INSPIRED

by Hattie Ellis (Salisbury)

The Canadian walked down the High Street with a bag of fish and chips in one hand and took a backwards look at the Spire. He vowed to return. Such promises change your life. It was 1972.

Decades passed. He dreamed up a school rugby trip to Britain. The Williams Lake Secondary Stags (caribou) each needed $3000. The parents gathered to decide. Money was tight. This was for education, for sport, to grow their community. You in?

Two years, week by week, of raffles, rodeos, ruck-down cleaning, heaving pianos and filthy dumpster-diving for cents on recycled bottles of pop. They moved a film-set glacier, block by block, in the hot height of summer. The funds inched up.

This week they arrived in the homeland of rugby after practising against each other in a cow-barn with snow outside. The adults raise pints to the adventure of tomorrow's match when they will have, for the first time ever, 15 in the team.

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What Hattie Ellis says about INSPIRED:

I met Rodger Stewart and friends, in the upstairs bar (‘the House of Lords’) of the Haunch of Venison. What were ten Canadians doing here? They told me their story.