going, then of course it's going to produce results.\"\n\n\"What kind of results?\"\n\n\"They've spelled out the names of all the people who ever died in the house, which is stupid because the house isn't that old. The man who supervises these sittings says that's because the house was built over the site of another, so the dead people are connected to it, you see. There's no way to prove or disprove any of it. He's got an answer for everything and always sounds perfectly reasonable.\"\n\n\"Is he the medium?\"\n\n\"No, but he brought him in. Alistair Bradford.\" She put plenty of venom in that name. \"He looks like something out of a movie.\"\n\n\"What? Wears a turban like Chandu the Magician?\"\n\nHer big dark eyes flashed, then she choked, stifling a sudden laugh. She got things under control after a moment. \"Thank you. It's so good to talk with someone who sees things the way I do.\"\n\n\"Tell me about him.\"\n\n\"No turban, but he has piercing eyes, and when he walks into a room, everyone turns around. He's handsome...for an old guy.\"\n\n\"How old?\"\n\n\"At least forty.\"\n\n\"That's ancient.\"\n\n\"Please don't make fun of me. I get that all the time from him, from all of them.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Miss Saeger. Are you the only one left in the house with any common sense?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She breathed that out, and it almost turned into a sob, but she headed it off. The poor kid looked to be only barely keeping control of a truckload of high emotion. I heard her heart pound fast, then gradually slow. \"Even the servants are under his spell. I have friends, but I can't talk to them about this. It's just too embarrassing.\"\n\n\"You've been by yourself on this since August?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Except for our pastor, but he can't be there every day. He tells me to keep praying for Flora, and I do, and still this goes on and just gets worse. I miss James, too. He was a nice man. He deserves better than this\u2014this\u2014\"\n\n\"What broke the camel's back to bring you here?\"\n\n\"Before Alistair Bradford came, all they did was play with that stupid Ouija board. I'd burn it but they'd just buy another from the five and dime. After he was introduced, they began holding real s\u00e9ances. I don't like any of that stuff and don't believe in it, but he made it scary. It's as though he gets taller and broader and his voice changes. With the room almost totally dark it's easy to believe him.\"\n\n\"They let you sit in?\"\n\n\"Just the once\u2014on sufferance so long as I kept quiet. When I turned the lights on in the middle of things, Flora banished me. She said my negative thoughts were preventing the spirits from coming through and that I was endangering Bradford's life. You're not supposed to startle a medium out of a trance or it could kill him. I wouldn't mind seeing that, but he was faking. While they were all yelling I had my eye on him, and the look he gave me was pure hate...and he was smiling. He wanted to scare me and it worked. I've kept my door locked and haven't slept much.\"\n\n\"I don't blame you. No one believes you?\"\n\n\"Of course not. I'm not in their little club and to them I'm just a kid. What do I know?\"\n\n\"Kids have instinct, a good thing to follow. Is he living in the house?\"\n\n\"He mentioned it, but Flora\u2014for once\u2014didn't think that was proper.\"\n\n\"Is he romancing her?\"\n\nMiss Saeger's eyes went hard. \"Slowly. He's too smart to rush things, but I see the way he struts around, looking at everything. If he lays a finger on Flora I'll\u2014\"\n\nI raised one hand. \"I get it. You want Flora protected and him discredited.\"\n\n\"Or his legs broken and his big smirking face smashed in.\"\n\nThat was something I could have arranged. I know those kind of people. \"It's better if Flora gets rid of him by her own choice, though.\"\n\n\"I don't see how; I may have left it too late. I called here on Saturday to make the appointment, but\u2014\" She went red in the face. \"I could just kill him.\"\n\n\"What'd he do?\"\n\n\"The last s\u00e9ance\u2014they have one every Sunday and that's just wrong having it on a Sunday\u2014something horrible happened. They all gathered in the larger parlor at the table as usual, lighted candles, and put out the lights. Soon as it went dark, I slipped in while they were getting settled. There's an old Chinese screen in one corner, and I hide behind it during their s\u00e9ances. Negative feelings, my foot; no one's noticed me yet, not even Bradford, so I saw the whole thing.\"\n\n\"Which was?\"\n\n\"He put himself in a trance right on time. It usually takes five minutes, and by then everyone's expecting something to happen; you can feel it. He starts out with a low groan and breathing loudly, and in the dark it's spooky, and that's when his spirit guide takes over. His voice gets deeper and he puts on a French accent. Calls himself Fr\u00e8re L\u00e8on. He's supposed to have been a monk who traveled with Joan of Arc.\"\n\n\"Who speaks perfect English?\"\n\n\"Of course. No one's ever thought of talking to him in French. I doubt Bradford knows much more than mon Dieu and sang sacr\u00e9.\"\n\nShe'd attended a good finishing school, speaking with the right kind of pronunciation. I'd heard it when I'd been a doughboy in France during the last year of the war, and had picked up enough to get by. Much of that was too rough for Miss Saeger's tender ears, though.\n\n\"And the horrible thing that happened?\"\n\n\"It was at the end. He pretends to have Fr\u00e8re L\u00e8on pass on messages from James. He can't have James talk directly to Flora or he'd trip himself up. He doesn't pass too many messages, either, just general stuff about how beautiful it is on the other side. She tries to talk to him and ask him things and she's so desperate and afterwards she always cries and then she goes back for more. It's cruel. But this time he said he was giving her a sign of what she should do.\"\n\n\"Do?\"\n\n\"I didn't know what that meant, until...well, Bradford finished just then and pretended to be waking from his trance. That's when they found what he'd snuck on the table. It was James's wedding ring, the one he was buried with.\"\n\nI gave that the pause it deserved. \"Not a duplicate?\"\n\nShe shook her head, a fast, jerky movement. Her voice was thick. \"Inside it's engraved with To J. from F.\u2014Forever Love. He never took it off and it had some hard wear: two distinct parallel scratches, and it wasn't a perfect circle. Flora showed it to me as proof that Alistair Bradford was genuine. She didn't want to hear my idea that...that he'd dug up and robbed James's grave. I thought she'd slap me. She's gone crazy, Mr.\u2014\"\n\n\"Fleming. Call me Jack.\"\n\n\"Jack. Flora's never raised a hand to me, even when we were kids and I was being bratty, but this has her all turned around. I thought Mr. Escott could find something out about Bradford that would prove him a fake or come to a s\u00e9ance and do something to break it up, but I don't think she'd listen now. The last thing Bradford said before his trance ended was 'You have his blessing.' Put that with the ring and I know it means if he asks Flora to marry him, she'll say yes because she'll think that's what James would want.\"\n\n\"Come on, she can't be that\u2014\"\n\n\"Stupid? Foolish? Under a spell? She is! That's what's driving me crazy. She should be smarter than this.\"\n\n\"Grief can make you go right over the edge. Guilt can make it worse, and I bet she's lonely, too. She should have gone to a head doctor but picked up a Ouija board instead. Does this Bradford ask for money?\"\n\n\"He calls it a donation. She's given him fifty dollars every time. He gets that much for all his sittings\u2014and he does thirty to forty a month. My sister's not the only dope in town.\"\n\nMy mouth went dry. Fifty a week was a princely income, but that much times forty? I was in the wrong business. I'd gotten twenty-five a week back in New York as a reporter and counted myself lucky. \"Well. It's safer than robbing banks. Your sister can give him more by marriage?\"\n\n\"Yes, her trust money and the estate from James. Bradford would have it, the house, never have to work again. Please, can you help me stop him?\"\n\nI thought of the people I knew who broke bones for a sawbuck and could make a man disappear for twice that. \"I need to check this, you know. I only have your side of things.\"\n\n\"And I'm just a kid.\"\n\n\"Miss Saeger, I'd say the same thing to Eleanor Roosevelt if she was in that chair. Lemme make a phone call. Anyone going to be worried you're gone?\"\n\n\"I snuck out and got a taxi. Flora and I had a fight tonight and she thinks I'm sulking in my room. She's busy, anyway\u2014the new s\u00e9ance.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" I dialed Gordy at the Nightcrawler Club and asked if he had any dirt on an Alistair Bradford, professional medium.\n\n\"Medium what?\" asked Gordy in his sleepy-sounding voice.\n\n\"A swami; you know, s\u00e9ances, fortune-telling. It's for a case. I'm filling in for Charles.\"\n\nHe grunted, and he sounded amused. \"You at his office? Ten minutes.\" He hung up. As the Nightcrawler was a longer than ten-minute drive away I took him to mean he'd phone back, not drop by.\n\n\"Ten minutes,\" I repeated to Miss Saeger. \"What's with the black getup? You still in mourning for your brother-in-law?\"\n\n\"It was the only way I could think of to cover my face. I'm full grown, but soon as anyone looks at me, they think I'm fifteen or something.\"\n\n\"And you're really...?\"\n\n\"Sixteen.\"\n\n\"Miss Saeger, you are one brave and brainy sixteen-year-old, so I'm sure you're aware that this is a school night.\"\n\n\"My sister is more important than that, but thank you for the reminder.\" There was a dryness in her tone that would have done credit to Escott. A couple years from now and she'd be one formidable young woman.\n\n\"What time is this s\u00e9ance?\"\n\n\"Nine o'clock. Always.\"\n\n\"Not at midnight?\"\n\n\"Some of the older Society members get too sleepy if things go much past ten.\"\n\n\"Why tonight instead of next Sunday?\"\n\n\"James's birthday. Bradford said that holding a sitting on the loved one's birthday always means something special.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"He won't say; he just smiles. It makes my skin crawl. I swear, if he's not stopped, I'll get one of James's golf clubs and\u2014\" She went red in the face again, stood up, and paced. I did that when the pent-up energy got to be too much.\n\nI tried to get more from her on tonight's event, but she didn't have anything else to add, though she had plenty of comments about Bradford's antics. Guys like him I'd met before: they're always the first to look you square in the eye and assure you they're honest long before you begin to wonder.\n\nThe phone rang in seven minutes. Abigail Saeger halted midword and midstride and sat, leaning forward as I put the receiver to my ear. Gordy was like a library for all that was crooked in the great city of Chicago, with good reason: if he wasn't behind it himself, he knew who was and where to find them. He gave me slim pickings about Bradford, but it was enough to confirm that the guy was trouble. He'd done some stage work as a magician, Alistair the Great, until discovering there was more cash to be had conjuring dead relatives from thin air instead of live rabbits. He preferred to collect as much money as possible in the shortest time, then make an exit. The wealthy widow Weisinger was too good a temptation to a man looking for an easy way to retire.\n\n\"You need help with this bo'?\" Gordy asked.\n\n\"I'll let you know. Thanks.\"\n\n\"No problem.\"\n\n\"Well?\" asked Miss Saeger.\n\nI hung up. \"Count me in, ma'am.\"\n\n\"That sounds so old. My name's Abby.\"\n\n\"Fine, you can sign it here.\" I pulled out one of Escott's standard contracts. It was short and vague, mostly a statement that the Escott Agency was retained for services by, with a blank after that and room for the date.\n\n\"How much will this be?\"\n\n\"Five bucks should do it.\"\n\n\"It has to be more than that. I read detective stories.\"\n\n\"Special sale, tonight only. Anyone walking in here named Abby pays five bucks, no more, no less.\"\n\nFor a second I thought she'd kiss me, and I was prepared to duck out of range. If my girlfriend found out I'd canoodled, however innocently or briefly, with a mere pippin of sixteen, I would find myself dead for real and for ever after.\n\nAbby signed, fished a five-dollar bill from her pocketbook, and took my receipt in exchange. I put the money and the contract in Escott's top desk drawer along with my shorthand notes. He'd have a fine time trying to figure things out when he came in tomorrow morning. I harvested my overcoat and fedora from the coat tree in the corner, and ushered my newest client out, locking up. She made it to the bottom of the stairs, then pulled the veil back over her face.\n\n\"Afraid someone will recognize you?\" I asked. The street was empty.\n\n\"No sense in taking chances.\"\n\nNow I really liked her. I opened my new Studebaker up and handed her in, checking the sky. It had been threatening to sleet since before I got up tonight; I hoped it would hold off.\n\n\"Nice car,\" she said.\n\nThe nicest I'd ever owned. My faithful '34 Buick had come to a bad end, but this sporty replacement helped ease the loss. I got the motor purring, remembered to turn the headlights on, and put it in gear, pulling slowly from the curb. \"Where's your brother-in-law buried?\" As Abby's chin was just visible, I could see her jaw drop.\n\n\"Why do you need to know that?\"\n\n\"I want to pay my respects.\"\n\n\"The cemetery will be closed.\"\n\n\"Which one? And where?\"\n\nShe told me, finally, and I made a U-turn and got us on our way. Chicago traffic was no worse than usual as we headed toward Lincolnwood. Following Abby's directions we ended up driving slowly along North Ravenswood Avenue. A railroad track on our left obscured the view of the cemetery grounds. When a cross street opened, I took the turn under the tracks. A pale stone building with crenellations, Gothic windows, and a square, two-storied tower with a number of slender, round towers at the corners and along the front wall looked back at us. It had too much dignity to be embarrassed. The gates that blocked its arched central opening were, indeed, closed.\n\n\"Told you,\" said Abby.\n\n\"Is Mr. Weisinger anywhere near the front?\" This place looked huge. They only put fancy stone buildings like that in front of the really large cemeteries.\n\n\"Go back south and turn on Bryn Mawr. I'll tell you when to stop.\"\n\nWhat the lady said. It took awhile to find a sufficiently secluded place to park, then Abby provided very specific directions to the grave, which was not too far from the boundary wall.\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" she asked.\n\nI was about to say she didn't want to know, but decided that would get me an observation about not treating her like an adult. \"I'm going to check to see if the grave has been disturbed enough to bring in the law.\"\n\n\"But the police, the papers\u2014\"\n\n\"A necessary evil. If they show up asking Bradford how he got that wedding ring, how long do you think he'll stick around?\"\n\n\"Would they put him in jail?\" She looked hopeful.\n\n\"We'll see. You gonna be warm enough? Good. I'll be quick.\"\n\n\"Don't you want me along?\"\n\n\"I'll bet you're good at it, but you're not exactly dressed for getting around fences.\"\n\nShe looked relieved.\n\nI slammed the door, opened the trunk, and drew out a crowbar from the toolbox I kept there. Since Abby didn't need to see it and try to guess why I'd want one, I held it out of sight while approaching the cemetery's boundary. It was made of iron bars with points on top, an easy climb if you were nimble.\n\nI had the agility, but slipped between the bars instead. Literally. One of my happier talents acquired after my death was being able to vanish and float just about anywhere I liked, invisible as air. Since it was dark and there was some distance between me and the car, I figured Abby wouldn't see much if I partially vanished, eased through, and went solid again. Blink of an eye and it was done.\n\nThe cemetery grounds were covered with a thick layer of mostly undisturbed snow. Trees, bushes, and monuments of all shapes showed black against it. I made my way to one of the wide paths that had been shoveled clear, looking out for the landmark of an especially ornate mausoleum with marble columns in front. Weisinger's grave marker was just behind it. The dates on the substantial granite block told me he'd been born this day and was only a few years younger than I, the poor bastard. Another, identical block sprouted right next to it with his widow's name and date of birth already in place.\n\nThe snow lay differently over his plot, clumped and broken, dirtier than the stuff in the surrounding area. Footprints were all over, but not being an Indian tracker I couldn't make much from them, only that someone had recently been busy here and worn galoshes.\n\nI poked the long end of the crowbar into the soil, and it went in far too easily. Ground that had had seven months to settle and freeze in the winter weather would have put up more resistance. Bradford or someone working for him had dug down, opened the coffin, grabbed the wedding ring, and put the earth back. Then he'd taken the trouble to dump shovelfuls of snow on top so a casual eye wouldn't notice. He was probably hoping there'd be another fall soon to cover the rest of the evidence.\n\nThe ghoulishness of the robbery appalled me; the level of greed behind it disgusted me. I knew some tough customers who worked for Gordy, and even they would have balked at this level of low.\n\nThe moment Abigail Saeger told me about Weisinger's death on the lake, I'd signed myself onto the job. Something twinged inside me then, connecting that death to my own and to that damned \"Gloomy Sunday\" song playing on the radio. I didn't want to believe in coincidences of the weird kind; signs and portents were strictly for the fortune-teller's booth at the midway.\n\nBut still...I got a twinge.\n\nIt was different from the gooseflesh creep that means someone's walking over your grave. When it came down to it, I didn't have a grave, just that lake. The people who'd murdered me had also robbed me of a proper burial. Weisinger had gotten one but Bradford had violated it.\n\nThat was just wrong.\n\nAnd just as that thought crossed my mind the wind abruptly kicked up, rattling the bare branches as though the trees were waking up around me. They scratched and clacked and I tried to not imagine bones making a similar noise, but it was too late.\n\n\"All right, keep your shirt on,\" I said to no one in particular, stepping away from the grave. It sure as hell felt like someone was listening.\n\nI was dead (or undead), surrounded by acres of the truly dead. The wind sent snow dust skittering along the black path. My imagination gave it form and purpose as it swept by. A sizable icicle from high up broke away and dropped like a spear, making a pop as loud as a gunshot when it hit a stone marker and shattered not two yards away. If my heart had been beating, it would have stopped then and there.\n\nIt's easy to be calm about weird coincidence when one is not in a cemetery at night. I decided it was time to leave. That I winked out quick and sped invisibly over the ground toward the fence faster than a scalded cat was my own business. Anyway, I went solid again as soon as I was on the other side.\n\nAbby and I needed to get to her house before nine.\n\nThat's what I told myself while quick-marching to the car, consciously not looking over my shoulder.\n\nRich people live in some damned oddball houses. The Weisinger place started out with Frank Lloyd Wright on the ground floor, lots of glass and native stone, then the rest looked like a Tudor mansion straight from The Private Life of Henry VIII. I could almost see Charles Laughton waving cheerily from an upper window, framed by dark wood crosspieces set into the plaster.\n\n\"It's awful, but roomy,\" said Abby as I parked across the street to indulge in a good long stare.\n\n\"You okay for going back without getting caught?\"\n\n\"Yes, but aren't you coming in?\"\n\n\"This is the part where I do some sneaking around.\"\n\n\"They'll catch you; they'll think you're a burglar!\"\n\n\"You hired an expert. Look, we can't go through the front so you can introduce me to everyone. It'll put Bradford on his guard, and your sister will be within her rights to kick me out.\"\n\n\"What will you do?\"\n\n\"Exactly what's needed to get rid of him\u2014and for that you need an alibi so they'll know you aren't involved. This means you can't hide behind that screen as usual. You said there're servants? Do they eavesdrop? Perfect. Think you can eavesdrop with them?\"\n\n\"It wouldn't be the first time.\"\n\n\"Good for you. Whatever happens I want them to truthfully vouch that you were with them the whole time. This keeps you off the hook with Flora. I'm going to do my best to make Bradford look bad, so you have to be completely clear. Can you look innocent? Never mind, you're a natural.\" I checked my watch: twenty to nine. \"I need a sketch of the floor plan.\"\n\nI pulled a shorthand pad from the glove compartment and gave her a pencil. A streetlamp on the corner bled just enough light to work by as she plotted out an irregular shape, dividing it into squares and rectangles, putting a big X in to mark the parlor.\n\n\"That's the ground floor.\" She handed the pad over. \"Kitchen, dining room, card room, music room, small parlor, large parlor: that's where they have the s\u00e9ances. How will you\u2014\"\n\n\"Trade secret. You'll get your money's worth and then some. Now beat it. Shuck those weeds and keep some witnesses around you. Don't be alone for a minute.\" She got out of the car quickly, coming around to the driver's side. I rolled the window down. \"One more thing...\"\n\nShe bent to be at eye level. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"When the dust settles, don't give your sister any 'I told you so's,' okay?\"\n\nAbby got a funny look, and I thought she'd ask one more time about what I'd be doing, and I'd have to put her off, not being sure myself. Instead, she pecked me a solid one right on the mouth, and honest to God, I did not see it coming.\n\n\"Good luck!\" she whispered, then scampered off.\n\nNo point in wiping away the lip color; she wasn't wearing any. Dangerous girl. I felt old.\n\nI took the car around the block once and found a likely place to leave it, close behind another that had just parked along the curb. A line of vehicles of various makes and vintages led to the Weisinger house. Partygoers, I thought. A well-bundled couple emerged and stalked carefully along the damp sidewalk toward the lights. Slouching down, I waited until five to nine, then got out and followed.\n\nNot as many lights showed around the curtains now, but I could hear the noise of a sizable gathering within the walls. The possibility of sneaking in to blend with the crowd occurred, but I decided against it. Groups like the Psychical Society tended to be close-knit and notice outsiders. With his membership card Escott could get away with bluffing himself in (his English accent didn't hurt, either), but I was a readymade sore thumb. Better that they never see my face at all.\n\nI took the long way around the house to compare it to Abby's sketch. She'd not marked the windows, not that I needed to open any to get inside; they were just easier to go through than lath and plaster. Picking a likely one above the larger parlor, I vanished, floated up the wall, and seeped through by way of the cracks.\n\nBumbling around in the space on the other side, I regretted not getting a sketch of the second story as well. The room was big and I sensed furniture shapes filling it. Though my hearing was muffled, I determined no one else was there and cautiously re-formed, taking it slow. An empty, dark bedroom, and laid out on the bed was a man's dressing gown. Neatly together on the floor were his slippers. The rest of the room was in perfect order, personal items set out on a bureau, no dust anywhere, and yet it didn't feel lived in. No one is ever this tidy when they're actually using such things.\n\nThe hair went up on the back of my neck.\n\nThis stuff was too high quality to belong to the butler. The J. W. engraved into the back of a heavy silver hairbrush confirmed it\u2014the room was a shrine. I concluded that Flora Weisinger was in sore need of real help to deal with her grief and guilt, not well-meaning morons with Ouija boards.\n\nThe upstairs seemed to be deserted, but I crept softly along the hall, ready to vanish again if company came. The downstairs noise was loud from several conversations going at once, the same as for any party, but no music, no laughter.\n\nNosy, I opened doors. The one nearest Weisinger's room led to Flora's, to judge by the furnishings and metaphysical reading matter. I never understood why it was that rich couples sometimes went in for separate bedrooms, even when they really liked each other.\n\nHer closet was stuffed with dark clothing, all the cheerful print dresses and light colors shoved far to either side. Women wore dark things in the winter, but this was too much. There was an out of place\u2013looking portable record player on a table by the bed. The only record on the spindle was Kemp's \"Gloomy Sunday.\"\n\nEnough already. I got out before I had another damn twinge.\n\nOne of the hall doors opened to a sizable linen cupboard. I stepped in and put on the light. With my vision the night is like day to me if there's any kind of illumination, but not so much in interior rooms with no windows. This place reminded me of the hidden room under Escott's kitchen where I slept while the sun was up. I took off my overcoat and hat, putting them out of sight in the back on an upper shelf. I wanted to be able to move around quick if required.\n\nSheets and towels filled other shelves, along with some white, filmy material that I figured out were spare curtains. When I was a kid my mom drafted me twice a year to help change the winter curtains to summer and back again. No matter that it was women's work, I was the youngest and available.\n\nI held the fabric up and it was just like what Mom used. In a lighted room you could see through it, but in a dark place with only a candle burning and imaginations at a fever pitch\u2014yeah, I could make good use of it. The widest, longest piece folded up small, and I easily pushed it into the gap between my belt and shirt in the back.\n\nBut I wanted something more spectacular than a fun house spook. The items in Weisinger's room would do it.\n\nFrom his bureau I pocketed the hairbrush, a pipe, a comb, and some keys, and checked out a bottle of aftershave cologne. Aqua Velva was good enough for me, but rich guys had to be different. I shook some into my hands and gave myself a thorough slapping down, face, neck, hands, and lapels. Fortunately, it smelled pretty nice.\n\nDownstairs, things suddenly went quiet. The s\u00e9ance must be starting.\n\nNo time for further refinements, I vanished and sank straight through the floor until I'd cleared its barrier and was sure it was now a ceiling. I hovered high, listening.\n\nThey sang \"Happy Birthday.\"\n\nI could have done without that.\n\nThe mostly in-key singing ended, then a man gently urged, \"Blow them out and make a wish for him, Flora.\"\n\nThe soft applause that followed indicated success, then there was a general shuffling and scraping as they took seats. No one spoke, which was odd. People talked at parties.\n\nSilence now, a long stretch of silence. I took the pause as an opportunity to explore the edges of the room. Certainly I bumped and brushed into people, and they'd shiver in reaction, because in this form I'd feel like a cold draft to them, but the silence held. Without too much trouble I found a corner and determined this was where Abby hid herself. She was absent, so I gradually re-formed.\n\nThe Chinese screen\u2014and I didn't have much experience with them\u2014was seven feet tall and wide enough to conceal a sizable serving area. When holding formal receptions, you didn't have to see the servants messing with the dishes. There were spaces between the painted panels that I could peer through, though. Each sliver of space provided a different angle on things.\n\nThe large parlor was much bigger than I expected. A long table was set up in the middle and seated eight to a side. Each chair had an occupant, and they were a motley group: some wore formal clothes, others were artistically Bohemian.\n\nAn older, more polished, more somber version of Abby sat at one end on the side opposite me: Flora Weisinger. Behind her was a framed portrait of a young man in his prime: her late husband. In front of her was a large birthday cake, its candles dead. She clutched a wadded handkerchief in one hand; in the other, pinched between thumb and forefinger and held up like an offering, was a gold ring. I could guess whose. Her posture was tense, expectant, her big dark gaze fixed on the tall man next to her.\n\nAt the head of the table, clearly in charge, stood Alistair Bradford. Having seen a few mediums in the course of my checkered life, I knew they ran to all types, from self-effacing, lace-clad ladies, to suave young lounge lizards with Vaseline-slicked hair. Bradford was lofty and distinguished, his own too-long hair swept back like that of an orchestra maestro. It suited his serious features. He was handsome, if you liked that brand of it, and his slate blue eyes did look piercing as they took in the disciples at the table.\n\n\"Now, dear friends,\" he said in a startlingly soft, clear, beautiful voice, \"please let us bow our heads in sincere prayer for a safe and enlightening spiritual journey on this very, very special night.\"\n\nSuch was the influence of that surprising voice that I actually followed through with the rest of them. I had to shake myself and remember he'd been happy to dig up a grave to get to that ring in Flora Weisinger's fingers. The wave of disgust snapped me out of it. The next time he spoke, saying amen, I had my guard up.\n\nDown the whole length of that big, bare table there were only two candles burning, leaving the rest of the room\u2014to their eyes\u2014dark. It was as good as daylight to me.\n\n\"And now I ask that everyone remain utterly quiet, and I will attempt to make contact,\" he said, smiling warmly.\n\nI expected them to hold hands, touch fingers, or something like that. So much for how things were done in the movies.\n\nBradford sat, composed himself with his palms flat on the table, and shut his eyes. He drew in a deep breath, audibly releasing it. In contrast, no one else seemed able to move. Flora looked at him with an intense and heartbreaking hope that was terrible to see.\n\nHis stertorous breathing gradually got louder. The man knew how to play things to raise the suspense.\n\nAnd I knew how to bust it.\n\nHis noises got thicker with more throat behind them, so I could guess he was ready to turn it into a good long groan so Fr\u00e8re L\u00e8on could make his entrance.\n\nI went invisible, floated until I was exactly behind his chair, went solid while crouched down, and drew a big breath of my own. During the brief silence between his puffings I cut loose with loudest, juiciest Bronx cheer I could manage, then vanished.\n\nIn a tense, emotion-charged room it had a predictable effect. I slipped behind the screen to watch.\n\nHis rhythm abruptly shattered, Bradford looked around in confusion, as did the others. Some seemed scandalized, a couple were amused, and one guy suggested that perhaps there was a playful spirit in the room already. A more practical man got up to check my corner, which was the only hiding place, and announced it to be empty.\n\nA few of them noticed the cologne and mentioned it. Much to their delight, Flora finally confirmed that it was James's scent hanging in the air. She sounded awful. Bradford made no comment.\n\nAfter some excited discussion that didn't go anywhere, they settled down, and Bradford started his breathing routine again. I watched and waited.\n\nFr\u00e8re L\u00e8on eventually began to speak through Bradford, and to give him credit, it was a damned well-done French accent. His voice was rougher, deeper in pitch, very effective in the dark.\n\nI ventured forth again, keeping low while he gave them a weather report for the other side, and went solid just long enough to call out a handy bit of French I'd learned while on leave in Paris. The loose translation was How much for an hour of love, my little cabbage?\n\nOr something like that; it had usually been enough to get my face slapped.\n\nThen I clocked him sharp on the back of the noggin with the hairbrush, dropped it, and vanished.\n\nI was back to the screen, going solid in time to see things fall apart. A few in the room had understood what I'd said and were either flabbergasted or trying not to laugh. Bradford's trance was thoroughly broken; he launched from his chair to look behind it, startled as the rest. He remembered himself, though, and flopped down again, apparently in a state of collapse. They fussed over him, and the electric chandelier was switched on.\n\nSomewhere in the middle of it Flora spotted the hairbrush. She froze, screamed, and sat down fast, sheet white and pointing to where it lay on the floor.\n\nIt took attention away from Bradford, and I was betting he was none too pleased. The knock he'd taken bothered him\u2014his hand kept rubbing the spot\u2014but I'd hit to hurt, not cause permanent damage. He'd earned it. I kept myself out of sight for the duration, going solid in the next room over, which was empty. Vanishing took it out of me. I'd have to stop at the stockyards before dawn for some blood or I'd feel like hell tomorrow night.\n\nSome guy who seemed to be the one in charge of the Psychical Society was for canceling the sitting, but Bradford assured everyone that he was fine. Sometimes mischievous spirits delighted in disrupting things\u2014unless, of course, there was a more earthly explanation. With Flora's permission the ground floor was searched for uninvited guests. I had to not be there for a few minutes but didn't mind.\n\nElsewhere in the house, probably the distant kitchen, I heard strident voices denying any part of the business. Abby's was in that chorus, her outrage genuine. Good girl.\n\nThis time it took longer for everyone to settle. Though the hour inched toward ten, none showed signs of being sleepy enough to leave. The entertainment was too interesting.\n\nThe hour struck and they assembled in the parlor again. On the long table fresh candles were substituted for the ones that had expired. The chandelier was switched off.\n\nFrom my vantage point at the screen I tried to get a sense of Flora's reaction to things. She had the silver-backed hairbrush square in front of her and kept looking at it. She had to be the gracious hostess, but her nerves were showing in the way she played with that handkerchief. She'd rip it apart before too long. As she took her seat again close to Bradford, she held the wedding ring out as before, but her fingers shook.\n\nThird time's the charm, I thought, and waited.\n\nBradford did his routine without a hitch, and before too long good old Fr\u00e8re L\u00e8on was back and in a thick accent offered them greetings and a warning against paying mind to dark spirits who could lead them astray from the True Path.\n\nThat's what he called it. I just shook my head, assembling my borrowed weapons quietly on the serving table, a napkin scrounged from a stack at one end to nix the noise.\n\nFlora gave Fr\u00e8re L\u00e8on a formal greeting and asked if her husband was present.\n\n\"He is, ma petit. 'E shines like the sun and speaks of 'is love for you.\"\n\nShe released a shaky sigh of relief and it sounded too much like a sob. \"What else does he say? James? Are you sure? Tell me what to do!\"\n\nBradford's old monk tortured her a little longer, not answering. He said he could not hear well for the dark spirits trying to come between, then: \"Ah! 'E is clear at last. 'E says 'is love is deep, and 'e wants you to be 'appy on this plane. You are to open your 'eart to new love. Ah\u2014the 'appiness that awaits you is great. 'E smiles! Such joy for you, sweet child, such joy!\"\n\nFlora shook her head a little. Some part of her must have known this was all wrong.\n\nTime to confirm it.\n\nI'd pulled out the curtain material and draped it over my head, tying one of the napkins kerchieflike around my neck to keep the stuff from slipping off. It looked phony as hell, I was sure, but in the darkness with this crowd it would lay 'em in the aisles.\n\nPicking up Weisinger's things, I eased from behind the screen. Everyone was looking at Bradford. He might have seen me in the shadows beyond the candle glow, but his eyes were shut.\n\nMade to order, I thought, and accurately bounced the keys off his skull. It was a damned good throw, and I followed quickly with the other things. The comb landed square in the cake, the pipe skidded along the table and slid into Flora's lap. She shrieked and jumped up.\n\nIf Fr\u00e8re L\u00e8on had a good entrance, that was nothing to compare to that of Jack Fleming, fake ghost-for-hire.\n\nI vanished and reappeared but only just, holding to a mostly transparent state\u2014standing smack-dab in the middle of the table. The top half of my body was visible, beautifully obscured by the pale curtain. The bottom half went right into the wood.\n\nIt didn't feel good but was pretty spectacular. The screaming helped.\n\nWith some effort I pressed forward, moving right through the table, candles and all, down its remaining length, working steadily toward Bradford. His eyes were now wide open, and it was a treat to see him shed the trance to see some real supernatural trouble. When I raised a pale, curtain-swathed hand to point at him, I thought he'd swallow his tongue.\n\nThen I willed myself higher, rising until I was clear of the table and floating free. I made one swimming circuit of the room, then dove toward Bradford, letting myself go solid as I dropped.\n\nI took in enough breath to fill the room with a wordless and hopefully terrifying bellow and hit him like bowling ball taking out one last stubborn pin. It was a nasty impact for us both, but I had the advantage of being able to vanish again. So far as I could tell he was sprawled flat and screaming with the rest.\n\nRemaining invisible was uphill work for me now, but necessary. I clung close to Bradford so he could enjoy my unique kind of cold. I'd been told it was like death's own breath from the Arctic. Through chattering teeth he babbled nonsense about dark spirits being gathered against him and that he had to leave before they manifested again. He got some argument and a suggestion they all pray to dispel the negative influences, but he was already barreling out the door.\n\nI stuck with him until he got in his car, then slipped into the backseat and went solid. He screeched like a woman when I snaked one arm around his neck in a half nelson. I'm damned strong. He couldn't break free. When he stopped making noise, I noticed him staring at the rearview mirror. It was empty, of course.\n\nLeaning in, my mouth close to his ear, in my best imitation of the Shadow, I whispered, \"Game's over, Svengali. Digging up that grave pissed off the wrong kind of things. We're on to you and we're hungry. You want to see another dawn?\"\n\nHe whimpered, and the sound of his racing heart filled the car. I took that as a yes.\n\n\"Get out of town. Get out of the racket. Go back to the stage. Better a live magician than a dead medium. Got that? Got that?\"\n\nNot waiting for a reply, I vanished, exiting fast. He gunned the motor to life and shot away like Barney Oldfield looking to make a new speed record.\n\nAs the wrecked evening played itself out to the survivors in the parlor, I made it back to the linen closet, killed the light, and parked my duff on an overturned bucket to wait in the dark. I needed the rest.\n\nThe house grew quiet. The last guests departed with enough copy from tonight to fill their monthly pamphlets for years to come. Escott would have some interesting reading to share. I got the impression Flora was not planning another sitting, though a few people assured her that tonight's events should be continued.\n\nThe residents finished and came upstairs one by one. Flora Weisinger went into James's room and stayed there for a long time, crying. Abby found her, they talked in low voices for a time, and Flora cried some more. I wasn't sorry. Better now than later, married to a leech. Apparently things worked out. The sisters emerged, each going to her own room. Some servant made a last round, checking the windows, then things fell silent.\n\nI'd taken off the spook coverings, folding the curtain and napkin, slipping them in with similar ones on a shelf. Retrieving my coat and hat I was ready to make a quiet exit until catching the faint sound of \"Gloomy Sunday\" seeping through the walls.\n\nDamn.\n\nThis night had been a flying rout for Bradford, but Flora was still stuck in her pit. She might dig it even deeper until it was a match for her husband's grave.\n\nSomeone needed to talk sense into her. I felt the least qualified for the job, but soon as I recognized the music I got that twinge again.\n\nI did my vanishing act and went across to Flora's room.\n\nThe music grew louder as I floated toward it, just solid enough to check the lay of the land. The lights were out, only a little glow from around her heavy curtains, enough to navigate and not be seen.\n\nQuick as I could I re-formed, flicked the phonograph's needle arm clear, and pulled out the record. It made a hell of a crunch when I broke it to pieces.\n\nThere was a feminine gasp from the bed, and she fumbled the light on. By then I was gone, but sensed her coming over. Another gasp, then...\n\n\"James?\" Her voice quavered with that heartbreaking hope, now tinged with anguish. \"James? Oh, please, darling, talk to me. I know you're here.\"\n\nShe'd picked up on the cologne.\n\n\"James? Please...\"\n\nThis would be tough. I drifted over to a wall and gradually took shape, keeping it slow so she had time to stare, and if not get used to me, then at least not scream.\n\nHands to her mouth, eyes big, and her skin dead white, she looked ready to faint. This was cruel. A different kind from Bradford's type of torture, but still cruel.\n\n\"James sent me,\" I said, keeping my voice soft. \"Please don't be afraid.\"\n\nShe'd frozen in place and I wasn't sure she understood.\n\nI repeated myself and she finally nodded.\n\n\"Where is he?\" she demanded, matching my soft tone.\n\n\"He's with God.\" It seemed best to keep things as simple as possible. \"Everything that man told you was a lie. You know that now, don't you?\"\n\nShe nodded again, the jerky movement very similar to Abby's mannerism. \"Please, let me speak to James.\"\n\n\"He knows already. He said to tell you it wasn't your fault. There's nothing to forgive. It was just his time to go, that's all. Not your fault.\"\n\n\"But it was.\"\n\n\"Nope.\" I raised my right hand. \"Swear to God. And I should know.\"\n\nThat had her nonplussed. \"What...who are you?\"\n\n\"Just a friend.\"\n\n\"That cologne, it's his.\"\n\n\"So you'd know he sent me. Flora, he loves you and knows you love him. But this is not the way to honor his memory. He wants you to give it up before it destroys you. He's dead and you're alive. There's a reason you're here.\"\n\n\"What? Tell me!\"\n\n\"Doesn't work like that, you have to find out for yourself. You won't find answers in a Ouija board, though.\"\n\nFlora had tentatively moved closer to me. \"You look real.\"\n\n\"Thanks, I try my best. I can't stay long. Not allowed. I have to make sure you're clear-headed on this. No more guilt\u2014it wasn't your fault\u2014get rid of this junk and live your life. James wants you to be happy again. If not now, then someday.\"\n\n\"That's all?\"\n\n\"Flora...that's a lifetime. A good one if you choose it.\"\n\n\"I'll...all right. Would you tell James\u2014\"\n\n\"He knows. Now get some sleep. New day in the morning. Enjoy it.\" I was set to gradually vanish again, then remembered\u2014\"One last thing, Flora. James's wedding band.\" I held my hand out.\n\n\"Oh, no, I couldn't.\"\n\n\"Yes, you can. It belongs with him and you know it. Come on.\"\n\nFresh tears ran down her face, but maybe this time there would be healing for her. She had his ring on a gold chain around her neck and reluctantly took it off. She read the inscription one more time, kissed the ring, and gave it over.\n\n\"Everything will be fine,\" I said. \"This is from James.\" I didn't think he'd mind. I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, very lightly, and vanished before she could open her eyes.\n\nFor the next few hours I drove around Chicago, feeling like a prize idiot and hoping I'd not done even worse damage to Flora than Alistair Bradford. I didn't think so, but the worry stuck.\n\nEventually I found my way back to that big cemetery and got myself inside, walking quickly along the path to the fancy mausoleum and the grave behind it.\n\nI was damned tired, but had one last job to do to earn Abby Saeger's five bucks.\n\nPinching the ring in my fingers as Flora had done at the s\u00e9ance, I extended my arm and disappeared once more, this time sinking into the earth. It was the most unpleasant sensation, pushing down through the broken soil, pushing until what had been my hand found a greater resistance.\n\nThat would be James Weisinger's coffin.\n\nI'd never attempted anything like this before but was reasonably sure it was possible. This was a hell of a way to find out for certain.\n\nPushing just a little more against the resistance, it suddenly ceased to be there. Carefully not thinking what that meant, I focused my concentration on getting just my hand to go solid.\n\nIt must have worked, because it hurt like a Fury, felt like my hand was being sawed away at the wrist. Just before the pain got to be too much I felt the gold ring slip from my grasp.