CONTENTS

About the Book

About the Authors

Title Page

Picture Section

Afterword and Thanks by Michael Calvin

Gareth’s Thanks

Photo Credits

Copyright

ABOUT THE BOOK

Gareth Thomas had it all. He was a national hero, a sporting icon. He was a leader of men, captain of Wales and the British Lions. To him, rugby was an expression of cultural identity, a sacred code. It was no mere ball game. It gave him everything, except the freedom to be himself.

This is the story of a man with a secret that was slowly killing him. Something that might devastate not only his own life but the lives of his wife, family, friends and teammates. The only place where he could find any refuge from the pain and guilt of the lie he was living was on the pitch, playing the sport he loved. But all his success didn’t make the strain of hiding who he really was go away. His fear that telling the truth about his sexuality would lose him everything he loved almost sent him over the edge.

The deceit ended when Gareth became the world’s most prominent athlete to come out as a gay man. His gesture has strengthened strangers, and given him a fresh perspective. Gareth’s inspiring and moving story transcends the world of sport to tell a universal truth about feeling like an outsider, and facing up to who you really are.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Gareth Thomas was born in 1974. He played rugby union for Bridgend, Celtic Warriors, Toulouse and Cardiff Blues, winning 100 international caps for Wales and captaining the British and Irish Lions. In 2010 he switched to rugby league, playing for the Crusaders RL, and for Wales. He retired from rugby in October 2011. Gareth announced publicly in 2009 that he is gay, and was voted the most influential gay person by Stonewall that year. He is a dedicated supporter of the charity Childline.

Michael Calvin has twice been named Sports Reporter of the Year. He is currently chief sports writer with the Independent on Sunday. His book Family: Life, Death and Football, was shortlisted in the 2011 Sports Book Awards. His last book, The Nowhere Men, was voted Sports Book of the Year 2014 at the British Sports Book Awards.

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Published in 2014 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright © Gareth Thomas and Michael Calvin

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Chapter One

THE SCENT OF A WOMAN

I wanted to be a beautiful corpse. My eyes were red-rimmed, milky and stagnant. They stared accusingly from the mirror as I bathed them with cold water, forcing me to focus on the image of someone I had come to despise. He was weak, deceitful and dangerous. The least he could do for those whose love he had betrayed was to have a decent death.

It was an automatic, numbing process. I moved from the bathroom, into the bedroom. The airy aroma of a fresh white shirt was faintly repellent, because I felt unclean. I chose a dark tie, tightened in a Windsor knot, to wear with one of the well-cut grey suits the Welsh Rugby Union issues to all internationals. A pair of black, patent leather lace-up shoes completed the mask of normality.

I walked around the bungalow I shared with my wife, Jemma, in a quiet cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Toulouse, where I played for one of the great clubs in world rugby. I opened the shutters, and the late-autumn sun flooded in through picture windows. It was one of those crisp, cloudless days on which running around the paddock was a reaffirmation of faith.

The house had Jemma’s imprint all over it: she was such a good nest-maker it had no stamp of my personality on it. She had arranged the furniture, selected the fabrics, and ensured there were always fresh flowers on the table. Things had seemed to happen magically: the kitchen was always spotless, the beds always made, and the clothes in the right place. She did everything my mother would do, everything a home-maker does.

But she had gone. She couldn’t bear to live my lie any longer.

I had made my confession to her three months previously, in our house in the village of St Brides Major, in the Vale of Glamorgan. Yet we had decided to return to France to work at our marriage in the vague, romantic belief that somehow things could change. All we really had was each other, and we had conspired in the belief that our daydream would be enough.

Everything fell apart when I returned from training to the empty house. I knew, instinctively, that things would never be the same again. I rang her repeatedly, but couldn’t get an answer. A better husband would have called her friends, or the police; he would have leapt to the panic-stricken conclusion that she had been run down by a careless driver while out shopping. But, instead of fearing the worst and heading to the local accident and emergency department, I sat there, in oppressive silence.

Her departure was hardly a surprise, and it forced me to confront what I had become. Deep down, I knew I had not been man enough to ask myself two hard questions, with two simple answers: Why are you doing this? Who benefits when you pretend that life is a fairytale – you or Jemma?

