Innocent rugby, when Meads played 133 times for his country between 1957 and 1971, a natural inhabitant of the Silver Fern jersey that had yet to be graffitied with a sponsor’s name. He is too lively a rooster to be regarded as a museum piece, but he stands as a kind of relic of another innocence – the New Zealand way of life, when we depended on farmers to work the land, to sell the milk and cream and wool and meat. Meads, famously, cut his King Country farm out of the bush. Everyone knew this is how he shaped his body and spirit to become the greatest, or at least the most loved, of all All Blacks. In the years since he stopped playing, he has risen, almost levitated, into a living New Zealand legend.
All right. Steady on. It would take an army of yogis to lift Meads off the ground. But there was more than characteristic New Zealand sentimentality at play when it became news that Meads had put his farm up for auction. Something intangible was being lost. Something important was ending. It was like the ridding of an ancient superstition; the image of Meads on his farm was reassuring, a promise held in place, a stopbank against modern life. But the spell was about to be broken.
He said: ‘That’s the way it goes.’ And: ‘That’s life, I suppose.’ Also: ‘Awwww well.’ We sat around a wooden picnic table on the porch. The shed was empty, except for a chopping block and Champ dog food. The kowhai tree was down to its last bloom.
We talked about life on the farm. His father, Vere, took the family from Cambridge to the King Country in 1943. No electricity, just kerosene lamps and a wood stove. Meads rode the bus to school with his brother Stan and sister Joan. ‘We milked right from when we could milk. It was all cream in those days. We had to have the cows milked and the cream separated before we caught the school bus.’ When did the bus come? ‘Half-past seven,’ he said. When he got home, more chores. I asked him about school. He said, ‘School was our holidays.’
He left Te Kuiti High School a few weeks before he turned fifteen. The next twenty years were hard and marvellous: winter tours with the All Blacks (he saved his allowance on the 1958 tour of Japan, and bought his wife Verna a washing machine), long hot summers with Stan, hacking away at scrub. I asked what they used. ‘Slashers,’ he said. ‘A lot of it was second growth. It had fire through it years before. There was some real big stuff in the gullies. We’d get up at all sorts of hours, come back when it was dark. We could come home earlier when club training started in the middle of February, end of February – that was two nights a week we didn’t have to chop till dark. We could knock off at six o’clock, have a feed, and go to club training in town at eight. And that was another couple of hours you didn’t have to spend cutting scrub.’
To his first biographer, Alex Veysey – ‘Called him Horse. Lovely feller’ – and his second biographer, Brian Turner – ‘Different! Didn’t know till we started that he wrote poetry’ – and also to Bruce Ansley, author of a classic Meads profile in the Listener in 2001, Meads said the same thing: ‘We prayed for rugby to come around.’ He said it again at his farm on Thursday. He said it with feeling.
Life on the farm. The time he got a hernia when he was on horseback: ‘Oh ho. Yeah. I ruptured myself. It was a racehorse. Mad bastard. I was shifting cows, and there was one who’d just calved, and she’d gone bloody crazy, and it worked the horse up, she was charging the horse, and he thought he was going back to the races again or some bloody thing, he took off, and I had to get the calf out of the paddock – we were putting thousands of ewes in there – and the only way was to get the calf up on the horse, and try and hang on, and this mad bloody horse – Sibo, his name was; he’d run second in the New Zealand Cup – drove the pommel into my guts. I managed to stagger home. I was in agony, and it wasn’t until I lay down that the pain went, and then I thought, “Oh well, she’s right” so I played rugby next day.’
He eventually submitted to a hernia operation. What about Sibo? ‘Poor old bastard died up in there somewhere years later.’
Crutching and drenching and shearing and fleecing and shifting the stock and whatever needed doing. In bed usually at half past eight. Booms in wool prices now and then. A couple of droughts, a few floods, but nothing too serious. He always ran beef cattle, usually Angus. Good steaks? ‘Awww yeah. Not for me to say. I only sell it. Some other bugger eats it.’
Meads bought up more and more land, spent up large. Trying to pay off offshore loans was crippling. I asked him whether he thought he’d been a successful farmer, and he said, ‘Awww probably not. My son Glynn always told me I was trying to get too big. I thought all the most successful fellers had big properties. I probably went too far too quick. I don’t know. Properties came up around me that were for sale and I just went ahead and bought them,