\n\nOne instant I was six feet under with my hand in a coffin and the next I was stumbling in the snow, clutching my wrist and trying not to yell too much.\n\nMy hand was still attached. That was good news. I worked the fingers until they stopped looking so clawlike, then sagged against a tree.\n\nWhat a night.\n\nI got back in my car just as the sleet began ticking against the windows, trying to get in. It was creepy. I wanted some sound to mask it but hesitated turning on the radio, apprehensive that \"Gloomy Sunday\" might be playing again.\n\nWhat the hell. Music was company, proof that there were other people awake somewhere. I could always change the station.\n\nWhen it warmed up, Bing Crosby sang \"Pennies from Heaven.\" Someone at the radio station had noticed the weather, perhaps, and was having his little joke.\n\nI felt that twinge again, but now it raised a smile.\n\n## The First Day of the Rest of Your Life\n\nRachel Caine\n\nRachel Caine is known for the bestselling Weather Warden series, as well as her hot new young adult series, The Morganville Vampires. She's also written novels for the Silhouette Bombshell line, and has numerous other books and short stories to her credit. Visit her website at www.rachelcaine.com for news and updates.\n\nEighteenth birthdays in Morganville are usually celebrated one of two ways: getting totally wasted with your friends or making a terrifying life-or-death decision about your continued survival.\n\nNot that there can't be some combination of the two.\n\nMy eighteenth birthday party was held in the back of a rust-colored '70s-era Good Times van, and the select guest list included some of Morganville's Least Wanted. Me, for instance\u2014Eve Rosser. Number of people who'd signed my yearbook: five. Two of them had scrawled C YA LOSER. (Number of people I'd wanted to sign my yearbook? Zero. But that was just me.)\n\nAnd then there was my best friend, Jane, and her sister, Miranda. I'd invited Jane, not Miranda. Jane was okay\u2014kind of dull, but seriously, with a name like Jane? Cursed from birth. She did like some cool things, other than me of course. Wicked '80s make-out music, for instance. BPAL\u2014Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab\u2014perfume, particularly from the Dark Elements line, although I personally preferred the Funereal Oils. Jane wasn't Goth\u2014more Preppy Nerd Girl than anything else\u2014but she had some style.\n\nMiranda, the uninvited one, was a kid. Well, Miranda was a weird kid who'd convinced a lot of people she was some kind of psychic. I didn't invite her to the party, because I didn't think she'd be loads of fun, and also she wasn't likely to bring beer. Her BPAL preferences were unknown, mainly because she didn't live on Planet Earth.\n\nWhich left Guy and Trent, my two excellent beer-buying buddies. They were my buddies mostly because Guy had a fake ID that he'd made in art class, and Trent owned the party bus in which we were ensconced. Other than that, I didn't know either one of them that well, but they were smart-ass, funny, and safe to get drunk with. Guy and Trent were the only gay couple I actually knew, gaydom being sort of frowned upon in the Heartland of Texas that was Morganville.\n\nWe were all about the ironic family values.\n\nThe evening went pretty much the way such things are supposed to go: guys buy cheap-ass beer, distribute to underage females, drive to a deserted location (in this case, the creepy-cool high school parking lot) to play loud headbanger music and generally act like idiots. The only thing missing was the make-out sessions, which was okay by me; most of the guys of Morganville were gag worthy, anyway. There were one or two I would have gladly crawled over barbwire to date, but Shane Collins had left town, and Michael Glass...well, I hadn't seen Michael in a while. Nobody had.\n\nJane brought me a birthday present, which was kind of sweet, especially since it was a brand-new mix CD of songs about dead people. Jane knows what I like.\n\nI was still a mystery to Guy and Trent, though. Granted, Morganville's a small town, and all us loser outcast freaks had a nodding acquaintance. The pecking order goes something like this: geeks, freaks, nerds, druggies, gays, and Goths. Goths were on the bottom because the undead think wannabes are disgusting if they're serious about it, or dangerously smart-assed if they aren't. Which I wasn't. Mostly.\n\nOh, I forgot to mention: vampires. Town's run by them. Full of them. Humans live here on sufferance, heavy on the \"suffer.\"\n\nSee what I mean about the ironic family values?\n\nI could tell that Guy had been trying to think of a way to ask me all night, but thanks to consuming over half a case of beer with his Significantly Wasted Other, he finally just blurted out the question of the day. \"So, are you signing or what?\" he asked. Yelled, actually, over whatever song was currently making my head hurt. \"I mean, tomorrow?\"\n\nWas I signing? That was the Big Question, the one all of us faced at eighteen. I looked down at my wrist, because I was still wearing my leather bracelet. The symbol on it wasn't anything people outside of Morganville would recognize, but it identified the vampire who was the official Protector for my family. However, as of that morning, I was no longer in that select little club of people who had to kiss Brandon's ass to continue to draw breath.\n\nI also would no longer have any kind of deal or Protection from any vampire in Morganville.\n\nWhat Guy was asking was whether or not I intended to pick myself a Protector of my very own. It was traditional to sign with your family's hereditary patron, but no way in hell was I letting Brandon have power over me. So I could either shop around to see if any other vampire could\u2014or would\u2014take me, or go bare...live without a contract.\n\nWhich was attractive but seriously risky. See, Morganville vampires don't generally kill off their own humans, because that would make life difficult for everybody, but free-range, unProtected humans? Nobody worries much what happens to them, because usually they're alone, and they're poor, and they disappear without a trace.\n\nJust another job opening at the Chicken Shack fry machine.\n\nThey were all looking at me now. Jane, Miranda, Guy, and Trent, all waiting to hear what Eve Rosser, Professional Rebel, was going to do.\n\nI didn't disappoint them. I tipped back the beer, belched, and said, \"Hell, no, I'm not signing. Bareback all the way, baby! Let's live fast and die young!\"\n\nGuy and I did drunken high fives. Trent rolled his eyes and clicked beer bottles with Jane. \"They all say that,\" he said. \"Right up until the AIDS test comes back. Then there's the wailing and the weeping....\"\n\n\"Jesus, Trent, you're the laugh of the party.\"\n\n\"That's life of the party, honey bunches. Oh, wait, you're right. Not in Morganville, it isn't.\" God, Trent was hyper, which was weird for a guy consuming as many brews as he had. Maybe he was just naturally that way. Maybe his Ritalin had worn off. Anyway, it was bugging me.\n\n\"Boo-ha-ha. Is that funny at all in other vans in town?\" Jane asked. \"Because it's not so funny in here, ass pirate.\"\n\n\"You should know, princess; you've been on your back in every van in town,\" Trent shot back.\n\n\"Hey, bitch!\" Jane tossed an empty bottle at him; Trent caught it and threw it in the plastic bin in the corner. Which, I had to admit, meant that despite the jittering, Trent could hold his liquor, because he led the field in ounces consumed by a wide margin. \"Seriously, Eve\u2014what are you going to do?\"\n\nI hadn't thought about it. Or, actually, I had, but in that what if kind of way that was really just bullshit bravado...but now it was down to do-or-don't, or it would be when the sun came up in the morning. I was going to have to choose, and that choice would rule the rest of my life.\n\nMaybe I shouldn't have gotten quite so trashed, given the circumstances.\n\n\"Well, I'm not signing with Brandon,\" I said slowly. \"Maybe I'll shop around for another patron.\"\n\n\"You really think anybody else is going to stand up and volunteer if Brandon's got you marked?\" Guy asked. \"Girl, you got yourself a death wish.\"\n\n\"Yeah, like that's news,\" Jane said. \"Look how she dresses!\"\n\nNothing wrong with how I was dressed. A skull T-shirt, a spiked belt low on my hips, bike shorts, fishnets, black and red Mary Janes. Oh, maybe she was talking about my makeup. I'd done the Full-On Goth today\u2014white face powder, big black rings around my eyes, blue lips. It was sort of a joke.\n\nAnd also, sort of not.\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" said a small, quiet voice that somehow cut right through the music.\n\nI'd almost forgotten about Miranda\u2014the kid was sitting in the corner of the van, her knees drawn up, staring off into the distance.\n\n\"It speaks,\" Trent said, and laughed maniacally. \"I was starting to think you'd just brought the kid along to protect your virtue, Jane.\" He gave her a comical flutter of his long, lush eyelashes.\n\nMiranda was still talking, or at least her lips were moving, but her words were lost in a particularly loud guitar crunch. \"What?\" I yelled, and leaned closer. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nMiranda's pale blue gaze moved and fixed on me, and I wished it hadn't. There was something really strange about the girl, all right, even if her rep as the town Cassandra was exaggerated. She'd supposedly known about the fire last year that burned the Collins family out; people even said she predicted that Alyssa Collins would die in the fire. Jane said Miranda made it all up after the fact, but who knew? The girl had a double helping of weird, with creepy little sprinkles on top.\n\n\"It doesn't matter what you decide to do,\" she said louder. \"Really. It doesn't.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" Trent asked, and leaned over to snag another beer from the Coleman cooler in the center of the van floor. He twisted off the cap and turned it over in his black-polished fingers. \"Why's that, o Madame Doom? Is one of us going to die tonight?\" They all made hilariously drunken ooooooooo sounds, and Trent upended the bottle and chugged.\n\n\"Yes,\" Miranda whispered. Nobody else heard her but me.\n\nAnd then her eyes rolled up in her skull, and she collapsed flat out on the filthy shag carpet on the floor of the van.\n\n\"Jesus,\" Guy blurted, and crawled over to her. He checked her pulse and breathed a sigh of relief. \"I think she's alive.\"\n\nJane hadn't moved at all. She looked more annoyed than concerned. \"It's okay,\" she said. \"She had some kind of vision. It happens. She'll come out of it.\"\n\nTrent said, \"Damn, I was starting to get worried it was the beer.\"\n\n\"She didn't have any, moron.\"\n\n\"See? Serious beer deficiency. No wonder she's out.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't we do something?\" Guy asked anxiously. He was cradling Miranda in his arms, and she was as limp as a rag doll, her head lolling against his head. Her eyes were closed now, moving frantically behind the lids like she was trying to look all directions at once, in the dark. \"Like, take her to the hospital?\"\n\nThe Morganville hospital was neutral ground\u2014no vampires could hunt there. So it was the safest place for anybody who was, well, not working at full power. But Jane just shook her head.\n\n\"I told you, this happens all the time. She'll be okay in a couple of minutes. It's like an epileptic seizure or something.\" Jane looked at me curiously. \"What did she say to you?\"\n\nI couldn't figure out how to tell her, so I just drank my beer and said nothing.\n\nProbably a mistake.\n\nJane was right, it took a couple of minutes, but Miranda's eyes fluttered open, blank and unfocused, and she struggled to sit up in Guy's arms. He held on for a second, then let go. She scrambled away and sat in the far corner of the van, next to the empty bottles, with her hands over her head. Jane sighed, handed me her beer, and crawled over to whisper with her sister and stroke her hair.\n\n\"Well,\" Trent said. \"Guess the emergency's over. Beer?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, and drained my last bottle. I was feeling loose and sparkly, and I was going to be seriously sorry in the morning\u2014oh, it was morning. Like, nearly 2 a.m. Great. \"I need to get home, Trent.\"\n\n\"But the night's barely late\u2013middle age!\"\n\n\"Trent. Man, I have to go.\"\n\n\"Party pooper. Okay, fine.\" Trent shot me a resentful look and jerked his head to Guy. \"Help me drive, okay?\"\n\n\"You're driving?\" Guy looked alarmed. Trent had downed lots of beer. Lots. He didn't seem to be feeling it, and it wasn't like we had far to go, but...yeah. Still, I didn't feel capable, and Guy looked even more bleary. Jane...well, she hadn't been far behind Trent in the Drunk-Ass Sweepstakes either. And letting a fourteen-year-old epileptic have the wheel wasn't a better solution.\n\n\"Not like we can walk,\" I said reluctantly. \"Look, drive slow, okay? Slow and careful.\"\n\nTrent shot me a crisp OK sign and saluted. He didn't look drunk. I swallowed hard and crawled back to sit with Jane and Miranda. \"We're going home,\" I said. \"Guess you guys get dropped off first, right? Then me?\"\n\nMiranda nodded. \"Sit here,\" she said. \"Right here.\" She patted the carpet next to her.\n\nI rolled my eyes. \"Comfy here, thanks.\"\n\n\"No! Sit here!\"\n\nI looked at Jane and frowned. \"Are you sure she's okay?\" And made a little not-so-subtle loopy-loop at my temple.\n\n\"Yeah, she's fine,\" Jane sighed. \"She's been getting these visions again. Most of the time they're bullshit, though. I think she just does it for the attention.\"\n\nJane was looking put out, and I guess she had reason. If Miranda was this much fun at parties, I could only imagine what a barrel of laughs she was at home.\n\nMiranda was getting more and more upset. Jane gave her a ferocious frown and said, \"Oh, God. Just do it, Eve. I don't want her having another fit or something.\"\n\nI crawled across Miranda and wedged myself uncomfortably into the corner where she indicated. Yeah, this was great. At least it was going to be a short drive.\n\nIt was what was waiting at the end of it that I was afraid of. Brandon. Decisions. The beginning of my adult life.\n\nTrent started the van and pulled a tight U-turn out of the high school parking lot. There were no side windows, but out of the back windows I saw the big, hulking '30s-era building with its Greek columns fading away like a ghost into the night. Morganville wasn't big on streetlights, although there were a crapload of surveillance cameras. The cops knew where we'd been. They knew everything in Morganville, and half of them were vampires.\n\nGod, I wanted to apply for the paperwork to get the hell out, but it was a waste of time. I needed an acceptance letter to an out-of-state university or waivers from the mayor's office. I wasn't likely to get either one with my grades and 'tude. No, I had to face facts: I was a lifer, stuck in Morganville, watching the world go by.\n\nAt least, until somebody cut me out of the herd and I became a snack pack.\n\nTrent was driving faster than we'd agreed. Not only that, the van was veering a little to the side of the road. \"Yo, T!\" I yelled. \"Eyes front, man!\"\n\nHe turned to look back at me, and his pupils were huge and dark, and he giggled, and I had time to think, Oh shit, he's not drunk; he's high, and then he hit the gas.\n\nMiranda's hand closed over my arm. I looked at her, and she was crying. \"I don't want them to die,\" she said. \"I don't.\"\n\n\"Oh, Jesus, Mir, would you stop?\" Jane said, and smacked her hand away. \"Drama princess.\"\n\nBut I was looking at Miranda, and she was staring at me, and she slowly nodded her head.\n\n\"Here it comes,\" she said, and transferred the stare to her sister. \"I'm sorry. I love you.\"\n\nAnd then something bad happened, and the world ended.\n\nI walked away from the smoking wreckage. Staggered, actually, coughing and carrying the limp body of Miranda; she was alive, bleeding from the head but still alive.\n\nMy brain wouldn't bring up anything about Trent, Jane, or Guy. Nothing. It just...refused.\n\nI walked until I heard sirens and saw flashing lights, and dropped to my knees, with Miranda in my lap.\n\nThe first cop on the scene was Richard Morrell, the son of the mayor. I'd always thought that even though his family was poisonous, he was kind of a nice guy. He'd been kind to me when I'd had to testify against my brother, after Jason...did what he did. Richard proved it again now by easing Miranda out of my arms and to the ground, cushioning her head gently to keep it from bumping against the pavement. His warm hand pressed on my shoulder. \"Eve. Eve. Anybody else in there?\"\n\nI nodded slowly. \"Jane. Trent. Guy.\" Maybe I'd been wrong. Maybe I'd imagined all of that. Maybe they were about to crawl out of that twisted mass of metal and laugh and high five....\n\nToo much imagination. I imagined dead, bloody bodies crawling out of the wreck and swayed. Nearly collapsed. Richard steadied me. \"Easy,\" he said. \"Easy, kid. Stay with me.\"\n\nI did. Somehow, I stayed conscious even when the ambulance drivers wheeled the gurneys past me. Miranda was taken first, of course, and rushed off to the hospital with flashers and sirens.\n\nThey didn't bother hurrying for the others. They just loaded the black zippered bags into one ambulance, and it drove away. They wanted me to go with them, but I told them no, I was fine, because no way was I getting in there with the bodies of my friends. I couldn't.\n\nThe fire department hosed down the wreck, and it smelled like burned metal and reeking plastic, alcohol, blood....\n\nI was still kneeling there on the pavement, pretty much forgotten, when Richard finally came back, did a double take, and looked grim. \"Nobody came to get you? From your family?\"\n\n\"You called them?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I called,\" he said. \"Come on. I'll take you home.\"\n\nI wiped my face. The white makeup was almost gone, and my skin was wet; I hadn't even known I was crying.\n\nNot a mark on me.\n\nSit here, Miranda had told me. Right here. Like she'd known. Like she'd picked me over her own sister.\n\nI couldn't stop shaking. Officer Morrell found a blanket in his patrol car and threw it around my shoulders, and then he bundled me in the back and drove me the five miles home. All the lights were on at my parents' house, but it didn't look welcoming. I checked the time on my cell phone. Three a.m.\n\n\"Hey,\" Richard said. \"This is the big day, right? I'm sorry about your friends, but you need to focus now. Make the right choices, Eve. You understand?\"\n\nHe was trying to be kind, as much as he knew how to be; must have been hard, considering the asshole genes he'd been given. I tried to think what his sister Monica would have said in the same situation. What a bunch of trashed-out losers. They shouldn't be in our cemetery. We've got a perfectly good landfill.\n\nI knew Monica too well, but that wasn't Richard's fault. I nodded to him numbly, gave back the blanket, and walked up the ten steps from the curb to my parents' front door.\n\nIt opened before I reached for the knob, and I was facing Brandon, the family's vampire Protector.\n\n\"I've been waiting for you, Eve,\" he said, and stepped back. \"Come in.\"\n\nI swallowed whatever smart-ass remark I might normally have given him and looked back over my shoulder. Richard Morrell was looking through the window of the police cruiser at me, and he gave a friendly wave and drove off. Like I was in good hands.\n\nYou know every stereotype of the romantic, brooding vampire? Well, that's Brandon. Dark, broody, bedroom eyes, wears a lot of black leather. Liked to think he was badass, and what the hell did I know? Maybe he was. He was badass enough to scare kids, anyway, with those sweet eyes and those cruel hands. Psycho bastard.\n\nI hated his guts, and he knew it.\n\n\"Honey?\" Mom. She was hovering behind Brandon, looking timid and nervous. \"Better come inside. You know you shouldn't be out there in the dark.\"\n\nDad was nowhere to be seen. I bit my tongue and crossed the threshold, and when Brandon closed the door behind me, it was like the cell slamming shut.\n\n\"I was in an accident,\" I said. Mom looked at me. We didn't seem much alike, even when I wasn't Gothed up.... She had fading brown hair and green eyes, and I took after Dad's darker looks.\n\n\"Oh, yes, Officer Morrell called,\" she said. \"But he said you weren't hurt. And you know, we had a guest, we couldn't just leave.\" She smiled at Brandon. My skin tried to crawl off my bones at the sight of that sick, eager-to-please look on her face.\n\n\"Three of my friends were killed,\" I said. I don't know why I bothered to say it; not like anyone here really cared. But just for once, I wanted to see my mother feel something for me.\n\nAnd once again, I was disappointed. \"Oh, dear,\" Mom said. \"That must have been terrible.\"\n\nYeah, once more with feeling, Mom. I sometimes thought maybe this was some kind of play, and Mom was an actress, not a very good one. If that was true, she really phoned in her performance.\n\n\"Any of mine?\" Brandon asked casually. I gritted my teeth, because I wanted to scream and hit him, and that wouldn't have done me any good at all.\n\n\"N-no,\" I managed to stammer over the fury. \"Jane Blunt, Trent Garvey, and Guy\u2014\" What the hell was Guy's last name? I wanted to cry now. Or keep on crying, because I wasn't sure I'd ever stopped. \"Guy Finelli.\"\n\nBrandon smiled. \"Sounds as if Charles had a bad night.\" Charles being a rival vamp. I knew he was the Protector for Jane's family. I hadn't known he'd been responsible for one or both of the others. Charles was just the opposite of Brandon\u2014a bookish little man, soft-spoken and mild until you pushed him. Not a bad choice, if I had to go shopping for Protectors, I supposed.\n\nGod, I hated this. I wanted this over.\n\n\"Let's just do it,\" I said, and walked down the hallway to the living room. Predictably, Dad was parked in his recliner with an open beer, probably working on his usual six-pack. He was a bloated vision of my future\u2014two hundred and fifty pounds, sallow and grim and full of rage and resentment he couldn't fling anywhere but around here, in the house. He managed the biggest local bar, which of course was owned by Brandon. All nice and tidy. Brandon owned the mortgage on the house. Brandon owned the notes on our cars.\n\nBrandon owned us.\n\nAnd now Brandon was smiling at me, all sleek and horrible with those hungry, hungry eyes, and he was taking a folded, thin sheaf of papers out of the pocket of his long black coat.\n\n\"You only wear that thing because you saw it on Angel,\" I said, and snatched the paperwork from him. I read the first few sentences. I, Eve Evangeline Walker Rosser, swear my life, my blood, and my service to my Protector, Brandon, now and for my lifetime, that my Protector may command me in all things.\n\nThis was it. I was holding my future in my hands, right here.\n\nBrandon held out a pen. My father tore his attention away from the glowing escape of the television and took a sip of beer, watching me with angry intensity. My mother looked nervous, fluttering her hands as I stared without blinking at the black Montblanc the vampire was holding out.\n\n\"Happy birthday, by the way,\" Brandon said. \"There's a signing bonus. Ten thousand dollars.\"\n\n\"Guess I could bury my friends in style with that,\" I said.\n\n\"You don't have to worry about that.\" Brandon shrugged. \"Their family contracts cover that sort of thing.\"\n\nMom sensed what I was thinking, I guess, because she blurted, \"Eve, honey, let's hurry. Brandon does have places to go.\" She encouraged me with little vague motions of her hands, and her eyes were desperate.\n\nI took a deep breath, held the crisp paper in both hands, and ripped it in half. The sound was almost drowned out by my mother's horrified gasp and the sound of the beer can crushing in my father's hand.\n\n\"You ungrateful little\u2014\" Dad said. \"You disrespect your Protector like that? To his face?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I said. \"Pretty much just like that.\" I ripped the contract in quarters and threw it at him. The paper fluttered like huge confetti, one piece landing on his shoulder until Brandon calmly brushed it off. \"Fuck off, Brandon. I'm not signing with you.\"\n\n\"No one else will take you,\" he said. \"And you're mine, Eve. You've always been mine. Don't forget it.\"\n\nMy dad got out of his recliner and grabbed my arm. \"You're signing that paper,\" he said, and shook me like a terrier shaking a rat. \"Don't be stupid! Don't you know what you're doing? What you could cost your family if you do this?\"\n\n\"I'm not signing anything!\" I screamed, right in his face, and took Brandon's expensive pen and stomped on it with my Mary Janes until it was a leaking black stain on the floor. \"You can be slaves if you want, but not me! Not ever again!\"\n\nBrandon didn't look angry. He looked amused. That was bad.\n\nDad shoved me and sent me reeling. \"Then you're gone,\" he said. \"I won't have you in my house, eating my food, stealing my money. If you want to go out there bare, then do it. See how long you last.\" He turned to Brandon. \"Our Protection stays intact if she leaves, right?\"\n\nBrandon inclined his head and smiled.\n\nI was stunned, at least a little; Dad had never even threatened a thing like that before. I backed away from him, into Mom. She got out of the way, but then, she always did, didn't she? She had all the backbone of a balloon.\n\nShe avoided my eyes completely. \"You'd better go, honey,\" she said. \"You made your choice.\"\n\nI turned and ran down the hall to my room, slammed the door, and dragged my biggest suitcase out from under the bed. I couldn't take much, I knew that; even taking a suitcase was risky, because it slowed me down. But I couldn't wait for dawn; I had to get out of here now, before Brandon stopped me. He wasn't supposed to use compulsion on me, but that didn't mean he wouldn't.\n\nI filled up the bag with underwear, shoes, clothes, and a few mementos that I couldn't leave, just in case Dad decided to fill up the barbecue with my belongings the minute I was out the door. I left the family photos, even the good ones, the ones from when I was a little kid and our family wasn't a total freak show. I didn't want those memories, and I didn't want pictures of my brother Jason, who was better off in jail, where he was currently rotting. Seeing his face made me feel sick.\n\nI went out the back door, since Brandon was still talking to Mom and Dad in the front, and dragged the suitcase as quietly as possible across the backyard to the alley. Alleys in Morganville are freaky at night and wildly dangerous, but I didn't have much choice. I hurried, bouncing my suitcase over rough, rutted ground and past foul-smelling trash bins, until I was on the street.\n\nAnd I realized I had no idea where to go. No idea at all. All the friends I'd had were dead\u2014dead tonight\u2014and I couldn't even really grieve about that; I didn't have time. Life-saving had to come first, right? That's what I kept telling myself.\n\nDidn't help me carry that giant boulder of guilt.\n\nCabs didn't run at night, because cabbies knew better, and besides, there were only two in the whole town. No bus service. At night, you either drove or you stayed home, and even driving was dangerous if you were unProtected.\n\nI could go to the local motel for the night, the Sagebrush, but it was a good twenty-minute walk, and I didn't think I had twenty minutes. Not tonight. I'd officially forfeited Brandon's Protection when I'd ripped up that paper, and that meant I was an all-you-can-suck buffet until I got somebody to take me in. Houses had automatic Protection. Any house.\n\nMichael. Michael Glass.\n\nMichael lived only a few blocks away. I'd gone to school with Michael, crushed hard on Michael from a distance, and semistalked him after he graduated, attending every single guitar-playing gig he'd landed in Morganville. He was really good, you see. And a sweetheart. And little baby Jesus, he was wicked hot. And he had his own house.\n\nI knew the Glass House. It was one of the historical homes of Morganville, all gently decaying Gothic elegance, and Michael's parents had moved out of Morganville on waivers two years ago. Michael lived there all alone, as far as I knew.\n\nAnd it was only three blocks away.\n\nI had no idea if he was home, or if he'd be stupid enough to let me in when I was running for my life, but it was worth a try, right? I broke into a jog, the wheels of my suitcase making a whirring, grating hiss on the sidewalk. The night felt deep and dark, no moon, only starlight, and it smelled like cold dust. Like a graveyard. Like my graveyard.\n\nI thought of Trent, Guy, and Jane, in their silent black bags. Maybe they were in cold metal drawers by now, filed away. Lives over.\n\nI didn't want to be dead. I didn't.\n\nSo I ran, bumping my suitcase behind me.\n\nI didn't see a soul on the streets. No cars, no lights in windows, no shadows trailing me. It was eerily quiet outside, and my heart was racing. I wished I had weapons, but those were hard to come by in Morganville, and besides, I had nosy parents who trashed my room regularly looking for contraband of all kinds. Being under eighteen sucked.\n\nBeing over eighteen wasn't looking so great, either.\n\nI heard the hiss of tires behind me, over the puffing of my breath, and the low growl of a car engine. I looked back, hoping to see Richard Morrell following me in the police car, but no such luck; it was a nondescript black sports car with dark-tinted windows.\n\nVampire car. No question.\n\nTwo more blocks.\n\nThe car seemed content to creep along behind me, tires crunching over pavement, and I had plenty of panic-time to wonder who was inside. Brandon, in the back, almost certainly; he'd be cruising with his friends, and when he took me, he'd do it in front of an audience.\n\nThe suitcase hit a crack in the sidewalk and tipped over, dragging me to an off-balance halt. I saw a light go on in one of the houses I was passing, and a curtain twitch aside, and then the blinds snapped shut and the lights flicked off. No help there. But then, in Morganville, that wasn't unusual.\n\nI wasn't crying, but it was close; I could feel tears burning in my throat, right above the terror twisting my guts. This was your choice, I told myself. You couldn't do anything else.\n\nRight now, that wasn't much comfort.\n\nUp ahead, I saw the looming bulk of the Glass House\u2014one more block to go. I could make it, I could. I had to. Jane and Trent and Guy were gone. I owed it to them to live through this.\n\nThe car sped up behind me as I crossed the street to the next corner. Four houses to go, all still and lightless.\n\nThere was a porch light on in front of 716, and it cast a glow on the pillars framing the porch, picked out the boards in the white fence in front. There were lights on inside, and I saw someone pass in front of a window.\n\n\"Michael!\" I screamed it and put everything into one last sprint. The car eased ahead of me and pulled in at the curb with a squeal of brakes, tires bumping concrete. A door flew open to block the sidewalk, and I gasped, picked up my suitcase, and tossed it over the fence. It weighed about fifty pounds, but I managed to pick it up and throw it. I grabbed the rough whitewashed boards with their sharp tops and vaulted over, got my shirt caught on the way and ripped it open. No time to worry about that. I grabbed my suitcase and started dragging it over the night-damp grass toward the pool of light. I yelled again, with even more of an edge of panic. \"Michael! It's Eve! Open the door!\"\n\nThey were behind me. They were right behind me. I knew it, even though I didn't dare look back and they made no sound. I could feel it. I felt something grab the suitcase, nearly twisting my arm out of the socket, and I let go, stumbling against the porch stairs. The house stretched above me, gray and ghostly in the dark, but that porch light, that was life.\n\nSomething caught my foot. I screamed and kicked, fighting to get free, but I went down to my hands and knees, then flat as whoever had me pulled. My searching fingers scratched at the closed wood of the door, and I tasted dust again. I'd been close, so close....\n\nThe door opened, and warm yellow light spilled out over me. Too late. I tried to grab for a handhold but I was being yanked backward...and I could feel breath on the back of my neck. Cold, rancid breath.\n\nSomething flew over my head and slammed into the vampire pulling on me, knocking him backward. I crawled back toward the door and got a hand over the threshold.\n\nMichael Glass grabbed my fingers and dragged me inside with one long pull. My feet made it over the line just a fraction of a second before another vampire slammed into the invisible barrier there.\n\nThat vampire was Brandon. Oh, damn, he was angry. Really angry. Our vampires were all about fitting in, but right now he clearly didn't care what we saw. His eyes had turned bloodred, and his face was whiter than I'd ever made mine. And I could see fangs, fangs a viper would have envied, flicking down from their hiding place to flash in menace.\n\nAnd Michael Glass didn't flinch. In fact...he smiled. \"You're not coming in, Brandon, so save it,\" he said. \"Leave.\"\n\nHe looked like I remembered him from high school, from the concerts, only...better, somehow. Stronger. Tall, built, golden hair that waved and curled surfer-style. He had blue eyes, and they were fixed on Brandon. Wary, but definitely not afraid.\n\n\"You okay?\" he asked me. I nodded, unable to say anything that would really cover how I felt. \"Then get out of the way.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Your legs. Please.\"\n\nI pulled them toward me, and he calmly shut the door in Brandon's face. I sat there on the wooden floor, knees pulled in to my chest, and tried to slow my heart down from triple digits. \"God,\" I whispered, and rested my forehead on my knees. \"That was close.\"\n\nI heard the rustle of fabric. Michael had crouched down across from me, back to the opposite wall. He was wearing some comfortable old jeans, a faded green cotton shirt, and his feet were long and narrow and bare. \"Eve Rosser, right?\" he asked. \"Hi.\"\n\n\"Hi, Michael.\" I was having trouble getting my breath.\n\n\"How have you been?\"\n\n\"Good. You?\"\n\n\"Fine. What the hell is going on?\"\n\n\"Um...my eighteenth birthday.\" I was shivering, and I realized my skull shirt was displaying a whole lot more bra than I'd ever intended. Kind of a plunge bra. Victoria's Secret. Not so much of a secret right now. \"Brandon's kind of pissed. I didn't sign.\"\n\nMichael rested his head against the wall and looked at me with narrowed eyes. \"You didn't sign. Oh, man.\"\n\nI shook my head, unable to say much more about that. I knew what he was thinking, and he was right: I'd brought trouble right to his door. Some friend. Acquaintance. Whatever. My cousin Bob always used to say No good deed goes unpunished. In Morganville, Bob was damn sure right.\n\nMichael said, \"You got someplace to go? Relatives, maybe?\"\n\nI just looked at him miserably, and I felt tears starting to bubble up again. What had I been hoping for? Some white knight hottie to save me? Well, I wasn't going to get it from Michael. He hadn't even come outside to get me, he'd just thrown a chair or something.\n\nStill, he'd opened the door. Nobody else on this street had or would have.\n\n\"Okay,\" Michael said softly. He stretched out a hand and awkwardly patted me on the knee. \"Hey. You're okay, right? You're safe in here now. Don't cry.\"\n\nI didn't want to cry, but that was how I vented, and boy, did I need to vent. All the fury and grief and rage and confusion just boiled up inside and forced their way out. I was sobbing like a punk, and after a couple of shaking breaths I felt Michael move across to sit next to me. His arm went around me, and I turned toward his warmth, soaking his shirt with tears. I would have told him everything then, all the bad stuff...the van, my friends, Brandon. I would have told him how Brandon gave my dad a pay raise when I was fifteen in return for unrestricted access to me and Jason. I would have told him everything.\n\nLucky for him I couldn't get my breath.\n\nMichael was good at soothing; he knew not to talk, and he knew just how to touch my hair and how to hold me. It wasn't until the storm became more like occasional showers, and I was able to hiccup steady breaths, that I realized he had a clear view down my bra.\n\n\"Hey!\" I said, and tried to artfully tuck the torn edges of my shirt under the strap. Michael had an odd look on his face. \"Free show's over, Glass.\"\n\nTrent would have snapped back some snazzy insult, but not Michael. Michael just looked uncomfortable and edged away from me. \"Sorry,\" he said. \"I wasn't\u2014\"\n\nWell, if he wasn't, I was offended. I gave good bra: 34B.\n\nHe must have seen it in my expression, because Michael held up his hands in surrender. \"Okay, yeah. I was. That makes me an asshole, right?\"\n\n\"No, that makes you male and straight,\" I said. Was it wrong I felt relieved? \"I just need to change my\u2014Oh, damn. My suitcase! It's still out there\u2014\"\n\n\"Come on.\" Michael got up and walked down the polished wooden hallway. The house felt warm but strange\u2014old, and despite the big open rooms, kind of claustrophobic. Like it was...watching. I loved it. I had no idea why, but it just felt...right. Strange and odd and right.\n\nThe living room was normal stuff\u2014couch, chairs, bookcases, throw rugs. A guitar case lying open on a small dining table, and the acoustic was abandoned on the couch as if he'd put it down to see what the trouble was out in the yard. I'd heard Michael play before, though not recently. People had said he'd given it up...but I guessed he hadn't. Maybe he'd just given up performing.\n\nMichael pulled the blinds and looked out. \"It's on the lawn,\" he said. \"They're going through it.\"\n\n\"What?\" I pushed him out of the way and tried to see for myself, but it was all just a black blur. \"They're going through my stuff? Bastards!\" Because I had some lingerie in there that I seriously wanted to keep private. Well, maybe share with one other person. But privately. I yanked the cord on the blinds and moved them up, then unlocked the window and threw up the sash. I leaned out and yelled, \"Hey, assholes, you touch my underwear and\u2014\"\n\nMichael yanked me back by my belt and slammed the window shut about one second before Brandon's face appeared there. \"Let's not taunt the angry vampires,\" he said. \"I have to live here.\"\n\nDeep breaths, Eve. Right. Suitcase not as important as jugular. I sat down in one of the chairs, trying to get hold of myself and not even sure who that was anymore. Myself, I mean. So much had changed in five hours, right? I was an adult now. I was on my own in a town where being alone was a death sentence. I'd made a very bad enemy, and I'd done it deliberately. I'd been disowned by my own family, not that they'd been much of a family in the first place.\n\n\"I am so screwed,\" I said. Michael didn't say anything to that; it was kind of rhetorical. \"So. You look like a nice, nonpsycho kind of guy. Need an unstable roommate with lots of enemies?\" I asked, and tried for a mocking smile. Michael hesitated in the act of reaching for his guitar, then settled in on the couch with the instrument cradled in his lap like a favorite pet. He picked out random notes, pure and cool, and bent his head. \"Sorry. Bad joke.\"\n\n\"No, it's not,\" he said. \"Actually\u2014I might consider it.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I didn't sign, either,\" he said.\n\nOh, man. No, I hadn't known that; I couldn't remember who his family's Protector had been, but it couldn't have been Brandon. Michael wasn't wearing a symbol bracelet, so no clues there.\n\n\"I was thinking,\" he continued, \"that maybe we ought to stick together. Those of us who don't have contracts. Besides, you and me, we always got along in school. I mean, we didn't know each other that well, but\u2014\" Nobody had known Michael really well, except his buddy Shane Collins, but Shane had bugged out of Morganville with his parents after his sister's death. Everybody had wanted to know Michael, but he was private. Shy, maybe. \"It's a big house. Four bedrooms, two baths. Hard to manage it by myself. Bills and crap.\"\n\nWas he offering? Really? I swallowed and leaned forward. My shirt was coming loose again, but I left it that way. I needed every advantage I could get. \"I swear, I'm good for rent. I'll get a job somewhere, at one of the neutral places. And I clean stuff. I'm a demon with the cleaning.\"\n\n\"Cook?\" He looked hopeful, but I had to shake my head. \"Damn. I'm not so great at it.\"\n\n\"You'd have to be better than me. I can screw up the recipe for water.\"\n\nHe smiled. He had one of those smiles. You know the ones\u2014the kind that unleashes lethal force on girls in the vicinity. I couldn't remember him smiling in high school. He was probably aware that it might cause girls to faint or unbutton clothes or something.\n\n\"We'll think about it until tomorrow night,\" he said. \"Pick any room but the first one; that's mine. Sheets are in the closet. Towels are in the bathroom.\"\n\n\"My suitcase\u2014\"\n\n\"After dawn.\" He was looking down again, picking out a sweet, quiet melody from the strings. \"Look, I've got someplace I have to go before then, but you'll be safe enough if you just go out to get it and come right back inside. I don't think Brandon's pissed enough to hang around in the sun.\"\n\n\"But you can't go out in the dark! He could\u2014\"\n\n\"Brandon? No, he couldn't. Trust me.\"\n\nOh, no. Alarm bells went off. \"You're not\u2014\"\n\nHe looked up sharply. \"I'm not what?\"\n\nI mimed fangs.\n\nMichael sighed. \"No, I'm not.\"\n\n\"Well, you know, the whole gone-during-daylight thing...\"\n\n\"I have a job; maybe you've heard of it. You leave the house, make money...? Any other questions?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Then how come you're up so late if you have to get up so early?\"\n\nHe looked at me for a second blankly, like he couldn't believe I'd asked. \"Well,\" he said slowly, \"I do get up to eat, shower, that kind of thing before work. Why? Don't you?\"\n\nOh. Put like that, it didn't sound quite as suspiciously vampiric. I swallowed hard, wondering if I could trust him. If I should. Well, idiot, what choices do you have?\n\nI pulled the silver chain around my neck and flipped the tiny silver cross out to hang over the tattered rags of my shirt. \"Touch it,\" I said.\n\n\"What?\" He now clearly thought I was crazy.\n\n\"Touch the cross, Michael.\"\n\n\"Oh, for Christ's sake\u2014\"\n\n\"I have to be sure.\"\n\nHe reached out and put a fingertip squarely on the cross, then spread his whole hand over it.\n\nThat came comfortably close to the top of my breasts. Not what I'd intended, but...wow. Bonus.\n\nWe sat there for a long second, and then Michael cleared his throat and sat back. \"Satisfied?\" He seemed to realize it was a trick question and didn't wait for an answer. \"I'll be back by dark. We'll talk about the rent then. But for now, you should\u2014\" He looked up. His gaze reached the level of my chest, stopped, and then lowered again. The smile this time was directed at the guitar. \"Put on a new shirt or something.\"\n\n\"Well, I would, but all my shirts are in my suitcase, getting molested by Brandon and his funboys.\" I flipped a finger at the window, in case they were watching.\n\n\"Get something out of my closet,\" he said. I thought he was playing something from Coldplay's catalog now, something soft and contemplative. \"Sorry about the, uh, staring. I know you've had a tough night.\"\n\nThere was something so damn sweet about that, it made me want to cry. Again. I swallowed the impulse. \"You don't know the half of it,\" I said.\n\nThis time, when he looked up, his gaze actually made it to my face. And stayed there. \"I'm guessing that means bad.\"\n\n\"Oh, whole new definitions of bad. But you don't want to hear about that.\"\n\n\"You'd tell me if I was a friend, right? And not just some guy whose door you randomly knocked on in the middle of the night?\"\n\nI thought about Jane, poor sweet Jane, my best and only real friend. Trent and Guy, who probably had been destined for nothing but still had been, for tonight at least, my buds. \"I'm not so good for my friends,\" I said. \"Maybe we ought to just call you a really nice stranger.\" I took a deep breath. \"I lost three people tonight, and it was my fault.\"\n\nHe kept looking at me. Really looking. It was a little bit hot, and a little bit disconcerting. \"Then would you talk to a really nice stranger about it? For\u2014\" He checked his watch. \"Forty minutes? I need to leave, but I want you to be okay before I do.\"\n\nIt only took thirty minutes to tell him about the Life and Times of Me, actually. Michael didn't say very much, and I felt so tired afterward that I hardly knew it when he got up and went into the kitchen. I must have dozed off a little, because when I woke up, he was kneeling next to my chair, and he had a chocolate brownie on a plate. With a semimelted pink candle sputtering away on top.\n\n\"It's a leftover,\" he warned me. \"It was crap in the first place, so I don't know how good it is. But happy birthday, anyway. I promise you, things will get better.\"\n\nI had news for him. They just had.\n\nWhen the sun came up, I'd have a whole new set of problems. Not the least of which would be finding a workplace not afraid to hire a girl with serious vampire relations issues and a wardrobe that leaned toward the macabre.\n\nBut for now?\n\nI took a bite of brownie, smiled at my new housemate, and celebrated my freedom.\n\n## The Witch and the Wicked\n\nJeanne C. Stein\n\nJeanne C. Stein is the author of the Anna Strong series, the first of which, The Becoming, was released in December 2006. The second book, Blood Drive, was published in July. She lives in Colorado, where, when not working on her novels, she edits a newsletter for a beer importer and takes kickboxing classes to stay in shape. She can be reached through her website, www.jeannestein.com.