In answer to the last, I did – in the short term, at least. The pretence of a normal marriage kept my secret safe. Jemma was getting nothing out of the arrangement. I was being hideously unfair, terribly selfish, yet, at the moment of crisis, I was consumed by self-pity: ‘Shit. People are going to know something’s wrong now. Everything I have hidden so well for so long is going to be discovered. For the first time in my life, I’m on my own.’

I knew I would have to carry on playing and training. I knew the phone calls would come, and that Jemma’s return to Wales would set tongues wagging. So I acted entirely in character, and lied through my teeth: I called my mother, Yvonne, and told her Jemma had walked out because she had discovered me cheating with another woman. I repeated the story to Ian ‘Compo’ Greenslade, my best friend and best man.

It is only now, when I recall the tone of their voices and the eloquence of their silence, that I understand what they were thinking, what they were too kind, loyal and loving to tell me: ‘Come on, Alfie. You can’t keep this going much longer.’

I was in too deep. I felt I had no option but to retreat into my delusional world, where I kidded myself that I was able to fool all of the people, all of the time.

I had not dared to be true to myself for so many years. The word ‘gay’ still made me shudder. It had terrorised me from my late teens, when I first played along with the idea I was one of the lads, out on the pull with a bellyful of beer. I could play the role of macho man to order. It was only when I was alone that I could acknowledge the truth to myself: I was sexually attracted to men.

I could suppress my urges, but they needed to be fulfilled; I could subdue my fears, but they never left me. The rest, the international career, captaining Wales and the Lions, was just window-dressing. Until I was honest, irrespective of the consequences, I didn’t deserve the privilege of looking myself in the eye. I wanted my sport to define me, because I wanted to live by its fundamental values of honesty and integrity.

A form of madness gripped me that first night after Jemma left. I needed her presence, so I invented it. I climbed into her wardrobe, and sprayed her favourite perfume, Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle, around the interior. I pulled her clothes off the hangers and shelves, and buried myself in them. In my warped state of mind, it was my only way of getting her back. I sensed her spirit, savoured her scent. I was in her space, her sphere. I missed her so badly, and hated myself for what I had inflicted on her.

I’m a tall guy, 6ft 3in, but cowered in a foetal position until dawn. Cramped and claustrophobic, I stared determinedly into the darkness because I was too scared to go to sleep. Whenever I closed my eyes, even for an instant, I’d see a series of nightmare images, projected onto an imaginary screen. They were slow-motion scenes of the destruction I had caused, the mayhem that was about to engulf me. If I blinked it felt like an eternity.

I saw my friends and family crying because I had killed myself. There was a single word, set into a screaming headline: ‘Why?’ I was dead, but had still not been spared the ramifications of my death. Jemma, her parents, my parents, my friends, my teammates. Every time I closed my eyes, they would be there. I heard them: ‘What a selfish fucker … Everything he’s ever told us, everything he’s based his life on, has been bullshit … We watched his back, we helped him out …’

It was continual. It reminded me of the sequence in the film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where Gene Wilder’s group is in the boat on the chocolate river. Images appear on the ceiling of the tunnel along which they are travelling in a trippy, hallucinogenic way. This was identical. The faces of my loved ones were grotesquely distorted, as if they were made of melting candle wax. They were nasty, sneering: ‘You should have done this, you shouldn’t have done that … You should have been honest, you should have been truthful.’

The solution – the fool’s way out – was waiting to be discovered the following morning, in a pantry on the way to the garage. It was where I kept my boots, trainers, kit and the odd bit of exercise equipment. There, on a shelf, were bottles of spirits and liqueurs. We used to store them, along with a few boxes of wine and several slabs of beer, in case we had a party. Friends used to come over regularly to visit in the summer. They’d bring booze, chill by the pool and have a nice holiday. We loved their company.

I never usually drank at home. My parents rarely do. I’ve never been the sort to go out every night, have two or three pints and stroll back to watch something mindless on the telly. Alcohol was just something to get me obliterated on a night out, when I drank to get pissed with my mates. But that day, I remembered the Heinekens, and I thought, ‘Fuck it, I feel like getting pissed.’ So that was breakfast taken care of.

