THE HAVER GOOSE TOURNAMENT

A Tale of Sogmarsh — being the fullest account yet attempted of the realm's premier sporting fixture, and of the year a grown man very nearly beat a goose.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

Every spring, on the Haver ground, the parishes of this realm hold the oldest continuous sporting fixture in the kingdom, and every spring it is won by a goose.

I am aware that a great many people know this much and no more. I am going to attempt the whole of it, because I have been going since I was six, and because the last honest account was written by a man who left at the interval, and because I have a piece of paper in front of me that I intend to work through before the ale wears off.

Let us begin with the difficulty that has defeated every previous chronicler, which is the small matter of what the sport actually is.

THE RULES, SUCH AS THEY ARE

The tournament is a contest of retrieval over broken ground.

That is the shortest true sentence available and I have spent two seasons arriving at it. A thing is thrown — traditionally a bound sheaf, latterly whatever is to hand — and it lands somewhere in the Haver ground, which is three-quarters wet, and the competitors go and get it, and the one who brings it back gets a point, and the one with the most points at the end is the champion.

If you are now thinking that this sounds like a game a dog would be good at, you have arrived, in one step, at the central problem of the Haver Goose Tournament, and it took the parishes two hundred years.

Dogs were barred in 1698. The relevant minute is short and, I think, the finest thing House Haver ever wrote:

Dogs are excluded, they having proved unsporting, in that they enjoy it.

Nobody has ever barred a goose. There was no reason to. Nobody at any point in the history of that committee sat down and thought: what if a goose entered.

WHY THE GOOSE WINS

I want to set this out properly, because the parishes are sick of being told they are fools, and they are not fools, and the Goose's advantages are structural and every one of them was voted in by men trying to be fair.

One. The ground. The Haver ground is bog with opinions. A man crossing it goes in to the knee at every fourth step and spends the day hauling himself out of the fourth steps. A goose does not cross the ground. A goose goes over the top of it, in that low insulting flap that geese do, six inches up, at the speed of a trotting horse, and comes down on the far side dry.

Two. The throw. The sheaf is thrown, by tradition, into the wind, so that the contest is fair to all comers regardless of which side of the ground they start from. This was decided in 1704, unanimously, by men who had thought hard about fairness and had never once considered that a thing thrown into the wind comes back a little, and that the only competitor on that field who understands wind professionally is the one with feathers.

Three. The whistle. Play begins on a whistle. The Goose has learned the whistle. The Goose has, over several generations of geese and one long institutional memory, learned the sharp intake of breath the whistleman takes before the whistle, which is a distinction the rules do not cover and which the parishes have twice declined to legislate on, on the grounds — and this is minuted — that "you cannot fine a bird for listening."

Four, and this is the one that finishes it. There is no rule requiring a competitor to bring the sheaf back to the same place. The rule says back. In 1672 everybody knew what back meant, because everybody was standing together at the near hedge. The Goose brings it back to where the Goose was standing, which is beside the trophy table, which is closer, and which is — read the rule again — entirely permissible.

It has been suggested that the rule be tightened. It has been suggested at every annual meeting since 1806. The motion has never once been put to a vote, because at the meeting of that year a member observed that the Goose was in the room, and the minute records that the matter was held over.

The Goose was in the room. It is always in the room. It has been in the room, in one body or another, for longer than the room.

THE GOOSE

Nobody is entirely clear whether it is one goose.

I want to be careful here, because this is where a chronicler makes a fool of himself. The parishes say the Goose, singular, and have said it since 1672, and if you ask a direct question you get one of three answers depending on who you ask and how much they have had.

The plain answer, which I believe, is that it is a succession of geese from the same Haver flock, handed down like an office, each one taught the whistle by the last, in the way farmyard birds do learn things off one another and nobody has ever been able to explain how.

The taproom answer is that it is the same goose, which is nonsense, and is asserted with such total confidence by men who can otherwise be trusted with money that I have stopped arguing.

The Haver answer, when the family was applied to in writing in 1843, was "Certainly not."

What can be said with certainty is that the Goose is a goose of considerable presence. It is grey and about the size of a dog nobody would keep. It walks the ground before play like a man inspecting a hedge he intends to complain about. It does not acknowledge the committee — this is not a figure of speech; the committee stands at the trophy table in their sashes at the opening, and the Goose walks past them, and has never once looked at them, in any year, in any body, and every child on that field notices it and finds it the funniest thing they have ever seen.

It is not, I should say, a nice goose. Two of the sashes have been bitten. The Perpetual Trophy has to be brought to it, because it will not go to the table, and the man who brings it goes at a certain angle with the trophy held out in front of him like a shield, and that man is chosen by lot, and refusing is permitted, and about one in three refuse.

THE CHALLENGERS, IN BRIEF

There have been serious attempts. I will not list them all, but the parishes' honour requires a few.

Boots off (1788). A cutter from Peatdike reasoned that the ground could be crossed barefoot faster than booted, and he was right, and he crossed it beautifully, and he was second by a margin of about a goose. He is remembered fondly and his time stood for sixty years.