\n\nThe idea came to Sophie during Jonathon Deveraux's one hundred fiftieth birthday party.\n\nShe was not there as a guest, of course. Witches are seldom invited to vampire functions, their magics dismissed as parlor tricks to amuse the masses. No, she was catering the event. Her business, Weird and Wonderful Catering (voted number one in the latest Supernatural Hot Ticket poll as the caterer for that special event), made her the only choice for a party of this scope and magnitude. For the moment, at least, her questionable heritage as a witch was forgotten.\n\nSophie blew on the tip of her finger and muttered, \"Extinguish\u00e9.\"\n\nThe small lick of flame sputtered and died. She waved her hand in the air in a vaguely distracted way, looking down at the cake and its many candles.\n\n\"Damn vamps,\" she said to no one in particular. Well, to no one at all, really, since she was alone in the room. Still, that didn't stop her from rambling on. \"Why did I agree to this? I almost burned my finger off lighting all those damned candles.\"\n\nShe turned from the table with a rustle of silk, her long burgundy skirt swirling around her legs. She wasn't an old witch, as witches go. Only eighty years. Her back was still straight, her dark hair barely touched with gray. She didn't look a day over forty, really. Good genes. And even better cosmetics, most of her own making.\n\nShe blew again on her smarting fingertip. She ought to pursue that\u2014marketing her own line of fine cosmetics\u2014instead of this thankless occupation. Caterers were underpaid, overworked, and generally ignored. Unless something went wrong. Then they became the center of unwanted and often perilous attention.\n\nEspecially with her unique clientele.\n\nThe door to the kitchen swung open. \"Are you ready with the cake, Sophie?\"\n\nThe question was asked in an eager, breathless way by a woman who looked twenty but whom Sophie suspected might be a little older, though certainly not by much. With vampires it was hard to tell. The woman standing in front of Sophie was confident, beautiful, and wife to a distinguished vampire. She was dressed to the nines in a designer gown with jewels that flashed at her neck and ears. Rumor had it that Mr. Deveraux turned her on their wedding night, and that was only six months ago. Now here she was, acting every bit the mistress of the manor.\n\nSophie swallowed a wave of envy and said, \"Yes, ma'am. Would you like me to bring it in?\"\n\n\"Oh, I want to do it.\" The woman's face glowed with anticipation. \"Jonathon will be so surprised.\"\n\nSophie frowned. \"You must be careful, Mrs. Deveraux,\" she said. \"There are one hundred fifty burning candles on this cake. If your dress brushes against even one of them\u2014\"\n\nHer concern was flicked away with the back of a bejeweled hand. \"Don't worry. I know how to be careful around fire. This is my surprise and I want to deliver it.\"\n\nSophie stepped back from the table. \"As you wish.\"\n\nThe woman took her place behind a tea cart bearing the huge tower of a cake. Sophie held open the door, careful to keep her own dress and hair out of the path of the blazing birthday tribute. The air fairly shimmered from the heat and glare of the candles. Why a vampire, especially such an old one, wanted candles on his cake was a mystery to her. One spark and he would burst into flame like an old Christmas tree.\n\nSophie hadn't met Jonathon Deveraux, tonight's guest of honor, but she had seen a picture of him, a portrait hanging over the fireplace, when she came to finalize the party arrangements. He was a tall, good-looking man who must have been turned in his thirties because his face was unlined, his hair dark and thick. That it was a contemporary portrait was borne out by his clothing, a casual shirt and linen slacks, and a backdrop of the stables here on the property. It was just an impression, the feeling that this was not a man who would have indulged in such a pretentious birthday display as one hundred fifty burning candles. No, Sophie thought, this must have been the idea of his vacuous new wife, too recently turned to know the danger.\n\nOh, well. Sophie looked at the mountain of cake pans and utensils stacked in the sink. Not her problem. Time to clean up.\n\nShe waved a hand. \"Lav\u00e0to.\"\n\nThe dishes arranged and rearranged themselves, moving from a sink of soapy water to another of clear running water and then onto a rack to be dried by a gentle stream of warm air. From the rack, they floated to the proper shelves in the cupboard or into silverware drawers. All done in the whisk of a cat's tail.\n\nFor the first time this evening, Sophie could relax. The cake was done, the kitchen in order. She had nothing to do now but wait for the festivities to be over. In reality, a vampire party was the easiest of all supernatural functions to cater. Vampires didn't require food. But they did like to impress each other with flashy displays, like the birthday cake. She found her biggest challenge for a vampire party was coming up with novel ways to serve blood. Like real Bloody Marys (finding thirty women named Mary to donate blood was no easy feat!). Tonight she had gone to great lengths to find something really special\u2014a case of vintage Rothschild taken from actual Rothschilds. She hoped the guest of honor appreciated the effort, since he was paying for it. But like most rich vampires, and their condescending wives, he would most likely take the gesture for granted along with the witch who provided it.\n\nThankless. This job was thankless.\n\nSophie took a seat on a stool and leaned her elbows on a granite countertop. She let her thoughts wander again to her favorite subject of late\u2014starting her own cosmetics firm. She was facing the shiny surface of a chrome toaster and she scooted down to examine her reflection.\n\nClear skin. Tiny wrinkles touching the corners of wide blue eyes. Generous mouth with none of the telltale crinkles that caused lipstick to smear and marked the lips of the middle-aged woman. She truly did not look her age. Not in the way of vampires who not only physically stopped the aging process but reversed it. But nearly as good. Her creams slowed it to a crawl. And her cosmetics transformed the plain into...She examined her features. Her mascara made pale lashes long and dark, and her blush gave cheeks the definition that nature hadn't.\n\nShe touched the tip of her nose. Nothing short of surgery would fix something like that, of course. But artfully applied foundation, dark at the sides of her nose and light at the tip, diminished the contour.\n\nShe wasn't beautiful by any means. But she was good at this. She could show others how to be good at it, too.\n\nShe'd made a success of the catering business; why not try her hand at cosmetics?\n\nThe screech and howl came simultaneously and Sophie jumped off the stool.\n\nYe gods, she thought. The idiot has caught herself on fire.\n\nThis was exactly what she feared might happen. Sophie knew in spite of her warnings to Mrs. Deveraux, she would be blamed for the accident.\n\nFor a second, she considered fleeing. But that would be a waste of time. Mr. Deveraux knew his wife had hired Sophie to cater his party. Unless she planned to transport herself to an alternate universe, he would find her.\n\nShe might as well face the music now. Teleportation would be a last resort. She listened as the din of the crowd gradually faded from shock and horror to mumbled condolences to the new widower. Sophie waited for the kitchen door to open and for the bereaved to storm in to exact his revenge.\n\nIt took much longer than she anticipated. The crowd was slow to leave, evidently, and Mr. Deveraux in no hurry to show them out. This puzzled Sophie but again, the antics of vampires were a constant source of puzzlement to her. They never did what was expected or what decorum dictated. She guessed that's what came from living hundreds of years and not being tied to the laws of god or man.\n\nSophie began to relax. Obviously, Mr. Deveraux was not devastated by the loss of his wife. Perhaps he had grown tired of her already. After all, what could he have had in common with such a young woman? In the manner of adolescents today (for to Sophie, anyone under the age of thirty was an adolescent), she would neither know nor care anything about recent history, let alone events from her husband's distant past.\n\nSophie took the fact that Deveraux had not yet made an attempt on her life as a sign from the gods that it was indeed time to switch careers.\n\nWhen it became obvious that the party was proceeding, Sophie took a seat again at the counter. She pulled a small notebook from the pocket of her tunic and opened it. On the inside cover was clipped a pen which she pulled free. With a careful, precise hand, she started making notations. She thought a night cream would be a good introductory product. When women saw the results, they would naturally want something for the daytime, too. Following that, she would launch cosmetics: foundation, blushers, mascaras. All with the same miraculous base guaranteed to slow the ravages of age.\n\nHmmmm. Ravishing. That might be an appropriate name for the line. A play on words. Ravaged to Ravishing. Voil\u00e0. A slogan.\n\nSophie felt the excitement build. She would do this. While the catering business was basically a one-woman show, this would be different. Her lotions were made the old-fashioned way, by hand. She would need to find a suitable place to make the cosmetics in batches large enough to accommodate what was sure to be a huge demand. And there was packaging and marketing to consider. She knew a warlock in advertising. He could help her find the right people to handle\u2014\n\nThe kitchen door flew open. Sophie, caught unaware and deep in her own musings, nearly fell off the stool. She scrambled to regain her footing and steeled herself to meet Mr. Deveraux.\n\n\"I'm so sorry, sir,\" she began, turning to face what would surely be her angry host.\n\nThe words died on her lips. Mrs. Deveraux stood smiling at her from the doorway. \"Not to worry, Sophie,\" she said. \"Mr. Deveraux had a long, full life. He went out in a blaze of glory befitting a vampire of his age and stature.\"\n\nSophie was too stunned to reply. How could a vampire as old as Mr. Deveraux let himself be caught on fire? Her candles were magic. One puff on one candle and the rest extinguished themselves. It was a safety feature of her own invention designed exclusively for vampires. The only danger would have come when the cake was presented.\n\nShe narrowed her eyes. \"I don't understand.\"\n\nMrs. Deveraux waved a hand. \"It's nothing for you to worry about. I have no intention of seeking retribution.\" She bent her head and examined her carefully manicured fingernails. \"It was entirely my fault. I tripped on the rug and the cart bumped Mr. Deveraux. When he turned around, poof. His jacket caught. It was an unfortunate accident.\"\n\nShe looked up at Sophie then, her own eyes tightening a little at the corners. \"I'm sure you must be relieved to know I don't hold you responsible in any way.\"\n\nSophie was smart enough to recognize the threat. She shrugged. \"I am relieved, yes.\"\n\nThe bright smile returned. \"Then please come and do a quick cleanup, will you? There is ash on the cake, but I think if you work your magic, you can re-frost it or something and we can enjoy it. After all, my guests and I have heard so much about your wonderful cakes. It would be a shame to throw this one away. Will you fix it? Please?\"\n\nSophie waved a hand, and a spatula flew from a drawer and into her grasp. She followed Mrs. Deveraux into the living room, barely drawing so much as a glance from anyone at the party. In fact, everyone seemed to have recovered quite nicely from the recent tragedy, thank you. The laughter and chatter and clink of glassware went on as if Sophie were here to clean up a small culinary accident instead of disposing of the host's mortal remains.\n\nSophie examined the cake. A dusting of ash did indeed cover one side, and a small mound of the stuff sparkled on the floor. Vampire dust was like diamond dust, hard and bright and the consistency of fine beach sand. Wouldn't do to bite into it. She started to smooth dust and icing away from the base of the candles when Mrs. Deveraux stopped her with a butterfly touch to the arm.\n\n\"Get rid of those candles, too, won't you? It's a gruesome reminder of\u2014well, you know.\"\n\nSophie nodded. Yes, she did know. Mrs. Deveraux showed no more grief for her dearly departed than any of her guests. Maybe it was a good thing Sophie hadn't met Mr. Deveraux. He must have been a thoroughly disagreeable individual to have his passing marked with such ambivalence.\n\nSophie invoked a spell and the candles disappeared. It made patching the icing much easier. When she was finished with the cake, she muttered another spell and a small dustpan and whisk broom materialized. She scooped up the ash from the floor and the small mound of dust-embedded icing and, with a nod to Mrs. Deveraux, retreated with relief back to the kitchen.\n\nSophie scraped the gritty icing into the garbage disposal. She stared at the sandy residue left sparkling in the dustpan. This was the first time anything like this had happened at one of her parties. She'd heard the stories of vampires accidentally immolating themselves through drunken or careless behavior. It happened more often than people realized, actually. Vampires took their immortality for granted and didn't follow basic principles of common sense. Falling asleep with a lighted cigarette, for instance, was as fatal to vampires as humans.\n\nSophie shook the remains of the late Mr. Deveraux into the palm of her hand and let him\u2014it\u2014sift through her fingers. The ash felt surprisingly silky to the touch. She thought of the portrait hanging over the fireplace. Mr. Deveraux died the second death on his one hundred fiftieth birthday, and yet he passed among humans as a thirty-year-old. Now that was the ultimate age defyer.\n\nShe sat up straight. How did vampires do it? How did they remain physically ageless regardless of the passing of time?\n\nThey drank blood, for one.\n\nSophie's brow wrinkled in concentration. She reviewed what she knew about vampire physiology. It wasn't a lot. She did remember reading somewhere that the blood thing was to supply energy needed to replace what could no longer be derived from normal food sources. Vampires had all the internal organs of an ordinary human. They just no longer functioned, frozen in their bodies, Sophie guessed, to preserve the outward physical appearance of a normal human being.\n\nSo was that what made them immortal? Organs that did not atrophy with age or disease? Was that what stopped the aging process?\n\nShe had no idea. Nor did she have anyone she could ask. Witches and vampires avoided each other. She was an exception, as were other witches who supplied services that vampires were unable or unwilling to perform for themselves.\n\nShe looked again at the ash, winking like starlight in the glare of the kitchen's bright incandescence. This was the essence of a vampire.\n\nWhat would happen if she mixed some of the ash into her lotions?\n\nShe felt a thrill as the idea took shape. Why not try it? What if adding the ash to her moisturizer, instead of merely slowing or decreasing the signs of age was, in fact, able to reverse them? It would be a revolutionary breakthrough. And it would be hers.\n\nSophie carefully emptied the ash into a ziplock bag and tucked it into a pocket in her tunic. She grew restless, impatient to get out of here and eager to experiment with this new ingredient. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was just a little before 1 a.m. Drat. Since vampires had adapted to sunlight, the constraint of getting home before dawn was no longer an issue. This party could drag on well into midday.\n\nHow to get around that?\n\nWhat could she say to get Mrs. Deveraux to allow her leave early? The obvious answer would be that she was devastated by the accident. She could offer to come back tomorrow and clean up, maybe even throw in a free cocktail party to be given at Mrs. Deveraux's time of choosing.\n\nVampires, for all their accumulated wealth, were notoriously tight-fisted. The free party might just do it.\n\nSophie closed her eyes and willed Mrs. Deveraux to come into the kitchen. She had only to wait a minute before the woman appeared at the door, looking slightly puzzled.\n\nShe frowned at Sophie. \"Now this is strange. A second ago I had a reason to come into the kitchen but now I seem to have forgotten it completely.\" She laughed a little self-consciously. \"The events of this evening must have unnerved me more than I realized.\"\n\nSophie assumed a properly downcast expression. She even began to clasp and unclasp her hands like an anxious schoolgirl facing a stern headmistress, making sure her distress transmitted itself through the air and into Mrs. Deveraux's consciousness.\n\nMrs. Deveraux immediately picked up on Sophie's angst. She reached out a hand but stopped just short of touching her. Sophie was, after all, the help and a witch to boot. \"Please, Sophie,\" she said. \"I can see how upset you are. I assure you there will be no repercussions from tonight's accident.\"\n\nSophie let a single tear trail down her cheek. \"I just feel so awful. The whole thing is making me physically ill.\" For added emphasis, she brought a fist up and pressed it against her mouth.\n\nMrs. Deveraux backed away in alarm. \"Perhaps you should go home,\" she said quickly. \"I didn't consider how this might affect a woman of your age. I can have my own staff clean up tomorrow. There is no need for you to stay.\" She caught herself then and gave Sophie a sideways glance. \"Naturally, I would expect a credit on the bill....\"\n\nVampires were so predictable. Sophie kept her face a mask of unhappiness. \"Naturally.\"\n\nAfter that impudent crack about \"a woman of her age\" (for Mrs. Deveraux had no way of knowing how old Sophie was), Sophie was tempted to forget about the party offer. But she didn't have that many vampire contacts and if the ash worked...She acknowledged Mrs. Deveraux's permission to leave with a nod. \"And for your consideration, I would be happy to cater a small cocktail party for you in the future. No charge.\"\n\nThat clinched it. Mrs. Deveraux practically pushed Sophie out the door with admonitions to take care going home and to put the unfortunate event of the evening out of her mind.\n\nSophie waited until the door was firmly latched behind her to allow a smile. She summoned her transport telepathically. She didn't drive. Often she teleported herself, a trick she learned from her big sister. Not many witches could do it. It took concentration, though, and she found when she was distracted or excited the results were sometimes spotty. She might end up in a different county or a different state. Tonight she was both distracted and excited. Better to be safe than sorry.\n\nBesides, she liked to support local business. The company she used was owned by a warlock with a driving service that provided after-hours transportation for supernaturals at reduced rates. Sometimes that meant waiting awhile for a car to appear. But tonight Sophie was lucky.\n\nIn a matter of minutes, the cab materialized in the driveway. Sophie climbed in, greeted the driver, and gave her address. The cabbie neither acknowledged the greeting nor the address. In fact, he hardly waited for her to pull shut the door before the car lurched away. Sophie's head banged against the headrest.\n\nHad a bad day, have we?, she thought grumpily, wondering if she should make it worse by giving him warts.\n\nBut happier thoughts soon prevailed. She couldn't wait to get home and mix up a batch of moisturizer, this time with a pinch of Mr. Deveraux. How much to use would be a serious consideration. She pulled the baggie out of her pocket. There wasn't a lot of ash. Even considering what little she scraped off the cake, the amount left would maybe fill a half-cup measure. It must be terrifically concentrated.\n\nThe driver screeched to a stop in front of her house the same abrupt way he had pulled away from the Deveraux mansion. Again, Sophie's head bounced. Her temper flared and she raised a hand to plant a great big hairy wart on the tip of his nose when he turned around for the first time.\n\nShe let her hand fall. Great. Of all the drivers in the city I get the troll, she thought. His hairy face was already covered with warts. And trolls were notoriously bad drivers.\n\nHis guttural voice barked at her. \"Here you be, ma'am. That'll be twenty bucks.\"\n\nShe clicked her tongue and forked over the cash, adding a five-dollar tip even though she knew he didn't deserve it. She had a soft spot for trolls. They couldn't help how they looked or their thorny temperaments. It was genetic.\n\nAt least this time, he waited for her to get all the way out of the cab before gunning away from the curb.\n\nSophie started up the path to her house. She lived on the outskirts of the city, a place close enough to allow access to the museums and theaters she loved, but far enough removed to allow the kind of outdoor activity witches enjoyed without attracting the curiosity or attention of neighbors. Her cottage was small but comfortable and she filled it with beautiful earthly objects\u2014rocks, seashells, flowers, and plants. It was a place of refuge and light.\n\nAnd best of all, it was a place with a basement.\n\nWhich is where Sophie headed now, pausing only to switch on a light upstairs before heading down. Her workshop was here. Her tools, her cauldrons, her herbs. She'd had an industrial sink and stove installed and shelving to hold the basic ingredients of her cosmetic line. Everything was neat and orderly and stored in a way to make her work easy.\n\nSophie was nothing if not organized.\n\nShe tied her hair back and an apron around her slender frame and got right to work. In forty minutes, she had a batch of moisturizer brewing on the stove. It was time to add the new ingredient; time to add Mr. Deveraux and see what he brought to the mix. Her hand was shaking with excitement as she measured out a teaspoon, then reduced it by one half. After all, she had no idea what the effect of the ash would be. And since she was going to be the guinea pig in this experiment, she felt it prudent to proceed cautiously. She could always add more to a later batch if need be.\n\nSophie stirred in the ash. It dissolved into the cream base instantly. Now all she had to do was wait for the mixture to cool. She could hardly stand still, her excitement and impatience bubbled up inside her like champagne waiting to be uncorked. She stuck her finger into the pan, testing, again and again only to snatch it back and dance around waving her burned digit. Why was it taking so long for the damned stuff to cool? She had spells to make things hot as fire but none that did the opposite. She'd have to work on that.\n\nLater.\n\nAt last, the mixture was cool enough to allow Sophie to spoon a portion onto a glass plate. She swirled it a bit, approving of the texture\u2014not too greasy, not too dry. She lifted the plate and sniffed. A nice citrusy bouquet...with just a slight undercurrent of musk. She wrinkled her nose and sniffed again. The citrus was supposed to be there. The musk? She wasn't too thrilled but realized that the musk was Mr. Deveraux. He was male, after all. Perhaps in the next batch she would add a stronger fragrance\u2014essence of jasmine, maybe, or frangipani\u2014to counteract it.\n\nIn any case, the scent was not important. It was time to sample the cream, to see if what she hoped was true.\n\nHer hand shook a little as she scooped a portion onto two fingers. She crossed the room to watch in the mirror as she smoothed the moisturizer onto her face. It felt rich and luxurious on her skin. That was a good thing. It was absorbed quickly into her skin, leaving no greasy residue. Good, again. It tingled just a little. Sophie's inspiration for when she took the stuff public. It gave the impression that there were active ingredients in the lotion, that it was doing something. An attribute of her original formula.\n\nThey were all attributes of her original formula.\n\nSo far, she saw and felt nothing new. No flush of rejuvenation. No tightening of the skin to signal a return to youthful firmness and texture.\n\nMaybe she needed to give it more time.\n\nShe stared at her reflection. And waited.\n\nAnd waited.\n\nFinally, after fifteen minutes, she gave up. With a shrug, she turned away from the mirror. She wouldn't let herself be too disappointed. This was only a first attempt, after all. She stared at the pan on the stove, wondering if she should give it another try tonight. But her tired feet and tight shoulders intervened, begging to be put to bed.\n\nSophie acquiesced with a sigh. She was exhausted. She locked the baggie with the remains of Mr. Deveraux in a drawer, flipped off the light, and went upstairs to lay her weary bones to rest.\n\nWhen she awoke the next morning, the first thing Sophie did was rush into the bathroom to examine her face in the mirror. She'd had a dream that the cream worked. Her dreams were often portents of things to come and she believed in them.\n\nBut she could see nothing changed in the heart-shaped face that stared back at her. The tiny wrinkles still radiated out from the corners of her eyes. Her hair was still touched with gray at the temples, though she hadn't really expected the cream would change her hair. Not unless she rubbed the stuff into it. She scolded herself in impatience for thinking such ridiculous thoughts. If she wanted to change her hair, there were plenty of conventional human products on the market to take care of it. No, she was looking for something different. Something to take the years away, not just cover them up.\n\nShe got dressed and went directly back down to the basement. This time she added a full teaspoon of the ash to a new batch of moisturizer. She applied it liberally and went about her day.\n\nThere were always lots of chores for a practicing witch. Besides her catering business, Sophie had clientele who came for readings or spells. There were herbs to gather, earth summonings to perform. She was an important witch in her part of the country, and a great deal of her time was spent in correspondence with others of similar station all around the world. Generally, the time passed quickly and she was content.\n\nToday, however, Sophie felt restless and ill at ease. She couldn't concentrate on her readings, had no interest in her spells. She ignored the weeds in her garden and cut short her correspondence on the Worldwide Witches Web, even though one of the messages was from her sister and marked \"important.\"\n\nWhen at last evening arrived, she allowed herself to look in the mirror. She saw no remarkable changes. Actually, she saw no changes at all. She stared at her reflection and frowned bitterly.\n\nThen she grew angry with herself. She recognized why her day had been unproductive and knew very well what was at the root of her restlessness. She had been self-indulgent, selfish, something very out of character. She had gotten caught up in a foolish daydream. She knew there was nothing (short of becoming vampire) that could reverse the signs of age. What had possessed her to even consider it? Especially since her own formulas worked a kind of magic in themselves and didn't rely on immolated vampire dust to work.\n\nNo, better to proceed with her original formulas. They were pretty darned good when you thought about it. Look at her. She was eighty, for goodness sake, and no one ever believed it when she told them. Besides, even if the formula had worked, how did she think she'd get her hands on more vampire ash? More birthday candle accidents? How likely was that?\n\nShe hurried down to the basement, determined to throw Mr. Deveraux right into the trash. She opened the drawer and pulled out the baggie, even had her foot on the pedal that levitated the lid of the trash can, when something stayed her hand.\n\nThe dream.\n\nThe dream she'd had last night. She closed her eyes and conjured the image. In the dream, she had been standing right in this very place, at this very counter, and when her eyes had risen to the mirror, the face and body reflected there were hers but younger, prettier. Her lashes were long and luxurious, her lips full, her body lush. She was perfect. She was beautiful. The cream had not only transformed her face but had altered her entirely.\n\nFor a woman who had always been considered \"plain\" (though not unattractive, she was quick to amend), it was a captivating and alluring dream. And one she was, in reality, loathe to abandon.\n\nAnd so Sophie made the decision to give it one more try. This time, she would add all that was left of Mr. Deveraux's mortal remains to the cream in the bottom of her kettle. She did it quickly before she could change her mind. Then she scooped the mixture onto her fingers and smoothed it thickly onto her skin.\n\nShe didn't stand around this time and wait for something to happen. She went straight to bed. If when she awoke in the morning, there was still no change, she would give it not one more thought. No, she'd proceed with her original plan and contact a witch she knew in real estate to start looking for an industrial site where she could manufacture her night cream. Her night cream. No more thoughts of adding vampire dust to a perfectly good product.\n\nSophie first heard the voice at 2:30 a.m. At least she thought it was a voice. It\u2014something\u2014made her sit straight up in bed, heart pounding. She looked around, wild-eyed and gasping. She was so frightened she dove back under the covers and waved her hand to illuminate every light in the house. Only when the cottage was aglow did she again peek out, eyes darting into every corner.\n\nShe was alone.\n\nSophie crept out of bed. She tiptoed from one room to the other, finding nothing amiss, no one (or thing) lurking anywhere. Just to be certain, she looked in every closet and peeked under the bed and under every large piece of furniture. She went from being frightened to embarrassed and then to feeling more than a little foolish.\n\nWhat was wrong with her?\n\nSophie trudged into the basement. She was wide-awake now. Might as well clean up the mess she'd left after her unsuccessful experiments with Mr. Deveraux. As she moved around, sending pots and utensils into the sink to be scoured, she thought how fortunate it was that none of her witch friends had been here to see that mortifying display of cowardice. She would have been drummed out of the Witches' Benevolent Society whose sole purpose was to come to the aid of fellow witches in times of peril. No one would have entrusted her safety to a witch that showed such a lack of courage, and because of what? An imagined whisper in a stupid dream.\n\nSophie looked around once the chores were done. She was keenly aware that deep inside her heart of hearts disappointment coiled like a serpent ready to pump its deadly poison into her psyche if she let it. Despite her best efforts to contain her optimism, she had wanted the cream to work. It would have elevated her in the human world, something from which Sophie had always felt separate and apart. It would have been her entr\u00e9e into a world of celebrity and acceptance. She would have been welcomed and sought after because she could offer what no one else had ever been able to\u2014a veritable fountain of youth. It would\u2014\n\n\"My god, how long am I going to have to listen to this drivel?\"\n\nThe voice was right at Sophie's ear. She started and yelped in surprise and shock. She whirled around, fists at the ready, a curse of protection on her lips.\n\nShe was alone.\n\nHow could that be?\n\nHer heart seemed ready to burst from her chest. \"Who's there?\" she yelled, adrenaline making her voice fierce and harsh. \"I am a powerful witch. If you don't show yourself, I'll send you to Hades in a million broken pieces.\"\n\nThere was a chuckle. Once again, right at her ear. \"I'm afraid you've fixed it so I can't show myself. However, if you look in that mirror over there, we might be able to figure this out.\"\n\nThe voice was masculine, authoritative, with a hint of a British accent.\n\nSophie didn't move. She was afraid it might be a trick. There were, after all, lots of invisible beings in the spirit world and not all of them were friendly. In order to battle one, however, she had to know what she was dealing with.\n\n\"I have no idea what I am now,\" the voice replied rather snippily, as if divining her thoughts. \"You've fixed that, too. Now go over to the mirror. I'd like to know even if you don't.\"\n\nThen, through no effort or will on Sophie's part, her feet moved toward the mirror. She tried to stop, digging in her heels, grasping at the counter with both hands. It did no good. Her feet trudged onward, and some invisible force broke her grip. She was being inexorably drawn to the mirror like a puppet responding to a master's tug on her strings. Her temper flared. Whatever this was might get her to the damned mirror but it couldn't make her look.\n\nShe squeezed her eyes shut, even pressed the palms of her hands against her eyelids, refusing to give in.\n\n\"Oh, for the love of everything evil and unnatural in this world and the next, will you stop behaving like a child? You're the one who did this. At least allow me to see what kind of hell you've trapped me in.\"\n\nSophie began to panic. The voice was right. Whatever it was had taken up residence in her body. How is that possible? She knew of possession. But whatever this was did not feel like a devil, exactly. And she wasn't levitating or spewing invective\u2014\n\n\"Not yet anyway,\" the voice said. \"But if you don't open your eyes in ten seconds, you'll be spewing more than invective, I promise you.\"\n\nSophie swallowed hard and took a deep breath. Okay. Let's get this over with.\n\nShe opened one eye.\n\nThe other flew open all on its own.\n\nYe gods. What was she seeing?\n\nShe rubbed her eyes and raised them again to the mirror.\n\n\"What the\u2014\"\n\nThe voice managed to sound both amused and horrified at the same time.\n\nSophie's right hand reached up and grasped her chin. It turned her head to the left and right and back again.\n\n\"You're a girl.\" This time the voice held only horror.\n\nA girl.\n\nSophie couldn't ignore the thrill that swept over her. The face in the mirror was hers. But not exactly. She looked twenty again, but not the twenty that had been her reality. This young woman's perfect skin stretched smooth and unwrinkled over high cheekbones. Her lashes were long and luxurious, her lips full.\n\nShe stepped back a bit, to see the rest. A body that was lush, perfect. A body she had seen before. The body in her dream.\n\nSophie gasped. The cream had worked!\n\n\"Cream? What cream? What is going on?\"\n\nSophie's excitement morphed into irritation. The voice's intrusion into her thoughts brought with it a wave of emotion different from her own. The voice had its own power over her feelings. She had two separate and distinct personalities inhabiting this one perfect body. And she knew who the second personality belonged to.\n\n\"Mr. Deveraux?\" she whispered.\n\n\"You know who I am?\"\n\nShe nodded at the mirror. \"I think this is my fault.\"\n\n\"Think?\" This time the voice thundered. \"What did you do, witch?\"\n\nSophie's shoulders slumped a little as she told him. She felt his anger and frustration and they flooded her with guilt. When she finished explaining, though, a shift occurred. His fury dissipated to be replaced by cold amusement at the absurdity of his predicament.\n\n\"So this is the result of a science experiment gone wrong?\"\n\nSophie bristled. \"Not gone wrong. Gone right, actually.\"\n\n\"Oh? I am trapped inside the body of a girl witch. This is the way it was supposed to be?\"\n\nSophie shrugged. \"Well. Not entirely. You see, you were supposed to make me...\" She pirouetted in front of the mirror. \"Like this. But you weren't supposed to come back. I mean, the mental part of you.\"\n\nMr. Deveraux snorted. \"How like a woman. Only wants a man for his body.\"\n\nSophie felt color creep into her cheeks. \"That's not what I meant. I thought your ash\u2014\"\n\n\"Which is another thing you have to answer for,\" he interrupted with an impatient huff. \"What did you think you were doing, letting my wife handle such a dangerous thing as a blazing cake? What kind of caterer are you? Was this your first vampire affair?\"\n\nIt was Sophie's turn to interrupt with an indignant huff of her own. \"Now just a minute. I warned her about the danger. Even offered to bring the cake in myself. She wouldn't hear of it. In fact, she insisted it was her surprise and she wanted to present it.\"\n\nAs soon as the words were spoken, Sophie and Mr. Deveraux were hit by the same thought. While Sophie's reaction was shock, Mr. Deveraux's was something quite different. Rage scorched through Sophie like an inferno.\n\n\"It was no accident.\"\n\nThey spoke the words as one, not aloud but like an echo that bounced from one consciousness to the other.\n\nSophie was half afraid to ask the next question but felt she owed it to herself as well as Mr. Deveraux to find the answer.\n\n\"Why would she do such a thing?\"\n\nMr. Deveraux did not answer. Sophie could sense a tornado of emotion emanating from him and ripping through her. A deep sadness gave way to disappointment and then surged again to fury before settling into an ominous sense of betrayal.\n\nThrough her memories of the night, Mr. Deveraux saw and interpreted his wife's actions, and through his, Sophie felt the cart being thrust deliberately and firmly into his back. Mrs. Deveraux had not tripped, and when her husband turned, his coat on fire and fear stark on his face, she had smiled and turned away to stand in the shelter of the arms of a young man who had reached out to her.\n\nNow another emotion, the desire for retribution, made bile rise in the back of Sophie's throat.\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" she asked.\n\nThat brought a chuckle that sent gooseflesh racing up Sophie's arms. \"You mean what are we going to do, don't you?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I can't be a part of malefic evil,\" she said firmly. \"I am a good witch.\"\n\nMr. Deveraux grew quiet, Sophie grew uneasy. At last, Mr. Deveraux said, \"Where are we anyway?\"\n\nHis abrupt change of subject made Sophie suspicious but she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. She turned so that her eyes swept the area. \"This is my home.\"\n\n\"You live in a\u2014\" He groped for the right word. \"Warehouse?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"This is the basement. Where I make my\u2014\" She stopped. Maybe she shouldn't go into what she made. It might lead back to why they found themselves in this predicament to begin with.\n\nIt didn't seem to matter to Mr. Deveraux anyway because he didn't pursue it. \"So show me the rest of the place,\" he said. \"I hope it's nicer than this.\"\n\nSophie bridled at his condescending tone. \"It's a very nice home. I happen to love it.\"\n\n\"Then show me.\"\n\nSophie started upstairs. Slowly. Even though she had been quick to snap at his insult, she was fully aware that Mr. Deveraux, until very recently, had lived in a mansion in the best part of the city. She, on the other hand, lived in a cottage on the edge of town, and while she did love it, he might not recognize its charm or appreciate its character.\n\nAnd he did not.\n\nWhen she completed the tour (it took about a minute), he lapsed into stunned silence.\n\nThen he said, \"Well. We can do something about this right off. We're moving to the mansion. It does belong to me, after all.\"\n\n\"But what about Mrs. Deveraux?\" Sophie asked, trying to point out the obvious.\n\nHe snickered. \"What about her? It will give me great pleasure to throw my wife out on her pretty butt. She and her boyfriend can find their own place to live.\"\n\nSophie felt a chill. She didn't ask how he planned to accomplish such a thing because she knew. Mr. Deveraux had no intention of throwing his wife out. He had something much more sinister in mind for her, and for the boyfriend. \"I won't be a party to murder,\" she said.\n\nShe expected an outburst. Instead Mr. Deveraux changed tack again. \"I think I'm hungry,\" he said, his voice reflecting confusion and awe. \"For food. Human food.\"\n\nSophie panicked. Was he hungry for humans? Had he gone from drinking blood to actually craving the corporeal body? Was that a result of the melding of their species? She hadn't had time to consider all the ramifications of a vampire and human commingling of the flesh. This one was pretty awful.\n\nMr. Deveraux started to laugh. \"No, silly. I mean I'm hungry for steak. Steak and French fries. Maybe a beer.\"\n\nSophie shook her head \"I don't have steak or beer,\" she said. \"I'm a vegetarian and I don't drink alcohol. I could bake a potato for you though.\"\n\nA long, exasperated sigh escaped Mr. Deveraux's lips. \"For the first time in a century and a half, I can enjoy real food, and I get trapped inside a teetotaling vegetarian? Well, let's get one thing straight right now, missy. If I have to live life as a woman, you are going to have to make a few concessions, too. And the first is finding me a steak and a beer.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I can't do that,\" Sophie said. \"I told you I don't eat meat. I can't even bear to touch it. You'll have to learn to\u2014\"\n\nSophie didn't finish the sentence. She couldn't. Her breath was cut off. Pressure built in her chest. It felt as if Mr. Deveraux had inflated a balloon that squeezed against her heart and cut off her oxygen. Gasping, she fell to her knees. The pain got worse and her vision began to fade. She was losing consciousness, darkness closing in until it surrounded her, beat her down, and she knew what it felt like to be dying.\n\nAnd then it was over.\n\nSophie rolled onto her back, panting and clutching at her chest.\n\nMr. Deveraux's voice cut through her fear. \"We have to coexist, Sophie. Let's try to make the best of it.\"\n\nIt was the first time he had used her name. Somehow it chilled her as nothing else before. She gathered her wits about her and sat up. Her nightgown had bunched up around her waist and she tugged it into place, embarrassed that she had so exposed herself. Mr. Deveraux seemed strangely absent from her mind, as if he was giving her time to compose herself. It did not comfort her. This demonstration had made it plain that he was in charge. He had given her physical beauty and taken away free will.\n\n\"Are you all right now?\"\n\nSophie pushed herself into a standing position. \"What do you think?\"\n\nHe ignored the sarcasm. \"Do you live alone?\"\n\nAnother abrupt change of subject that sent ice through Sophie's veins. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"No boyfriend? Husband?\"\n\nSophie shrugged, \"No.\"\n\n\"Widowed, then?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nSophie felt a gentle probing of her mind and, more disturbingly, of her body. Then she felt Mr. Deveraux's startled reaction. \"You're a virgin? You lived eighty human years and never had sex?\"\n\nHe said it as if it was a terrible failing on Sophie's part, as if she had somehow let him down.\n\n\"Oh, this gets better and better,\" he moaned. \"No red meat, no alcohol, and no sex. What fresh hell is this?\"\n\nSophie squared her shoulders. \"I wanted to save myself,\" she said with great dignity. \"For the man I loved.\"\n\n\"Oh? How'd that work out for you?\"\n\nHis disdain cut like a whip. It also triggered a flash of temper. \"At least my wife didn't set me on fire to get rid of me,\" she snapped.\n\nMr. Deveraux lapsed again into silence. Sophie congratulated herself on the tiny victory and went into the kitchen. She could use a cup of tea.\n\n\"Coffee,\" Mr. Deveraux corrected.\n\n\"No,\" Sophie responded. \"Tea.\"\n\nShe waited for something to happen, for Mr. Deveraux to hurt her again, but he didn't. Once again, he was strangely absent. He seemed to feel the same things she did. Perhaps his display of cruelty backfired because the pain inflicted on her came back to torture him.\n\nShe fixed the tea and sat down at the kitchen table. Her head spun with confusion and anxiety. She had no idea what she should do. On the one hand, she could live her dream. She was sitting here in the body of a beautiful twenty-year-old with the unlimited possibilities that offered. On the other hand, she shared that body with a man who could inflict pain. A man who was not very nice. Who might even be\u2014she gulped at the thought\u2014wicked.\n\nShe wished she could talk to someone about her dilemma. Her sister, maybe. But Belinda lived in San Diego and was caught up in some intrigue of her own. Besides, to Sophie's dismay, Belinda teetered on the knife-edge of white and black magic. Sophie couldn't always trust her advice.\n\nSophie sipped at her tea. She watched herself, her reflection caught in the window over the sink. Her hair fell in a straight, shiny sweep to her shoulders. Her eyes shone with bright expectation. If she saw this woman in a caf\u00e9 or restaurant, she would be envious. Wonderful things happened for beautiful women. Boyfriends and husbands, families who showered them with love. Beautiful women learned early what they could get with a dazzling smile.\n\nSophie had never before possessed a dazzling smile.\n\nMr. Deveraux made fun of her when she said she had not had sex because she had saved herself. Sophie realized he probably knew the truth. No opportunities had ever presented themselves. She had never had a boyfriend.\n\n\"We're going to do something about that.\"\n\nMr. Deveraux was back. His tone this time was not caustic but actually cheerful. \"I've been taking a test drive thorough the neighborhood,\" he said brightly. \"It's not too bad in here. You've got a brain, a fairly good one for a female. Business sense. A knockout body. Sophie, you've got potential.