That was fun, a reverie on fence dwelling & etc

I've belatedly gotten round to stumping up for my MCC membership renewal. The MCG holds so many memories for me that letting go that membership would be like letting go of all but one of the best bits of my life ... dad taking us to a Sheffield Shield match attended by us, a few sad blokes in pork pie hats and thousands of raucous seagulls is probably my earliest memory.

We didn't know how little time we'd have left together. He must have been in his early thirties, thought himself fit and healthy. The cricket was slow, overly nuanced for a six year old. We went exploring. We found our way up to the top tier and then through a gap in the internal division separating the members from the hoi polloi. We made it round to about Bay 10 before recognising we were a very long way away from certain safety. Dad had only noticed we weren't there because we weren't fidgetting and generally getting on his nerves. He'd been grateful for the peace and possibliy relieved we'd not obviously been irritating someone else instead.

In those days the seats were rickety wooden benches with peeling paint, bet they're long gone. Habitually we sat in the bit of members' area between the 'smoking stand' which was for members only [in those days men only] and bit of stadium further round on the wing that was for Melbourne Football Club members, though that was only apparant during the football season.We sat about two thirds of the way up the lowest tier, on the right hand side; if we could get there we'd sit up against the low wire fence separating the men from the mixed company.

This was important because my grandfather, who was often there too would take up position up against the fence but on the far side from my grandmother - so that he could enjoy all the comforts of home and the illusion of male bonding simultaneously - at fixed intervals guided by his diabetes she would pass him the sandwiches and tea without inconveniencing strangers. And this little arrangement was in place up and down that fence. A gentleman who inadvertently took up a seat on that far side and thereby took the place next to the wife of a fellow member would cheerfully vacate his place for that member however crowded the ground might have become, however difficult it might have been to find another seat.

What a strange ritualised time it now seems, before John Cain had his way.

It should be added that this cosy arrangement could come under some strain at times of peak interest and demand such as the Boxing Day test match and the Finals series. On such days there might instead be cheerful passing amongst strangers of cups and sarnies wending their way from wife to hubby. I have to admit that the camaraderie that built up amongst the fence dwellers might not have existed anywhere else in the ground (except among the fan club enclaves). I wouldn't know.

Except in extremis that was where we sat and it was our own little bubble. The position was almost ideal, being nearly behind the bowler's run up, but high enough and off-side enough to be unaffected by the sight screen and in winter perfectly placed on the wing. My mum helped me to bunk off school for the final day's play in the Centenary Test but we got there late; we ended up stranded near the Melbourne Football Club supporters and several rows higher up than usual which was a bit disorientating at first. By the time the last ball was bowled I couldn't have cared less where we were sitting, but then we did win the match ... and by the same margin as the match it was commemorating blah, blah.

We also got to the ground late and missed the start of England's first innings in the Melbourne test of the 1978/9 series: we heard one roar as we walked through the park from Richmond railway station and a second as we passed through the turnstiles. By the time we'd fought our way through to the ground side Rodney Hogg had taken both Boycott and Brearley for the price of two measly runs. Oh well.

I remember that roar the same way I remember the tumult of the crowd leaving the ground at the end of the 1973 Grand Final. My grandmother took me to that. I wouldn't have been very big at the time and crowd was phenomenally exhilarated and energised by what it had seen. I managed to slide out of slipstream pushing the pair of us towards the railway station and buy one of those traditional post-Grand Final cartoon posters that were part of tradition. I didn't care which team had one, I'd been there, done that and now I'd bought the poster.

Mum and I went to the 1977 Grand Final which was played out by Collingwood and North Melbourne. I've no precise figure for the attendance, and no firm grasp of the ground's attendance at that time, but there probably were between 95,000 and 100,000 souls in that ground that day. I've never known a silence like the one that fell over us as the final siren sounded, and I can still see the players of both teams having given their all for 120 minutes looking shell-shocked as realisation it had been for nowt took hold.

Later, still in the days before membership was opened to women but while both my grandfathers were alive and I had access to an indecent number of Ladies Tickets (both grandfathers were of sufficient in the club standing to be awarded two rather than one) I would go unaccompanied. I saw a lot of football and a fair bit of cricket too in my late teens and early twenties.

Before she went back to the US we took to the football an American girl who'd been at our school while her father spent a couple of years down under setting some company or other to rights. Not only had Deanna absolutely no interest in Aussie Rules whatsoever, she basically had no interest in sports in any form whatsoever. For her benefit we sat one tier up to give her a clearer perspective. Watching the game lower down is fine for the initiated, but a novice will benefit from the lesser foreshortening from the higher altitudes. For two quarters she sat quietly, taking it all in, asking few questions. By the end of the game she had a huge grin on her face. The penny had dropped, she'd got the point and ... she'd actually enjoyed herself.

Just once we made our way up to the open top tier at the western end of the ground just the 'other' side of the Smoking Stand. On that occasion I was with mum and a friend of hers and we hitched up our skirts to catch a few rays. One of the significant drawbacks to being up there, apart from the obvious disadvantage to the short sighted of being so very much further from the action, was that the big screen scoreboard was almost at one's back. Keeping track of the detailed score, never mind watching the replays, necessitated frequent swivelling. We only went up there once.

During my precocious then prolonged teenage rebellion I ditched the dowdy and hugely unsuccessful Demons, supported by generations of my family during their pomp, in favour of the raffish and hugely successful Tigers. I had a friend called Josie, also a Richmond supporter of convenience, and we went everywhere except Kardina Park in the wake of the Tigers. We'd take it in turns to drive.

On one memorable weekend I drove us to Moorabbin in my battered early model Torana to watch Richmond take on perennial no-hopers St Kilda. Out the Saints came for the kick off, seventeen men and something that looked human only scaled up. We turned to each other, two posh girls from Canterbury, and said almost simultaneously "What the Fuck is THAT?" A quick consultation of the Record revealed THAT to be one Tony Lockett. There at the birth of a legend, we were.

We loved slumming it. I particularly loved Victoria Park which in those days was home to the Magpies. An odd ground, low slung and lurking at the end of a truly, breathtakingly ordinary side street but oozing such charisma and history. The outer, or at least the bit of it we preferred, had no seating but instead gravel covered shallow terracing. Neither of us had turned out to be particularly tall (or particularly heavy) so we worked out a strategy of getting right up to the front of one of those terraces and then standing on a couple of upright (emptied, but surprisingly sturdy) tinnies for added height. We didn't drink and we didn't need to, there were usually plenty of cans lying about even before kick-off.

Later I repented my wild teenage ways and returned to the MFC fold in time to spend a period of my twenties swanking at the annual club Ladies' Lunch at which it was quite de rigeur to swoon as Robbie Flower signed ones menu. I have one somewhere in storage at home if the mice haven't eaten it or mum hasn't turfed it out with all my other crap.

Given the circle I've turned I'll probably be grateful the old slatted wooden benches on which I once parked my much younger arse have now given way for individual plastic jobs. I can't help thinking though that the kind of camaraderie I experienced on those benches as a child went to the scrap yard with them. If there are fifteen seats in that row, then there will be fifteen bodies in there, no more. But there was once a time when gentlemen ungrudging swapped seats with fellow members and we'd squeeze twenty in and pretty cheerfully too if necessary.

I've paid my membership for another year, have a whole year to settle that credit card bill, and the hope that one day I will get home to see another game.