One thing led to another. I found the vodka and discovered that by taking a couple of paracetamol tablets with it, I could lapse into a sort of sleep for 20 minutes or so. The witches were still waiting for me when I woke up, but they weren’t so cruel and caustic. Everything was a little mellower, a little easier. Then the demons started to befriend me, whispering: ‘The more you take, the easier things get, the more chilled life is.’ And I began to think to myself, ‘There could be a nice little way out here.’

I ventured outside, through the back door, and onto the patio. A set of stairs and a gate led to the swimming pool and a moment of revelation – I would drown myself. I’d never again have to deal with a vision of someone screaming at me. I’d never have to justify myself. I’d do it properly, in the grand manner. I’d dress smartly, for my mother as much as anyone. It would be a beautiful way to go.

Looking back, it was a form of nervous breakdown. Before I knew it, I was poolside, suited and booted. A fresh bottle of vodka was in one hand, a full bottle of pills in the other. I removed my socks and shoes, meticulously rolled my trousers up to the knees, and dangled my legs in the freezing water. The Man had a Plan.

I decided I wouldn’t gobble the pills, or chug down the booze like a cartoon drunk. They were, after all, my weapons of choice. Instead, I’d repeatedly take a small swig and a single tablet, propelling drugs and drink into my mouth with what, in my frazzled state, I interpreted as a symbolic stabbing action.

My suicide would be measured, civilised. I would gradually become incapable, and slip gently into the water. My last image, before I eased beneath the surface, would be of my family, in happier times. I’d finally understand one of the eternal truths of the sea: the reason drowning men are invariably discovered with a smile on their face.

So much for the fantasy fatality … I couldn’t follow it through.

I staggered away to be sick. I don’t know how close I was to losing consciousness, but survival made me angry. I was consumed by self-loathing, and the internal conversation wasn’t pretty: ‘You’re a shit. If you want to do something, whether it’s killing yourself or fucking winning for your country, do it properly. You’re weak, a fucking pussy.’

I’ve asked myself countless times over the years, but have never worked out why I didn’t take that final swig, that last tablet. Was I a coward? Was someone watching over me? All I know is that something was stopping me – something wasn’t right. Even though I was ready for death, had prepared for it and wanted it, an unseen force was saying, ‘Not now. Not now.’

The drink was a means to an end, because I didn’t like it. It anaesthetised me, but offered no release. Every time I woke, after dropping off for a couple of minutes, there would be a split-second where I had forgotten my circumstances. Then would come the king hit, the realisation that nothing had changed, and the cycle of self-pity and self-loathing would begin again.

I would have given anything not to worry about waking up to a lonely cold house, to an unmade bed that I once shared with Jemma. I would catch a faint whiff of that perfume, and fantasise about waking up to people who loved me and weren’t going to judge me. I made empty promises about finding the right time to do the right thing.

It was weird. Even though, rationally, I knew Jemma had gone, almost certainly for good, I convinced myself she was still there. I’d never lived in this house without her. She’d never been there without me. The eerie feeling that her ghost was still watching over me made things worse. For weeks afterwards, I’d be lying in bed and, though I knew she wasn’t around, I’d call out her name. I wanted her to answer, to reassure me all would be well.

I was still utterly alone. The only way I could face a return to training, after two sleepless nights, was to neck three bottles of Stella on the drive to the club. I hadn’t eaten, because I wasn’t hungry and I had lost weight with alarming speed. I felt listless, desperate, but gave the impression of training well.

All experienced athletes know how to cheat their way through a conditioning session with a minimum of fuss, but I could not fool a friend. Trevor Brennan won 13 caps for Ireland, either in the second row or on the flank, but his playing career was destined to end soon, and controversially, in the aftermath of a tempestuous Heineken Cup match against Ulster in Toulouse. While warming up, as a replacement, he jumped into the crowd to fight with a travelling supporter who had called his mother a whore. I was led away by Serge Lairle, our venerable forwards coach, after flicking the finger to his assailants, who were showering me with abuse and plastic beer glasses. We were blood brothers.

We both faced a hanging jury, formed by tournament organisers who were determined to play to the media gallery. Trevor was banned for life, an over-reaction barely tempered or excused by its subsequent reduction to a five-year suspension. A hard man of the greatest integrity and dignity, he promptly retired. I was banned for three internationals, and was appalled at the vindictiveness and incompetence of the authorities.