\"\n\nSophie was almost afraid to ask. \"Potential for what?\"\n\n\"Why, for just about anything. This night cream, for instance. Great idea. We can do something with it.\"\n\nSophie shook her head. \"I've been thinking about that. Look what happened to me\u2014to us. If we started going around setting vampires on fire, it would certainly attract unwelcome attention from the community. Once or twice is an accident; more than that is war.\"\n\nHe clucked his tongue. \"No. You don't understand. We're not going to use ash.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"We're going to use blood.\"\n\n\"Blood?\"\n\n\"Yes. I've been thinking about it, too. You were correct in assuming the ash was the concentrated essence of a vampire. Concentrated being the key word. You got the whole enchilada. Something else I'd like to try, by the way. Blood, on the other hand, is a vampire's source of physical energy. Blood keeps a vampire strong and controls the outward signs of aging. Get it?\"\n\nSophie nodded. The way Mr. Deveraux explained it made perfect sense. If they added blood to her cream, the user would get the benefit of youthful beauty without\u2014\n\nWhat was she thinking?\n\nSophie squeaked in protest. \"If we thought setting vampires on fire would be a problem,\" she said, \"what do you think will happen if we start bleeding them?\"\n\n\"Well, I admit there are some wrinkles to iron out.\"\n\nHe said it in an offhand, casual way that made Sophie wary. \"What are you up to?\" she asked.\n\nHe chuckled. \"Well, conjoined less than a day and you have me figured out. All right. I'll confess. We need a test subject, right?\"\n\nSophie nodded.\n\n\"I have the perfect person in mind.\"\n\nSince it happened to be her mind, too, Sophie knew exactly who that perfect person was. \"How do you expect to get Mrs. Deveraux to agree?\"\n\nA hush settled deep in Sophie's consciousness. It was neither peaceful nor serene but heavy with foreboding. She shivered involuntarily.\n\n\"I cannot be a party to evil,\" she said, for what seemed the thousandth time.\n\nA flare of indignation burned through her. \"You have already been a party to evil,\" Mr. Deveraux answered with contempt. \"You made the damned cake that murdered me.\"\n\nSophie squirmed in the heat of his accusation. \"Well, we won't have to kill her, will we?\"\n\nIn a flash the indignation was gone. \"Of course not. What good would it do to kill her? We need to keep her alive to use her blood, don't we? And if it works, we'll pick only the most wicked vampires to drain. The gods know there are plenty of them around. Think about it, Sophie. We'll be performing a public service. Ridding the world of bad vampires and offering mortal women the gift of beauty. It's perfect.\"\n\nSophie sighed. She couldn't believe she was actually considering Mr. Deveraux's plan. But some of what he said made sense. Mrs. Deveraux was not exactly an innocent. She had murdered her husband. On his birthday, no less. And there were lots of bad vampires around wreaking havoc and taking innocent lives. This would get them out of circulation.\n\nBesides, she was a partner in this enterprise. She would use her good influence to counterbalance any evil Mr. Deveraux tried to sneak by her. Like exacting revenge on the guests at his party who carried on as if nothing had happened after his death.\n\nSophie knew Mr. Deveraux was sensing the shift in her thinking. She could feel it in the shifting of his own disposition. Warmth flooded her system.\n\n\"How are we going to approach her?\" Sophie asked at last.\n\nMr. Deveraux greeted her question with a mental clap of approval. \"That's my girl. Sophie, this is going to be the start of a great adventure, I promise. Now go get dressed and throw some things in a suitcase.\"\n\n\"Suitcase?\"\n\n\"I told you we would be moving to the mansion.\"\n\nSophie stood up slowly from the counter and looked around. \"I've lived here a long time. Do we have to move?\"\n\nHe released a snort of impatience. \"You've seen the mansion. You can't possibly expect me to live here.\"\n\nBut when he sensed the spark of anger his remark provoked in Sophie, he added, \"But we'll keep this place. You can come visit anytime you want. How's that?\"\n\nSophie thought about it a minute. She had seen the mansion. And the grounds. And the cars. What would it hurt to experience them, too?\n\nShe moved toward her bedroom. \"You didn't answer my question,\" she said. \"How are we going to approach Mrs. Deveraux?\"\n\nMr. Deveraux remained silent for the time it took Sophie to throw some things into a battered valise. She felt timid, at first, getting dressed with Mr. Deveraux here. But she did it by standing away from mirrors and only stepping in front of one to comb her hair. Seeing her reflection sent a thrill once more along her spine. She was truly, wonderfully beautiful.\n\nHer dress, however, looked like a rag on her youthful frame.\n\nMr. Deveraux clucked his tongue. \"We need to go shopping. Your taste in clothes runs to the archaic.\"\n\nSophie didn't argue. He was right.\n\nShe smiled at her reflection. She couldn't help it. Just as she couldn't help the thrill of anticipation coursing through her. Mr. Deveraux had said they were embarking on a great adventure. She'd never had a great adventure.\n\nShe turned away from the mirror and snatched up the suitcase. \"Okay. What's the plan?\"\n\nMr. Deveraux was smiling, Sophie could feel it. \"You promised my wife a party, right?\"\n\nSophie nodded.\n\n\"Well, it just so happens that Mrs. Deveraux has a birthday of her own coming up. Next week, in fact.\"\n\n\"Do you think she'll recognize me?\" Sophie asked, casting another approving glance at her reflection.\n\n\"Doesn't matter. You can tell her you're Sophie's granddaughter. Her business manager.\"\n\nSophie smiled. It could work.\n\n\"Of course it will work, Sophie,\" Mr. Deveraux said. \"It's all going to work. Now let's go see a woman about a party.\"\n\n## Blood Wrapped\n\nTanya Huff\n\nTanya Huff lives and writes in the wilds of Southern Ontario. Her twenty-two books run the gamut from heroic fantasy to space opera although she is probably best known for the Vicki Nelson Blood books\u2014recently adapted for television as Blood Ties and showing on Lifetime in the United States and a CHUM affiliate in Canada. Her twenty-third book, The Heart of Valor, was a July 2007 release, and the sequel, Valor's Trial, will be out in the spring of 2008. The following story is in the world of the Smoke books\u2014Smoke and Shadows, Smoke and Mirrors, and Smoke and Ashes.\n\n\"What do you think of that?\"\n\n\"The window display?\"\n\n\"The shawl!\"\n\nHenry stepped closer to the Treasures of Thailand window and examined the lime green silk shawl draped more-or-less artistically over a papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 mountain. \"Nice,\" he said after a moment, \"but not your color. If I were you, I'd wear the turquoise.\" A wave of his hand indicated a similar shawl hanging in the window's \"sky.\"\n\n\"It's not for me!\" Tony Foster shot a scathing look at his companion.\n\n\"Ah, for Lee then. In that case, you need a deeper green.\"\n\n\"It's for Vicki!\"\n\n\"Vicki?\" Henry turned, frowning slightly, to see Tony staring at him with an expression of horrified disbelief.\n\n\"You didn't forget. Don't tell me you forgot. You must have gotten Celluci's e-mail.\"\n\n\"E-mails.\" Over the last few weeks there had been a series of messages from Detective Sergeant Michael Celluci. Each of them had been as direct and to the point as the detective himself tended to be, falling somewhere between terse and rude, and each of them had been read and promptly deleted. \"About Vicki's birthday.\"\n\n\"Right. So\"\u2014looking relieved, Tony nodded toward the shawl\u2014\"what do you think?\"\n\n\"I think you're unnecessarily concerned,\" Henry told him. \"It's just a birthday.\"\n\nTony stepped out into the middle of the sidewalk and stared at the bastard son of Henry VIII, once Duke of Richmond and Somerset, Marshal of the North, now vampire and romance writer, like he'd just grown another head. \"Are you insane?\"\n\nTony took a long drink of his latte, set the mug carefully back on the artfully distressed surface of the coffee shop's round wooden table, leaned forward, and looked Henry right in the eye. It was something not many people could or would do and not something he dared on a regular basis, but he needed to make sure Henry understood the seriousness of the situation. \"She's turning forty.\"\n\n\"She's essentially immortal,\" Henry pointed out, keeping the Hunter carefully masked despite the other man's provocation.\n\n\"What difference does that make?\"\n\nHe spread his hands. \"An infinite number of birthdays.\"\n\n\"So?\" Taking the opportunity to look away without backing down, Tony rolled his eyes. \"She's still only going to turn forty once.\"\n\n\"And someday, God willing, she'll turn a hundred and forty, two hundred and forty...\"\n\n\"You just don't get it, do you?\"\n\n\"Apparently not.\" Taking a swallow from his bottle of water, a modern conceit he appreciated since it granted him an accepted public behavior\u2014and there were many in Vancouver who drank neither caffeine nor alcohol\u2014Henry studied Tony's reaction and shook his head. \"Apparently not,\" he repeated. That Vicki Nelson, who had been the first child of his kind he'd created in almost four hundred and seventy years, would care about something so meaningless as a birthday was hard for him to believe. Granted, she'd been definitely human before the change: strong willed, opinionated, with a terrier-like determination.... No, not terrier. That implied something small and yappy and Vicki was neither. Pit bull then. Aggressive, yes, but more often badly handled and misunderstood. He grinned at the thought of anyone attempting to put a muzzle on Vicki Nelson.\n\n\"What? You're wearing one of your I'm so clever smiles,\" Tony told him as his thoughts returned to the coffee shop. \"Have you thought of something to get her?\"\n\nBest not to mention the muzzle. Toronto, and Vicki, were three thousand odd miles away but the idea of that getting back to her gave him chills the way nothing had in the last four centuries.\n\n\"I've know her for years and I've never given her a birthday present.\"\n\n\"Forty, Henry.\"\n\n\"And why is that so different from thirty-nine?\"\n\nTony sighed. \"You write bodice rippers, Henry. I can't believe you know so little about women!\"\n\n\"No woman in my books has ever approached forty.\" Grocery bills might be negligible but he still had condo fees and car insurance to pay and middle-aged heroines didn't sell books.\n\n\"Yeah, and your fans?\"\n\nFrom the mail he got, his fans were definitely closer to middle age. Given that they thought he was a thirty-five-year-old redhead named Elizabeth Fitzroy, he declined all invitations to romance conventions. \"We don't exactly converse, Tony.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should. Look\"\u2014elbows planted on the table, he leaned forward\u2014\"forty is a big deal for women. It's either the age where they have to stop pretending or have to start pretending a lot harder.\"\n\n\"Pretending what?\"\n\n\"Youth, Henry.\"\n\n\"Vicki will be forever young.\"\n\n\"No.\" Tony shook his head. \"You'll be forever young; you were changed at seventeen. Vicki was thirty-four when you drew her over to the dark side\u2014you know, dark? Literally.\" As Henry frowned, Tony waved a hand at the coffee shop's window and the night sky just barely visible behind the lights of Davies Street. \"Never mind. The point is, she was human twice as long as you were. And she was in her thirties. And she's a woman. Trust me, forty counts. And if you can't trust me, trust Celluci; he's living with her.\"\n\nVampires did not share territory. By changing her, Henry had lost her to his mortal rival. And that sounded like a line from a bad romance. He rubbed his forehead and wondered what had happened to make his life so complicated. Stupid question. Vicki Nelson, ex\u2013Wonder Woman of the Metropolitan Toronto Police, had happened. Vicki had seen past the masks and gotten him involved in life in a way he hadn't been for hundreds of years. Vicki had pushed Tony into his life and had, with her change, been at least indirectly responsible for the two of them ending up in Vancouver. Forty years to such a woman should mean nothing.\n\n\"Look at it this way, Henry.\" Tony's voice interrupted his musing. \"Vicki's essentially immortal; that's a long time for her to be pissed at you.\"\n\nOn the other hand, who was he to say what forty years should mean to such a woman? He moved his water bottle, creating concentric rings with the condensation. \"What are you getting her?\"\n\nTony, ex\u2013street hustler, ex\u2013police informant, third assistant director on the most popular vampire detective series on syndicated television and the only practicing wizard in the lower mainland, sagged against the wrought iron back of his chair. \"I have no fucking idea.\"\n\nThere were two messages in Henry's voice mail when he woke the next evening. Both were from Tony. The first was, predictably, about Vicki's birthday. According to the script supervisor working on Darkest Night, women of her age appreciated gifts that made them feel young without reminding them of their advancing years. Given that Vicki's years weren't exactly advancing, Henry had no idea of what that meant.\n\nAssuming it contained more of the same, Henry intended to delete the second message without listening to it but he hesitated a moment too long.\n\n\"Henry, there's a little girl missing from up by Lytton and someone called Kevin Groves about her.\"\n\nKevin Groves, who worked as a reporter for the Western Star, one of the local tabloids, had the uncomfortable ability of recognizing the truth. Given that his byline had once run under the headline OLYMPIC ORGANIZERS RELOCATE FAMILY OF SASQUATCH, this was occasionally more uncomfortable for those who knew about his skill than it was for him. Over the last year he'd become an indispensable way of keeping tabs on the growing metaphysical activity in Vancouver and the lower mainland.\n\nLike attracted like. Henry had experienced this phenomenon over his long life, and as Tony gained more control over his considerable power, he was discovering it in spades. The difference was that while Henry would move heaven and earth for those he claimed as his own, he was generally willing to let the rest of humanity go its own way. But Tony had bought into the belief that with great power came great responsibility and become something of a local guardian for the entire lower mainland. A policeman, as it were, for the metaphysical.\n\nHenry, because he considered Tony his, very often found himself acting as the young wizard's muscle. Vicki referred to them alternately as Batman and Robin or the new Jedi Knights, and for that alone deserved to have her birthday forgotten.\n\nOccasionally, Henry wondered if he wasn't using Tony as an excuse to become involved. Celluci had called him a vampire vigilante once. He'd meant it as an insult, but when Henry thought of little girls gone missing, he also thought that the detective had been more perceptive than he'd been given credit for.\n\nMoving quickly into the living room, Henry picked up the remote and turned on the TV.\n\n\"...while playing in the backyard with her mother working in the garden only meters away. There is rising fear in this traumatized community that a bear or cougar or other large predator has come out of the mountains and is feeding upon their children.\"\n\nHenry suspected the reporter had taken advantage of a live feed to get that last line on the air.\n\nThe young woman stared at the camera with wide-eyed intensity and the certain knowledge that this was her time in the spotlight. \"Julie Martin's distraught father has declared his intention of 'taking care' of who or whatever has made off with his precious little girl. A spokes-person from the Ministry of Natural Resources has suggested that it would be dangerous for search parties to head into the wood unless accompanied by trained personnel but admits that their office is unable to provide trained personnel at this time.\"\n\nShe makes it sound like the Ministry should have grizzled trackers standing by. Henry waited until they cut back to the news anchor who solemnly reiterated that four-year-old Julie Martin had disappeared without a trace in broad daylight, then, as the screen filled with a crowd of angry and near-hysterical townspeople standing outside the RCMP office, berating two harassed-looking constables for not having found the child, he turned off the set.\n\nIf Kevin Groves had gotten a call about Julie Martin's disappearance and felt it had validity enough for him to call Tony, then the odds were good it wasn't a police matter. Or a matter for the Ministry of Natural Resources, as it was currently mandated.\n\nAt 6:47 p.m. Tony would likely still be on the sound stage, so rather than leave him a message Henry went straight to the source.\n\n\"Western Star; Kevin Groves.\"\n\n\"It's Henry.\"\n\nVery faintly, Henry heard the reporter's heartbeat speed up. Everyone had a hindbrain reaction to vampires, the most primal part of them gibbering in terror in the presence of an equally primal predator. Kevin Groves knew why.\n\n\"So, are you...That is, I mean...You're calling about the missing Martin kid?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"Werewolves.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon.\"\n\n\"I had a tip that there's werewolves in the mountains.\"\n\nThere was, in fact, a pack working an old mining claim just outside of Ashcroft. \"And you believe that a werewolf took Julie Martin?\" It wasn't unheard of for a were to go rogue; they were more or less human after all.\n\n\"No. Just that there's werewolves in the mountains, but if that's the case then...\"\n\n\"Then?\" Henry prodded when Kevin's voice trailed off.\n\n\"Well, you know. Werewolves!\"\n\n\"Is that it?\"\n\n\"One of the Martins' neighbors saw something large and hairy carrying a small body.\"\n\n\"In its mouth?\"\n\n\"No, but...\"\n\n\"Werewolves don't have an intermediate state. They look like wolves or they look human.\" Essentially like wolves and essentially like humans but close enough. \"It's not werewolves.\"\n\n\"The old lady seemed pretty sure it wasn't a Sasquatch.\"\n\nEven six months ago Henry would have believed it wasn't a Sasquatch went without saying. \"Large and hairy?\"\n\n\"That's what she said.\"\n\nThey couldn't save every child who went missing in British Columbia but large and hairy pointed toward something the police might not be able to handle. \"Give me the witness's name and we'll check it out.\"\n\n\"So\"\u2014just past the Spuzzum exit, Henry pulled out and passed an empty logging truck then tucked his 1976 BMW back into the right lane\u2014\"where's Lee?\"\n\n\"He's down in L.A. for a couple of days, auditioning for a movie of the week.\"\n\n\"He's leaving Darkest Night?\" Lee Nicholas, Tony's partner, was one of the leads in the popular syndicated vampire detective show.\n\n\"What? No.\" That pulled Tony's attention off the screen of his PDA. \"They'll be shooting in Vancouver; he figures he can do both. C.B.'s willing to adjust our shooting schedule if necessary.\"\n\n\"That doesn't sound like him.\" Chester Bane was notoriously inflexible when it came to situations that might cost him money.\n\n\"He's hoping he can scam some free publicity.\"\n\nHenry snorted. \"That does. What,\" he asked a few kilometers later when it became obvious Tony wasn't going to pick up the conversational ball, \"are you finding so fascinating on that thing?\"\n\n\"Sorry, I was just going over the list of possible...um, things.\"\n\n\"Things.\"\n\n\"Suspects who might have taken the kid. But they're not exactly people.\"\n\nEyes nearly closed in the glare of oncoming headlights, Henry sighed. \"Let's hear the list.\"\n\n\"Well, there's Bugbears, a kind of a hairy giant goblin. Or Chimeras, because the lion and goat parts are hairy and that might have been all they saw. It could be any one of a number of different demons but then we need to find out who's calling them. Uh...\" He squinted at the screen as he scrolled down. \"Displacer Beasts look like cougars except they're black and have tentacles so it wouldn't necessarily be carrying the kid in its mouth. Ettins are two-headed giants that live in remote areas and\u2014\"\n\n\"Tony, where did you get this list?\"\n\n\"Sort of from Kevin Groves.\"\n\n\"Sort of?\"\n\n\"He lent me an RPG monster index. RPG: role playing game,\" Tony expanded when Henry's silence made it obvious he had no idea what that meant. \"Like Dungeons and Dragons.\"\n\n\"I've never heard of it.\"\n\n\"Really? Because it's old. Well, oldish.\" When Henry replied with more silence, he sighed. \"I wanted to go in with more information than hairy thing that eats children and hopefully isn't a werewolf.\"\n\n\"So you went to a game?\"\n\nIt was Tony's turn to snort as he powered down and twisted around to slip the PDA into a side pocket on his backpack. \"Yeah, well believe it or not, Googling big hairy eats children doesn't pull up anything useful.\"\n\n\"But imaginary...\"\n\n\"Henry, whatever this is, I guarantee it'll be considered imaginary by most of the world. Hell, we're considered imaginary by most of the world.\"\n\n\"I'm sure more people than you expect believe in third assistant directors.\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised.\" Slouching down as far as the seat belt would allow, he propped his knees up on the dashboard. \"Ninety-nine percent of the world's population is in denial about something. Take you, for instance.\"\n\nThat drew Henry's attention off the road. \"Me?\"\n\n\"You're still in denial about Vicki's birthday.\"\n\n\"I said I'd get her something.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but it has to be something good and I don't think you're giving it much thought.\"\n\n\"There's a child missing....\"\n\n\"You want to talk about that all the way to Lytton? Because I don't.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" Henry pulled out and passed a pair of trucks. \"What about a gift certificate?\"\n\n\"Dude, it's a good thing you're hard to kill.\"\n\nThe village of Lytton was about a two-hour drive from Vancouver. Henry had picked Tony up at his apartment in Burnaby at twenty to eight, and it was a quarter to ten when Henry left the highway and steered the BMW down Main Street.\n\n\"You think they usually roll the sidewalks up this early,\" Tony wondered, staring out at the dark windows, \"or is this a reaction to the Martin kid getting grabbed?\"\n\n\"Bit of both, I expect.\"\n\n\"I feel like we're being watched from behind lace curtains.\"\n\n\"Why lace?\" Henry asked.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Tony waggled the fingers of his left hand in front of his face, sketching in the air lacy lines of power that dissipated almost instantly. \"It's creepier I guess.\"\n\n\"I don't know about the lace, but we're definitely being watched.\" Henry could feel the fear and anger roiling through the town. Could feel some it directed toward them. With a child missing in a village of only three hundred and eight souls, any and all strangers would be suspect. \"It might be best if we were...unnoticed.\"\n\n\"Do you have to use such cheesy setup lines?\" Tony muttered, laying two fingers against the metal strip between the front and back windows. In the last few months, he'd gotten enough practice in with the Notice-me-not spell that he no longer needed to consult the instructions on the laptop. Of course, there were still one hell of a lot of spells he wasn't as adept at, so the laptop remained close at hand.\n\nFrom their perspective within the car, nothing changed but Henry felt the watcher's attention drift away.\n\n\"Could be a troll under the railway bridge.\"\n\n\"Julia Martin wasn't anywhere near the bridge,\" Henry reminded him. \"And a troll would never hunt that far from home. They're creatures of habit.\"\n\nGrace Alton, the witness who'd spoken to Kevin Groves, lived out past Eighth Street where Main began to curve toward Cache Creek, three houses closer to town than the Martins'. Old enough to be part of the original settlement, the small, white frame house was set back from the road at the end of a long, gravel driveway.\n\nHenry pulled in behind an aged Buick and parked. \"There's lights on in the front room. She's still up.\"\n\n\"It's just ten. Why wouldn't she be?\" When Henry turned and lifted a red gold brow, Tony shrugged. \"Right. Country.\"\n\nStanding on the front porch, Tony fingered the ball bearing that anchored his personal Notice-me-not and glanced back toward the car. Because he knew exactly where the BMW had been parked, he could almost see a shadowy outline\u2014anyone else would have to bump into it to find it. Which was how he'd found it the first couple of times, although it had been more slam into it than bump. His right knee ached remembering.\n\n\"One heartbeat. She's alone.\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\"\n\n\"Makes it simpler,\" Henry said as he opened the door.\n\n\"The door's not...Right. Country,\" Tony said again as he followed Henry into the house. By the time he reached the living room, Henry was on one knee beside an ancient recliner holding the hand of an elderly woman who was staring at him like he was...something elderly women really got into. Tony had no idea of what that might be although from the d\u00e9cor, crocheted doilies and African violets figured prominently. The place smelled like cat piss and the fat black-and-white cat staring disdainfully at Henry from the sofa seemed the most likely culprit.\n\nUnlike dogs, cats had no issues with vampires.\n\nOr wizards, Tony noted as the cat turned that same unblinking green stare on him, and if there was a spell they deigned to acknowledge, he hadn't found it yet.\n\n\"Just tell me what you saw,\" Henry said softly, and by the way the old lady leaned toward him, Tony knew his eyes had gone dark and compelling.\n\n\"I was out back, wasn't I, checking to see how the trellis at the end of the old summer kitchen had come through the winter. I have roses in the summer, pink ones; they climb right up to the roof. I saw something moving down by the river. There's nothing wrong with my eyes.\" Her upper lip curled. \"I don't care what that constable says. I can see at a distance as well as I ever could. All right, fine, up close maybe I should wear my glasses, but at a distance I know what I saw.\"\n\n\"What did you see, Grace?\"\n\nShe preened a little, an involuntary response to Henry's attentions, which, given the visible as opposed to actual age difference, was kind of creeping Tony out. \"It was passing between those two clumps of lilac bushes. They're nothing much now, but you should see them in the spring. Lovely. And the smell. Snotty young pup from the Ministry wanted to tear them out. I tore him a new one, that's what I did. Those lilacs are older than he is.\"\n\nTony wasn't without sympathy for the guy from the Ministry, whichever ministry it happened to be.\n\n\"What did you see passing between the lilacs, Grace?\"\n\n\"I saw something bigger than a man but hunched over. And it had a big, hairy hump. The shape looked wrong. It looked...evil!\" She drew out the final word with obvious enjoyment, and Tony, who'd seen some terrifying things over the last few years, suppressed a shudder. \"It was moving fast but I saw, I saw clear as anything, that it was holding a child. I saw the leg kick and the poor little thing had on a red rubber boot. Julie Martin was wearing red rubber boots when she disappeared, you know. I yelled for it to stop but then it was gone, so I came inside and I called the Mounties and they didn't believe me. Oh, they were polite enough, those young men, but they didn't believe me not for one minute. 'Are you sure the boot was red?' they said. Like I couldn't see a little red boot against a big, hairy creature. Not like a Sasquatch, I told them. They're just misunderstood, poor dears. This was ungroomed, ratty. I don't like to judge but it was clearly a creature of evil appetites come down out of the mountains to feed. He asked me what kind of creature, and I said how would I know; did I look like I knew creatures? And he said maybe the light was playing tricks so I said it was a lot better back when I saw it because they hadn't exactly hustled to get here, you know. When they left, I said to Alexander\"\u2014she gestured toward the cat, who looked bored\u2014\"I said, we'll involve the fifth estate, that's what we'll do, and I called the paper.\"\n\nA messy pile of tabloids, topped by a copy of the Western Star, had a place of prominence beside her chair. The only visible headline screamed, IT'S NOT A RACCOON! Tony rubbed at a healing bite on his calf. It had actually been a Pekinese with a really bad temper.\n\n\"The man at the paper, he believed me.\"\n\n\"I believe you, Grace.\"\n\nShe patted Henry's cheek with her free hand. \"I know, dear.\"\n\nAs amusing as it was to see Henry Fitzroy, vampire, treated in such a way, Tony couldn't see how this was getting them any closer to finding Julie Martin. They'd gotten as much information from Kevin.\n\nThen Henry leaned closer. \"What did you hear, Grace?\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"Hear?\"\n\n\"What did you hear?\"\n\nShe frowned, slightly, and cocked her head to one side. \"I heard rustling through the bushes, but that might have been the wind. I heard the river, of course. I heard...\" She looked surprised. \"I heard a car door slam.\"\n\n\"Werewolves drive.\"\n\n\"Some of them,\" Henry admitted as they crossed the backyard. \"But not very well.\"\n\n\"It's been a long winter and kids are easier to hunt than elk. Maybe they're taking food back to the pack.\"\n\n\"It's possible but unlikely that there'd be enough rogue were around to form a pack.\"\n\n\"You just don't want it to be were,\" Tony muttered, staring into the gap between the lilac bushes. The gap was only minimally less dark than the bushes themselves. The sky had clouded over and he could barely see his hand in front of his face. \"You'll have to guide me through to the other side. I don't want to risk a light until I'm blocked from the road. There's only so much a Notice-me-not can cover.\n\n\"Guide me,\" he repeated a moment later as Henry set him down. \"Not carry me.\"\n\n\"This was faster. You need to put more work into that Nightsight spell.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Tony snapped on his flashlight, beam pointed carefully at the ground. \"I'll get right on that in my copious amount of spare time between working and saving the world. You got anything?\"\n\nCrouched, Henry brushed a palm over the crushed grass. \"Unfortunately, the police believed Grace enough to check this out. There's no scent here now but theirs.\"\n\nThe tracks\u2014the mess the police had made visible even to Tony\u2014followed a path behind the lilacs probably created by deer or some other non-small-child-eating animal. The police appeared to have reached a set of tire tracks that lead up between two houses and back to the road and stopped their search.\n\n\"Do you think Ms. Alton told the Mounties about the car door?\"\n\n\"No. She didn't remember it until I asked her specifically what she heard. I think because this\"\u2014Henry indicated the tracks\u2014\"is the obvious place for a car but the tracks just as obviously haven't been used this spring, the police assumed Grace was...\"\n\n\"Making things up to get attention?\" Tony offered diplomatically.\n\n\"Possibly. And you can't exactly blame them; there'd be no reason to bring an abducted child down here unless you had a car and this\"\u2014he waved at the unused tracks again\u2014\"this says there was no car. But because we know there was a car involved we need to find another place you can bring in a vehicle. Wait here.\"\n\n\"Why\u2014\"\n\n\"Because I'll be moving quickly and I don't want you to fall in the river.\"\n\nTony sighed and turned off the flashlight. He couldn't see the river, about three meters away and down a steep bank, but the sound of rushing water filled the night, drowning out every other sound.\n\nFive minutes. The scar on his left palm itched and he thought about conjuring a Wizard lamp. Ten minutes. When he got his first decent job in Vancouver, he'd bought a cheap watch with a luminescent dial, tired of spending unacknowledged time in the dark. Fifteen minutes. He yawned and nearly swallowed his tongue as Henry's pale face appeared suddenly out of the shadows.\n\n\"Just past those cedars, it's all bare rock. It wouldn't be impossible to get something with four-wheel drive and a high clearance along the edge of the river and then back up to Highway Twelve right at the bridge.\"\n\n\"Just because it 'wouldn't be impossible' doesn't mean there was a car there,\" Tony pointed out as they headed for Grace Alton's driveway and the car. \"I doubt Ms. Alton heard anything over the sound of the river, Henry. That track's likely got nothing to do with\u2014\"\n\nHenry held up a small red boot.\n\nBoot in one hand, laptop balanced on his knees, Tony scrolled through his spell directory. \"Here it is. Pairbonding: joining two halves back into a whole. I cast the spell on the boot and it acts like a compass leading us to its mate.\" He pulled a black marker from the pack between his feet and slowly drew a rune on the instep of the boot.\n\n\"Whatever has the child reeks of old blood, old kills,\" Henry growled, driving up onto the bridge. \"The stench hides its nature.\"\n\n\"If it isn't rogue were, there's nothing that says some of the smaller giants couldn't drive. I mean, as long as the car was big enough.\" Rummaging in the pack, Tony pulled out a plastic grocery bag of herbs, removed a spray of small red berries almost the same color as the rubber, and dropped it in the boot. \"Belladonna,\" he explained. \"To clear the way. I'm working the sympathetic magic angle. It's a diuretic, makes you piss, and that's clearing that way anyway.\"\n\n\"I didn't ask.\"\n\nBoot balanced on his palm, Tony reached for power and carefully read the words of the spell.\n\nThe boot slammed against the middle of the inside of the windshield.\n\nHenry's nostril's flared.\n\nTony sighed, powered down the laptop, and performed a quick Clean Cantrip. \"Yes, I pissed myself,\" he muttered defensively, cheeks burning. \"Like I said, it's a diuretic but at least the boot didn't blow up. Or melt. Or break your windshield.\"\n\n\"But you're still using too much power.\"\n\n\"Am not. New spells always need a bit of fine-tuning.\"\n\n\"Fine-tuning? My car\u2014\"\n\n\"Is clean. Fresh. All taken care of.\" He slouched down in the seat. \"Whether they believed Ms. Alton or not, the cops had to have searched the riverbank. How come they didn't find the boot?\"\n\n\"I found it by scent down deep within a crack in the rock. The RCMP would have needed to go over the riverbank with a fine-tooth comb to find it, and I doubt they have sufficient manpower even for this given the foolishness of the recent budget cuts.\"\n\n\"You sound like Vicki. Only with less profanity.\"\n\nAlthough she hadn't been a police officer for some years before Henry changed her, Vicki continued to take government underfunding of law enforcement personally.\n\n\"Speaking of Vicki\"\u2014because speaking of the boot or the child or the thing that had taken her would only feed his anger and that would make it dangerous for Tony to remain enclosed with him in the car\u2014\"do you think she'd like one of those purple plants?\"\n\n\"Purple plants?\"\n\n\"Like all those plants Grace owns.\"\n\n\"Would Vicki like an African violet? For Christ's sake, Henry, she's turning forty, not eighty.\"\n\nReaching across the front seat, Henry smacked him on the back of the head. \"Don't blaspheme.\"\n\nJust before the sign for the Nohomeen Reserve, a gravel road led off to the east, into the mountains. The boot swung around so quickly to the passenger window, it nearly smacked Tony in the head. As Henry turned off the highway, it centered itself on the windshield again, bouncing a time or two for emphasis.\n\n\"Not exactly a BMW kind of road,\" Tony pointed out as a pothole nearly slammed his teeth through his tongue.\n\n\"We'll manage.\"\n\nThe road ran nearly due north, past the east edge of the Keetlecut Reserve and farther up into the wild. They passed a clear-cut on the right\u2014the scar on the mountainside appallingly visible even by moon and starlight\u2014then three kilometers later the boot slid hard to the left, the rubber sole squeaking against the glass.\n\nLeaning out past Henry, Tony stared into the darkness. \"I don't see a road.\"\n\n\"There's a forestry track.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Tony clutched at the seat as the car bounced through ruts. \"Remember what you said earlier about a high road clearance and four-wheel drive? And hey!\" he nearly shrieked as they lost even the dubious help from the headlights. \"Lights!\"\n\n\"We don't want them to see us coming.\"\n\n\"You don't think the engine roar will give us away? Or the sound of my teeth slamming together?\"\n\nA moment later, Tony was wishing he hadn't said that as Henry stopped the car. Except that he didn't want the engine to give them away. He didn't want to walk for miles up a mountain through the woods in the dark either but then again Julie Martin hadn't wanted to be snatched out of her backyard so, in comparison, he really had nothing he could justify complaining about.\n\nHe crammed handfuls of herbs into an outside pocket on his backpack and wrestled the red rubber boot into the plastic bag. When he held the handles, it was like a red rubber divining rod...bag, pulling with enough force that it seemed safest to wrap the handles around his wrist. As he leaned back into the front seat for his backpack, it started to rain. \"Wonderful,\" he muttered, straightening and carefully closing the door. \"Welcome to March in British Columbia. Henry, it's almost one and sunrise is at six oh six. Unless you want to spend the day wrapped in a blackout curtain and locked in your trunk, we need to be back at the car by three. Do we have time...\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThat single syllable held almost five hundred years of certainty. Tony sighed. \"I don't want to leave her out here either but...\"\n\n\"We have time.\"\n\nThe flash of teeth, too white in the darkness, suggested Tony stop arguing. That was fine with him except he wasn't the one who spontaneously combusted in sunlight or bitched and complained for months after he spent the day wrapped around his spare tire and jack. And it wasn't like camping out was an option. He skipped the Brokeback Vampire reference in favor of suggesting Henry head for his sanctuary and he go on alone. \"I'm not entirely helpless, you know.\"\n\n\"You're wasting time,\" Henry snarled.\n\nThe evil that had taken the child was close. The drumming of the rain kept him from hearing heartbeats\u2014if these things had hearts\u2014and the sheets of water had washed away any chance of a scent trail, but Henry knew they were close nevertheless. Vicki would have called it a hunch and followed it for no reason she could articulate so he would do the same.\n\nFor twenty minutes they moved up the forestry track, his hand around Tony's elbow both to hurry his pace and to keep him from the worst of the trail invisible to mortal eyes in the dark and the rain. The white bag pulled straight out from Tony's outstretched arm, a bloodhound made of boot and belladonna. A step farther and the bag pulled so hard to the right Tony stumbled and would have fallen had Henry's grip not kept him on his feet.\n\nThe track became two lines in the grass that led to a light just visible through the trees. Not an electric light, but not fire either. A lantern. Behind a window.\n\n\"Were build shelters,\" Tony muttered, ducking under a sodden evergreen branch. \"Or the pack could be squatting in a hunting cabin.\"\n\n\"I hear nothing that says these are were.\" But also nothing that said they weren't. The rain continued to mask sound and scent but its tone and timbre changed as they drew closer to the building and a pair of large, black SUVs. The cabin, crudely built and listing to the left, did not match the cars.\n\nLips drawn back off his teeth, Henry plucked a bit of sodden fur from where it had been caught in one of the doors. \"Dog. And the stink of old death I caught by the river lingers still.\"\n\n\"It was wearing dog? Okay.\" A moment while Tony assimilated that. \"Still could be giants then. These things\"\u2014a nod toward the SUVs\u2014\"are fucking huge. Hang on.\" Releasing one handle, Tony reached into the bag and used the ball of his thumb to smudge out the rune. With the boot now no more than a reminder that a child's life hung in the balance, he wrapped the plastic tight and shoved it into his jacket pocket. \"I'll likely need both hands.\"\n\nThe rune in his left hand throbbed with the beat of his heart.\n\nAs they stepped under the eaves of the roof and out of the pounding distraction of the rain, Henry felt something die. Not the child\u2014he could hear her heartbeat now, too slow but steady, probably drugged\u2014but an animal who had died terrified and in great pain. Growling deep in his throat, he looked in through the filthy window.\n\nHalf a dozen kerosene lanterns hung from the rafters of the single room. One lantern alone made shadows, mystery. Six together threw a light that was almost clinical.\n\nThere were two men, middle-aged and well-fed, standing at each end of a wooden table stained with blood. Henry saw nails and a hammer and didn't need to see any more. Over the centuries he had seen enough torture to recognize it in the set of a torturer's shoulders, in the glitter in the eye. Both these men were smiling, breathing heavily, and gazing down on their work with satisfaction.\n\nHe had seen their expressions on priests of the Inquisition.\n\nThey might have started by accident, inflicting pain on a hunting trophy wounded but not killed. Over time, they had come to need more reaction than an animal could provide, and to answer that need Julie Martin lay curled in the corner of an overstuffed sofa wearing one red rubber boot and one filthy pink sock. Her face was dirty but she seemed unharmed. From what he knew of men like these, Henry suspected the drugs that had kept her quiet had kept her safe. There was no point in inflicting pain on the unaware.\n\nThe raw pelts draped over the back of a chair had probably been worn when they took the girl. Perhaps as disguise. Perhaps as a way of working themselves up to the deed, reminding themselves of pleasures to come. Grace Alton had seen the evil. Had seen clearer than anyone had believed.\n\n\"They're just men.\" But not even Tony sounded surprised.\n\n\"There is no such thing as just men,\" Henry growled, barely holding the Hunter in check. \"Angels and demons both come of men. To say these two are just men is to deny that. Is to deny this. I want the girl safe first.\"\n\n\"I've got her. Just open the door.\"\n\nHenry didn't so much open the door as rip it off its hinges, rusted nails screaming as they were torn from the wood, the blood scent roiling out to engulf him.\n\nHe sensed rather than saw Tony hold out his scarred hand and call. A heartbeat later the young wizard staggered back under the weight of the child and grunted, \"Go.\"\n\nHenry smiled.\n\nAnd the two men at the table learned what terror meant.\n\nTony slid the boot onto Julia's foot and lifted the sleeping child off the backseat of the car, settling her against his shoulder. As they drove back to Lytton, the drugs had begun to release their hold and, to keep her from waking, he'd sung her a lullaby from his laptop. It hadn't seemed to matter that the words were in a language she'd never heard nor would probably hear again. She'd sighed, smiled, and slipped her thumb into her mouth. Now he wrapped them both in a Notice-me-not and carried her up the road to her parents' house. Although it was just past two in the morning, all the lights were still on when he laid her gently on the mat and rang the bell.\n\nRolling the ball bearing between his thumb and forefinger, he walked back to the car, listening to the crying and the laughing and wishing he could bottle it. The sound of hearts mending and innocence saved: that would make the perfect present for Vicki.\n\n\"You think she'll remember anything?\"\n\nWith the Notice-me-not wrapped around the car, Henry drove back toward Vancouver at considerably more than the legal speed, racing the sunrise. \"I hope not.\"\n\n\"You think they'll ever find the bodies?\"\n\nHe shrugged, not caring. \"I expect someone will stumble over them eventually.\"\n\n\"You didn't leave anything that would lead the cops back to you? I mean\"\u2014Tony slouched against the seat belt strap\u2014\"these were men.\"\n\nHenry turned just far enough that Tony could see the Hunter in his eyes. \"Would you have preferred we left them to the law?\"\n\n\"Hell, no.\" He scraped a bit of mud off his damp jeans. \"They hadn't done anything to that kid yet but they were going to. It's just, monsters are one thing, but those\u2014\"\n\n\"Were also monsters. Do you have to throw up again?\"\n\nIt had been a reaction not to what Henry had done but to suddenly realizing just what they'd prevented. It had also been incredibly embarrassing, but the rain had washed the stink off his boots.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Good. It doesn't matter if or when they find the bodies, Tony. There's nothing that can link them back to us. To me.\" His teeth were too white in the headlights of a passing transport and his eyes were too dark. \"No one believes in vampires.\"\n\nTony stared at the face of the Hunter unmasked and shuddered. \"Dude, we're doing a hundred and fifty-five k. Could you maybe watch the road?\"\n\n\"All right, I still don't understand how forty is any more important than one hundred and forty, but I think I've got Vicki's birthday covered.\" Henry pulled a jeweler's box from his jacket pocket and opened it. \"One pair half-carat diamond earrings.