Joe Schmidt - Ordinary Joe

Joe Schmidt

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ORDINARY JOE

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First published by Penguin Ireland 2019
Published in Penguin Books 2020

Copyright Joe Schmidt, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Front cover photography by Paul Stuart

ISBN: 978-1-844-88410-0

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To Kelly and our kids, Abby, Tim, Ella and Luke, with thanks for your patience and support

Not long after our win over the All Blacks in Chicago, an email arrived at the Irish Rugby Football Union:

Our two brothers have been having a dispute over whether Joe Schmidt is the same Joe they used to play rugby with after school in their hometown of Te Aroha. We are talking around 45 years ago and they played against Joe and his brother. PLEASE CLARIFY THIS FOR US, it will really help stop this family debate!

Thanks, Aly

Aly was Alyson Gwynne. There was a house between the flat-roofed, Art Deco-styled Gwynne residence and ours in Te Aroha but no fences between the grassy backyards, which offered plenty of space for running about. My elder brother, Kieran, and I would combine with Alys brothers, Brent and Clark, to play marathon rugby test matches after school until we couldnt see the ball or each other. Alys note brought me right back to those barefoot battles wed had when I was just four or five years old.

I wrote back to Aly, confirming that I was the same Joe Schmidt from Aroha View Avenue who used to play backyard rugby and kick the ball around with her brothers. Still the same, and very ordinary, Joe Schmidt.

When you finally go back to your old home,

you find it wasnt the old home you missed but your childhood.

Sam Ewing

I began life in a small maternity hospital in the very small town of Kawakawa. It was September 1965 springtime in the Far North of New Zealand.

We shifted to Te Aroha, a small town in the Thames Valley, when I was very young, so my earliest memories come from there. Catching chickenpox and not being able to go to the birthday party next door; going to athletics on summer evenings at the club just across the bridge; swimming in the thermal pools on Sunday evenings. Wed be packed into the family Mark II Zephyr, each of us jockeying for position to avoid sitting close to the hole in the floor, where stones would fly up and sting your legs if someone shifted the cardboard that covered it.

I went back to Te Aroha recently and was struck by how little had changed since my early childhood. The town is nestled at the base of the Kaimai ranges, and the immense Telecom tower that sits at the very top of the ranges was just as impressive as I remembered from when I used to look out my bedroom window at its flashing red lights. Boyd Park at the end of Aroha View Avenue, with its multiple rugby and soccer fields, was as expansive as I recalled, as were the wide streets with their generous grass verges. Plenty of space for youngsters to run and breathe.

The house we lived in was still there, and it still backed directly on to farmland; but the back lawns were now divided by fences. Looking at the chimney a metal funnel that doesnt really fit with the stucco of the house I thought back to the day that the house felt like it was going to be shaken apart. The original brick chimney toppled over and thundered down the sloping roof during a powerful earthquake. My mother was usually unflappable, but earthquakes were one of the few things capable of unsettling her and the noise of the chimney made it sound as if the roof was about to collapse in on top of us.

My formal education started under the watchful eye of the nuns at St Josephs Primary School. I would set off for school with cheese-and-jam sandwiches and home-baked treats, especially the peanut brownies that my mother still bakes better than anyone else I know. We quickly learned to be vigilant in the classroom, conscious that a sudden smack across the knuckles could occur at any time if we were caught being sloppy in our exercise books. Sometimes it was the flat side of the wooden ruler that would be used, but most often it was the narrow harder edge, which delivered a painful, sharper blow.

At break times, wed play tag, leaping up steps and across tyres in the schools adventure playground, then launching ourselves down slides and hurdling seesaws. The monkey bars were officially out of bounds for the new entrants but, as a lightweight kid, they were great to use as an escape route, swinging hand over hand to get away. One day my hand slipped and the momentum of my legs swung them higher than my flailing arms. I fell to the ground with my left arm extended. The impact hurt, but what really upset me was how crooked my left forearm looked.

I still remember one of the nuns scolding me for being on the monkey bars, because I was only five years old. Then she softened a bit and took me to the sick bay, where I waited for my mother to collect me and take me to Waikato Hospital.

By the time I was seven years old we had shifted to the lower North Island town of Woodville, where my dad took the position of Postmaster. That meant that he supervised the Post Offices banking and mail operations, as well as managing the telephone exchange. The Post Office occupied the lower floor of a large old two-storeyed building, while we lived on the floor above. It was handily positioned just across the road from the primary school and had a good-sized backyard.

Woodville was wedged between the steep hills and jagged peaks of the Ruahine and Tararua ranges. It was even smaller than Te Aroha, with a population of about 1,600 people. There were seven kids in the family at that point. My elder brother, Kieran, and sister, Anna, are twins. I was third, followed by a sister, Mary, two brothers, Andrew and Jamie, and finally a sister, Lucy. The youngest of us, Helen, was born after we shifted to Woodville, and once she started primary school my mum became the district nurse.

With eight kids in the family plus the odd stray youngster that my mum would bring home after her nursing rounds, meal times could be a bit cramped and chaotic. But before mealtimes the kitchen was usually quiet, with mum reading a book while cooking dinner. She would have the book open on the benchtop, reading passages in between checking the oven or whatever was on the stove. Her other ritual was successfully completing the crossword on the back page of the