But all that was in the future. What he first noticed were the empties in the passenger seat of my car, and he growled through the open window: ‘What the fuck is going on with this?’

I did my usual desperate song-and-dance act about drinking to forget that my wife had discovered my imaginary infidelity but he was ahead of me. I learned later that Jemma had spoken to Paula, Trevor’s partner, and asked them to keep an eye on me. They knew the truth, but they didn’t seek confirmation. It was an unforgettable gesture of tenderness and respect, because they were prepared to wait for as long as necessary for me to tell them, on my own terms.

I was out of control. The beers had been demolished within a few days, so I began working my way through the spirits shelf. I needed oblivion. I was a feral creature, acting absurdly with little or no conscious thought. When Trevor walked through an open front door into the house that evening, shouting my name, he found me under the table. I had heard his knock, but was beyond caring. A burglar could have helped himself.

I still don’t know whether it was a child-like attempt to feel safe, or the irrational action of someone beyond redemption, but I had made a camp. The chairs were pulled in tight, so I could only stick my head out between their legs in response to his call. Trevor saw that I was wasted, noticed the bottle in my fist, and gave me an undeserved opportunity to benefit from his tough love.

‘If you want me to go, I’ll go, but if you want me to stay, I’ll stay,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to force you to do anything – you’re a grown man. If you’ve decided to drink it’s your decision. You live by the sword, you die by the sword.’

He didn’t get a lot of sense out of me that night, even though I wasn’t drunk in the established sense – I wasn’t wobbling around, making an idiot of myself, but I was confused. I was destabilised by the knowledge I didn’t really want to be alive, or face things I would have preferred to forget.

Trevor said nothing the following day, when he sat next to me on the bus to a game against Montferrand. We made small talk about going home immediately after the match, to start to prepare for the autumn internationals, but our eyes conducted a parallel, unspoken conversation. Eventually, he cracked.

He gave me a quizzical look and said, ‘All you need to do is fucking tell me what’s wrong. Whatever it is, don’t worry, because it’s fine with me.’ Then I think he gave me a wink.

And I thought, ‘OK. I’m not ready to tell you, because I’m not ready to tell anyone, but thank you for caring.’ I knew he knew. He knew I knew he knew. But, to be honest, I’m not sure how I would have reacted to him challenging the depth of my duplicity. I needed the conceit of being in control of my destiny. Trevor’s silence was simply his way of telling me not to go any lower.

It wasn’t as easy as that, of course. Returning to Wales to face the rituals of an international series was a schizophrenic experience. There were rugby issues to address, matches to win, collective ambitions to rationalise; I had coaches to impress, fans to please. I needed to renew the bonds of respect and inter-dependence with my teammates. But, on a personal level, tittle-tattle had to be dealt with. I was on autopilot, sustaining the fiction that Jemma and I had split because I had been unfaithful with another girl. I was happy to perpetuate the myth, but, in my quieter moments, I felt an utter fraud. People knew something was up. The knowledge that Jemma was answering the same questions, and having her private life reduced to a tasty morsel of gossip, haunted me.

For all my faults, my friends regarded me as a loyal, decent sort of guy. I may have had problems remembering names – I have a habit of calling everyone ‘butt’, the Welsh equivalent of ‘mate’ – but they knew me as a good type, who’d help if he could. I was expecting them to ignore their instincts; that there had to be more to the situation than met the eye.

Strangers were a different proposition. I had no idea of what they were gossiping about, but couldn’t avoid the suspicion that they had leapt to a plausible conclusion. I couldn’t influence them, because I couldn’t reach them. It’s the modern way to be blissfully ignorant, and make something up about someone in the public eye – what if their Chinese whispers unintentionally hit on the truth that Jemma had left me because I was gay, and spread the word? The prospect was random, but real. It scared me witless.

I cherished the unconditional love of my family, but there was nowhere in the world at that point I would have felt comfortable. Had I been alone, in the middle of the Sahara desert, I would have still been fearful of company at the occasional oasis. I wasn’t comfortable with what I’d done, with who I was. I still hadn’t accepted there were three people in that wrecked marriage, and that two of them were me. I had a hopelessly split personality.