\"\n\nTony stepped aside to let Henry into his apartment, peered down at the stones, and nodded. \"Good choice. Diamonds are forever and so is she.\"\n\n\"Now read the card.\"\n\n\"Ah, you've included a newspaper clipping about the miraculous return of Julie Martin. Very smart. Almost makes up for the pink, sparkly roses on the front of this thing. Blah, blah, blah, as you approach the most wonderful years of your life, blah, blah, young as you ever were, blah, in your name a pair of evil men have been sent to hell where they belong.\" Tony looked up and grinned. \"Man, they really do make a card for every occasion.\"\n\n\"I added the last bit.\"\n\n\"No shit? Seriously, Henry, it's perfect. You don't have to wrap it, she doesn't have to find space for it, and you can't beat the sentiment.\"\n\n\"You think she'll like it?\"\n\n\"Like it?\" Tony snorted as he tossed the card onto his kitchen table. \"I think she'll want to collect the whole set. You should start thinking about what you're going to do when she turns fifty.\"\n\n\"Fifty.\" Halfway across the apartment, Henry froze.\n\n\"Fifty. Sixty-five. Seventy-five. Ninety. One hundred. One hundred and twenty-seven.\"\n\n\"One hundred and twenty-seven?\"\n\n\"Kidding. You get her something really fine at one hundred and you're probably good until at least one-fifty...\"\n\n## The Wish\n\nCarolyn Haines\n\nCarolyn Haines has written more than fifty books. The latest in her Mississippi Delta series is Ham Bones. She also writes single titles. Hallowed Bones and Penumbra were named one of the top five mysteries of 2004 and 2006, respectively, by Library Journal, and Carolyn received an Alabama State Council on the Arts fellowship. An avid animal-rights supporter, she shares her home with nine cats, six dogs, and eight horses. Because no minute should go unused, Carolyn also teaches fiction at the University of South Alabama. Her website is www.carolynhaines.com.\n\nIt hasn't rained for weeks, longer than anyone remembers. Each gust of wind carries tiny particles of dirt\u2014soil shifting from place to place, fleeing across the borders of lawns, counties, and states. The land is on the move, as if it's given up hope for America and is headed vaguely north, aiming to cross the border. It's a long way to Canada from Mobile, Alabama.\n\nThe weather is all the talk in the grocery and feed stores, the nurseries and post office, places where I carry on the business of my life. Old men, as weathered and crinkly as the grass, study the sky that looks like spring and feels like Minnesota as they stand outside the Hickory Pit and the tractor dealership. They see nothing good. The climate is changing, and the farmers are catching the brunt of it. Gamblers at heart, they have no clue where to lay the odds in this New South of hard drought and hurricane.\n\nSitting in my pickup, waiting for a load of mulch and fertilizer while the heater blows ineffectually, I watch the dirt fly down Highway 45 in an orange cloud. Across the road, at the Stovalls' abandoned nursery, a tulip tree sways purple against the clear blue sky of another cold, dry, windy day.\n\nThe late February winds, unusually strong for south Alabama, pick up the fallen petals of the tulip tree, and suddenly I see her shape against grass that glistens with melting frost. The coffee cup I hold slips from my nerveless fingers and drops to the floorboard. I never hear the crockery shatter, nor the tinkling of the wind chimes abandoned at the nursery. My world goes mute. Again.\n\nShe stands beneath the tree, beside barren hydrangeas and glossy green miniature gardenias that will permeate the April air with a scent as delicious as taste. How easily I'd assumed that spring was a season I'd experience\u2014waiting has become my only game. I haven't been to a doctor for fifteen years, but I feel healthy enough. Illness isn't my destiny. She's taught me that.\n\nShe nods at me, an acknowledgment of our pact, and then she's gone. The bruised petals fall softly to the thawing ground. Bosco, my old coonhound, breaks into a long, low howl in the backseat of the truck. He understands who and what she is. The enemy.\n\nMobile isn't the center of anything, merely a small port city on a bay where lazy rivers meet in one of the last untainted habitats in the Southeast. It's a sleepy place with smiling, crocodile politicians one step removed from the horse thieves and slave traders who first took the land from the Choctaw Nation. While the town is physically beautiful, it lacks the sophistication of New Orleans, or at least pre-Katrina New Orleans. The Moral Majority holds sway in Mobile, those prunelike faces set against the joie de vivre that made New Orleans so special.\n\nI should have left Mobile, but it's because of her that I've remained here for so many years. Her and a certain ship's captain who finds the empty downtown of old Mobile to his liking. No Disney creation, this pirate holds the answer to my dilemma.\n\nAnxious in my grief and unable to sleep one long night, I walked the empty streets. By happenstance that evening, I saw him plying his trade in a dark alley, and I made it my business to learn his haunts and habits. He is my field of expertise, the most important element of my future. The cobblestone alleys of old Mobile are a perfect hunting ground for him, and one he returns to regularly, because in the dark of the moon, anything that's truly desired can be found in old Mobile.\n\nOnce I deliver the mulch and fertilizer, I'll put my plan into action. By moonrise, I'll find him, the man, or some would call it a thing, who will help me.\n\nTo fully explain my story, I have to go back in time twenty years to a hot August day. Sometimes I forget that once I was another person. A wife and mother. A woman with dreams and expectations. To understand how I came to this point, the past has to be pulled out like so many wrinkled snapshots and examined.\n\nIt's an irony, really, because I hate remembering. In memory, the images are so sharply focused they slice through the layers of alcohol I've used to pad my pain. People tell me that I live in the past, like that's an accusation of moral degeneracy. \"You live in the past\" in their mind equates with \"You killed your children.\" Hardly. We all have a past. We all have a present. But not all of us have a future.\n\nOnce upon a time, I had a future. I had the family and job, the normal, boring things that Middle America takes so for granted. I also had a mortgage and a car note and nights when my husband and I made passionate love and forgot the dirty dishes in the sink, the piles of laundry waiting, and the spats about bills and babies. Today, none of those things trouble me. They're all in the past, along with my heart.\n\nOn a too-hot August morning twenty years ago, I woke up plagued with a fever of unexplainable origin. The day was sweltering, even for south Alabama, and the humidity lay on my skin like a wool suit. We were in dog days, when it rains each afternoon and Mobile takes on the foliage of the tropics, thick and lush and green. Dennis had a breakfast meeting, and even though I felt terrible, I took Kala and Kevin to day care. My intention was to return home, shower, and go to work. I had a client meeting that couldn't be missed, a big account, a cash bonus.\n\nThe antihistamine I'd taken in an effort to dry up my sniffles had left me feeling dizzy and disoriented. The twins, identical even in their moods, were quiet as I buckled them into the car seats and headed out, a cup of hot tea in my hand. The day care was only eight blocks away. Eight short blocks in a residential neighborhood shaded by live oaks that buckled sections of the sidewalk with gnarled roots.\n\nI was almost there\u2014I could see the day care sign with the happy alphabet letters spelling the name\u2014when I saw her in the Darcy yard. I thought I was hallucinating, and I slowed the car for a better look. Some would call her a wind wraith, a substanceless creature of twigs and leaves, but she isn't. Nor is she a sprite or fairy or gremlin. I stopped the car, completely stunned at this creature formed of debris and spinning air currents who beckoned to me from the shade of the Darcys' yard. I didn't know it then, but I know now what she is. She's an angel. A dark angel with a list of names. At the top of her list were Kevin and Kala.\n\nI never saw the Ozark Water delivery truck that hit me from behind. I never even had a chance to glance at my children in the rearview mirror. My seat belt stopped me from impaling myself on the steering column, but my forehead cracked the wheel, and I was knocked unconscious, or so they told me at the emergency room when I tried to tell the doctor what I'd seen. No one believed me, but it doesn't stop it from being true.\n\nFrom far away I heard sticks and sand pelting the windshield. Semiconscious, I fought to wake up, to protect my babies. A man yelled at my window, but I didn't pay any attention to him. I watched her, standing at the passenger side of the car. Her hands reached through the car, lovely hands, fine boned and delicate. Kala took her hand first, then Kevin. Each one so trusting.\n\n\"No! No! Kala! Kevin!\" I tried to call them back to me. \"Don't leave me. Don't go.\"\n\nShe held my children's hands and shook her head at me. \"I'll be back for you,\" she said.\n\n\"Don't take them,\" I begged. \"Please. They're only children. Take me instead.\"\n\n\"It isn't your time.\"\n\nSuch a matter-of-fact answer for an event that would make me wish for death a million times over.\n\n\"Take me. Let my children have a chance to grow up. Kala wants to be a veterinarian. She wants to make animals well. And Kevin\u2014\" My voice broke and I couldn't continue. \"Dennis will be a good father. They'll be fine without me. Take me.\" I held out my wrists, offering the veins to the broken windshield for a slashing.\n\n\"It isn't your time.\" Her face was pale, the eyes dark and sad.\n\n\"Make it my time. Trade me for them.\" Panic had begun to build beneath my ribs. My heart squeezed, and I hoped it was the first sign that a deal had been struck.\n\n\"You can't bargain with death,\" she said. \"It's either your time or not. This isn't your time.\"\n\nAgainst the pain in my chest, I struggled to free myself from the seat belt that held me. \"No!\" I fought, but the belt was tight. \"No!\"\n\nThey backed away from the car. A shaft of sunlight touched Kala's chestnut curls. Tears hung in her lashes. \"Mama.\" She held out her arms to me. Kevin bit his lip.\n\n\"Please!\" I ignored the man tugging at the driver's door, his face showing horror and panic. \"Please don't take them.\"\n\n\"It's their time.\"\n\n\"That's supposed to bring me comfort?\" I wanted to kill her. I wanted to tear her fleshless body with my teeth, rending her apart. Anything to protect my children.\n\n\"Their purpose is done. Let them move forward.\"\n\nThe pressure in my chest became unbearable, and I knew it wasn't a heart attack. Grief had set up lodging. My new boarder had brought his full accommodation of pain. \"For God's sake, I'd rather be dead. Please, take me!\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"When your time comes, I'll be back.\"\n\nThey stepped out of the sunshine and slowly dissipated in the shade cast by the oaks.\n\n\"Please!\"\n\nI was still shrieking when the man got the door open and Mrs. Darcy reached in to grasp my hands that clawed at the air. She tried to calm me until the ambulance came, but I could tell by the tears on her face that my children were gone. Just like that, gone. As quick as snuffing out a match.\n\nThere was a funeral, which I don't remember. For a year, Dennis tried to make a go of it, but he lost not only his children but his wife. No man should have to live with a zombie, and though Dennis tried, there was nothing he could do to bring life back to the husk of my body. I ate what I was forced to eat. I sat in the sun if someone led me there. I bathed if a bath was drawn. Mostly I sat in a rocker by the front window and watched for her. I knew I'd see her again.\n\nAfter Dennis left me, I cut my wrists in a bathtub of warm water. It's a funny thing, but I'd always expected it to be painless. Bleeding to death is excruciating. The body demands to live, no matter what the mind or spirit says. My lungs burned for oxygen. My starving heart suffered anguish. I felt agony, but I knew soon it would be over.\n\nThat's when I saw her again. She stood in the doorway of the bathroom, a vague creature of swirling air currents and energy and bath powder. For a moment I saw the terrible beauty of her face as she shook her head.\n\n\"It isn't your time, Sandra.\" She held out a scroll, and for a split second, I thought I saw names written in blood. \"Your name isn't here.\"\n\n\"Fuck you.\" It's hard to be witty while bleeding to death.\n\n\"You can't cheat death,\" she whispered. \"And you can't hurry it.\"\n\n\"Where are my children?\"\n\n\"Their destiny is no longer your concern. They're where they're supposed to be.\"\n\nWith those words, I knew Kala and Kevin were forever lost to me. Death would not resolve my loss. \"I hate you! You won't win! I'll do whatever is necessary.\" My voice weakened.\n\nShe slipped closer and looked into the tub that was bright with warm blood. \"It isn't your time.\"\n\nShe disappeared and I heard footsteps pounding up the staircase. Dennis to the rescue. Why couldn't he leave it be? He could've collected the insurance money and been done with the guilt. But no, he'd come back to check on me. I hadn't looked good. He'd been worried, had a bad feeling. Feeling guilty over the divorce, he'd come back to make sure I was okay. But, of course, I wasn't. I was far from okay.\n\nTwo years later, the wounds on my wrists were hard to find. My new attitude\u2014one of self-sufficient acceptance\u2014had won my freedom from West Briar Estates, the place where crazies can get twenty-four-hour surveillance and legal pharmaceuticals to blur reality. Never make the mistake of telling a psychiatrist that you've had a conversation with Death; it's a surefire ticket to involuntary incarceration. While under the watchful eye of the medical staff, I began to formulate my revenge.\n\nI learned to smile and pretend an interest in the news and the visits of my nieces and nephews. Actually, I was interested in the news. I'd begun to catch glimpses of her in the newscast footage of violent slums, on the dusty roads of the Middle East, and in the mud villages of Central America as a flood swept houses away. She was always there, a half-formed face in the shuddering palm fronds or in a dust devil shifting across the desert. She was there, the Pied Piper of the dying. She'd always been there, but no one looked for her. Except me. I sought her out, gathering the tidbits that would become my arsenal.\n\nWhen the doors of West Briar closed behind me, I moved into a lovely old home with screened porches and an acre of yard that Dennis bought for me. He'd remarried and his wife was pregnant. They both came to visit, to include me in the growth of their baby. No two people could have worked harder. So I feigned an interest and began to garden with spectacular results. I had a green thumb. Imagine that. Someone who watched for death could grow anything.\n\nAs the years passed and I waited to see her, my plan took shape. She'd sentenced me to a half life. When she took my children, she took my joy. She wouldn't let me die. She said it wasn't my time, as if she could dictate the end of a person's life by a timetable worked up like a train schedule. Good. I've been waiting. I've arranged for a little surprise.\n\nIt begins tonight, symbolically enough, on my birthday. I saw his ship in the harbor last night while I walked the midnight streets, unafraid of harm because it \"isn't my time.\"\n\nTonight I'll be forty-three, a mother of dead children, a divorc\u00e9e, a failed suicide. A winner.\n\nThe winter days are short, and I've watched the sun wane and the timid appearance of the gibbous moon. Somehow, I thought it might be full\u2014too many superstitions and legends, I suppose.\n\nMy home isn't far from downtown, which is my destination. Thank goodness it's a weeknight. On weekends young people crowd Dauphin Street to drink and party and listen to music. Tonight, a Tuesday, the downtown will be quiet. The hunters will be out.\n\nBy the time I park my Volvo beside a meter, which I deliberately don't feed, dusk has fallen like the soft kiss on a child's sleeping brow. The Mobile River is only a few blocks away, and I can smell the water. The last, lingering businessmen and-women are hurrying out of downtown. Hurrying home, as out of control of their lives as I used to be.\n\nNeon lights a few bars, and I go to Barnacle Bill's. I've watched my pirate often enough to know this is where he'll be. Just as I step to the doorway, a rustle of wind reveals her image. She's in Bienville Square, a vague outline among the squirrels and homeless people who sleep on the park benches. She walks beside an old man, and he never senses her. I know exactly what she'd say. It isn't his time.\n\nI never considered that she might read my mind. Can she squeeze my heart at a distance? Can she send a blood clot streaming through my lungs? I'd always assumed she has to touch me, but I might be wrong. Now that would be a fatal mistake, so to speak.\n\nI step into the darkness of Barnacle Bill's and inhale the smell of stale smoke and spilled beer. Old men slouch at the bar, hovering over mugs of beer. I'm the only woman in the place, and that draws interest, for about ten seconds. One look at my face, and all the men turn back to the drinks they're nursing. I'm not there for company.\n\nA puff of smoke spirals from a corner so dark I can't make out the features of the smoker. That's where I want to be. I walk to the booth and sit, uninvited.\n\n\"I'm Sandra, and it's my birthday,\" I say. \"I have a wish.\"\n\n\"Fascinating.\" The accent is impossible to place, a blend of French and Spanish and old South. Beautiful. Seductive. I hadn't expected to feel that.\n\n\"Will you grant me a wish?\" I have to clear my throat twice before I get the question out. I'm afraid. Fancy that. After all this time, all the planning, I'm afraid.\n\n\"Depends.\"\n\n\"I know who you are. I know about you. I've done my homework. Mobile Bay, 1823, the ship Esmeralda. You were walking along the docks late one night. You felt a tap on your shoulder and then a bite on your neck. You come back to Mobile to commemorate your making, and to hunt.\"\n\nHe leaned forward, his eyes so black I felt as if I were being pulled into bottomless darkness. \"And what else do you think you know, cher?\"\n\n\"I know you can give me peace. You can take my life and give me immortality.\"\n\nHis hand, the fingers chill, brushes my cheek. His touch is sensual and also terrifying. This is the hand of Death that I've sought for the last half of my life, but death on my terms.\n\n\"It doesn't always work that way, cher. This immortality you request comes in degrees and always with a price.\"\n\nWhen he smiles, I see the points of his fangs. His face is dark-hued, the color of coffee or a nut. His teeth are white and his hair jet-black, long and beautiful. He's no older than forty-five, or maybe two hundred and forty-five.\n\n\"Death has come for me. She says it's my time. After twenty years of begging to die, I refuse to do it on her schedule. She took my children. She took my life.\" The anger hardens my words into rocks that I hurl at him. \"She has her little list with my name at the top, but she won't win this time.\"\n\nHis laughter is sucked into the beer-sodden wood of the bar. I've amused him.\n\n\"You think to best Death.\"\n\n\"I do.\" I don't hesitate. I stretch out my wrists. \"I've wanted to die for a long time. Now I refuse\u2014because it suits her.\"\n\n\"So you want the bite of immortality. To what end?\"\n\n\"You hold the power of life and death. You are her rival. I want you to win.\"\n\nHis smile looks haunted, and he doesn't answer immediately.\n\nFrom the table beside us a pile of napkins whirl into the air. She's here. She's standing right beside me, her hand reaching out for mine.\n\n\"Help me. Please.\" I ignore her and focus all of my powers of persuasion on him. I think that I shouldn't have waited until the last minute. I should've come sooner.\n\nBefore I can blink, he's swept me into his arms. In a blur of speed we're out the back door and into the alley.\n\n\"Happy birthday, Sandra,\" he says just before his teeth sink into my neck. This time the blood loss is erotic instead of painful. I feel my body grow limp. Soon I will sleep and awaken to a world where Death has no hold on me.\n\n## Fire and Ice and Linguini for Two\n\nTate Hallaway\n\nTate Hallaway is the author of other works featuring the main characters in this story: Tall, Dark & Dead, published in May 2006, and Dead Sexy, published in May 2007. She's intimately familiar with Midwest winters, having grown up in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Tate currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with five monochromatic cats and her adorable four-year-old son, Mason.\n\nSebastian told me several times that his birthday was cursed. I didn't really believe him, but when I found myself standing ankle deep in exhaust-smudged snow on the shoulder of County Highway 5 while Sebastian stared glumly at the engine block of our stalled car, I started to reconsider.\n\nWe were stuck. A broken broomstick handle propped open the hood of the '90 Honda Civic. Sebastian usually drove a mint-condition classic car, but since it had no heater, it wasn't especially suitable for Wisconsin winters. The Honda was a beater from Jensen's, the garage where Sebastian worked. He had it on loan for as long as the bad weather lasted.\n\nSebastian held the distributor cap in his hands and was doing something to it with a fingernail file he had borrowed from my purse. The way he was dressed, it could be twenty degrees, instead of twenty below\u2014no hat, no scarf, no gloves. In fact, all he had on as protection against the wind was one of those shapeless parkas, broken-in, loose-fitting jeans, and cowboy boots. He looked much more like a car mechanic than a vampire. Of course, he was a car mechanic\u2014it was his day job. That's right, you heard me, day job. Sebastian had been made by magic instead of by blood, and he could walk in the sunshine.\n\nNot that there was much of that left.\n\nThe sunset threw pink and blue shadows over the frozen cornfields. In the fading light, icicles glittered from the eaves of a nearby abandoned barn. A dog howled in the distance. It would have been beautiful if it wasn't so damned cold.\n\nDespite the below-zero breeze pulling at his long black hair, Sebastian worked unhurriedly, impervious to the cold. The tips of his ears weren't even red; I could feel mine burning under the fake fur of my hat. His composure in the bitter cold made him seem especially supernatural. When I took in a deep breath of icy air, my jaw clenched in a way that made my teeth actually chatter.\n\nIt must be nice to be dead.\n\nMeanwhile, I was freezing my butt off. I looked great in my estate sale\u2013find Harris Tweed wool coat, fluffy Russian hat, and fake-fur lined boots, but the skimpy little black number I had underneath everything let the cold seep in to the bone. Normally, a forecast of subzero temperatures suppressed my fashionista tendencies, but it was Sebastian's birthday, and I'd wanted to glam things up. No doubt I looked absolutely fabulous underneath my winter layers, but a fat lot of good that did me right now. I was shivering so hard that my knees literally knocked together.\n\nThe deep blue shadows stretched in the fading rose-colored light, and above us, a highway light snapped on. Sebastian glanced up in the sudden illumination, and then glared at me for a short moment before going back to the distributor cap.\n\nSebastian hadn't said much since the car sputtered and died twenty minutes ago, and I knew he was brooding. He hadn't wanted to come out for his birthday. He said he'd never celebrated it in all the thousand-odd years of his life, and he hardly wanted to start now. It had never been a happy occasion for him.\n\nHe believed his birthday caused him to become a vampire.\n\nToday was Christmas.\n\nApparently, the superstition at the time Sebastian was born was that sharing a birthday with Jesus was extremely bad juju\u2014something about your parents engaging in earthly pleasures at the same time of year that the Virgin Mary had been divinely conceiving. Whatever. It made no sense at all to me, not being of a religious persuasion that concerned itself with Jesus' birthday, but it was important to Sebastian. Plus, he had been reminded of this wickedness every single birthday. He told me once that the curse had become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, since he had pursued the \"dark arts\" of alchemy and witchcraft partly because people expected him to. If he hadn't, he would never have discovered the formula that made him a vampire.\n\n\"Try it now, Garnet,\" Sebastian shouted from somewhere under the hood. I slipped and slid over the frozen slush to the driver's side. I scooted into the driver's seat and shut the door to the wind. Depressing the clutch, I put my hand on the key and made a quick appeal to Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire. I closed my eyes and whispered, Give us a spark. Please.\n\nWhen the engine turned over, I almost thought my prayers were answered. Then the noise stopped again, and this time, I had the distinct impression that something died\u2014a metal-on-metal, grinding, final death.\n\n\"Nothing,\" I shouted back as if he couldn't tell. Having grown up with Midwestern winters, I couldn't help but complete the traditional call-and-response of injured vehicles.\n\nI waited for another word from Sebastian. Instead, he shut the hood with a firm finality, like closing the lid of a coffin.\n\nI cranked down the window as he came around. I gave him a hopeful smile, but he shook his head. \"It's dead.\"\n\nI tried to remain perky. \"It's still early,\" I said. \"We could call a cab.\"\n\nSebastian leaned against the driver's side door, looking away from me. Crossing his arms in front of his chest despite the bulk of his parka, he stared out into the darkening fields. \"Is anyone going to be working today?\"\n\n\"The restaurant is open,\" I reminded him. \"As is the movie theater.\" Despite being moderately sized, Madison\u2014a left-leaning, radical, college town\u2014had a large contingent of people for whom Christmas is just another day. In fact, I'd debated long and hard about whether or not to keep open the occult bookstore I managed but had decided to close it in deference to Sebastian's birthday. It was winter break and my college-age staff was all at home enjoying roast turkey right about now, and I'd have had to staff the store myself. I'd wanted the day off to spend with Sebastian.\n\nSebastian fished through his pockets for his cell phone, but came up empty-handed. \"Figures,\" he sighed as we searched the car. \"Benjamin must have walked off with it again.\"\n\nBenjamin was Sebastian's resident house-ghost\u2014well, poltergeist, really, since he had a tendency to toss things around when riled up. Still, it wasn't like him to run off with Sebastian's things. Benjamin was usually very loyal to Sebastian to the point of \"defending\" the house from all interlopers, even me. \"What did you do to piss him off?\"\n\n\"I've been thinking about rewallpapering Vivian's room.\"\n\n\"Are you insane?\" Vivian was Benjamin's wife, whom we suspected Benjamin had axe-murdered in that very room. Benjamin got especially crazy if anything in her bedroom was altered. In fact, Benjamin was so obsessed with keeping things precisely as they were, Sebastian could sometimes trick him into cleaning the place by moving some of Vivian's things to other parts of the house.\n\nSebastian lifted his shoulders in a shrug barely visible through the thick down of his parka. \"Why don't we just go home?\"\n\nI would have been more excited about his suggestion if he'd sounded more \"in the mood.\" But I could hear the defeatism oozing from each syllable. Even so, part of me did want to just give up\u2014the exact part being my frozen toes\u2014but I was on a personal crusade to shake Sebastian of his birthday melancholia. He'd been carrying around this hatred of his birthday for a millennium. It was time for an attitude adjustment.\n\nSebastian's farm was just about as far away from us now as Portobello Restaurant, where we had reservations in twenty minutes. We could still make it.\n\n\"I'm sure there's a farmhouse nearby,\" I said, rearranging my hat so it covered more of my ears. \"We can call a cab from there.\"\n\n\"For home.\"\n\n\"For the restaurant.\"\n\nWe got into one of those stare-downs where a normal person would just let the vampire win. The look of fierce intensity in those chestnut brown eyes with their eerie golden starburst pattern around the pupil said Back off. I, however, am a pigheaded Witch, and I'm somewhat careless with my sense of self-preservation.\n\n\"Come on.\" I pasted a cheery smile on my face, despite the skin-numbing chill. Swinging the car door open, I strolled out into the frozen wasteland with a jaunty step. \"It'll be an adventure.\"\n\nFor several steps I wondered if Sebastian was going to let me have this so-called adventure on my own. Then, in that silent way he had, he was suddenly beside me.\n\n\"You're incorrigible,\" he grunted, but there was the hint of a smile in his voice. Victory.\n\nIt didn't take long for me to regret my pluckiness. Minus twenty was dangerously cold, and I was just not dressed for it. My face felt raw, and my toes had gone way past the tingly phase. I was seriously entertaining the idea of asking Sebastian to turn me into one of the living dead so that I didn't have to deal with the prospect of freezing to death when we spotted a pickup truck heading in our direction.\n\nActually, at first, all I saw were two points of light, like the eyes of some huge animal. Through the still night air, I heard the snarl and spit of a working engine. I waved frantically, hoping to flag the vehicle down. My only thought was: heater.\n\nMiraculously, it stopped.\n\nBehind the wheel of the shiny black Ford was a woman in her mid to late fifties. The curls of hair that stuck out from an Elmer Fudd earflap hat were the color of steel wool. Her cheeks were burned red by the wind and cold. One look at her REI arctic-ready parka, insulated gloves, snow pants, and heavy-duty boots, and I knew she was a farmer.\n\nThe interior of the cab was blessedly hot and smelled faintly of stale coffee and wet dog. \"Thanks for stopping,\" I said, climbing in gingerly.\n\nShe nodded in that rural way that implied You're-welcome and I-should-have-my-head-examined-for-this-act-of-kindness all at once.\n\n\"You should really stay with your car on a night like this,\" the driver said as I wedged myself into the center of the bench seat. She was right, of course. Beyond the actual temperature, there was the wind chill, which could be considerably lower. A car protected you from that. Plus, out in the elements the cold hemorrhaged heat from your body. Inside a car, at least, you could build up a bit of warmth just from your own breathing. Not to mention the fact that I had no idea how far I would have had to walk to find another farm, and there's always the risk of getting lost. Cops and snowplow drivers are trained to stop for cars with red flags tied to the antenna to look for people trapped inside.\n\nAs a native Minnesotan, I knew all that. I was about to acknowledge my failure in winter safety rules when she added, \"Don't either of you two have a phone?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said miserably.\n\nSebastian just shook his head. \"I don't suppose you do?\"\n\nShe flashed a thin smile that held only a hint of self-righteousness. \"Of course.\" She pulled a sequin-studded flip case from the interior pocket of her parka. I raised my eyes at the shiny appliqu\u00e9s as I handed it to Sebastian.\n\nHe snapped it open and frowned. \"No signal.\" Then, \"And...now your battery is dead.\" Handing it back to me, he mouthed, \"Cursed.\"\n\n\"That's strange,\" she said when I gave it back to her. \"It was working a half hour ago.\"\n\n\"I'm cursed,\" Sebastian said out loud this time, matter-of-factly.\n\nThe woman gave us a crook of a snow-white eyebrow and pulled back on to the road. \"So,\" she said, sounding anxious to get rid of us, \"where are you headed?\"\n\nI didn't take it personally. I was sure we made a strange pair\u2014me, bundled up like some kind of accident between a Russian babushka and a Goth supermodel, and him, grumpily cryptic and ridiculously underdressed.\n\nI looked to Sebastian for an answer to her question, but he stared out at the graying sky. I had to snap him out of this. He was being downright antisocial and rude.\n\n\"If you're headed to town,\" I tried hopefully, and when she didn't deny it, I added, \"Anywhere close to State Street would do us.\"\n\nShe nodded, her eyes on the black strip of asphalt. Wind threw streaks of powdery snow across the road where it slithered like snakes, twisting and turning before merging with the drifts on the opposite side. \"You kids off on a date?\"\n\n\"His birthday.\"\n\nShe nodded as if considering something. I braced myself for a Christmas comment or joke. Finally, she simply said dryly, \"Nice day for it.\"\n\nThunder rolled outside, strangely synchronous with her tone.\n\nSebastian roused himself from his brood enough to inquire, \"Was there supposed to be a storm coming in?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah,\" said the driver, in a pitch-perfect Minnesotan accent. \"National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning.\"\n\n\"This just gets better and better,\" Sebastian grumbled.\n\nI gave him a punch in the arm, as if to say, \"Be nice!\"\n\n\"I feel terrible,\" I said. \"I should really have introduced myself. I'm Garnet Lacey, and my delightful companion here is my boyfriend, Sebastian Von Traum.\"\n\nShe nodded her greeting. \"Fonn Hyrokkin.\" In the flash of a passing car's headlight, something sparkled in her eyes like ice.\n\nHyrokkin sounded a lot like the Finnish surnames I'd grown up with in northern Minnesota, but something about the way she said it, as though it were more of a title, made me pause.\n\nI looked with my magical vision, but it was too dark to get a good read of her aura. Auras are like halos of refracted light around a person or an object, and they can't be seen without some kind of illumination. I've found artificial fluorescents work best, but light of some kind is an absolute must. The glow of the dashboard just wasn't cutting it.\n\nDespite my growing unease about our driver, we fell into a silence.\n\nYou can't live in the upper Midwest without having to deal with quietness. I grew up in Minnesota, so I should be used to it: but I'm a chronic chatterer. I even commit the cardinal sin of enticing strangers into conversation in elevators. When I can't talk, I tap my toes and drum my fingers. It was strange, but one of the things I like about my adoptive state of Wisconsin is that people around here seem to be much more willing to engage in copious amounts of small talk. Just my luck, the one Norwegian in all of Wisconsin would have to pick us up.\n\nI glanced at Sebastian for support as my feet started their nervousness dance. He just glumly watched the darkness roll past the window.\n\nPulling at the fingers of my gloves, I looked back at Fonn. She stared resolutely ahead. Our shoulders touched when the truck bounced over uneven patches in the road, and each time they did I would have sworn I could smell dog more sharply. I told myself that maybe her golden retriever liked to nap on her coat. I mean, I was sure some of my clothes smelled of cat. Barney snoozed in my dresser drawer any time I accidentally left it open. Anyway, why should that make me so nervous? As someone who kept a pet, I tended to see animal ownership as a positive personality trait. The people who didn't have animals when they could always seemed a little suspect. So what bothered me? Was it that the dog wasn't anywhere in sight?\n\nI listened to the sound of the engine growling as we continued to bump along the deserted county road. I wanted to ask Fonn about the dog I could smell but couldn't think of a polite way to bring it up. \"Say, I notice your truck stinks of wet pooch. So what kind is it, and where is it anyway?! Oh, that's actually your body odor? My bad,\" seemed just a little bit tactless.\n\nOn the side of the road, Christmas lights festooned a one-story ranch whose lawn was littered with illuminated and motorized reindeer, elves, snowmen, and a glow-in-the-dark plastic cr\u00e8che. Three pairs of eyes turned to watch the extravaganza disappear behind us, but, in true Midwestern fashion, we kept our own counsel.\n\nLightning flashed across the sky. Snow sprinkled the windshield.\n\n\"What the heck?\" I said, looking at tiny kernels of snow that the wiper brushed away. \"It's far too cold to snow.\" I might have failed winter safety, but I knew that there were temperatures at which snow couldn't form. It was simply not possible.\n\nSomething very strange was happening outside. Something unnatural.\n\n\"Storm,\" Fonn whispered reverently. \"It's going to be a big one.\"\n\nDeep in my belly, Lilith grumbled.\n\nSharing a body with the Goddess Lilith meant that sometimes She felt free to editorialize. The snarl surprised me, however. It struck me as threatened...or even territorial. Though I knew it wasn't audible to anyone else, I put my hand over my stomach.\n\nI glanced over at Sebastian to see if he registered Lilith's complaint. Thanks to a blood-bonding spell, Sebastian could sense Lilith's moods.\n\nHe inspected Fonn with sudden interest. I followed his gaze to see what it was about her that suddenly fascinated him and concerned Lilith. In the bluish glow of the dashboard lights, her facial features were sharp, yet broad, and her skin stretched tightly across high cheekbones. She had a certain regalness about her, but nothing I hadn't seen in countless faces of the farmers in Finlayson, Minnesota, where I grew up.\n\nThe only thing that struck me as particularly odd was the faint hint of a smile. She stared out at the wind and snow like something about it tickled her fancy...or made her proud. Yeah, that was it. She was staring at the growing storm like a mother would watch a baby taking its first steps.\n\nCreepy.\n\nSebastian and I shared a look that said, Something here isn't right. After all the silence, I was grateful to be communicating with Sebastian again, even if it was only about the bizarreness of our situation. He flashed me a crooked smile which seemed to say, Isn't this just our luck? I nodded in quiet agreement.\n\nWind pushed against the truck hard enough to cause us to coast slightly toward the center line. Fonn corrected for it with a twinkle in her eye.\n\nSo, my first thought was that Fonn was some kind of demented storm chaser, except that Lilith rarely gave me the nudge when people were just plain odd. If She did, I'd be getting poked a lot, given the type I tended to attract. No, there had to be something supernatural going on here, but what?\n\nIf Fonn wasn't a deranged meteorologist, what else could she be? Severe weather made her ecstatic, she was out on a cold night alone, and her truck smelled like dog. Seemed to me it was time to play twenty questions. Yet how to interrogate her without raising suspicion? \"So, Fonn,\" I said, trying to affect the vaguely disinterested conversation style of a church basement social gathering. \"You from around here?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\nArgh! Foiled by a yes-no question and a wily yet taciturn respondent.\n\n\"Where are you from?\" Sebastian asked, picking up the dropped ball.\n\n\"Came over from the Old Country.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Sebastian said. \"I was born in Austria. You?\"\n\n\"Norway.\"\n\nOkay, we had something on her. Not that it helped much. I looked to Sebastian, but he just shrugged. He didn't have a clue what sort of magical being she might be, either.\n\nThe wind howled around the truck. Sheets of snow spattered against the windows. That was another oddity. The snow had changed from tiny ice pellets into large, fluffy flakes. The temperature must have shifted dramatically. It was just plain strange to see that kind of snow transformation so quickly. Normally, you saw one kind of flake or another, or if they changed at all, it was gradual, like over the course of several hours. Not minutes.\n\nThis storm challenged all my well-honed Midwestern senses. It was seriously freaking me out. Somehow Fonn was behind it, I was certain.\n\nSo, okay, maybe Fonn wielded some kind of weather magic. Did I know any Old Norse otherworldly beings in charge of snow? To be honest, the only Norwegian female baddie I could think of was a Valkyrie, and somehow I sensed that wasn't right. It seemed to me that you had to die in battle to meet one of those\u2014oh, and you should probably also be a Viking. Unless something really weird had happened without my knowledge, neither Sebastian nor I fit that particular bill. Well, okay, Sebastian was dead. And he had died in a battle, like the Crusades or against the Huns or something, but that was a long time ago and he definitely wasn't Norse.\n\nFonn turned the truck onto a major thoroughfare. The snow became a blur of fast-falling, large flakes. Despite the wider, well-traveled road, all I could see ahead of us was a vague sense of the center line and ice crystals glistening in the headlights. The truck barreled ahead confidently, but I snaked a hand over to Sebastian's and squeezed tightly.\n\nLilith rippled across my abdomen\u2014a warning.\n\nOkay, so Fonn was crazy magical, but what was Lilith saying? Was Fonn dangerous, too? How?\n\nDespite the Ford's heater going full blast, I felt an icy breeze on the back of my neck. My muscles tensed involuntarily. I snuggled a bit closer to Sebastian, who seemed to be feeling the chill also. The arm he wrapped around my shoulder shuddered slightly.\n\n\"Cold?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said, raising his shoulders as if to ward off a wind. \"Just now.\"\n\n\"The storm is picking up,\" Fonn said, as if that explained why the temperature suddenly affected my undead vampire lover. \"We might need to find shelter,\" she added, using her gloved hand to turn the wipers up a notch. They beat furiously against the glass.\n\n\"We've got to be getting closer to town,\" I muttered to myself. Sebastian's farm was no more than ten minutes from the edges of Madison's suburbs. It seemed like we'd been driving twice that long, especially given that when we'd broken down we were almost halfway to the edge of town.\n\n\"I may have missed a turnoff,\" Fonn said. \"Visibility sucks. I think I might have gotten turned around. We're a bit lost.\"\n\nWe're not lost, I thought. We're being taken somewhere. Madison wasn't exactly a bustling metropolis. Okay, sure, it was the capital city of Wisconsin, but there weren't that many roads that led in and out of it. Provided you stayed pointed in the same direction, getting lost was actually kind of difficult. Fonn knew where we were, I was sure of it, especially when I noticed that slight, malicious smile twitched across her lips again. I was just about to call her on it when Sebastian piped up.\n\n\"A bit lost? Isn't that like being a little pregnant?\" Sebastian asked, though his question was clearly rhetorical and sarcastic. \"Lost. That's fantastic.\"\n\nI rolled my eyes and shrugged out from under his arm. \"This is not your curse,\" I said with a long-suffering sigh.\n\n\"Are you kidding me?\" Sebastian snapped out of his funk long enough to let out a rant. \"We're stuck in an ice storm with the creature from the black lagoon, and you don't think it's because my parents are sinners and I practiced the dark arts on the holy days?\"\n\n\"No, I don't. You're suffering because your parents had sex on a night they weren't supposed to? Do you even realize how insane that sounds?\" I asked, giving him the she-can-hear-you glare.\n\n\"I'm from Norway,\" Fonn added, sounding only a little put out. I started to giggle at the absurdity of her correction, when she continued, \"And I'm not a 'creature'; I'm a demon.\"\n\n\"Oh, well,\" Sebastian said dryly. \"That makes things much better.\"\n\nI gave Sebastian a little nudge to say Go ahead, idiot, poke the demon.\n\nThe wipers smeared ice and slush uselessly across the windshield. We were surrounded in whiteness. The storm had become a full-on blizzard.\n\nPulling off to the side, Fonn slowed to a stop. \"We need to wait this out.\"\n\n\"Yeah, great,\" Sebastian muttered.\n\nEven though she'd identified herself as a demon, I still figured a little common courtesy could go a long way. \"Thanks for picking us up,\" I said, staring out into the shifting white. \"We'd be dead otherwise.\"\n\nFonn smiled.\n\nLilith tightened the muscles in my abdomen.\n\nThe chill crept along my spine again, like fingers of frost.\n\n\"Jesus, it's cold in here,\" Sebastian said, reaching for the heater.\n\nSebastian huddled near the vent, hugging himself for warmth. I looked at Fonn and the gleam in her eye.\n\nFonn pushed a button on her dash, and suddenly the cabin was filled with the droning voice of some announcer on Wisconsin Public Radio talking about the stock market and Bulgarian politics or some other esoteric subject. I didn't really listen. I was too busy freaking out. Sebastian looked miserable. He shivered pathetically. I ran my hand along the back of his neck lightly to comfort him. His skin felt cold.\n\nCold? That wasn't right. Yeah, okay, he was a vampire, and most vampires have cold skin. Not my boy. His magic made him hot-blooded. I pulled my fingers away in surprise.\n\n\"Sebastian,\" I said. \"You're cold.\"\n\n\"Damn right. I'm freezing.\" He rubbed his arms in the classic style, trying to get some heat from the friction.