at Bude - my rugby was improving and I felt I was getting recognition with my selection for England U16s. I certainly wasn’t looking to move on or to be promoted to a higher-ranking side, I was quite happy ticking along at my local club.
Anyway, my priority back then was the farm. When I finished at Budehampton School aged 16, I continued preparing for my life as a farmer. There was much I still had to learn and do … I wanted to qualify as a cattle inseminator. Now this may sound like an odd thing to want to do, but all farms are looking to save money and we thought we could make savings if I did the inseminating, instead of paying for an outside company to do it for us. It was the only way to make the business work. The daft thing was that I got the qualification but then ended up leaving the farm before I ever got to use it on any of our cows!
I also sat my tractor test when I was 16, meaning I was qualified to drive the tractor on the road and annoy all the traffic forced to queue behind me, trying to get past. I had to go to a small training place, just through the village, to take my test. It wasn’t too onerous an assignment for someone who’d been riding in tractors since he was a baby and driving them around on the farms since he could walk. I passed the test and it seemed that my future in farming was really starting to take shape.
I had left school in early summer 1992, so no longer had to worry about schoolwork and could throw myself into life on the farm. Then, one day, out of the blue, I had a call from a guy called Simon Blake. He said that he and a friend of his - a guy called Terry Pryor - would like to come and see me. I told them that was fine, but that I had milking to do, so they arranged to come over one evening in early July to have a chat with me. I remember the whole thing vividly. The two of them appeared at the farm in a Peugeot 205 and came into the house. They sat down and said they were coaches from Redruth Rugby Club, and had driven the hour-and-a-half trek to try and persuade me to come and play for the team - a much bigger club playing tougher opposition but based around 70 miles from my home. It turned out that Terry Pryor was a school teacher as well as being the club coach, and he knew of me through the school system because he had coached me at U14 level.
To be honest, my first thought when they asked me was that I was extremely flattered to be approached by the coaches from a much bigger club than the one I was playing for, but then I thought, How on earth am I going to do that? Redruth was miles away and I had cows to milk and a farm to help look after, and I couldn’t drive (well, only a tractor). They were quite insistent, though, and said that playing rugby at a higher level would help my career develop.
I went to bed that night thinking about what to do. The more I thought about the proposition, the more eager I became. In the end, I decided to give it a go and play rugby for Redruth. I know that Bude weren’t very happy when I told them, but I think they understood that I had to do this in order to progress.
So there began a very hectic part of my life when I was doing incredibly long days. My day would start with milking the cows at 5 a.m., then I’d be out on the farm all day. In the evening I’d do the milking, then Mum would come and pick me up to take me to Redruth for training. I’d jump into the car still wearing my milking gear and she’d have prepared my tea for me to eat on the way. I’d get there, slip out of my milking gear and into my rugby kit and go training.
Poor Mum would be left wandering around on the touchline, or sitting in the car, then she’d drive me home. She would do this twice a week and at the weekend, as well as driving me to loads of trials and representative matches. I know that other members of my family would help out with the trips at weekends - with aunts and uncles calling in to take me to the Midlands for trials and to London for matches and training weekends - but when I look back, so much of the ferrying around was done by Mum in her little car. I even remember that when I reached 17 and was learning to drive, I would drive there with L-plates on, with Mum in the passenger seat making sure we arrived in one piece.
The rugby at Redruth was a big step up after Bude but it was all made easier to adjust to because I found the club very welcoming, just as Bude had been when I’d first gone down there, aged 13. The first training session that I went down to at Redruth was in mid-August and it was held at Redruth School. The guys who were there at the time say it was very funny, because I arrived a little bit late for the session (all the milking and farming followed by the long journey to get there meant I was often late for things), so I turned up at the school and everyone else was already there. They say that they looked up as I appeared over this small hill leading down to the pitch, and for a moment, as I came into view, I appeared to totally block out the sun.
‘It was like a scene from a film,’ Simon told me. ‘I had this tingling feeling; I knew we had someone special when I saw you arrive that time.’
It’s great of the guys to have thought that, but I knew that even if the coaches and senior players thought I was something special, the regular team players wouldn’t be so excited to see me because if I was successful it would mean that I would take someone else’s place in the team. I would have to do a lot to persuade them that I was capable of contributing something that would help the club as a whole, and could slot into the team without making waves. Today, players come and go in teams all the time, but back then few people moved from team to team. You just played for the team in your town and that was that.
I got my chance to prove my worth to the players at the next Redruth training session which was held at Cornwall College, in the third week of August. Now we were actually going to get stuck into a bit of rugby, rather than do fitness and skills as we had in the first sessions. I was introduced as this powerful U16 player who was the best thing since sliced bread. The captain of the side was a U19 player who was also a prop. He looked at me - I could see he didn’t rate me - and I looked at him. The whole session descended into a power struggle between the two of us in which neither took a backward step all the way through the training session. We tested each other to the full. As an induction or initiation, it was unbelievable. After it, I found myself much more readily accepted by the guys because they knew that, in the heat of a match, I had the guts to keep going and keep fighting and would never let the team down.
It was important to me that they accepted me and realised that I was genuine and would play my heart out for the club. I’m a loyal sort of a guy, and once I was playing for Redruth I did my best to make sure I got to all the training sessions and matches I could and always took a step further than everyone else. I felt I had more to prove and wanted to show them that I was worthy of my place in the team. It was hard sometimes because if we hadn’t finished on the farm I couldn’t go to training, so I became determined not to let anything else, other than farming, interfere with my sport. My social life went out of the window, and life, to me, was farming and Redruth.
I remember there was a club tour to a place called Barkers Butts near Coventry that I was due to be going on, but then I got a call from John Elliott in the England set-up trying to get me to come to a final England trial. I didn’t want to let Redruth down, so I went on the tour. I don’t think any of the guys at Redruth could believe it, but I felt it was the right thing to do and I think I went up in their estimation afterwards. There was a part of me that thought, If I’m good enough to play for England, I’ll play for England, without me having to let all my teammates down in the process. Anyway, I don’t think the England selectors held it against me because I was selected to play for England despite not going to the trial.
Farming continued to be an important part of my life and take up a great deal of my time. I remember telling my mates at Redruth that I couldn’t come out at the weekend because I had to milk the cows. They looked at me oddly, as if they thought it was strange that I would be working at the weekend. No matter how many times I tried to explain about the twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week nature of farming, I don’t think some of them ever quite got it. They thought I needed a break from work and a chance to let my hair down and have some fun; they didn’t realise that’s exactly what rugby offered. I valued their friendship enormously and always enjoyed my time down at the club.
In