I had six months left on my contract at Toulouse, which was due to expire in the summer of 2007. I was playing for what I regarded as the Real Madrid of rugby; I had an amazing salary, and they wanted me to stay. It was the fulfilment of a childhood dream – everything for which I’d worked hard as a player. But I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t tell anyone what was troubling me, and I was drinking like a fish. I had to be sober to play and I didn’t want to be sober, so I began to fake a back injury.

My mind was blown. I had a panic attack in a toilet at Bristol Airport, after a brief trip back home on the pretence of considering the offer of a new contract with Toulouse. I called my mother, who excused herself from work and flew to France on the first available plane. She sensed I was in big trouble, but loved me too deeply to insist on the details.

Eventually, I sold the French house to one of my teammates, Omar Hasan, an Argentinian prop, because I just didn’t trust myself to live in it. There had been more aborted suicide attempts, and the pool retained its macabre fascination for me.

Due to the imminent move, Jemma returned one day, while she knew I was out training, to retrieve her belongings. Trevor had agreed to take some of our furniture – ornate pieces which we had so enjoyed studying, and buying, at auction. I booked myself into a hotel, which was a disaster. While it wasn’t exactly The Ritz, and room service left a lot to be desired, I was incapable of looking after myself.

The club drew their own conclusions about the move, asking, understandably enough, why I wanted to sell up after verbally agreeing a contract extension – one I had no intention of signing. I insisted I was injured; they suggested I play. It was a mess. I became increasingly depressed, and made a conscious decision to flee.

The manner of my departure was inglorious and unbecoming. I booked an afternoon flight, but reported for physiotherapy treatment in the morning. I am ashamed to admit I compromised my mother by asking her to call the club at midday, insisting that she speak to me because of a family problem.

When she did so, I was summoned from the treatment room to the office to call her back. I dialled an incomplete number, and invented a conversation about the death of my grandfather, who had, in truth, passed on some years earlier. I insisted on going home immediately, to support my mother and pay my respects.

It was embarrassing, disrespectful and utterly unprofessional. I didn’t bother to retrieve my belongings from the hotel, and flew back to Wales. I had no intention of returning to France.

The people at Toulouse deserved far better. They had welcomed me as one of their own. They sent a huge bouquet of flowers to my mother, to sympathise with her supposed loss. I felt worthless, wretched, wracked by guilt. Another lie: more conniving. How low could I go? I had involved my own mother, and her late father, in my dishonesty. It was unforgivable.

Mum is fiercely protective of her three sons, and her four grandchildren, but is unafraid to tell us our fortune if we have disappointed her. This time, though, she understood the pointlessness of anger, sensing that I had to find my own way through a minefield of destructive emotions. I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t want to be alive. The last thing I wanted was for someone to sit me down and give me a lecture about right and wrong. I needed it, but just not at that juncture in my life.

It was more than enough to know my mother was there for me. I’d catch her out of the corner of my eye, watching me like a hawk. She was reading the signs, assessing her priorities. I never had to tell her I was gay. She just knew. She devoted herself to my welfare, and tried to create an environment where I could be at ease, and feel loved and safe. She wanted to reduce the pressure on me – I couldn’t hide the strain from her or my father.

I’d love to say that it was perfect, my return home; that the depression lifted instantly and we were Walt Disney’s version of a happy family, but that would be yet another half-truth, at best.

I felt terribly conflicted that first night back in the whitewashed, semi-detached house, which had been home for my entire life. Lying in my old single bed, in the front bedroom, I had to contend with the inner voice that sniggered that I was a failure. There I was, a grown man of 33, struggling to sleep in the same room I had occupied as a fretful adolescent of 13. What did I have to show for those 20 years? I refused to give myself the easy way out, by concentrating on my rugby achievements. Instead, I questioned my status as a son, husband and lover. Did I deserve such a great family? What sort of person was I? Why did I devastate a wonderful wife? Why could I not summon the courage to invite the world to accept me for who I was? What did I have, spiritually rather than materially?

Viewed from the outside, I had everything. I was approaching a century of caps for a country that regarded me as a favourite son. I had a form of fame that millions craved. I had a storied career. I played for a fantastic club who looked after me, taking pains to be supportive even when they realised I was faking a bad back. They still wanted me to be a part of their team when I was a hopeless drunk.