\n\nWind rattled the windows of the truck. Everywhere was white on night, and where the headlights beamed, it reminded me a bit of the image of hyperspace from Star Wars. Sebastian shouldn't be cold; this storm shouldn't be so strong, so soon.\n\n\"You're sucking the life from us to make this storm, aren't you?\" I demanded of Fonn, who sat smugly watching the snow pile up on the windshield.\n\nMidshiver, Sebastian glanced up at Fonn. \"Hey, I don't have any life,\" he pointed out.\n\n\"Energy,\" Fonn interjected. \"And, if I may say so, you're both loaded.\"\n\nThat would explain why Lilith didn't like Fonn much. An energysnarfing demon would probably consider a goddess an all-you-can-eat-buffet.\n\n\"That's fan-fucking-tastic,\" Sebastian said. \"Happy birthday to me.\"\n\nA knock on the driver's side window made everybody jump, even Fonn. She powered-down the window, letting in an arctic blast of wind and snow. I noticed the faint flash of blue lights behind us and the reflective paint at the tip of a snowplow's blade.\n\n\"Everyone all right in here?\" a male voice asked. I had the impression of a mustache underneath the fake fur of a parka hood wrapped tightly around his head.\n\nFonn eyed the newcomer in a way that could only be described as hungry.\n\n\"We could use some help,\" Fonn said, her voice abruptly shifting to that of a feeble older woman's. Fonn was going to eat this unsuspecting stranger, too! I suddenly realized she'd been out trolling for victims and anyone would do. Of course, she'd lucked out and got a goddess-toting Witch and her supernatural vampire boyfriend. Good day for Fonn; bad day for us.\n\nLilith pushed against my stomach, like a snake uncoiling. But before I could react, Sebastian spoke up.\n\n\"Actually, we're fine. Just waiting out the storm a bit.\" Sebastian's voice was liquid glamour. For a moment, I swore the cab of the truck smelled faintly of cinnamon toast and hot cocoa\u2014very comforting smells, very homey. In fact, even I was feeling pretty safe and a little bit sleepy.\n\nThe snowplow driver nodded, completely duped by vampire charm. \"Yeah, this weather sure is a doozie. You take care now.\"\n\nHe disappeared into the snow, and I let out my breath when I heard the plow's engine spring to life behind us.\n\nFonn did not look happy with either of us.\n\nThe temperature inside the cab dropped ten degrees. I could see my breath come out in white puffs. Sebastian took in a ragged breath at the same time, as if he also felt the shift. The snowy wind coming through the open window tossed Fonn's curls about wildly. Her eyes flashed a stormy gray. Wind howled around the truck like a wolf.\n\nHeat leeched from me in waves. I could see steam lifting from my body, rising to curl around Fonn like smoke. Fonn's expression was pure triumph. She was going to suck the heat from us and make the mother of all blizzards.\n\nSo I kicked her.\n\nI'm not usually a big proponent of violence, but I found her self-satisfied grin too annoying to bear.\n\nI'd like to pretend that after my swift kick to the shin Fonn crumpled over in abject pain and suffering, we overpowered her, and that was the end of things, but in reality she gave me a do-that-again-and-I-will-squash-you-like-a-bug frown and continued stealing our life force.\n\nUndaunted, I kicked her again. Harder. With both feet this time.\n\nI must have gotten the angle just right, because she fell backward onto the door latch. Unexpectedly, the door swung open, causing her to lose her balance. She flailed around gracelessly for a second, groping for something to hold on to. Finding nothing, Fonn fell with a whump out of the cab.\n\nI slid into her seat and shut the door.\n\n\"Go!\" shouted Sebastian, despite the fact that the only thing I could see out of the window was white, white, and more white. \"Let's get out of here.\"\n\n\"We can't,\" I explained. \"You saw what she was like with the snowplow driver. She'll just find another person to suck.\" Rolling up the window, I cranked up the heater a notch.\n\n\"Garnet,\" Sebastian said, \"she's clearly some kind of elemental. We're not going to be able to stop her. I'm not even sure Lilith could. Forces of nature are just that.... Part of the natural order of things. You can't just wipe out the one in charge of winter.\"\n\nWhy not? Couldn't I just back the truck up and run over her a few times? Bump-bump, no more winter! I mean, come on, in Wisconsin winter generally sucks. Here in America's Dairyland it was cold and miserable for nearly half the year. Sure, the first snowstorm with those fluffy, storybook flakes was beautiful, but it took less than a week for all the snow to get dirty from exhaust and other urban detritus.\n\nBut I supposed Sebastian had a point. Global warming was already a problem. If we stopped having winter altogether, we'd probably ruin some endangered ecological niche. Walleye population would explode from a lack of ice fishing. There'd be no annual mosquito die-off and they'd take over the world. So not cool, as it were.\n\nEspecially since I try to be so low-impact, you know? I even recycle my toilet paper rolls.\n\n\"We have to do something,\" I insisted. I was starting to feel a bit warmer, more like myself, but not quite. My hands shook where I gripped the steering wheel.\n\n\"Yeah, drive,\" said Sebastian. \"Away. Fast.\"\n\nThe snow flurries lessened enough to give me a tad more visibility. I glanced down out the side window, hoping to see Fonn unconscious on the snow. No luck. She was out there somewhere. Lurking.\n\nI waved my hands in the direction of the sheets of snow still coming down thick and wet. \"If I hit the gas right now, Sebastian, we'd ram into a light pole or another car. I can't see a damn thing.\"\n\n\"Except that,\" Sebastian said dryly, pointing.\n\nI gasped. Fonn pressed her face against the windshield. Rows of sharklike teeth lined an open, hungry mouth. Her hair whipped like snakes in the wind, blending into the sleet. Claws raked at the glass.\n\n\"Oh, great,\" I said.\n\n\"Did you have a plan to get rid of her?\" Sebastian asked as the safety glass began to show spiderweb cracks. \"Because now would be a great time to let me know.\"\n\n\"So, what do you think?\" I asked, jumping in my seat at each slam of her claws on the windshield. \"Could you take her? You've got super-vamp strength, right? How about you jump her?\"\n\n\"How about I not? For one, I don't think I could take her down, and secondly, what do I do once I have her? I can't bite her; she might have antifreeze in her veins. How about you unleash Lilith?\"\n\nThe windshield was completely cracked and starting to buckle in places. Safety glass, my ass.\n\nLilith was more than ready for the fight. It would not be a difficult thing to let Her out; but, She was Queen of Hell, Mother of Destruction. What if Lilith not only killed Fonn but also showed her usual lack of discretion and killed Sebastian, too? Then we'd have all that environmental disaster or Ragnarok or Goddess-knows-what-end-of-the-universe kind of stuff, and I'd be out one boyfriend.\n\nColdness began to seep in. I knew Fonn would be inside in a second.\n\nI hit the gas hard and then slammed on the brakes. She slid off the hood and disappeared into the whiteout.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Sebastian, a little startled. \"Good job.\"\n\n\"She'll be back,\" I reminded him. \"We need to think of something slightly more permanent, but not too permanent.\"\n\n\"Not to be unmanly, but I still think running away is a good option.\"\n\n\"Well, it may come to that,\" I admitted, hating the idea of leaving the next poor sap who happened to be out on Christmas to the fate of getting chomped by a heat-munching demon. \"Are you sure you can't bite her?\"\n\n\"I could,\" Sebastian said thoughtfully, then added, \"if I want to die. Magical blood will kill me dead. And, like I said, God knows what's coursing through those veins. You saw her, right? Did she look even vaguely human?\"\n\n\"No,\" I agreed. \"So, if she eats energy, how do we counter that? She can't be too affected by cold. I mean, she clearly controls it.\"\n\n\"What about antifreeze?\" Sebastian asked. \"What if we blasted her with hot water and antifreeze straight from the radiator? Maybe, if nothing else, we could overload her.... Yeah, this could work. Turn off the engine. I've got an idea.\"\n\nSwitching the ignition off meant no more heat. In the dangerous snowfall, it made no sense. As I hesitated, I felt someone pull at the truck's door. I had to twist in my seat to double-check that it was locked. Sebastian reached across the seat and pulled out the keys.\n\n\"Distract her,\" he said, opening the passenger's side door and disappearing into the snow.\n\n\"Distract her? With what, my good looks?\" I shouted at the open door. Two seconds later it registered: there was an open door.\n\nSlowly taking form, Fonn materialized out of the snow. First, I noticed the black pits of eyes. Next I saw snow-white hair slashing wildly around her inhuman face. She crawled across the seat toward me, slowly, like a cat stalking its prey. Bitter wind blasted me, freezing the tips of my nose and ears.\n\nOkay, I'll admit it. I screamed. Screeched, really\u2014all high-pitched and useless. I even started fumbling with the locks, slipping and scrabbling like a classic horror-film babe, until I remembered my purse. I made a snatch for it, and in a second, my fingers found the Mace where it always hung on the chain next to my keys.\n\nPulling out the tiny canister, I pointed the nozzle at those razor-sharp teeth. I let rip a big, nasty blast of the stuff.\n\nFonn reared back with a painful shriek. She pawed at her face.\n\nI didn't wait to see how quickly she might recover. Besides, discharging the pepper spray in an enclosed space had unintended consequences, like my own eyes starting to water. This time deftly flipping the lock, I scrambled out of the truck. Once outside, I slammed the door. I hadn't really meant to shut it quite so hard, but the wind propelled it out of my hand.\n\nSnow raged around me in blinding swirls. Momentarily, I lost sight of the truck even though I was standing right beside it. For a second, I thought maybe I'd blinded myself with the Mace. Then the truck reappeared in a gust of wind. I slapped my hands on to the metal frame so as not to lose it again.\n\n\"Sebastian,\" I shouted into the squall. \"Where are you?\"\n\nI strained to hear anything beyond the rush of air, and I inched forward toward the hood of the vehicle. Oh, it would so not be good to lose my boyfriend on his birthday. I started to feel a real quiver of panic as the storm continued to bluster. I couldn't see anything. Snow slid into the tops of my boots as I sank knee-deep with each step. I felt like I was climbing forward into empty space.\n\n\"Sebastian!\"\n\nAt this point, I might even have been grateful to see Fonn. Any sign that I wasn't completely swept away into nothingness would have been welcome.\n\nAs if on cue, claws snipped at my back. Talons pierced my coat and scratched skin.\n\nI tried to run. I tripped over something and lost my grip on the truck. My entire world became snow. There was snow in my mouth, my eyes, my nose, covering my face, and surrounding my body. I felt suffocated by cold. I started really screaming\u2014deep, terrified-for-your-life bawling.\n\nHands griped my shoulders with a familiar strength and pulled me under the truck. The space between the undercarriage and the road was like a little cave. Heat from the engine had carved a no-snow zone, and I lay on my belly on warm, wet road. Sebastian stretched out beside me with a long hose in his hand. The hose was attached to something above us, and his fingers rested on a tiny spigot.\n\n\"Radiator drain,\" Sebastian explained. \"Is she coming?\"\n\nI started to explain that Fonn had been at my back a second ago when we noticed the digging. Claws scooped out huge chunks of snow, like a demonic prairie dog. Plus, I could feel her magic leeching the heat from me. Cold seeped in from the ground. My body felt heavy with ice, as if I were freezing solid.\n\nTeeth were the first things I saw. I swore they'd grown. They now extended into grotesque spikes, like something you might see on a deep-sea creature or in your nightmares. Her face, too, was distended, almost fishlike, so she seemed to be one human-sized, extended gullet.\n\nSebastian's hand began to quake. Ice rimmed his eye lashes and coated his hair. I hadn't noticed that his fingers crimped together the hose; as the magic started to immobilize him, his fingers slipped off. A blast of heated liquid shot forward. Steam billowed everywhere. The smell of antifreeze filled the air, and I coughed, gagging.\n\nNeon green splashed down Fonn's gaping throat. When she startled and closed her mouth with a snap, the hot stuff squirted her right between her eyes.\n\nFonn yelped like a wounded dog, but there was so much steam in the cramped space I had a hard time seeing what was happening. But I certainly heard the gnashing of teeth, the snarling (which might have been Sebastian, come to think of it), and then a howl like a wounded hound of hell that nearly split my eardrums. The wind lifted the tires of the truck off the ground unevenly, so it seemed to bounce.\n\nThen everything was quiet. Dead quiet.\n\nSebastian crimped the hose again. When the steam cleared, all I could see was a huge melted hole of toxic-green slush. From the front bumper, icicles dripped to sharp points like teeth.\n\nThere was no sign of Fonn. I held my breath hopefully and strained to hear anything. Sebastian scanned all around us, his fangs still bared.\n\nI almost didn't dare hope, but I felt the difference immediately. I still felt cold, but my limbs lightened. I no longer thought I might become a block of ice.\n\nSebastian put his hand on the spigot. \"Do you think we got her?\" he asked.\n\nI wedged my hand between the ground and my belly. Closing my eyes, I let my consciousness rise out of my body. With Lilith's eyes, I scanned the storm. When I didn't sense Fonn in the immediate area, I reached my mind out further. Far off, on Highway 169, I caught the image of a woman riding bareback on a giant wolf. The vision blurred at the edges, melting into the snow, and steam streamed out of her like blood. She was running wounded. \"We got her,\" I said confidently.\n\nThen I sneezed. The antifreeze smog and the cold plugged up my nose. Dirt was slowly freezing itself into the fabric of my ripped coat and dress. Sebastian screwed tight the spigot and looked over at me. Perhaps in reaction to my miserable expression, he laughed.\n\n\"I'm clearly not cursed.\" He smiled.\n\n\"Oh, yeah, why not?\" Although, when I said it, the words sounded a bit more like \"Hi, what?\"\n\n\"For one, we're not dead,\" he said, pulling the hose from the radiator drain. \"Second, you've got a smudge of dirt on your nose that's absolutely adorable.\" He leaned over and kissed said nose, and I had to scrunch my face to hold back another wet sneeze.\n\nI shook my head. \"No, you are cursed. This was insane.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" he said with a laugh. \"Once I get the hose back in place, we can get this baby running again.\"\n\nI guess defeating an ice demon can brighten a vampire's day, or night, as the case may be. Feeling gross, exhausted, and tired of the cold, I wasn't nearly as chipper as I had been at the start of our trip.\n\nAs he popped the hood, I started to wonder. I supposed the truck now could be considered a stolen vehicle. What is it when you borrow an abandoned one? Still a crime, no doubt. And, honestly, I had to wonder about whether or not Fonn owned this truck to begin with. What if, somewhere out in the snow drifts, there was a heat-sucked corpse waiting to be found and somehow linked back to us? \"Are you sure that's a good idea?\"\n\n\"Be practical,\" Sebastian said as he slid me out of our warmish, wet cave under the truck. \"You'll freeze to death without the heat.\"\n\nHe had a point. I was already chilled to the bone. \"What about all the antifreeze?\"\n\n\"The truck can run on water for a little while.\"\n\nI tried to remember if I'd seen a bottle of water anywhere in the cab. \"Where are we going to get that?\"\n\nSebastian looked around at the piles of snow and gestured with his open hands. \"We seem to have an abundance of the frozen kind right here.\"\n\nI nodded. He got to work with a grin and a whistle. He seemed genuinely pleased to be fixing up the truck. I left him to it. The storm had abated to the point where I could see where I was going, so I stumbled my way back and threw myself into the passenger side of the truck. The interior stank of pepper spray, and, while I waited for Sebastian to finish, I coughed and sneezed until I had to open a window. Sebastian worked by the light of the headlights, while I sat there glumly.\n\nIn the fifteen minutes it took him to reconnect the hose and refill the radiator with snow water, the storm quit enough that I could see the occasional star through breaks in the clouds.\n\nThe truck ran hot all the way into town, but, luckily, Sebastian told me that the best way to contain that problem was to keep the heaters on full-blast.\n\nMy toes were toasty again by the time we pulled up to the darkened restaurant. \"Oh, no,\" I said, noticing the absence of any lights.\n\nSebastian just shook his head, a trace of his earlier sullenness returning. Even so, he pulled the truck into a parking spot and killed the engine. \"We might as well go check it out.\"\n\nDespite myself, I felt a deep stab of desolation. The one thing I'd been fighting for\u2014a decent night out for Sebastian's birthday\u2014now seemed ruined. I could feel a tear hovering at the corner of my eye. I wiped at it with a knuckle. \"Yeah,\" I said, trying to sound hopeful, but failing even to my ears. \"Let's go check it out.\"\n\nI trudged through the courtyard, one of my favorite features of Portobello during the summer. Snow draped the barren Virginia creeper vines that twined around the walls like white-frosted lace. Where they poked through the drifts, black-eyed Susan seed heads wore dots of snow. Dried husks of milkweed and mullein stood sentry over sleeping garden beds. The cobblestone walkway had been recently shoveled, and Sebastian and I made our way quickly to the heavy wooden door. A pull on the brass handle confirmed my worst fears. It was locked. Closed.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I blubbered. Despite my best efforts, a hot tear ran down my chill-burned cheek.\n\nSebastian wrapped his arms around me, and I smelled that comforting scent of cinnamon again. I breathed in deeply. \"It's okay,\" he lied smoothly. \"I'm just glad we're both alive.\"\n\nYeah, and it's my fault we were out in the first place, I wanted to say, but I was too choked up to make my throat work. I was just about to suggest we turn around and head for my apartment, when the door swung open, nearly knocking us off our feet. A round-faced older man wrapped in a shapeless parka and a stocking hat raised his eyebrows at us hugging on the restaurant doorstep.\n\n\"Von Traum party?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, wiping at my tears. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\"You were our only reservation tonight,\" he said. \"When the blizzard hit, everyone cleared out. The storm only now just let up enough for me to get out and shovel. I was just about to head home.\"\n\nI wanted to beg him to stay, but I couldn't blame the guy for wanting to get home after a storm like this one. \"Please don't let us stop you. I'm so sorry you waited for us. We forgot our cell phone.\"\n\n\"No, no problem. If you're happy to pay, I'm happy to stay!\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" I brightened.\n\nHe waved a mitten dismissively. \"I've seen worse storms. Besides, it's your birthday,\" he said to Sebastian. \"You should do something nice. I know how it is; my birthday is on Thanksgiving. Do you even know how sick of turkey I am?\"\n\nWe all laughed.\n\nThen, to Sebastian I asked, \"Are you up for it? Really? I'd understand if you just wanted to go home, too.\"\n\nSebastian smiled. \"Let's stay. I'm starving.\"\n\nThough my dress had claw marks down the back, we had wine and pasta by candlelight and the place to ourselves. The cook pampered us with special sauces, fresh breadsticks and garlic butter, and tiramisu for two. Sebastian's kisses tasted of fresh whipped cream and chocolate.\n\nWe walked to my apartment in the quiet, peaceful snow, hand in hand. At home, I gave him his birthday present\u2014ironically, a part for his antique car that he'd been searching for\u2014and a lot more.\n\n\"Still think you're cursed?\" I asked him, after.\n\nSebastian thought for a moment. \"Let's see, today we had our car break down, met some kind of storm demon who tried to kill us, and had fantastic pasta. Yes, I'm cursed,\" he said. When I was about to protest, he put a finger on my lips. \"But I also have you. That makes the whole thing bearable.\"\n\nAnd then he called me incorrigible again, and we laughed and kissed until dawn.\n\n## Vampire Hours\n\nElaine Viets\n\nElaine Viets is the author of two mystery series. Murder with Reservations is her sixth Dead-End Job novel. Her third Josie Marcus Mystery Shopper book, Accessory to Murder, will be out this fall. Elaine has won both the Anthony and Agatha Awards for her short stories. \"Vampire Hours\" is her first vampire story. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, across the water from a condo whose occupants were the inspiration for this story.\n\n\"It's three o'clock in the morning, Katherine. Go to sleep.\"\n\nMy husband, the surgeon. Eric barked orders even in the middle of the night.\n\n\"I can't sleep,\" I said.\n\n\"I have to be at the hospital in three hours. Turn off the light. And go see a doctor, will you? You're a pain in the ass.\"\n\nEric rolled away from me and pulled the pillow over his face.\n\nI turned off the light. I felt like a disobedient child in my own home, as I listened to my husband of twenty-five years snore into his pillow. Eric could fall asleep anywhere, any time. Especially when he was in bed with me.\n\nIf I pushed his face into the pillow, could I smother him?\n\nProbably not. Years of late-night emergency calls had given Eric an instant, unnatural alertness.\n\nI lay alone on my side of the vast bed, stiff as a corpse in a coffin. My white negligee seemed more like a shroud than sexy sleepwear. My marriage to Eric was dead, and I knew it. I wanted him to love me, and hated myself for wanting a man so cold.\n\nHe wasn't like that when we were first married. Then, he'd ripped off so many of my nightgowns, he'd bought me a thousand-dollar gift certificate at Victoria's Secret. I'd model the latest addition and he'd rip it off again. Back then, he didn't care if he had early surgery. We'd had wild, all-night sex.\n\nA tear slipped down my cheek, and I cursed it. Tears came too easily these days, ever since menopause. \"The change,\" my mother had called it. Once, before I knew what those changes were, I'd looked forward to menopause. I wanted the monthly flow of blood to stop. I was tired of the bloat, the cramps, and the pain.\n\nBut the change was infinitely worse. Oh, the blood stopped, as promised. But nobody told me what would start: the weight gain, no matter how hard I dieted. How could I get fat on rice cakes and lettuce?\n\nThe change brought other changes. My skin started to sag along the jaw. The lines from my nose to my lips deepened into trenches. My neck looked like it belonged on a stewing hen.\n\nAnd my husband, the old rooster, was chasing young chicks. I knew it, but I didn't dare confront him. I'd seen what happened to my friends when they'd faced down their rich, powerful husbands. Elizabeth, courageous, I-won't-stand-for-this Elizabeth, had been destroyed. She'd caught Zack, her husband of thirty years, groping some not-so-sweet young thing in the dim lights of the local bar. Elizabeth had fearlessly confronted Zack on the spot. She'd embarrassed him in front of his backslapping cronies.\n\nGood old Zack hired a pinstriped shark\u2014one of his bar buddies. Now the elegant Elizabeth lived in a cramped hotbox of an apartment, with a cat and a rattling air conditioner. She worked as a checker at the supermarket and barely made the rent. Elizabeth was on her feet all day and had the varicose veins to prove it.\n\nI'd taken her out to a dreary lunch last month. I'd wanted to do something nice. We went to the club, where we'd always lunched in the old days, when she was still a member. Some of our friends didn't recognize her. Poor Elizabeth, with her home-permed hair and unwaxed eyebrows, looked older than her mother. She was so exhausted, she could hardly keep up a conversation.\n\nThat same fate awaited me. I had to stall as long as I could, until I could figure out what to do with my life. If Eric dumped me now, I'd be at the supermarket asking my former friends, \"Would you like paper or plastic?\"\n\nI'd be one more useless, used-up, middle-aged woman.\n\nI was already. In seven days, I'll be fifty-five years old. My future had never looked bleaker. I had no money and no job skills. My husband didn't love me anymore. Happy birthday, Katherine.\n\n\"Lie still,\" Eric snarled. \"Quit twitching.\"\n\nI didn't think I'd moved. Maybe Eric felt my inner restlessness. Maybe we were still connected enough for that.\n\nBut I couldn't lie there another moment. Not even to save myself. I slid out of bed.\n\n\"Now what? Where are you going at this hour?\" Eric demanded.\n\n\"I thought I'd get some fresh air. I'm going for a walk.\"\n\nEric sat straight up, his gray hair wild, his long surgeon's hands clutching the sheet to his hairy chest. \"Are you crazy? You want to go outside in the middle of the night? After that woman was murdered two streets away?\"\n\n\"People get murdered all the time in Fort Lauderdale,\" I said.\n\n\"Not like that. Some freak drained her blood. They didn't put that little detail in the papers. The city commission wants to avoid scaring the tourists. Dave at the medical examiner's office told me. That woman hardly had a drop of blood left in her. She went for a walk at three in the morning and turned up drained dry. For Chrissakes, use your head.\"\n\n\"All right,\" I said. \"I'll sit on the balcony. I didn't want to wake you.\"\n\nI put on my peignoir and padded into the living room. I never tired of the view from our condo. To the east was the dark, endless expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, lit by ancient stars. Straight down were the black waters of the Intracoastal. Across the little canal that ran alongside our building were the Dark Harbor condos. Those places started at three million dollars. But it wasn't the money that fascinated me. Florida had lots of expensive condos. There was something about Dark Harbor. Something mysterious. Exciting. Exotic. Even at three in the morning.\n\nI slid open the glass doors, careful not to make a sound. The warm night air caressed my cheek. I loved the night. Always had. Moon glow was kinder than the harsh Florida sun. I could hear the water softly lapping at the pilings on the dock, seven stories below.\n\nLaughter drifted across the water, and the faint sounds of a chanteuse singing something in French. It was an old \u00c9dith Piaf song of love and loss.\n\nThere was a party in the Dark Harbor penthouse. Such a glamorous party. The men wore black tie. The women wore sleek black. They looked like me, only better, smoother, thinner. These were people in charge of their futures. They didn't have my half-life as the soon-to-be-shed wife. They were more alive than I would ever be.\n\nI sighed and turned away from my beautiful neighbors. I drifted back into our bedroom like a lost soul, crawled in next to my unloving husband, and fell into a fitful sleep.\n\nEric woke me up at five-thirty when he left for the hospital.\n\n\"Good-bye,\" I said.\n\nHis only answer was a slammed door.\n\nThat night, while getting ready for bed, I looked in my dressing room mirror and panicked. I'd always had a cute figure, but now it had thickened. I had love handles. Where did those come from? I swear I didn't have them two days ago. I burst into tears. I couldn't help it.\n\nI ran into the bathroom to stifle the sobs I knew would irritate Eric. But it was too late. \"Now what?\" he snarled. \"I can't take these mood swings. Get hormone replacement therapy or something.\"\n\nHe was definitely getting something. I'd found the Viagra bottle in his drawer when I put away his socks. It was half empty. He wasn't popping those pills for me. We hadn't made love in months.\n\nNo pill would cure my problem. Not unless I took a whole bunch at once and drifted into the long sleep. That prospect was looking more attractive every day. Didn't someone say, \"The idea is to die young as late as possible\"? Time was running out for me.\n\nI spent another restless night, haunting the balcony like a ghost, watching another party across the way at Dark Harbour. Once again, I drifted off to sleep as Eric was getting ready for work.\n\nTuesday was a brilliant, sunlit day. Even I couldn't feel gloomy. I was living in paradise. I put on my new Escada outfit\u2014tight black jeans and a white jacket so soft, it was pettable. I smiled into the mirror. I looked good, thanks to top-notch tailoring and a body shaper that nearly strangled my middle.\n\nI didn't care. It nipped in my waist, lifted my behind, and thrust out my boobs. I sashayed out to the condo garage like a model on a catwalk. A sexy, young model.\n\nI had a charity lunch at the Aldritch Hotel. I was eating\u2014or rather, not eating\u2014lunch to support the Drexal School. I didn't have any children, but everyone in our circle supported the Drex. As a Drexal Angel, I paid one hundred dollars for a limp chicken Caesar salad and stale rolls.\n\nMy silver Jaguar roared up under the hotel portico. A hunky valet raced out to take my keys. The muscular valet ogled my long legs and sensational spike heels, and I felt that little frisson a woman gets when a handsome man thinks she's hot.\n\nThen his eyes reached my face and I saw his disappointment. The valet didn't bother to hide it. I was old.\n\nI handed him my keys. The valet tore off my ticket without another glance at me. I felt like he'd ripped my heart in half. I used to be a beauty. Heads would turn when I strutted into a room. Now if anyone stared at me, it was because I had a soup stain on my suit or toilet paper stuck on my shoe. I was becoming invisible.\n\nI caught a glimpse of myself in the hotel's automatic doors. Who was I kidding in my overpriced, overdressed outfit? I was losing my looks\u2014and my husband.\n\nI stopped in the ladies room to check my makeup. My lipstick had a nasty habit of creeping into the cracks at the lip line. I used my liner pencil, then stopped in a stall, grateful it had a floor-to-ceiling louvered door. I needed extra privacy to wriggle out of the body shaper.\n\nI heard the restroom door open. Two women were talking. One sounded like my best friend, Margaret. The other was my neighbor, Patricia. I'd known them for years. I nearly called out, but they were deep in conversation and I didn't want to interrupt.\n\n\"...such a clich\u00e9,\" Margaret said, in her rich-girl drawl.\n\n\"I can't believe it,\" Patricia said. Her voice was a New York honk. \"Eric is boinking his secretary?\"\n\nEric. My husband, Eric? Panic squeezed me tighter than any body shaper. There were lots of Erics.\n\n\"Office manager,\" Margaret said. \"But it's the same thing. She's twenty-five, blond, and desperate to catch a doctor. It looks like Eric will let himself get caught.\"\n\n\"Can you blame him?\" Patricia honked. \"Katherine's let herself go.\"\n\nKatherine. No, there weren't many Erics with Katherines. I felt sick. I sat down on the toilet seat and listened.\n\n\"She won't even get an eye job,\" Patricia said. \"And her own husband is a plastic surgeon. How rejecting is that? Eric did my eyes. Then he did the rest of me.\" Her words filled the room. I couldn't escape them.\n\n\"You slept with him?\" Margaret sounded mildly shocked.\n\n\"Everyone does,\" Patricia said.\n\nI could almost hear her shrug. I wanted to rush out and strangle her. I wanted to blacken her stretched eyelids. But I was half-dressed, and my jiggly middle would prove she was right.\n\n\"It's part of the package,\" Patricia said. \"My skin never looked better than when I was getting Dr. Eric's special injections.\"\n\n\"You're awful,\" Margaret said. Then my best friend laughed.\n\n\"It's part of my charm,\" Patricia said. \"But someone better clue in Katherine, so she can line up a good divorce lawyer before it's too late.\"\n\n\"It's already too late,\" Margaret said. \"Eric's already seen the best lawyer in Lauderdale, Jack Kellern.\"\n\n\"And you didn't tell Katherine that Eric hired Jack the Ripper?\"\n\n\"How could I? He's my husband.\"\n\nAnd you, Margaret, are my best friend. Or rather, you were. Margaret had also had her eyes done by Jack. Did she get the full package, too?\n\nI waited until my faithless friends shut the restroom door. I rocked back and forth on the toilet in stunned misery. It was one thing to suspect your husband was playing around. It was another to learn of his betrayal\u2014and your best friend's. I was a joke, a laughingstock. I had even less time than I thought.\n\nI pulled my clothes together, pasted on a smile, and found my table. A waitress set my salad in front of me. I studied the woman. She was about my age, with a weary face, limp brown hair, and thick, sensible shoes. This time next year, would I be serving salads to the ladies who lunched?\n\nOnly if I were lucky. I didn't even have the skills to be a waitress. I picked at my salad but couldn't eat a bite. No one noticed. Well-bred women didn't have appetites.\n\nA polite clink of silverware on glasses signaled that the headmaster was at the podium. He was a lean man with a good suit and a sycophantic smile.\n\n\"You've heard that Drexal has one of the finest academic records...\" he began. My thoughts soon drifted away.\n\nMenopause had killed my marriage, but it had been dying for a long time. I knew exactly when it had received the fatal wound: the day my husband asked to cut on me.\n\nI was thirty-five, but looked ten years younger. Eric was itching to get out his scalpel and work on my face.\n\n\"Just let me do your eyes,\" he said, \"and take a few tucks. If you start early, you'll look younger longer.\"\n\n\"I look fine,\" I said.\n\n\"You don't trust me,\" he said.\n\n\"Of course I do,\" I said. \"You're the most successful plastic surgeon in Broward County.\"\n\nBut not the most skilled. Eric was right. I didn't trust him. He'd never killed anyone, unlike some Florida face sculptors. But I saw his work everywhere. I could recognize his patients: Caucasian women of a certain age with the telltale Chinese eyes and stretched skin.\n\nEric gave them face-lifts when no other doctor would. He'd give them as many as seven or eight, until their skin was so tight they could bikini wax their upper lip.\n\nI pleaded fear of anesthesia. I invented an aunt who died from minor surgery when I was a child. But Eric knew the truth: I was afraid to let him touch me. I was his in every way, except one. I would not surrender to his knife.\n\nFor ten years, he never stopped trying. He nagged me for a full face-lift at forty. At forty-five, I knew I could probably use one, but still I wouldn't submit.\n\n\"Nothing can make me twenty-five again,\" I said. \"I'll take my chances with wrinkles.\"\n\nIt was the worst rejection a plastic surgeon could have. I made him look bad. Everyone could see my lines and wrinkles. These normal signs of aging became an accusation. They said every woman but his wife believed Eric was a fine surgeon.\n\nWhen I turned fifty, Eric quit asking. That's when our hot nights together cooled. I suspected there were other women, but knew the affairs weren't serious. Now things had changed. Eric was going to marry a twenty-five-year-old blonde. In another five years, she'd submit to his knife.\n\nSuddenly, I was back in the hotel ballroom. The headmaster's speech had reached its crescendo. \"We have almost everything we need to make the Drexal School the finest educational institution in Broward County. Only one thing is missing. After today, we'll have it all. I'm pleased to announce the creation of the Drexal Panthers\u2014our own football team. Your donations have made it possible.\"\n\nThe lunching mothers cheered wildly.\n\nI looked down at my plate and realized I'd eaten an entire slice of chocolate cheesecake with raspberry sauce.\n\nWorse, I hadn't tasted one bite.\n\nNo wonder I was fat.\n\nOn the way home, I picked up some college catalogues. I made myself a stiff drink and settled into my favorite chair in the great room to study the glossy catalogues. I looked at careers for legal aides, dental assistants, and licensed practical nurses. One choice seemed more depressing than the other.\n\nWhat had I wanted to be before I met Eric?\n\nAn English teacher. Back then, I saw myself teaching poetry to eager young minds, watching them open like flowers with the beauty of the written word. Now, I knew I couldn't cope with the young ruffians at the public schools. Would the Drexal School hire an Angel down on her luck? Would the headmaster remember how often I'd lunched to make his dream team possible?\n\nIf I went back to college, how many years would I need to complete my degree? Would my life experience count for anything? What had I done in fifty-five years?\n\nI fell asleep on the pile of catalogues. I woke up at midnight when I heard Eric unlock the door. I hid the catalogues with my arms, but he never noticed them. Or me. He went straight to bed without even saying good night.\n\nI woke up at three. I couldn't sleep through the night anymore. I kept vampire hours now. I drifted into the living room and watched the condo across the way. There was another party tonight. This time, the music seemed livelier, the guests more keyed up, more dramatically dressed, as if they were at some special ceremony.\n\nOur condo walls seemed to close in on me. I slipped on my jeans and a cotton shirt. I was going for a walk along the water, even if it killed me. I'd rather risk death than suffocate inside.\n\nThe night air was delicious, cool but not cold. I was drawn to the lights of the Dark Harbor party, and picked my way along the docks until I was almost underneath its windows. I couldn't see anything, but I could feel the contained excitement inside. The walls seemed to pulse with life.\n\n\"Wish you were here?\"\n\nI jumped at the voice\u2014very rich, very male.\n\nThe man who came out of the shadows wore evening dress. His skin looked luminous in the moonlight. His hair was black with a slight curl. There was strength in his face, and a hint of cruelty. I couldn't tell his age. He seemed beyond such ordinary measures.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to trespass,\" I said.\n\n\"You aren't trespassing, Katherine,\" he said. \"You spend a lot of time watching us, don't you?\"\n\n\"Am I that obvious?\" I said.\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"But I feel your yearning. It makes you very beautiful\u2014and very vulnerable.\"\n\nInside the condo, there was a shriek of triumph, followed by polite tennis-match applause.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" he said. \"I must return to my guests. My name is Michael, by the way.\"\n\n\"Will I see you again?\" I said.\n\n\"If you want to,\" he said.\n\nHe was gone. Only then did I wonder how he knew my name.\n\nI floated back to my condo wrapped in soft, warm clouds of fantasy. How long had it been since any man had called me beautiful?\n\nI was beautiful. Michael made me feel that way. I crawled into bed beside my husband and dreamed of another man.\n\nIn the morning, I woke up smiling and refreshed. For the first time in months, I didn't check my mirror for more ravages. I didn't need to. I was beautiful. Michael had said so. I was dreamy as a lovesick teenager, until the phone shattered the sweet silence at eleven a.m.\n\n\"Katherine, it's Patricia.\" Of course it was. She'd slept with my husband and confessed it in a public restroom. I'd know her honking voice anywhere. Except today it had a different note. She sounded subdued, even frightened. \"Have you heard about Jack?\"\n\n\"Jack who?\" I said.\n\n\"Margaret's Jack. They found his body in the parking lot of his law office early this morning.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" I said. \"Was he mugged?\"\n\n\"They don't think so,\" Patricia said. \"The police say the murder didn't take place there. They think he was abducted.\"\n\n\"Kidnapped and murdered? But why?\" Which wife killed him, I wondered. How many deserted women wished him dead?\n\n\"No one knows. But it gets worse. Jack's body was drained of blood. Completely dry.\"\n\n\"That's awful,\" I said. \"I'll go see Margaret immediately.\"\n\nI hung up the phone quickly, hoping to hide my elation. Jack the Ripper was dead\u2014horribly dead. My husband no longer had a divorce lawyer. I felt a brief stab of shame for my selfish thoughts, but Jack's death was poetic justice. Someone had sucked the blood out of the city's biggest bloodsucker. Someone had given me more time.\n\nI put on a navy pantsuit and a long face, and stopped by a smart specialty shop for a cheese tray and a bottle of wine. My long-dead mother would be proud. She'd taught me to bring food to a house of mourning.\n\nThere were other cars in Margaret's driveway, including what looked like unmarked police cars and three silver Lexuses. Lawyers' cars.\n\nMargaret was a wreck. Her eyes were deeply bagged and swollen. Her jawline sagged nearly as badly as mine. All my husband's fine work was undone. I felt petty for noticing. She's a new widow, I told myself. Show some pity.\n\n\"Katherine!\" Margaret ran weeping into my arms, smearing my jacket with makeup.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I said, patting her nearly fleshless back. I could feel her thin bones. It wasn't a lie. I was sorry for so many things, including the death of our friendship. Women need the sympathy of our own kind. Margaret had destroyed even that small comfort for me.\n\n\"Come into the garden where we can talk,\" she said. \"The police are searching Jack's home office. Three lawyers from his firm and a court-appointed guardian are arguing over what papers they can take.\"\n\nWe sat at an umbrella table near a bubbling fountain. Palms rustled overhead. Impatiens bloomed at our feet. It looked like every other garden in Florida. A Hispanic maid brought iced tea, lemon slices, and two kinds of artificial sweetener.\n\n\"May I have sugar, please?\" I asked.\n\n\"Sugar?\" the maid said, as if she'd never heard the word.\n\n\"You use sugar?\" Margaret might be dazed with grief, but she was still surprised by my request. In our crowd, sleeping with a friend's husband was a faux pas. Taking sugar in your tea was a serious sin.\n\n\"Doctor's orders,\" I said. \"Sweeteners are out. Cancer in the family.\"\n\nActually, I liked real sugar. And it was only eighteen calories a spoonful.\n\n\"How are you?\" I asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Margaret said. Two more tears escaped her swollen eyelids. \"I thought Jack was seeing someone, and that's why he worked late so often these last few weeks. I was furious, but I couldn't say anything. I was too afraid.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" I said.\n\nShe flushed with guilt.\n\n\"My husband went to see Jack,\" I said. \"So I know how you feel.\"\n\nMargaret had the grace to say nothing. I appreciated that.\n\n\"Do you think Jack's lover killed him?\" I said.\n\n\"I don't know. I don't even know now if he had a lover. One of the firm's associates found Jack in the parking lot when she came to work at six this morning. Maybe he really had been working late. I had to identify him. Jack didn't look dead so much as...empty. Someone took all his blood. It wasn't some slashing attack. Just two holes in the side of his neck. There were bruises, too. Terrible bruises on his wrists, legs, and shoulders.\"\n\n\"Was he beaten?\" I asked.\n\n\"No. They think someone\u2014or maybe more than one person\u2014held him down while he was\u2014while they\u2014\" Margaret couldn't go on.\n\n\"Do the police think it was a serial killer?\" I asked.\n\n\"They won't say. But the way they're acting, I know it's strange. There were other attacks like this in Lauderdale. Jack wasn't the only person to die like this.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"Eric told me that the woman found off of Bayview had been drained dry, too. He heard that from the medical examiner's office. The police kept it out of the papers.\"\n\n\"It's like some nightmare,\" Margaret said, \"except I can't wake up. Mindy is flying home this afternoon from college. This will be so hard for our daughter. Mindy idolized her father.\" Margaret started weeping again.\n\nI wasn't sure what to do. If we'd still been friends, I would have folded Margaret in my arms. But she had betrayed me. I knew it, and she knew it.\n\nI was saved by a homicide detective and a lawyer.\n\n\"Margaret,\" the lawyer said, \"I'm sorry to disturb you, but we have some more questions about your husband.\"\n\n\"I'd better go,\" I said. \"I'll let myself out.\" I air-kissed her cheek. It took all my self-control to keep from running for my car.\n\nOnce, I would have called my husband and told him the awful news. Now I didn't. What could I say? You know that lawyer you hired to strip me of my last dime? The son of a bitch was murdered. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.\n\nI suspected Eric already knew about Jack's death. He was probably looking for a new bloodsucker.\n\nI spent the afternoon taking calls from Margaret's shocked friends, pretending to be sad and concerned and hating myself because I couldn't feel any of it. Instead, I felt oddly excited. I broiled a skinless chicken breast, steamed some broccoli, and waited for my husband to come home.\n\nAt eleven o'clock, there was still no sign of Eric. He didn't bother to phone me. I didn't humiliate myself by calling around asking for him.\n\nWhat if he turned up dead, like Jack? I wondered. Then my troubles would be over. I felt guilty even thinking that. But it was true.