The long arm (1822). A man arrived with a rake. There is no rule about a rake. He got the sheaf on the first throw and the crowd went up, and then he had to carry a rake across three-quarters of a bog, and the bog took the rake, and it is still there, and the parishes point at the spot.

The committee's own attempt (1854). Two members entered in an official capacity to demonstrate that the thing was beatable by a man of method. They finished fourth and seventh out of eight and did not enter again, and the minute for that year is one line long and reads "no further demonstration is proposed."

The dog question (1871). A man from a dry country brought a dog, having read the rules and found no dog in them, having not read far enough, and was shown the minute of 1698, and read it, and said — according to four witnesses who agree — "but the goose enjoys it," which is the best point anybody has ever made at that ground and which was ruled out of order.

THE YEAR OF THE CHALLENGER

Now the year I came to write about, which the parishes call the Long Final, and which is the reason grown men in three villages still cannot be got to shut up about a bird.

The challenger was a woman called Aggie Prowse — of the Prowse family, mud and stone, the ones who re-lay the stepping-stones on Mire Road every time the water takes them, which is twice a year, which turns out to matter enormously.

She was about thirty, built like a door, and she had spent her whole working life crossing exactly the kind of ground the Haver tournament is held on. Not training. Working. That is the part the story keeps and the part I would like on the record: she did not prepare for the tournament. She had a job that happened to be the tournament.

And she had thought about it. This is what raises the Long Final above the rakes and the bare feet: Aggie Prowse had gone and stood on that ground in February, alone, in the wet, and worked out the one thing two hundred years of committee had not.

She did not try to beat the Goose across the ground. She worked out where the sheaf was going to land.

The throw is into the wind, by rule. The wind on the Haver ground in April comes off the west and does the same thing every year, and a woman who has spent her life reading water knows what wind does to a thrown object better than she knows her own family. She paced it out in February. She put a stone down. She came back in March and the stone was right.

On the day, she did not start at the near hedge with the others. There is no rule requiring it. She started out on the ground, at her stone, having walked out there in front of a crowd of about eight hundred people while the committee consulted each other in a rising panic and found, to their visible distress, that she was entitled.

The sheaf came down, they say, close enough to her that she did not have to run.

She had it up and was turning before the Goose was properly airborne, and eight hundred people made a noise that was heard at Mucklecombe, and for about four seconds the oldest fixture in the realm was lost.

And then Aggie Prowse had to carry a sheaf three-quarters of the way across a bog with a goose in the air beside her.

They went the whole way together. That is the detail. Not a chase — level, the two of them, the woman going through it to the knee and hauling out and going again with the sheaf up over her head, and the bird six inches off the surface doing that flat contemptuous flap, and neither of them gaining, all the way across, for what the parishes insist was four minutes and was probably closer to two.

She lost by the length of a table.

Not by the ground. She had the ground beaten; she was ahead at the last firm footing and she is the only competitor in the history of that tournament who was. She lost because at the last she had to go to the near hedge, where the field starts, and the Goose went to the trophy table — the rule of 1672, the word back, the thing that has never been put to a vote — and the table is nearer.

She lost to the minute. The parishes have never been in any doubt about it and neither has anybody else.

WHAT HAPPENED AFTER, WHICH IS THE PART I ACTUALLY CAME TO TELL

The committee met the following winter, and there was a mood.

Somebody — and it was not Aggie Prowse, who has never asked for anything and finds the whole business embarrassing — somebody put the motion at last. That the rule be tightened; that "back" shall mean the near hedge; that the matter be settled.

And it was debated properly for the first time in two hundred years, and it was going to pass. Everybody in that room says it was going to pass.

And then Old Marle stood up. He was eighty-something and had carried the trophy out to the Goose in 1859 and had the mark on his hand to prove it, and he said the thing that ended the argument and has been quoted at that ground every spring since:

"Aye, tighten it. And then what have we got? A field, and a sheaf, and the best of us wins. There's a hundred parishes with one of them. We've got the only one where the best of us comes second to a bird, and I'd not swap it for a fair one."

The motion was withdrawn. The minute reads "the matter was held over," which is what that minute has read since 1806, and which the parishes now use as a general expression meaning we all know and we are not going to.

The Goose won the next spring, and the spring after, and it is winning still.

Aggie Prowse has entered every year since and come second every year since, and is, by a distance, the most celebrated competitor in the history of the fixture. There is a bench on the Haver ground with her name on it — not the Goose's; the Goose has the Perpetual Trophy and does not require a bench — and the bench faces the last firm footing, which is where she was ahead.

She was asked once, at a Mucklecombe supper, in front of company, whether it galled her.

And she thought about it, in the Prowse way, which is slowly and with her hands flat on the table, and she said:

"It'd gall me if I'd been beat by a man. Beat by that thing —" and here she made a gesture that everybody present agreed was a very good goose "— that's not a defeat, that's a feature of the county."

A fixture that could be made fair and has been left crooked on purpose for two hundred years is not a failure of administration; it is a parish deciding, unanimously and without ever quite saying so, that it would rather have a story than a trophy — and there is no prouder second place in this realm than the one the Haver ground gives out every spring to the best of us, behind a bird that will not look at the committee.