\n\nAt three in the morning, I woke up alone and drenched in sweat. Night sweats, another menopausal delight. I punched my soggy pillow and tried to settle back to sleep. At three-thirty, I gave up. I reached for my jeans, then abandoned that idea. Instead, I pulled out a long, nearly sheer hostess gown that looked glamorous in the soft moonlight.\n\nI wasn't going for a walk. I was going hunting. For Michael.\n\nThere was no party tonight. His condo was dark except for flickering candles in the living room and the opalescent light of a television. Michael was alone, like me. He couldn't sleep, either.\n\nHe was waiting for me down by the Dark Harbor docks. At first, I heard nothing but the gentle slap of the water and the clinking of the halyards as the boats rocked back and forth. It was a peaceful sound. A light breeze ruffled my hair and pressed my gown against my body.\n\n\"You dressed for me, didn't you?\" he said.\n\nMichael seemed to appear from nowhere. His white shirt, open at the throat and rolled at the sleeves, glowed in the moonlight. His hair was black as onyx, but so soft. I longed to run my fingers through it.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said.\n\nHis hand touched my hair and traced the line of my neck. I stepped back. It wouldn't do to seem too eager too soon.\n\nMichael smiled, as if he could read my mind. \"You don't have to play games,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm not playing games,\" I said. \"I'm being cautious. I don't know anything about you. Are you married?\"\n\n\"My wife has been dead for many years. I live alone.\"\n\n\"You have such lovely parties.\" I couldn't keep the wistful note out of my voice.\n\n\"I have many friends. We enjoy the night.\"\n\n\"I do, too,\" I said. \"I'm tired of the Florida sun. It burns the life out of everything.\"\n\n\"You may be one of us,\" Michael said. \"I'd like to see more of you, before I go.\"\n\n\"Go?\" The word clutched at my heart. \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"I'm selling the condo. Nobody stays long in Florida. You know that. Will you be here tomorrow night? May I see you again?\"\n\n\"Three o'clock,\" I said. \"Same time, same place.\"\n\nThere. I'd done it. I'd made a date with another man. My marriage was over, except for the legalities. It was time to face the future. Maybe, if I was lucky, I'd have Michael in my life. If not, I'd find someone else. He'd shown me that I was still attractive. I was grateful for that. I'd let Eric destroy my confidence.\n\nI turned around for one last look, but Michael was gone. Only then did I realize he hadn't asked if I was married. I wondered if he knew. Or cared.\n\nEric was waiting for me when I returned, tapping his foot like an impatient parent.\n\n\"Where were you?\" he said.\n\n\"I could ask you the same question,\" I said.\n\n\"I was with a patient,\" he said.\n\n\"Administering more special injections?\" I said. \"Patricia says they're wonderful for the complexion. I wouldn't know. It's been so long I've forgotten.\"\n\n\"You're certifiable.\" Eric turned the attack back on me. He was good at that. \"Jack is dead. Murdered! Some freak drank his blood. And you're roaming the streets at night like an Alzheimer's patient. I should hire a keeper.\"\n\nI should hire a hit man, I thought. But I held in my harsh words. I didn't need Eric now. I had Michael.\n\n\"Good night,\" I said. \"I'm sleeping in the guest room.\"\n\n\"You can't\u2014\"\n\nI didn't stop to hear what I couldn't do. I locked the guest room door and put fresh sheets on the bed. What I am doing? I wondered. I have a three a.m. rendezvous with a man I don't know. There's a murderer running loose in my neighborhood. Yet I'd never felt safer or more at peace. I slept blissfully until ten in the morning. I woke up with just enough time to get ready for my literacy board meeting.\n\nAs I walked into the dark paneled board room, I caught snatches of conversation: \"he was drained dry...don't know when they'll have a funeral...Margaret is devastated.\"\n\nAll anyone could talk about was Jack's murder, at least until the board meeting started. Then we had to listen to Nancy blather on about bylaws changes. She'd kept the board tied up with this pointless minutiae for the last eight months.\n\nOnce I saw myself as a philanthropist, dispensing our money to improve the lives of the disadvantaged. But I'd sat on too many charity boards. Now I knew how little was possible. Here I was in another endless meeting, listening to a debate about whether the organization's president should remain a figurehead or have a vote on the board.\n\nHow did this debate help one poor child learn to read? I wondered.\n\n\"Katherine?\"\n\nI looked up. The entire board was staring at me.\n\n\"How do you vote on the motion: yes or no?\" Nancy asked.\n\n\"Yes.\" I wasn't saying yes to the motion, whatever it was. I was saying yes to a new life.\n\nMercifully, the board meeting was over at noon. I dodged any offers of lunch and went straight home. I spent three hours on the Internet, looking at my career options. Work couldn't be any worse than board meetings. Then I'd get ready for my date with Michael.\n\nBy four that afternoon, I'd decided to become a librarian. It would only take another three years of college. The pay was decent. The benefits were not bad. The job prospects were good. I'd be a useful member of society, which was more than I could say for myself now.\n\nI pushed away the memory of Elizabeth's dreary apartment and made an appointment with a feminist lawyer. Tomorrow, we would discuss my divorce. Today, I wanted to think about my date with Michael.\n\nI washed my hair, so it would have a soft curl. I applied a mango-honey face mask and swiped Eric's razor to de-fuzz my legs. Eric hated when I did that. I hoped the dull razor would rip his face off tomorrow morning. I sprayed his shaving cream on my long legs. I was now covered with goo from head to toe. Naturally, the doorbell rang.\n\nWho was that?\n\nI looked out the peephole. A young woman with a cheap blond dye job was on my doorstep. Her skirt was some bright, shiny material, and her tight halter top barely covered her massive breasts. I'd seen her before, at Eric's office.\n\n\"Just a minute,\" I called, and quickly wiped off the shaving cream and the mango mask.\n\nWhen I opened the door, I was hit by a gust of perfume.\n\n\"Yes?\" I said. \"You're from Eric's office. Is there a problem?\"\n\n\"There is.\" She boldly walked into my home and sat down on my couch. \"My name is Dawn. I'm Eric's office manager.\"\n\nAnd his lover. The recognition was a punch in the face. Eric was leaving me for this big-titted clich\u00e9. I stood there in silence, hoping to make this husband-stealing tramp squirm. She'd have to do the talking.\n\nDawn came right out with her request. \"We want to get married,\" she said.\n\n\"We?\"\n\n\"Eric and I.\"\n\n\"He's married to me,\" I said.\n\n\"That's the problem, isn't it?\" Dawn smiled. She had small, feral teeth, and smooth skin. Eric would revel in that flawless skin. How my husband would love to put a knife into it. He had the gall to try to improve perfection.\n\n\"If you make it easy for me, I'll make it easy for you,\" Dawn said. \"I'll make sure you get a nice allowance. You drag us through the courts, and I'll fight you every step of the way.\"\n\n\"You're threatening me in my own living room?\" I said.\n\n\"It won't be yours for long,\" Dawn said. She looked around at my carefully decorated room. \"No wonder Eric doesn't like to hang here. It's like a funeral parlor. White couches in Florida. Hello? Can you say corny? This place needs some life.\n\n\"Oh, dear, you've got some gunk on your forehead. Those do-it-yourself beauty treatments don't work. Should have gone to your husband for help. You might still have time. But maybe not. He can only do so much.\"\n\nI sat there, speechless, while the little slut sauntered past me. I picked up the first thing I could find, a delicate gold-trimmed Limoges dish\u2014a wedding present\u2014and threw it at her. Too late. She'd already shut the door.\n\nThe dish shattered with a satisfying sound. Plates, glasses, candy dishes, even a soup tureen followed, until the hall's marble floor was crunchy with smashed crockery and broken glass. It took me an hour to sweep it up and drop it down the trash chute. I knew Eric wouldn't miss any of it. He wouldn't even notice anything was gone. These were the things I loved. I wondered if the slut would be dining off my best china and drinking from my remaining wedding crystal. Over my dead body. Better yet, over hers.\n\nI cleaned off the remnants of the mango-honey mask and shaved my legs with a shaky hand. I had a date with a man at three o'clock in the morning. What kind of time was that? I nicked my leg and watched a small drop of blood well up. Blood.\n\nThree a.m. was a good time for a vampire.\n\nThat's what Michael was, wasn't he? Who else had drained Jack dry but a vampire? What else could Michael and his sleek, night-loving friends be?\n\nI expected to feel shocked and horrified, but I didn't. Michael and his friends did me a favor by killing Jack. If they'd killed Eric, I would have been the center of a murder investigation. Instead, they gave me a little more time to arrange my life before it self-destructed.\n\nWas Michael a danger to me? I didn't think so. If he'd wanted to kill me, he'd had many opportunities. No, Michael wanted more than a quick kill. But what, exactly? His conversation was full of innuendoes, invitations, and explanations.\n\n\"I feel your yearning. It makes you very beautiful\u2014and very vulnerable.\"\n\n\"My wife has been dead for many years. I live alone.\"\n\n\"I have many friends. We enjoy the night.\"\n\n\"You may be one of us.\"\n\nMichael had told me what he was, if I had listened carefully. Did I want to be one of his beautiful friends? Could I kill other people?\n\nDepends, I thought. I could kill lawyers like Jack, doctors like my husband, and that little bitch who waltzed into my house and claimed my husband like a piece of lost luggage.\n\nI wondered about the other woman who'd been drained dry. Who was she? Did she deserve to die? I didn't have her name, but I knew the date she'd died and the street where she was found\u2014Forty-seventh, off of Bayview.\n\nA quick Internet search found the story in the Sun-Sentinel. The dead woman was forty-five, divorced, an IRS auditor. Another deserving victim. Another bloodsucker. Eric and I'd been audited one long, hot summer. The IRS found one small error, but the accountant and lawyer bills to defend ourselves were tremendous. We would have had more rights if we'd been accused of murder instead of cheating on our income tax.\n\nYes, I could kill an IRS auditor. I could hand out justice to the unjust. In my new life, I would punish the wicked. I would be super-woman\u2014invisible by day, fearless by night. That beat being a divorced librarian living in a garden apartment.\n\nI hardly tasted my dinner, I was so excited by my new life. Not that my dinner had much flavor: four ounces of boneless, skinless, joyless chicken and romaine with fat-free dressing.\n\nFor dessert, I treated myself to two ounces of dark chocolate and a delicious daydream of Michael. It had been a long time since any man had wanted me. And this man had so much to give me.\n\nI watched the full moon rise and paced my condo. Eric didn't come home that night. I didn't expect him to. I was glad. I was in no mood to confront him.\n\nI dug out my favorite black Armani dress. It was specially designed to cover my flaws. The high neck hid the crepe under my chin. The short sleeves disguised the unsightly wings under my arms that no workouts could eliminate. The short hem showed my legs at their best. I put on sexy high-heeled sandals. They were dangerous on the docks, but I was living dangerously these days.\n\nMichael was waiting for me outside my condo. He'd come to me this time. His hair was black as a midnight ocean. His luminous skin was like moonlight on snow. He kissed me, and his lips were soft and surprisingly warm.\n\n\"You know who we are, don't you?\" he said.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"I want to be like you.\"\n\n\"You must be sure. You must have no illusions before you adopt our way of life. You must ask me any questions tonight.\"\n\n\"Are you immortal?\" I said.\n\n\"Almost,\" he said. \"We can be killed by fire, by sunlight, and by wooden stakes through the heart. All natural elements.\"\n\n\"What about crosses and holy water?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"There were vampires long before there were Christians.\"\n\n\"What will happen to me? How will I become one of you?\"\n\n\"I will make you a vampire by giving you my blood. I will take yours. Don't be frightened. It's not painful. You'll find it quite exhilarating. Once the transference is complete, you must make your first kill.\"\n\n\"Will I change? Will I look different?\"\n\n\"You'll look like yourself, only more beautiful. Any wrinkles will vanish. Any physical flaws will disappear. You'll quickly attain your ideal weight. Our people are never fat.\"\n\nVampirism\u2014the ultimate low-fat diet. I wanted to smile. But suddenly, I couldn't joke. The changes were profound, and frightening. \"I'll never be able to eat food again.\" I felt a sudden desperate pain at what I would have to give up.\n\n\"Do you eat now?\" Michael said.\n\nThe question seemed ridiculous. \"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\"But do you like what you eat? Do you actually hunger for carrot sticks? Do you long for steamed broccoli and romaine with diet dressing?\" He put his warm lips next to my ear and whispered, \"When was the last time you had food you really wanted?\"\n\nI thought of the meals of my youth, when I could eat anything: fried chicken and cheeseburgers, crispy French fries lightly sprinkled with salt, hot fudge sundaes with warm whipped cream, crusty bread and butter.\n\n\"You haven't had any of those in years, have you?\" Michael said.\n\nHe could read my mind. I knew that now.\n\n\"You'll never experience the pain of dieting again,\" he said. \"You will have no need for ordinary food. You will drink the food of the gods. Blood is offered to them as a sacrifice. You will take it for your own pleasure. It is a thrill you cannot imagine. You will still hunger, but now you will be satisfied. You are hungry, aren't you? Even now, after your supper of skinless chicken.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The pale, pathetic hunk of bird nearly turned my stomach. \"I can do good, too,\" I said. \"I can feed on those who deserve to die.\"\n\nHis eyes were suddenly darker, and I realized he was angry. \"No! You must embrace the dark side like a lover. Any good you do will be accidental.\"\n\n\"But Jack\u2014\" I began.\n\n\"When Rosette killed that bloodsucking lawyer, she made a lot of scorned wives happy. But Jack will be mourned by his daughter. Randall killed the IRS agent because she'd been auditing his books. She nearly drove him crazy, and he was innocent. But she was the sole support of her elderly mother. And, irritating though she was, the agent was an honest woman.\n\n\"You cannot fool yourself into believing that you will only feed on serial killers or child molesters. That is romantic nonsense.\n\n\"You are evil and you must choose it. Your killing will not make the world a better place. We kill for revenge, for sport, for reasons that are impossibly petty. Marissa once killed a dress shop clerk on Las Olas because she wouldn't wait on her.\"\n\n\"So you've killed more people in Fort Lauderdale than Jack and the IRS agent?\" I said.\n\n\"Many more,\" Michael said. \"The details about the other bodies being exsanguinated did not make the papers. The police try to hide that information. When it becomes public, then it's time for us to leave. That's why we're going tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"What happened to the other bodies?\"\n\nMichael said nothing. He didn't have to. I realized we were looking at the wide black ocean.\n\n\"Where will you go when you leave?\" I said.\n\n\"The south of France,\" he said. \"I have a cottage by the sea. The air smells of lavender and the sound of the waves is wonderfully soothing.\"\n\nA small sigh escaped me. He was offering me such a beautiful life.\n\n\"Why me?\" I asked. \"There are millions of women like me, a little past our prime, abandoned by our husbands.\"\n\n\"Do you define yourself only by your husband?\" he asked. \"I don't think so. Americans have such boring ideas about age. Older cultures celebrate all aspects of a woman's life. Americans only want youth, which can be the dullest time. I prefer a woman who has lived.\n\n\"And you are not like the others. You are strong. You have resisted the lemminglike urge for plastic surgery. It's became a national obsession, but you fought it, even though it cost you your marriage and your comfortable life. You knew it wasn't the right choice for you. That takes courage. You know who you are. Do you know what you are?\"\n\nFor the first time, I knew I was someone special.\n\nHe took my hand. \"I'd like you to join us,\" he said. \"I want you. Now that you know, you have only two choices: join us or die.\"\n\n\"May I have twenty-four hours? I have some loose ends to tie up.\"\n\n\"Yes. But, remember, no one will believe you if you go to the police. And we will be gone before they can get a search warrant.\"\n\n\"I would never betray you,\" I said. \"You've already helped me. Did you encourage Rosette to kill Jack? For my sake?\"\n\n\"I wish I could take credit,\" Michael said. \"But Jack was her idea. Still, I'm glad it helped you.\"\n\nThen he kissed my hand. \"You have much to think about,\" he said. \"I hope you make the right decision.\"\n\nI left him feeling oddly lighthearted for a woman whose only choice was death: my real death, the living death of middle age, or the death-in-life of a vampire.\n\nI slept well that night, or what was left of it. Then, at five-thirty, I was awakened by Eric slamming doors and opening drawers. He had four white shirts in plastic bags. I'd picked up those shirts for him from the best laundry in Lauderdale, prepared precisely the way he liked: hangers, no starch.\n\nI sat up groggily in bed. \"From now on,\" I said, \"have your slut pick up your laundry. That's the last errand I'm running for you.\"\n\n\"Don't you dare call Dawn that,\" Eric said.\n\n\"Dawn! What kind of name is that? Has it dawned on you how trite you are?\" My bitterness burst like a lanced boil, and I was screaming like a fishwife. My husband yelled right back.\n\nOur argument was interrupted by a pounding on our front door. Marvin, our condo security guard, was standing on the doorstep. He looked embarrassed. \"I'm sorry,\" he said. \"But there have been complaints about the noise.\"\n\nWe both apologized to the guard. Now my humiliation was complete. Eric walked out a few minutes later, clutching his fresh shirts by the hangers. \"You'll hear from my lawyer,\" he said.\n\nThat was it. That was how he ended our quarter-century marriage, the day before my birthday.\n\nHe'd forgotten that, of course. He couldn't even say, \"I'm sorry, I've found someone else.\" Eric wasn't sorry, was he? But he would be.\n\nI watched the sun rise on the last morning of my life. The new morning turned the air a pearlescent pink, and a shimmering fog drifted across the water. White birds skimmed along the Intracoastal.\n\nI will never see this beauty again, I thought. But I didn't have time to wallow in regret. I had things to do. I stopped at a diner for a last, lavish breakfast. The young, busty waitress was too busy flirting with a table full of businessmen to pay any attention to me. I could hear the cook ringing the bell in the kitchen. When the waitress finally brought my breakfast, the eggs had congealed to rubber and the home fries were coated with grease.\n\n\"This food is cold,\" I said to the waitress.\n\n\"Huh?\" she said, as if she'd just noticed me for the first time. Once again, I was the incredible, invisible middle-aged woman.\n\n\"I'll get the cook to warm it up,\" she said.\n\n\"Never mind,\" I said. \"I'm not hungry after all.\"\n\nI threw some money on the table and left. I'd lost my taste for food.\n\nAt ten o'clock, I was weeping in my lawyer's office. The tears came easily, and they weren't entirely false. Only the accusations were made up.\n\n\"Please help me,\" I sobbed. \"My husband is divorcing me. He has a new girlfriend and he hates me. They're fighting about how soon they can get married. I'm in the way. I'm afraid Eric will harm me.\"\n\n\"Harm you how?\" the lawyer said.\n\nShe would look perfect on the witness stand during Eric's murder trial, I thought. She was serious enough for the women to believe her, but sexy enough to get the men's attention. There was something about her tailored black suit, tightly pulled-back hair, and horn-rimmed glasses that made men wonder what she'd look like without them.\n\n\"K-kill me,\" I said. \"Eric doesn't let anyone stand in his way.\"\n\n\"Have there been any threats?\" the lawyer said.\n\n\"Nothing in front of witnesses,\" I said. \"But we had a terrible fight this morning, and he said he'd kill me if I didn't give him a divorce and...I'm so embarrassed. Condo security had to knock on our door.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" the lawyer said. \"I mean, it's not good, but it will help.\"\n\nShe made plans to get a restraining order and told me to change the locks. Of course, I would tragically disappear before I could carry out her instructions.\n\nIt was after noon when I left the lawyer's office, my least favorite time of day in Florida. The parking lot was baking in the harsh sun. It showed all the cracks in the buildings and the sidewalks\u2014and in my lips and skin. I won't miss this, I thought. Not one bit.\n\nI wanted to treat myself to a special dress for this evening, my coming out. I strolled along Las Olas Boulevard, where all the smart shops were. The windows glowed with dresses in dramatic black and fabulous colors.\n\nBlack, I thought. Black was the right choice when you're going to the dark side.\n\nI entered a cool shop. A young saleswoman, who looked like a thinner version of Dawn, was talking to another clerk. They didn't look up when I came in. They didn't notice me.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" I said. \"May I have some help?\"\n\nThe two young women smirked and rolled their eyes, and I understood why Marissa had killed her salesclerk. If I had more time in Lauderdale, I'd come back for this one.\n\nBut I didn't. I bought the first dress I tried on. It didn't fit quite right. I could see my drooping back in the mirror, the little rolls of fat at my waist. But they would be gone soon. In my new life, this dress would be spectacular.\n\nAs I left, I knew I'd made the right decision. Not about the dress. About my life. I would be invisible, but it would be my choice.\n\nI would be powerful.\n\nI would be beautiful forever.\n\nI would get the blood back. It would flow again. It would flow into me, and I would feel the ecstasy. I would not be young, but I didn't want to be young. The young were vulnerable, trusting, hurting. I never wanted to feel that way again.\n\nI sat in my condo and thought about the rest of the night and the beginning of my new life.\n\nWhen the sky began to bleed red, I walked once more through my condo, saying good-bye to all my things. It would be easy to give them up. I sat on the balcony until the sun set and the sky turned dark velvet. Then I dressed for my final night.\n\nAt midnight, I met Michael down by the docks. He was frighteningly beautiful.\n\n\"Have you made your choice?\" he said.\n\n\"I choose you,\" I said.\n\nHe kissed me. \"I'm so glad,\" he whispered. \"Everyone is waiting for you. Who will be your first kill?\"\n\n\"Dawn, Eric's office manager. The police will find her bloodless body outside his clinic.\"\n\n\"What about your husband?\"\n\n\"I'll let him live. It will be fun to see how he explains his drained and dead girlfriend and his missing wife. I'll be gone, but I won't take anything with me\u2014no money from our bank account, no stocks, not even my jewelry. I'll follow the trial on the Internet from the south of France.\"\n\nMichael smiled. \"I'm sure we'll all be entertained by the drama,\" he said. \"Happy birthday, Katherine.\"\n\n## How Stella Got Her Grave Back\n\nToni L. P. Kelner\n\nToni L. P. Kelner is the author of the Laura Fleming Southern mystery series and the forthcoming Where Are They Now? series about a freelance entertainment writer who specializes in articles about the formerly famous. She has won the Agatha Award for best short story and the Romantic Times Career Achievement Award, and has been nominated for the Anthony, the Macavity and the Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice awards. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, fellow author Stephen P. Kelner Jr., and two daughters. Though she's a longtime fan of vampire fiction, this is her first vampire story.\n\nThey stared at the tombstone. Or rather, Mark stared. Stella glared.\n\n\"Are you sure this is the right place?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"Of course I'm sure!\" she snapped.\n\n\"It's been a while since you've been here, right? And the circumstances that night were pretty much tailor-made for making you forget the exact location.\"\n\n\"I'm sure,\" she said. \"A person doesn't just forget something like that!\" She continued to glare at the tombstone, as if waiting for its current inhabitant to rise and answer her questions. \"What I want to know is, who the hell is buried in my grave?\"\n\n\"I told you this was morbid.\"\n\nAlmost exactly an hour earlier, Mark had asked, \"Don't you think this is kind of morbid?\"\n\n\"We're vampires,\" Stella replied. \"It doesn't get much more morbid than that.\"\n\n\"Still, visiting your grave on your birthday? That kind of goes beyond the pale.\" He snickered. \"Beyond the pale! That's good\u2014I mean, we're nothing if not pale.\"\n\n\"It's not bad,\" Stella admitted. \"Not that you're all that pale yet.\"\n\n\"True.\" He'd been a vampire for less than a year, so as long as he applied generous amounts of SPF 45, he could still go outside in the daylight, and his tan hadn't faded.\n\nThey drove down the North Carolina highway in silence for a few minutes, Stella handling the maroon Cadillac with the ease only decades of practice can bring, and the caution for which vampires were infamous. While they could walk away from most accidents, reckless driving could lead to overly curious medical personnel or jail cells with uncurtained windows, so vampires tended to obey the rules of the road. Mark hadn't had time to absorb that yet, which was why she was driving.\n\nHe asked, \"Is this your actual birthday or the anniversary of your death?\"\n\n\"Both,\" she said.\n\n\"You died on your birthday? That's harsh. How old were you?\"\n\n\"You tell me.\"\n\n\"No way! I know better than to try to guess a woman's age.\"\n\n\"We vampires are proud of our age.\"\n\n\"Yeah, right. If I said you looked thirty-five when you stopped aging at twenty-five, I'd be walking home.\"\n\n\"You think I look thirty-five?\"\n\n\"What I think is that you are a timeless beauty.\" There was something about becoming a vampire that enhanced a person's best traits, but Mark suspected Stella had been gorgeous even before death. Her hair was glossy chestnut, her eyes chocolate brown, her skin like porcelain, and her figure lush. \"In fact, I think you've become even more beautiful since I've known you.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I'll accept that. But, for the record, I was eighteen.\"\n\n\"Really? I would have guessed thirty-five.\"\n\n\"Bastard,\" she said, still smiling.\n\nThey passed a few more exits before Mark went back to his original point. \"Other vampires don't go to their graves on their birthdays, do they?\"\n\n\"Other vampires don't put dirt into their beds, either.\"\n\n\"That's not fair! Ramon swore that I'd lose vitality if I didn't sleep in the earth of my homeland.\"\n\n\"I wonder how long you'd have kept doing it if I hadn't smelled it on your pillow.\"\n\n\"No telling,\" he said. \"He bugs me about it every time he sees me, too.\"\n\n\"He tells everybody he sees about it.\"\n\n\"Damn it! How long will it take me to live that down? Die that down. Whatever.\"\n\n\"Until he plays the same trick on somebody else.\"\n\n\"Yeah, like he's going to find a sap as big as me anytime soon,\" he said glumly, looking out into the darkness of the countryside as they approached Allenville. \"What counts as the dirt of my homeland anyway? Does it have to be from the town where I died or the town I was born in? Or buried in, for that matter? Or just the county? The state? The country?\"\n\nStella flipped on her signal and turned off of the highway. \"Well, the dirt in Allenville would have done the job nicely. I was born here, died here, and buried here.\"\n\n\"On your birthday. That sucks!\" He resisted any number of potential vampire\/sucking jokes, having been threatened with being locked inside a tanning booth the last time he made one.\n\n\"Are you kidding?\" Stella said. \"It was the best birthday ever!\"\n\n\"I see you celebrated birthdays differently in your youth.\"\n\nShe flashed him a look. \"Look around the town.\"\n\n\"Just let me know when we get there.\"\n\n\"We are there.\"\n\nMark looked out the window. The interstate had been better lit than the street they were driving down, which had just enough light for him to see the WELCOME TO ALLENVILLE sign put up by the local Jaycees. The existence of a few scattered houses was betrayed only by the flickering blue glow of TV screens. \"Not exactly a happening place, is it?\"\n\n\"Not unless you're into chicken farming. Have you ever smelled a chicken farm?\"\n\n\"Wait! There're lights ahead.\" They crested a hill, but he saw nothing more exciting than a McDonald's, a gas station, and a Wal-Mart. \"Never mind.\"\n\n\"At least there's a Wal-Mart now,\" Stella said. \"If we'd had something like that here when I was growing up, I'd have been in hog heaven.\"\n\nMark realized that her usual sophisticated tones had been growing more and more countrified during the drive but decided it would be impolite to mention it, and perhaps dangerous as well, considering the strength and speed of a vampire Stella's age.\n\n\"You weren't happy here?\" he asked as they left the oasis of neon behind.\n\n\"Mama used to say I started walking early, just so I could get away from here that much sooner.\"\n\n\"But you didn't.\"\n\n\"I wanted to, God I wanted to, but I had nowhere to go. No money, no schooling, nobody to stay with. I saved every penny I could, but I'd just about given up on ever getting a chance to leave when I met Vilmos. As soon as I saw him, I knew he was my ticket out of here.\"\n\n\"Just not quite in the way you expected.\"\n\n\"Not hardly,\" she said. \"Anyway, I thought I was seducing him, and afterward, I poured out my heart to him. He offered me the Choice, and I accepted it.\"\n\n\"And you never looked back?\"\n\n\"Not once.\"\n\nOf course that begged the question of why they were there that evening, but he resisted asking until they reached an area with knee-high weeds that Stella insisted was the parking lot for the graveyard she'd abandoned. That was when he stepped into something he wouldn't have wanted to go near with his former sense of smell, let alone with the vampire upgrade.\n\n\"Why are we here again?\" he groused\n\n\"Because it's my birthday,\" she said.\n\n\"That's a lousy reason.\"\n\n\"How about because I'm your sire and I say so?\"\n\n\"Why are you my sire, anyway?\"\n\n\"Because I bit you, bled you to the point of death, and gave you my blood. Or are you asking why I decided to bring you over?\"\n\n\"No, I know you brought me over because you couldn't resist my manly wiles. I mean, why are you my sire? Shouldn't you be my dam?\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"A sire is a male parent. A female is a dam. And damned if you're not female.\"\n\n\"Vampires always say sire,\" she said doubtfully.\n\n\"That's because vampire society is male chauvinist, and has been since Dracula developed a taste for Turks on a stick. Let's strike a blow for feminism! From now on, you can be my dam. My dam of the damned!\"\n\nAs quickly as only a vampire could, Stella grabbed him by the neck and kissed him soundly. \"That,\" she said, when she was done ravaging his mouth, \"is why I brought you over.\" Then she went back to leading the way.\n\nThough Mark had no false modesty about his manly wiles, which included jet-black hair, green eyes, and a swimmer's build, he knew part of the reason for the enthusiastic smooching was Stella's nervousness. He recognized it even though the only other time he'd seen it was when he'd first woken up after his death, and she was there to welcome him to vampirehood.\n\nShe'd been so afraid he wasn't going to like it, that he'd be angry at her. It had taken some effort to prove to her her that he considered the Choice to be better than a lifetime pass to Disney World, and one of his other manly wiles was showing the strain by the time she was convinced.\n\nThey reached the entrance, an open iron arch with the name \"Spivey\" overhead.\n\n\"Spivey was your name?\" Like most vampires her age, Stella had changed her name more than once.\n\n\"No, Spivey was Mama's maiden name. I'm a Boyd. Mama didn't get along with Daddy's people, so she had me and him buried here.\" She hesitated.\n\n\"Are you sure you want to go in?\"\n\n\"It would be right silly to come this far and not go in,\" she said.\n\n\"It's silly to go to monster truck rallies, too, but that never stopped me.\"\n\nShe smiled briefly, then stepped through the arch. Mark followed closely in case she needed him and because her night vision was considerably better than his own.\n\n\"Stella Boyd,\" he said experimentally. \"Not bad.\"\n\n\"Try again. My old name was Estelle,\" she said, putting the emphasis on the first syllable. \"But nobody calls me that now. Ever.\"\n\n\"Message received.\"\n\nThey kept on for a few minutes, Stella pausing now and then to read the words on tombstones that were nothing but black blocks to Mark. She finally stopped by a wide monument, with room for two names. \"Here's Mama and Daddy. I didn't find out about her dying until a long time afterward, but I figured she'd be buried here, with Daddy and me.\"\n\nMark moved close enough to make out the inscriptions. \"Caleb Boyd. Beloved Husband and Father. Oveda Boyd. Beloved Wife and Mother.\"\n\n\"Mine is over by that tree.\"\n\n\"What tree?\"\n\n\"Sorry, by that tree stump. It was a tree when I was here last. But there's my stone.\"\n\n\"I'm guessing your epitaph includes 'beloved.'\"\n\n\"I don't know. It hadn't been put in when I left\u2014there was just a big fieldstone marking the place. I imagine Mama had to save up to pay for a tombstone.\"\n\nStella walked over to the grave, then went as still as only a vampire can.\n\nMark, thinking she must be feeling like Scrooge had when confronted by the price of his sins, put an arm around her, but she didn't respond. He looked down at the stone, then blinked.\n\n\"It says 'Jane Doe,'\" he said. There was no birth date, and the only date of death was the year.\n\n\"I know what it says.\"\n\n\"Then where's your grave?\"\n\n\"You're standing on it.\"\n\n\"Are you sure this is the right place?\"\n\n\"Of course I'm sure!\"\n\n\"It's been a while since you've been here, right? And the circumstances that night were pretty much tailor-made for making you forget the exact location.\"\n\n\"I'm sure. A person doesn't just forget something like that!\"\n\nShe stayed there while Mark wandered over toward the neighboring graves, hoping to find the correct one, but there was no Estelle Boyd. Eventually he came back to where she was still standing.\n\n\"Maybe your mother moved you somewhere...\" He stopped before saying nicer. \"To another cemetery.\"\n\n\"She wouldn't have moved me and left Daddy here. I was a Daddy's girl from the day I was born\u2014she wouldn't have separated us.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe nobody realized you were already here. I mean, you said there was no tombstone.\"\n\n\"Are you saying my own mother didn't buy me a tombstone?\" she said, an edge in her voice.\n\n\"No, I'm just saying\u2014Hell, I don't know what I'm saying.\" He looked around helplessly, but there was no night watchman to bespell and question. \"Let's go back to the hotel. I'll hit the web and see what I can Google about Jane. Okay? We'll find out what happened.\"\n\nFortunately they'd already fed, so they could go straight to their hotel, where Mark immediately booted up his laptop. By searching for \"Allenville, NC\" and \"Jane Doe,\" he found a hit on the Allenville Sentinel's website archives.\n\n\"Here we go,\" he said. \"Story dated a year and a half ago. Jane Doe to be buried in Spivey family plot. Unknown murder victim. Believed to be between sixteen and nineteen years old. Found raped and strangled in Allenville six months previously. No funds in the budget for burial, so Officer Norcomb offered room in his family plot. He must be a relative of yours.\"\n\n\"I suppose so. The Spiveys always were a fertile bunch. Mama would have had a house full if Daddy hadn't died so early.\"\n\nMark continued reading. \"Ongoing investigation. Norcomb still hopes he'll be able to identify her and her killer. There's a photo of the funeral, complete with locals paying their respects.\"\n\n\"Nothing about relocating the previous inhabitant of the grave?\" she asked.\n\n\"Nope. Shouldn't they have found your coffin?\"\n\n\"There wasn't much left of it when I broke out of it.\"\n\n\"Vilmos didn't dig you up?\" he said, appalled. Stella had arranged it so that he'd never been buried, but sometimes it was necessary to placate the human world. In those cases, the vampire's sire dug up the coffin as promptly as possible.\n\n\"He was late. It took him longer than expected to find some men to bespell to do the digging. I could have waited, but I panicked.\"\n\n\"No wonder. Why didn't he dig for you himself? He could have done it faster than bespelled humans.\"\n\n\"Vilmos get his hands dirty? Please!\"\n\nMark supposed it wasn't surprising that he disliked Stella's sire so intensely.\n\n\"At any rate,\" Stella said, \"the coffin was broken up pretty thoroughly. Vilmos splintered the rest, tossed it back into the grave, and had it buried again. I don't know how long it takes wood and cloth to rot, but I don't expect they found anything when digging Jane's grave that would have told them I'd been buried there. Only there should have been a marker of some sort. Let me see that picture.\"\n\nHe moved the screen so it was aimed toward her.\n\n\"No tombstone, no fieldstone, no nothing,\" she said. \"I don't understand. Why would Mama have moved the marker? Why didn't she get me a real tombstone? I know they're expensive\u2014she had to save for a year to pay for Daddy's\u2014but...I guess she decided not to bother.\"\n\n\"Hey, don't make assumptions! Tell you what\u2014tomorrow I'll go back and see what the story is. There must be records of who's supposed to be where.\"\n\n\"Probably not. When Daddy died, Mama just picked a spot and buried him. I'm not even sure who owned the land then, let alone now.\"\n\n\"I bet Officer Norcomb will know. I'll track him down and ask him.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter anyway. You were right. It was stupid to come back.\"\n\n\"I didn't say it was stupid\u2014I said it was morbid. And I'm going to find that guy tomorrow and see what happened.\"\n\nShe shrugged, saying only, \"I am a little curious.\" Then she reached for the TV remote control. \"I wonder what they've got on pay-per-view.\"\n\nThey picked out something violent and mindless, and when it was over, Mark produced the birthday present he'd hidden in his suitcase. Stella demonstrated her appreciation for the sapphire pendant ardently, proving once again that her years had given her skills beyond safe driving. Still, Mark could tell her unbeating heart wasn't in it, though he certainly enjoyed her efforts on his behalf.\n\nAs the night ended, Stella got into bed, and after making sure the door was locked, the windows thoroughly curtained, and the DO NOT DISTURB sign was in place, Mark joined her. An instant before dawn arrived, he felt her start to cry. Then they both stiffened in death.\n\nAt some point, Mark shifted from a vampire's death-sleep to human sleep, and he woke when it was nearly eleven. Stella would remain cold and unmoving until dusk, but his body was still fighting off the vestiges of humanity.\n\nNormally he stayed nearby while Stella rested, especially when they were away from home, but finding out about Stella's grave took priority. His first target was Officer Norcomb, the one who'd given permission for Jane Doe to be buried in the Spivey plot. While en route to Allenville, he used his cell phone to call the police station to find out if Officer Norcomb was in. According to the cop who answered the phone, Norcomb was on his lunch break, and he directed Mark to Benny's Truck Stop near the highway.\n\nMark had noticed Benny's the night before, admiring the glamor of the chubby neon chef and his flashing burger. In the daylight, it was less glamorous, but the gas and diesel islands were doing a brisk business. As Mark got out of the car, he tried for a deep breath of fresh country air but instead breathed in a horrible mix of ammonia and general nastiness coming from the buildings a field away. He stepped inside quickly.\n\nAs the only police officer in the place, Norcomb was easy to spot. A skinny man, despite the remains of gravy-soaked meat and mashed potatoes left on his plate, and as far as Mark could tell, he didn't bear the slightest family resemblance to Stella.\n\nMark approached his booth and, with his friendliest smile, said, \"Officer Norcomb?\"\n\nNorcomb gave him such a suspicious look that Mark used his tongue to make sure his fangs weren't out. \"You the one who called the station looking for me?\" he said.\n\n\"That's me. Can I join you?\"\n\n\"If this is about a traffic citation, don't bother. I don't fix nobody's tickets.\"\n\n\"Nothing like that,\" Mark assured him. \"I'm here about Jane Doe.\"\n\nNorcomb sat up straight, and before Mark could put rump to the sticky vinyl of the bench, the cop said, \"Do you know who she is?\"\n\n\"No, I'm afraid not, I just wanted to\u2014\"\n\n\"Are you a reporter?\"\n\n\"Why don't we start over? My name is Mark Anderson.\" He offered his hand, and Norcomb reached over his late lunch to take it. As they shook, their eyes met, and Mark exerted the force of will a vampire used to bespell his victims.\n\nA moment later, Norcomb said, \"You going to let go of my hand anytime soon?\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Mark muttered. Stella assured him he'd develop the ability to bespell victims before too much longer, but so far, nothing. Since his compelling gaze hadn't worked, he'd have to rely on his backup plan. \"I believe you and I are related,\" he said.\n\n\"Is that right?\" Norcomb said skeptically. \"I don't recall any Yankees in the family. No offense.\"\n\n\"None taken. If we are related, it's only by marriage. You see, my wife's great-aunt Estelle is from Allenville, and she's always said she wanted to be buried in the Spivey family cemetery. Since I'm in Raleigh on business, my wife asked me to confirm that it's still in use.\"\n\n\"I'd heard there were some Spiveys who moved up North, and I know old folks are big on coming back home to be buried.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Aunt Estelle is getting quite frail, so I don't think it will be too much longer.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear that,\" Norcomb said with enough genuine sympathy to make Mark feel guilty.\n\n\"At least she's had a long life,\" Mark said, which was true enough. \"I found the Spivey cemetery the other day, and while I was checking for recent burials, I noticed Jane Doe's grave. I was curious, so I did some research on the web, read that you gave permission for Ms. Doe to be buried there, and figured you were the one to talk to. Do we need to fill out any paperwork?\"\n\n\"Shoot, we don't get that formal around here. If Aunt Estelle is family, she's welcome.\"\n\n\"My wife will be glad to hear that.\"\n\nNorcomb seemed to be pulling himself together in preparation for leaving, so Mark hurriedly said, \"I know you've got to go back on duty, but I did wonder how Jane Doe came to be buried with the Spiveys. Is there reason to suspect she's a relative?\"\n\n\"We don't have any idea of who she is, bless her heart.\"\n\n\"Really? I realize it might not be proper to talk about an ongoing investigation...\" He tried to bespell the man again, and was almost certain he felt something. Or maybe Norcomb just felt like talking.\n\nHe said, \"The case is still open, but I wouldn't exactly call it ongoing. That poor girl's been dead over two years, and we don't know a bit more than we did a week after we found her. Wasn't far from where we are now, as a matter of fact. Just on the other side of that chicken barn you can see from the parking lot.\"\n\n\"So it's chickens in that building. What a stink!\"\n\n\"You should smell then in the middle of summer. Anyway, some boys found the girl in a field, partially covered up with leaves and brush. She'd been stripped, and the killer bashed her face in so bad that she was unrecognizable, so we had no clue who she was. Nobody's ever claimed her.\"\n\n\"I read online that she was seen in Wal-Mart.\"\n\n\"That's right. The manager identified her from her hair, believe it or not. She had it dyed solid black and cut kind of funny. One of those Goths. We don't get many of those in Allenville, which is why the manager remembered her. Even though she bought some things, she paid cash, so that was no help, and she wasn't with anybody, either. I went through the store's security tapes and got some pictures of her to run in the newspaper, but nobody knows who she is.\"\n\n\"I take it that her purchases weren't helpful, either.\"\n\n\"Actually, that was kind of peculiar. She bought herself a whole outfit, and afterward, she went to the store's bathroom, changed into the clothes she'd just bought, and threw the old stuff into the trash can.\"\n\n\"That is peculiar.\"\n\n\"My take is that she was in trouble, maybe drug-related, and wanted to disguise herself. But whoever was looking for her found her anyway, and nobody in town saw anybody suspicious.\"\n\n\"Isn't that strange in a small town?\" Mark said, tactfully not suggesting that a local could have been involved.\n\n\"Not as much as you might think. We get all kinds of people passing through: runaways, transients of every description. Plus Raleigh is a big city, with big city problems, and sometimes that causes us problems, too.\"\n\nHaving spent time in New York, Boston, and London, Mark didn't see Raleigh as big or dangerous, but perspective was everything. \"I still don't understand how Ms. Doe came to be buried in the Spivey plot.\"\n\n\"We kept her in cold storage for a while, hoping something would turn up, but decided it would only be right to bury her. Bob Henry at the funeral home donated a coffin and tombstone and the florist sent flowers, but when nobody had a burial plot they were willing to part with, I offered her a place with my family.\"\n\n\"That was very decent of you.\"\n\nThe cop looked abashed. \"We had plenty of space\u2014that whole corner of the lot was nearly empty. Besides, I was the first officer on the scene, and I feel bad that we've never found out who she was. Not that I've given up, mind you. There's not enough time or money to keep an investigation moving indefinitely, but I'm like a bloodhound\u2014I may not have a scent to go on now, but when I get one, I'll not give up.\" He started to rise again, and said, \"Now I do need to get going. You have your wife give us a call, and we'll pick out a nice place for Aunt Estelle.\"\n\n\"I'd do that. Thank you very much for your time.\"\n\n\"Hey, what are families for?\"\n\nThe two men shook hands, and Norcomb headed for the door. Mark was about to follow him when he noticed his stomach was growling. Stella no longer needed food, other than the occasional dose of dark chocolate she claimed vampires required, but he still ate one or two regular meals a day. So when the waitress came to clear off Norcomb's table, he ordered lunch.\n\nOn the way back to Raleigh, Mark speculated about how Stella would react. He honestly had no idea\u2014Stella's unpredictability had been part of what had attracted him to her in the first place, even before she confessed her undead status. Some days she seemed as young as she'd been at death, while others she demonstrated every day she'd lived. Most of the time he was happy to go along, so even though he didn't understand why she'd wanted to make a birthday pilgrimage to her grave, he hadn't argued.\n\nNow there was one thing he was sure of. Stella wanted her grave back.\n\nMark was in bed with Stella when she came back to life, and she responded immediately, if not in the way he'd hoped.\n\n\"You reek!\" she said with a grimace.\n\n\"Damn it,\" he said, sliding out from under the covers. \"All I had was a cheeseburger! No onions or mustard, and I brushed my teeth and used mouthwash. Twice!\"\n\n\"It's not the food,\" she said, sniffing.\n\n\"I ate next door to a chicken farm,\" Mark said.\n\nShe shuddered. \"Maybe that's it. After living near one all those years, I was ready to switch to blood just to make sure I never had to eat chicken again.\"\n\n\"Ready to hear about the body in your grave?\"\n\n\"Not yet\u2014I'm hungry.\" As long as he got regular food, Mark could go two or three days without blood feeding, but Stella could not. \"Did you scout out a place for us to hunt? What should I wear?\"\n\n\"Workout clothes. The desk clerk recommended a nearby jogging path. It's around a lake and includes numerous twists and turns.\"\n\n\"I'll hit the shower and get ready to go.\"\n\n\"I better shower again, too, to get that nasty smell off of me. And in the interest of conserving water...\"\n\n\"By all means, let's conserve.\"\n\nOddly, taking a shower together took longer than two separate showers would have.\n\nIf it had been his grave, Mark would have been frothing at the mouth to find out more about the body buried there, but older vampires were annoyingly patient. Stella wanted to wait until after dinner.\n\nAdmittedly, it didn't take her long to pick out a healthy-looking man and bespell him into following her to a darkened patch of trees. She quickly sated herself, and then Mark took his turn. After that, Stella kept the man bespelled long enough for their saliva to heal the wounds, and fuzzed his memory before sending him on his way again. All he'd remember was that the run had taken more out of him than usual.\n\nMark could have tried to bespell his own donor, of course, but it would have taken longer, and he'd have had to spring for a nice dinner and a movie. Stella's methods were much more efficient.\n\nAfterward, they headed back for the Caddy, and since he didn't have Stella's patience, Mark was about to explode with his news by the time she asked, \"What did you find out?\"\n\nHe told her everything Norcomb had told him but wasn't so distracted that he didn't notice that Stella was driving back toward the Spivey family plot. He finished as they arrived, and when she parked the car, he followed her to the grave.\n\nShe just looked at it. Though it was a much darker night, he had no doubt that she could read each letter of the tombstone's inscription.\n\n\"We could have her moved to a public cemetery,\" he said.\n\n\"How would we explain it to that cop?\"\n\n\"We'll tell him Aunt Estelle doesn't like a stranger in here, that she wants this space. Hell, we've got enough lawyers and money that we don't have to explain anything. Or you can bespell him\u2014that would be cheaper.\"\n\n\"I don't want to do that to her.\"\n\n\"It's not like she'd know. She's dead\u2014really dead, I mean. It wouldn't hurt her feelings.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Because there's no such thing as ghosts.\"\n\n\"A year ago, you'd have said that there's no such thing as vampires. A year from now, there's no telling what you'll be saying.\"\n\nA chill ran down Mark's spine, but that was a conversation he wasn't ready for. \"Well, if she is watching, she'll understand why you want your grave back.\"\n\nBut Stella shook her head. \"I don't want to just dump her somewhere. At least here, she's got Norcomb looking after her. She won't be forgotten.\"\n\n\"Then we'll move her to another spot here in the Spivey plot.\"\n\n\"No. Why should I care if there's somebody buried here anyway? It's not like I'm planning to use the grave. And who knows? Maybe someday Norcomb will figure out who she is, and her people will take her home.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Mark said doubtfully, knowing that the majority of cold cases were never solved. What had Norcomb said? That there wasn't enough time or money to pursue an investigation forever. Mark considered it. Time wasn't a problem for him, thanks to the eternal life clause of vampirism, and neither was money. Stella was loaded and, as was customary, had settled a big chunk of change onto him when she brought him over.\n\n\"Stella, did you ever read the Nancy Drew books?\"\n\n\"Why?\" Before he could answer, she said, \"Are you seriously suggesting we go snooping around like Nancy Drew to find out what happened to Jane?\"\n\n\"Why not? We've got no plans for the next few days.\"\n\n\"And you believe you can solve a murder in a few days when the police haven't been able to in two years?\"\n\n\"I don't think it's any more ridiculous than believing in vampires.\"\n\nShe gave him a look.\n\n\"Okay, maybe it is,\" he conceded. \"But how about this? We snoop around for a few days, and if nothing comes of it, we'll hire a private investigator. How does that sound?\"\n\n\"Ridiculous.\" Then she smiled. \"Let's do it.\"\n\nMark still didn't believe Jane Doe's spirit was watching, but he sketched a salute toward her tombstone as they left, just in case.\n\n\"What first?\" he said once they were in the car.\n\n\"Are you admitting that even though this was your idea, you have no plans about what we should do first?\"\n\n\"I'm a big-picture guy. I leave the details to you.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Stella said dryly. \"In that case, I think I'd like to meet my third-cousin once removed, or whatever relation Officer Norcomb is to me.\"\n\nThey decided making another call to the police station to track him down might provoke unwelcome attention, so rather than drive back to get to Mark's laptop in Raleigh, Stella called Ramon in Boston and asked him to find Norcomb's address and directions to his house.\n\nAfter hanging up, she said, \"By the way, Ramon said\u2014\"\n\n\"I know, he said to remind me to put dirt in my bed. Smug bastard! I'll come up with a way to get him back one of these days.\"\n\n\"Would it help if I mentioned that Ramon is afraid of snakes?\"\n\n\"Is he?\" Mark said with just the kind of fiendish grin a vampire was supposed to sport. He was happily plotting revenge when they passed by Norcomb's house. A squad car was parked in the driveway, making it a good bet that Stella's cousin was at home.\n\nStella drove a few blocks farther and parked outside a dark house. \"Does he live alone?\"\n\n\"No wedding band, so he's not married, and he mentioned calling his mother, so he doesn't live with her,\" Mark said.\n\n\"Good. I don't want to risk anybody seeing the car, so you take it and keep circling the area. I'll call you on the cell when I need you.\"\n\n\"Aye aye, captain.\"\n\n\"Don't get lost!\" She scooted out and was gone in a blink, while Mark moved to the driver's seat to randomly drive up and down the streets of the housing development, hoping nobody would notice him. An hour and a half later, his cell rang.\n\n\"Stella?\"\n\n\"No, it's dear old Aunt Estelle. Do you remember that big red house right after we turned onto Norcomb's street?\"\n\n\"Having driven past it approximately twenty-eight times tonight, I doubt I'll ever forget it.\"\n\n\"Pick me up there.\"\n\n\"Aye aye\u2014\"\n\n\"Once was funny. After that it gets old.\"\n\n\"Yes, beloved.\"\n\n\"That one never gets old.\"\n\n\"Neither do we,\" Mark said, and broke the connection.\n\nStella wasn't in sight when he drove up but appeared at his window almost immediately. \"Move over.\" She climbed in and, as she got the car moving, tossed a yellow legal pad and a videotape into his lap.\n\n\"What's this?\" he asked.\n\n\"My notes from my talk with Norcomb and a copy of the Wal-Mart security tape. Or rather the copy of his copy that I had him make. If he'd had a photocopier, I'd have copied the case files, too.\"\n\n\"He had all that at his house?\"\n\n\"For one, your talk today got him thinking about Jane again, and for another, I think he's a little obsessed with her.\"\n\n\"Clearly.\" Then a thought occurred to him. \"He didn't kill her himself, did he?\"\n\n\"Nancy Drew would be proud of you,\" she said approvingly, \"but no, he did not. I asked.\"\n\n\"You're sure? How thoroughly did you bespell him?\"\n\n\"Deeply enough that he won't remember me, you, or Aunt Estelle. I could have made him forget his own address while I was at it, but that seemed a bit excessive.\"\n\n\"You've got to teach me how to do that.\"\n\n\"It just takes practice,\" she said.\n\n\"What else did he tell you?\"\n\n\"Everything he knows about the case, but there wasn't a lot more than what he told you, unless you count the forensic details: decomposition, tissue damage, lividity. I'd have been done half an hour sooner if I hadn't had to ask what all the terminology means.\"\n\n\"You'll have to watch more CSI. Any leads we can use?\"\n\n\"Possibly. It turns out that Jane was at Benny's the day she went to Wal-Mart.\"\n\n\"That's where I met Norcomb. Kind of a coincidence, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Not really. How many restaurants do you think there are in Allenville?\"\n\n\"Good point. Was she there before or after her shopping spree?\"\n\n\"Before, when her outfit was still noticeable. Black on black, with a skull ring.\"\n\n\"No wonder she threw it away.\"\n\n\"A good thing she did, or the murderer would have disposed of it along with the clothes she was wearing when he killed her.\"\n\n\"What difference does that make?\"\n\n\"Well, it turns out my cousin is one devoted investigator. He went to the dump and found Jane's old clothes, still stuffed in the shopping bag.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me he had that at his house, too?\"\n\n\"He did. Having a boy like that in the family does my heart proud.\"\n\n\"And well it might. Did you learn anything from the clothes?\"\n\n\"I didn't want to handle them too much\u2014I've watched enough CSI to know about contaminating evidence\u2014but I did get a good whiff of them. Of course, I got a good whiff of garbage from the dump, too, but still, I've got Jane's scent.\"\n\n\"Stella, how good do you smell?\"\n\n\"Sweet enough to make bees give up roses, according to the perfume bottle.\"\n\n\"Granted, even without the perfume, but I was referring to your sense of smell. Compared to, say, a bloodhound's.\"\n\n\"I've never made the comparison,\" she said, \"but I am considered gifted, even for a vampire.\"\n\n\"Gifted enough that you'll be able to track her after two years?\"\n\n\"It's a long shot, but since this whole idea is a long shot...\"\n\n\"True enough.\"\n\nIt took a while for Stella to find a secluded parking place somewhat near where Jane's body had been found, though it was still a long enough walk that Mark was glad they were wearing running shoes. Even vampires got blisters on their feet from walking too far in dress shoes.\n\nFinally they found the spot Stella was sure matched the description in the police report, just past a decrepit wooden fence. The neon of Benny's was visible as a glow above the tree line.\n\n\"Now I know why you reeked when you came to bed today,\" she said.\n\nMark inhaled deeply and regretted it. \"I see what you mean about chicken farms. They're foul. Or fowl, if you'd rather.\"\n\n\"It's not the chicken,\" Stella said. \"Yes, I smell them, and yes, they are foul, but there's something else.\"\n\nHe started to ask what she meant, but she was leaning over, sniffing at the ground. Mark decided further bloodhound references would not go over well, so concentrated on staying out of her way as she wandered this way and that, sometimes breaking into a run so fast that he'd have lost her if he weren't a vampire, too.\n\nFinally, after he'd chased her over what seemed like half the state, Stella came to a dead stop. \"Here.\"\n\n\"You actually tracked her?\" he said incredulously.\n\n\"No, you were right. It's been too long. I caught a trace of Jane's scent back where the body was, but that's it.\"\n\n\"Then what are you talking about?\"\n\n\"I smelled somebody else. There's another body here, Mark\u2014we're standing on the grave.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Can't you smell it?\"\n\n\"You know I'm new at this,\" he grumbled, but leaned over and tried again. She was right. The stench of death was there, though masked by the chickens' stink and several feet of earth between them and the corpse. \"It's not fresh.\"\n\n\"No, but I think the one over there is.\" She pointed a little bit away.\n\n\"There's another?\"\n\n\"More than that, I think.\"\n\n\"Jesus, Stella, what have we gotten ourselves into?\"\n\nBetween their sense of self-preservation and the realization that dawn was coming, they made their way back to the car and drove back to the hotel, arguing as they went. Mark was in favor of an anonymous call to Norcomb about the bodies, along with another bout of be-spelling him if necessary, but Stella wasn't willing to risk their involvement coming to light.\n\nOr so she said, but Mark suspected that she just didn't want to give up their investigation, and when he said so, she pulled rank on him. He objected, and by the time they got back to the hotel, they were no longer speaking.\n\nMark was still angry when he woke the next day, and both ignored Stella and pretended he'd never heard of Jane Doe. It was only when he'd gone out for lunch, defiantly eating a large bowl of chili with onions on top, that his resolve weakened, as it always did with Stella. She was older, richer, stronger, and faster than he was, and had other vampiric abilities he was just beginning to discover, and he still felt protective of her. He had no idea if it was a man-woman thing, a vampire-sire thing, or just a Mark-Stella thing. Whatever it was, he went to buy something they were going to need, and nearly had it set up when Stella woke.\n\nHer nose wrinkled, so he knew she smelled his lunch despite his using a whole bottle of mouthwash, but she refrained from comment. \"What are you doing?\" she asked.\n\n\"I got a VCR so we can watch the security tape.\" He made the last connection, turned on the TV and VCR, and reached for the tape.\n\nStella got to it first. \"We don't have to do this,\" she said. \"You don't have to do this.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"All that 'I'm your sire and I say so!' stuff is bullshit!\"\n\nMark blinked at that\u2014Stella rarely swore\u2014and repeated, \"I know.\"\n\n\"Then why did you get the VCR?\"\n\n\"Consider it a belated birthday gift.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Only if you come here and let me give you an early birthday gift.\"\n\nHe started to join her on the bed but then stopped. \"My lunch was kind of smelly.\"\n\n\"So I won't kiss you. Not on the lips, anyway.\"\n\nAn hour later, they got around to watching the video. Norcomb had put together a greatest hits tape, with snippets from various camera views that showed Jane. The film quality was mediocre, but they got the general idea.\n\nJane arrived dressed in urban Goth glory\u2014black cargo pants, a black T-shirt ripped at the neckline, scuffed black boots. Her hair was, of course, black with the flat look of a cheap dye job. It was short, but Mark couldn't tell if it had been styled to look asymmetrical or just hadn't been brushed recently. She must have used half a tube of mascara to ring her eyes so thoroughly, and she was wearing a fine selection of heavy-looking Goth adornments: a skull ring, a bat wing necklace, and other less visible chains and rings.\n\n\"She doesn't exactly blend in, does she?\" Mark said.\n\n\"But she doesn't seem to mind being stared at,\" Stella commented.\n\nEven though nearly everybody who saw her did a double-take, Jane strode through the store confidently, not seeming to notice them. She headed out of range of that camera, and the view switched to the juniors department. Jane went through the racks to pick out a pair of jeans and a light blue pullover sweater. After a trip to the dressing room, which was not documented, she went to the shoe department to try on sneakers in blinding white. She got socks, too\u2014the ones she was wearing had holes in both big toes. Next she got panties and a bra.\n\n\"Granny panties,\" Stella said thoughtfully.\n\n\"Beg pardon,\" Mark said.\n\n\"The female equivalent of tighty whities. Waist-high briefs, instead of a bikini or a thong.\"\n\nThe next scene was of her standing next to a rack of hats, and she settled on a light blue sun hat, the kind of modified ball cap Mark saw girls wearing in the summer.\n\nShe went to the register with her gleanings, still ignoring the curious looks she was getting, and once it was all paid for, headed toward the bathroom. There was a break in the film, and it started up again with her coming out again. Now Jane was dressed in her new outfit, and with her face scrubbed clean, her hair hidden under the hat, and the jewelry gone, she looked like a new person. The people walking past her didn't give her a second glance, except a high school boy who flashed a grin.\n\nJane walked toward the front of the store, carrying the Wal-Mart bag that presumably carried her old things. But just before she stepped out, she looked at the bag, then stuffed it into a trash can by the door. She walked out the door, and after ten seconds more, the tape ended.\n\n\"Kudos to your cousin for spotting her,\" Mark said. \"I wouldn't have known it was the same girl.\"\n\n\"I don't know that I would have, either,\" Stella said. \"Not by sight anyway. So how did her killer recognize her?\"\n\n\"He must have known her well.\"\n\n\"What about the other bodies?\"\n\n\"Norcomb thinks drugs were involved,\" Mark said, \"and drug dealers make lots of enemies. Though I have to say that Allenville doesn't seem like the place for that kind of activity, even with the big city nearby.\"\n\nStella rewound to the part where Jane emerged from the bathroom. \"She looks a lot younger like that. Even her body language changed. Before she was so sure of herself\u2014now she looks almost timid.\"\n\n\"Part of the disguise?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" Stella watched to the end again, shut it off, and announced, \"I'm getting hungry.\"\n\nThey decided not to risk returning to the lakeside park from the previous night and instead went to the North Carolina State Fair, which was in full swing. After Mark won a stuffed version of Seasame Street's Count from the milk bottle throw, they started looking for a likely target.\n\n\"There,\" Stella said, nudging Mark in the side. A group of women who looked like college students was discussing what ride to go on next, and when they decided on the Ferris wheel, one of them begged off, saying she wanted to get something to drink. The others kidded her for being afraid of heights and joined the long line for the ride.\n\n\"Perfect,\" Mark said. They followed the acrophobic girl for a few minutes, then flanked her, and Stella made eye contact to bespell her instantly. It took only a few minutes to find a secluded spot between trailers, and Stella fed while Mark kept watch. Then they escorted the girl back, Mark bought her a Coke, and Stella implanted the idea that a very attractive man had flirted with her.\n\nThey were halfway back to the hotel when Stella said, \"That's it!\"\n\n\"That's what?\"\n\n\"Why did we pick that girl to feed on?\"\n\n\"Because she was temporarily alone.\"\n\n\"Because she was vulnerable. Now think about how Jane looked. Before she changed clothes, she looked tough and streetwise. People stared at her but nobody messed with her. Afterward, she looked vulnerable.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\n\"Norcomb thought she changed clothes as a disguise, and that may be it, but maybe that's not why she was killed. What if she was killed because she was vulnerable? What if somebody saw that and marked her as his prey?\"\n\n\"Another vampire?\"\n\n\"No\u2014the autopsy report had nothing about her being drained. But we're not the only predators around.\"\n\n\"Meaning what?\" Mark said, thinking uncomfortably of those other things Stella had referred to before. \"Werewolves? Zombies? Ghouls?\"\n\n\"I'd have smelled any of them at the graves we found,\" Stella said matter-of-factly, and Mark didn't know if she was kidding or not. \"I'm talking about a human monster.\"\n\n\"A serial killer,\" Mark said, momentarily relieved, \"with a penchant for young girls.\"\n\nStella nodded. \"We know Jane was at Benny's before she went to Wal-Mart, but we don't know where she went next. If she was passing through, wouldn't she go back to the truck stop to look for a ride? And if you lived in Allenville and wanted a steady supply of victims, wouldn't you hang around Benny's to find them?\"\n\n\"May I point out that Benny's isn't far from where Jane's body was found and from where the other bodies still are.\"\n\n\"Right you are, Ned.\"\n\n\"Ned?\"\n\n\"Ned Nickerson. Nancy Drew's boyfriend.\"\n\n\"So what would Nancy and Ned do in a case like this?\"\n\n\"Set a trap for the killer.\"\n\n\"A trap requires bait.\"\n\n\"Who do we know who looks younger and more vulnerable than she really is?\" Stella said, batting her eyelashes.\n\nDespite his teasing before, Stella really did look older than the eighteen she'd been before making the Choice. Mark didn't understand how\u2014something about the way she moved, or her clothes and makeup\u2014but she looked like a woman, not a girl. At least, she always had until retreating into the bathroom with the bag of stuff she'd bought at Target on the way back to the hotel.\n\nMark was watching CNN when he heard, \"Excuse me?\" in a timid voice.\n\nHe looked up to see a girl in khaki crop pants with a peacock blue cami that did nothing to hide the pink bra strap beneath or her generous bosom. Her soft brown hair was held off from her face with a glittery headband, and her makeup was frosted pastels. Her necklace said \"Princess,\" with a heart dotting the i.\n\n\"Stella?\" he said wonderingly.\n\n\"How do I look?\" She spun around.\n\n\"Like jailbait. If you were my daughter, I would order barbed wire for the fence and a chastity belt for you.\"\n\nShe dimpled\u2014he hadn't known she could dimple\u2014and said, \"Do you think you could, you know, let me use your car?\"\n\n\"Dear Lord, you even speak young! I'll drive\u2014you don't look old enough to have a license.\"\n\nDamned if she didn't dimple again.\n\nMark was still a bit unnerved when, halfway to Allenville, Stella reached over and stroked his thigh. \"Do you want to, like, park somewhere before we go in?\"\n\n\"God, no!\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\" she said as she drew her hand back, sounding like her old self.\n\n\"No offense, but I never cared for Lolita, and you're just too damned convincing.\"\n\n\"I thought all men fantasized about young girls.\"\n\n\"I prefer women.\"\n\n\"I see,\" she said, sounding more thoughtful than offended.\n\n\"Were you like this when you were eighteen?\"\n\n\"Well, I probably would have dressed in comparable fashion, given the choice, but for one, we didn't have the money, and for another, Mama would never have allowed it.\"\n\n\"Good for her,\" Mark said self-righteously. \"Now, if you could make yourself up as a coed, maybe midtwenties...\"\n\n\"Pervert,\" she said amiably.\n\nMark exited at a rest area they'd seen a mile before the Allenville exit, and parked around back. Stella got out and, after checking to see that nobody was watching, slipped into the bushes to make her way to Benny's over land. Mark returned to the highway to drive the rest of the way.\n\nThe truck stop was bustling with vacationers, locals, and truckers. Mark snagged the last open booth and ordered a cheeseburger with no onions, fries, and a beer. Then he pulled out his laptop and a stack of paperwork so it wouldn't look suspicious if he stayed around for a while.\n\nMark knew Stella had arrived before he saw her, thanks to their sire-vampire, or dam-vampire, relationship. But he tried not to watch as she found a seat at the counter, made a show of counting out how little money she had, and asked for a burger and a small Coke. When he finally risked a glance in her direction, he saw that she'd let herself get a touch grubby during her trip through the woods, making the illusion of a runaway that much more convincing.\n\nFor the next hour and a half, Mark ate, sipped his beer, fiddled with papers, and watched as people wandered past Stella. She made eye contact with every lone man she saw, and some of the women, but while reactions included delight, disgust, and lust, nobody reacted like the predator they were looking for. She even asked a couple of the men for rides, but nobody took her up on it.\n\nThe crowd thinned, Mark was running out of things to do, and Stella had been nursing the last quarter inch of her Coke for half an hour when Mark decided that their quarry hadn't come in that night. They might well have to stake out the place for weeks, especially if the killer was a trucker or commuter. Stella's repeated presence would be noticed, even if she changed her look, so he'd started considering other young-looking vampires they could enlist to play bait when he saw the cook coming out of the kitchen.\n\nThe man looked like he was in his midthirties, stocky, with greasy hair Mark hoped was caused by his own body chemistry and not the food he prepared. He slipped an order of fries in front of Stella along with another glass of Coke.\n\nShe tried to thank him, but he scurried away before the waitress could see him.\n\nStella, still in character as a hungry runaway, scarfed the fries down. Mark was impressed. She could still eat regular food, but her body gained no nutrition from it, and since her senses were so refined, she rarely enjoyed the taste. Eating the burger must have been a strain, and to add fries on top showed how seriously she was taking their investigation.\n\nAnother half an hour passed. Mark was about to gather his belongings and give Stella their prearranged signal to call it a night when the cook snuck back out of the kitchen and placed another full glass in front of Stella, again not meeting her eyes when she tried to thank him.\n\nThe hairs on the back of Mark's neck prickled. Random generosity wasn't unheard of, but something about the man's furtive movements bothered him. Besides which, the man was supposed to be working in the kitchen, not watching customers.\n\nWhile Mark was trying to work it out, Stella drank down the Coke and left enough money on the counter to pay her check. Then she stood up and wobbled, as if she'd lost her balance. Mark's eyes narrowed. Vampires, at least vampires as old as Stella, didn't lose their balance.\n\nTheir plan had been to leave separately, with at least five minutes between their exits, so Mark stayed put, despite his consternation. What was Stella playing at anyway? Trying to look more available by pretending to be drunk, even though all she'd had was Coke? Cokes, he corrected. Two of which had been given for free by a man who was acting decidedly odd. \"Jesus!\" Mark whispered. The bastard had put something into Stella's drinks!\n\nHe shoved his things into his briefcase, threw money onto the table, and headed for the door. He stopped by the car, hoping Stella had used her key to get in, but when she wasn't there, he tossed the stuff into the trunk and grabbed a tire iron.\n\nHe slowly walked through the parking lot, checking for Stella's scent, and caught it leading out across the field in the direction of the chicken barn. There was another scent mingled with hers, the strong sweat from the truck stop cook.\n\nThey'd lured out their predator, and in normal circumstances, Mark would have had no doubts about Stella's safety, but the way she'd been weaving as she went out the door worried him. He couldn't have been too far behind, and he was moving with the speed even a young vampire could muster, but he couldn't see them, and he quickly lost the scent.\n\nHad his nose misled him? Had the man gotten Stella into a car or even met up with a confederate? Where were they? He was alone in a field, with nothing in sight but the truck stop behind him and the chicken barn before him, when he realized where they had to be. He ran toward the barn.\n\nAs he got closer, he heard talking and recognized Stella's voice, even though it was slurred.\n\n\"Where are we? Who did you say you were anyway?\"\n\n\"Just a friend,\" a man's voice said, and Mark guessed it was the cook. \"I thought you might need a place to sleep. See, there's a bed here.\"\n\n\"It smells funny.\"\n\n\"That's just the chickens. If you lay down, you'll be asleep in no time, and it won't bother you anymore. Here, let me help you take your shoes off.\"\n\nStretching up, Mark could peer into the window of the room where Stella and the man were, and even from the outside, he knew the smells in that room had nothing to do with chickens. While he watched, he saw Stella's eyes drift shut, and she slumped to the floor.\n\n\"That's my girl,\" the cook said, and reached for her.\n\nMark had seen enough. He ran around the building until he found the door. It was locked, but he shoved his shoulder against it, splintering it. More chickens than Mark had ever seen at one time fluttered wildly, clucking and shrieking and making even more protesting noises as he ran through them to get to the door that lead to Stella. The man had heard him coming, of course, and was waiting behind the door as Mark burst in. Mark had been expecting it and dodged at the last minute, which was enough to deflect the knife thrust from his back to his arm.\n\nUnfortunately it was the arm with the tire iron, which slipped from Mark's grasp as he whirled around to face his attacker.\n\nIt took Mark only an instant to take in the scene, the man standing in front of where Stella lay sprawled on the bed. He was about to launch himself when a hand moving so fast it seemed to appear from nowhere latched itself onto the killer. Between his legs. Gripping his genitals.\n\nHe crumpled with a sound that would have been a scream if he'd had enough breath for it.\n\nStella went down with him, still squeezing. The expression on her face had nothing to do with the nymphet she'd been pretending to be and everything to do with a vampire.\n\n\"All right, you son of of a bitch,\" she said. \"Tell me who Jane Doe is before I rip your prick off!\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he wheezed.\n\n\"Are you telling me you don't know one of your victims is buried in the Spivey family plot?\"\n\n\"I know she's there, but I don't know her name. I don't know any of their names.\"\n\n\"You lying sack of shit,\" Stella said, squeezing harder. \"You kept her clothes, didn't you? I bet you jacked off in them. There must have been something.\"\n\n\"Nothing. I swear. Only a little money.\"\n\n\"Tell me!\"\n\nThe man's face was starting to change colors.\n\n\"I don't think he knows,\" Mark said.\n\nShe didn't let up.\n\n\"Stella, he doesn't know. Trust me\u2014no man is going to let you keep doing that if he has any way to stop you.\"\n\nFor a long moment she still didn't react; then, with a last squeeze, she let go. The man rolled into a ball and whimpered.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Mark asked.\n\n\"Of course. You know drugs can't affect me.\"\n\n\"I wasn't sure,\" Mark admitted. \"You're a very good actress.\"\n\n\"What about you? That bastard stabbed you,\" Stella said, and Mark finally noticed that his arm was bleeding freely. \"Does it hurt?\"\n\n\"Quite a bit, actually.\"\n\nStella stepped over the killer, touched the blood with one finger, and brought the finger up to her mouth. Then she gave Mark a kiss that almost made him forget the pain.\n\n\"You're welcome,\" he said breathlessly. \"What do we do now?\"\n\n\"First we take care of your arm,\" she said, and leaned over to start lapping at his wound. Not only did it stop the bleeding, but it felt damned good, too.\n\nWith that done, Stella dragged the killer from the floor, grabbed his chin to make him look her in the eyes, and bespelled him so thoroughly he'd have laid still for her to finish squeezing his balls off, if she'd asked him to. Then she told him exactly what he was going to remember about this night. How he'd drugged the girl at the truck stop and brought her to his nest, meaning to rape and kill her the way he had the others. But the girl had fought back, gotten in a lucky blow, and left him unconscious on the floor. Meanwhile Mark did a bit of stage decoration, leaving threads from Stella's clothes on the bed and dropping the princess necklace on the floor. Then they picked up the tire iron and made their way out through the still-agitated flock in the barn.\n\nTheir next stop was the pay phone outside the truck stop, where Stella called the police to tell them who had attacked her and where. When they asked who she was, she hung up.\n\nMark already had the car running, and they lost no time in taking off, driving away just as the first police car arrived, siren blaring.\n\nDespite the lingering pain in his arm, Mark was feeling pretty pleased with himself. \"What do you know? We solved the case.\"\n\n\"No, we didn't. We still don't know who Jane Doe is.\"\n\n\"But we did catch a serial killer. Nancy Drew never did that, I bet. Not only will he not kill anymore, but now they'll find his other victims. Doesn't that count for something?\"\n\n\"Of course it does. I've been thinking of all those mothers who must have been wondering what happened to their daughters. It's made my coming home worthwhile. I just wish we could have found out who Jane is. Her mother needs to know, too.\"\n\nThey were quiet for a few miles.\n\nThen Mark said, \"Stella, about coming home. Why now?\"\n\n\"I told you. For my birthday.\"\n\n\"You've never come back for your birthday before, and eighty-two isn't a particularly meaningful birthday.\"\n\n\"No, but it's been a meaningful year. Because of you.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"You're the first vampire I've sired. Or damned. My first child.\"\n\n\"I'm not a child.\"\n\n\"No, but you are the closest thing I've got to a child. You're my bloodline. Is it any wonder that I've been thinking about my human bloodline?\"\n\n\"And about your mother?\" he guessed.\n\nShe nodded. \"Granted that my feelings toward you aren't precisely maternal\u2014\"\n\n\"Thank God for that!\"\n\n\"But it has made me think about being a mother and how I'd feel if anything happened to you. How Mama must have felt when I died. God, Mark, I was a terrible daughter!\"\n\n\"Why would you say that?\"\n\n\"I told you\u2014when Vilmos gave me the Choice, I never looked back. Ever. I lived the high life in Europe for decades, and by the time I even thought to check on Mama, she'd been dead for years. I forgot she existed. And I guess she forgot me, too.\"\n\nThere was no way Mark could answer her, no way he could comfort her, so he didn't even try.\n\nOnly when they were in bed did he say, \"If I'm your child, does this mean I've got to give you a Mother's Day present?\"\n\nHer smile was his reward. \"Damned straight! I want breakfast in bed, flowers, and a bottle of perfume, too.\"\n\n\"It's a deal.\"\n\nThe results of the night's adventures were all over the news the next morning, and Mark spent most of the day watching the story unfold, as the newscasters put it. He was still watching when Stella woke for the night.\n\n\"Did it work?\" she asked him.\n\nIn answer, he pointed to the TV screen, where the local news was discussing the case, complete with film of Officer Norcomb with the killer cook in cuffs. \"They've found two bodies already. This guy has been working at the truck stop for several years, so there's no telling how many more there are.\"\n\n\"Has he said anything about Jane?\"\n\n\"Only that he killed her but got interrupted by hunters before he could bury her, and she was found before he had another opportunity. Nothing about who she was.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"We did good, Stella. You did good.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Besides, with all the extra publicity, maybe somebody will come forward with new information. You know Norcomb isn't going to give up now. And if he does, you can bespell him into changing his mind.\"\n\n\"True enough. Are you hungry?\"\n\n\"I am. Hey! I didn't eat any food today\u2014I didn't even think of it.\"\n\n\"My little boy is growing up.\"\n\nHe gave her a determinedly Oedipal kiss and said, \"There's an NC State game this evening. Should be a good place to get a bite. I'll hit the shower. Want to join me?\"\n\n\"No, thanks. I want to get dinner before midnight this time.\"\n\n\"Spoilsport.\"\n\nWhen Mark was done, he saw Stella was watching TV but not the news. Instead she was watching the security tape of Jane.\n\n\"Stella...\"\n\n\"I'm not brooding. There's just something about Jane that's not right. Or rather about Norcomb's explanation of what she was doing in Allenville.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"He figured she was tied into drug dealing, but all we really know is that a girl who looked like a runaway came to Wal-Mart and bought new clothes. If she wasn't disguising herself, why the makeover?\"\n\nMark thought about it. \"Could she have been doing the same thing you are?\"\n\nShe cocked her head at him. \"Meaning what?\"\n\n\"You were sort of a runaway but eventually you wanted to come home. Right?\"\n\n\"Yes, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Hear me out. When you came back to Allenville, suddenly you had an accent again. You kind of reverted to who you used to be. Maybe Jane was reverting, too. She'd been this Goth creature of the night, but now that she was coming home, she wanted to become a normal girl again. So she stopped at Wal-Mart, dressed like her old self, and threw the Goth identity away. She wanted to go home.\"\n\nStella looked at him, eyes wide. \"You're a genius!\"\n\nMark tried to look modest and pointed out, \"Of course, that doesn't really help us figure out who she was.\"\n\n\"It might. Jane only bought one set of clothes, and she put them on right away. That means she expected to get home that night or the next day at the latest\u2014otherwise the new clothes would have gotten dirty. She may not have been from Allenville, but she was local. This could narrow Norcomb's search enough to find her!\"\n\n\"It must be hereditary\u2014you're a genius, too! Shall we call in another anonymous tip?\"\n\n\"I've got a better idea.\" Stella got ready in record time, and they took yet another trip to Allenville. It took a while to track down Norcomb, what with his working the biggest case of his career, but once they found him, it didn't take long for Stella to bespell him and plant both the idea about finding Jane and the conviction that he'd thought it up himself. As Stella put it, it was the least she could do for family.\n\nThey stuck around Raleigh for a while longer as the police continued to find bodies, celebrating when two of the victims were identified by personal effects kept by the killer. But the big celebration came when Norcomb announced that Jane's real name was Leah and that her family lived in nearby Cary. They'd heard about Jane Doe, but between the poor quality of the Wal-Mart security tapes and the changes in Leah's appearance during the four years she was gone, they'd never made the connection between Jane and their daughter.\n\nThe next day, the newspaper reported that an anonymous donor was paying for Leah's body to be moved closer to her family and that a tasteful granite monument would be included. Mark was among the many who attended the funeral, making sure that Leah finally got back home.\n\nStella was ready to head back to Boston, maybe stopping in New York to see some shows, but Mark put her off, pointing out that the state fair was still going on, and they hadn't ridden all the rides. Though he knew that she knew he was up to something, she played along.\n\nThe next night, Mark drove them back to Allenville, and parked outside the Spivey family plot.\n\n\"Okay, why are we out here?\" Stella asked.\n\n\"I want you to show you something.\"\n\nHe led her through the gate toward where her parents were buried, and she couldn't resist looking over toward Jane's, or rather Leah's, former grave. \"Why did they leave the tombstone?\"\n\n\"Let's look.\"\n\nHe was watching her face as she got closer and realized it was a different stone.\n\nShe turned to him. \"You bought me a tombstone?\"\n\n\"I was going to,\" he admitted, \"but somebody beat me to it.\"\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"I went to see Bob Henry. He's the man who donated Jane's tombstone, and I thought a little karmic payback was in order, so I was going to order one for you from him. When I told him where it was to be placed, he mentioned that his family had been in the business for several generations, and that they've done all the monuments in this plot. And when I told him the name to put on the stone, he told me the story.\"\n\n\"What story?\"\n\n\"Do you remember the tree that used to be over your grave? Lightning hit it years after you were buried and knocked it down.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"So it fell on the tombstone your mother had put up for you and broke it.\"\n\n\"Then she did get me a stone?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"She had Bob Henry Senior take it back to repair it, but she was already ill and died before she could finish paying for the work. It was still in the storeroom. All I did was pay the balance and a rush charge to get it out here tonight.\"\n\n\"Then Mama bought this?\"\n\n\"It was her last gift to you.\"\n\nStella knelt down on the grave and ran her fingers over the stone's inscription. Not her name, or the dates of her birth and death, but the two words under her name:\n\nBeloved Daughter\n\n\u2022 \u2022 \u2022\n\n[For a complete list of this author's books click here or visit  \nwww.penguin.com\/harrischecklist](http:\/\/penguin.com\/harrischecklist?CMP=OTC-HARRISCHKLST)\n\n## COPYRIGHTS\n\n\"Introduction: A Few Words,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner.\n\n\"Dracula Night,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Charlaine Harris.\n\n\"The Mournful Cry of Owls,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Christopher Golden.\n\n\"I Was a Teenage Vampire,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Bill Crider.\n\n\"Twilight,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by KLA Fricke, Inc.\n\n\"It's My Birthday, Too,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Jim Butcher.\n\n\"Grave-Robbed,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by P. N. Elrod.\n\n\"The First Day of the Rest of Your Life,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Roxanne Longstreet Conrad.\n\n\"The Witch and the Wicked,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Jeanne C. Stein.\n\n\"Blood Wrapped,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Tanya Huff.\n\n\"The Wish,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Carolyn Haines.\n\n\"Fire and Ice and Linguini for Two,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Lyda Morehouse.\n\n\"Vampire Hours,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Elaine Viets.\n\n\"How Stella Got Her Grave Back,\" copyright \u00a9 2007 by Toni L. P. Kelner.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}