How did I repay them? By running away, jumping on a plane and leaving them to pick up the pieces. I felt I lacked any redeeming human qualities. I wasn’t even able to do something simple, something I craved, like killing myself. Pathetic.

Lying there in the darkness, I tossed and turned. I gave up trying to assess what was good about my life, because everything seemed irredeemably bad. I had created total chaos, and then brought it back to where I thought I belonged. But, I realised, the old certainties had gone. I felt helpless, trapped. Coming home was almost too much, psychologically, for someone so fragile. It triggered feelings of guilt and despair rather than relief and optimism. Rugby was still there for me, because Cardiff Blues were offering a contract, but the athlete had first to answer to the little boy in the front bedroom.

At my lowest point, I had to come to terms with who I was, and how I intended to make my family proud.

Chapter Two

TEULU (FAMILY)

As entrances into the world go, mine was distinctive. It involved a black Labrador puppy, a privet hedge and a pile of soot. My mother, in trying to catch the dog in our backyard, tripped over a temporary gate, fell through the hedge and landed, head first, in the contents of our recently cleaned chimney.

It was enough to trigger a two-day labour before I was born in Bridgend General Hospital at noon on 25 July 1974. I was a week early but since I weighed in at 9lb 12oz, and filled the cot from head to toe, I had been ready to make my appearance.

My father, Barrie, had been banished from the delivery room, and heard the happy news from a foreman at Costin’s Cement Works where he worked, on the far side of town.

‘You have a baby,’ he was told, in tones that didn’t quite do justice to the miracle of childbirth. ‘Unfortunately, it’s another boy. Sounds like he’s a big fella, though.’ Dad, one of life’s gentle souls – just as well, really, since Mum tends to go off like a Catherine Wheel on Bonfire Night – was content. If he had a premonition of his third son captaining his country and becoming an international cause célèbre, he kept it to himself.

Historically, it was a day of some significance. In Washington, President Nixon was forced to hand over the Watergate tapes, which led to his impeachment. In rugby, the British Lions were completing preparations for the final Test against South Africa in Johannesburg; they had won the previous three but, in keeping with the sour mood of a brutal tour, were denied a chance to do more than draw the last game, which was ended four minutes early with them camping on the Springboks’ line.

Sport was big in our household. My parents love their rugby, and Dad claims he was a decent footballer, but they made a point of sacrificing their time to enable us to develop a variety of interests. It was a happy home, in which the front door was always ajar, and to this day I refer to our neighbours as Auntie and Uncle. No one stands on ceremony. I know this sounds corny, but when someone recently asked me to sum up my life in six words, I chose the phrase, ‘My family has always loved me.’

That’s not strictly true, of course. My brothers, Steve and Richard, five years and sixteen months older than me respectively, used me as a human punch-bag from time to time. Steve is closer in character to me: he is impulsive, entertaining and aggressive when the need arises; Richard is more studious, sensible and precise – virtues with which I have rarely been associated.

We were taught the enduring values of honesty, humility and hard work. We looked after our own. We were expected to be compassionate, combative and principled. We understood the importance of where we came from, the significance of what we represented.

The greatest gift – a strong sense of identity – cost nothing. We weren’t British. We were Welsh. That wasn’t a political statement – although the English sense of entitlement has been mentioned in many dressing rooms I have occupied – but a simple matter of flesh and blood. My forefathers came from a group of tightly knit communities situated within a four-mile radius of Sarn, a village of 2,500 souls, three miles to the north of Bridgend. Money was scarce; life was hard. One of my great-grandfathers on my mother’s side did well enough to run a grocery shop, and then a fish shop, after leaving the mines. His wife, who came from the Wye valley in mid-Wales, was disowned by her family on their wedding day, because of the stigma of having supposedly married beneath her station. They never contacted her again.

I’ve a greater association with my mum’s other grandfather: I was given his mining lamp by my granddad, his son. I became really close to him in the months before he died. He was a man’s man, a kindly character whose house was a treasure trove. He had noticed me admiring the lamp, which hung beside the fire, and made sure I got it when he passed away. He’d do anything for anyone. Soon after my rugby career had taken off, I decided I needed a little space and moved into a house with my auntie, Denise. She’s 17 years younger than my mother, her sister, and acted as my surrogate sister. My nan and granddad would scour the place, from top to bottom, three times a week. We used to call them the cleaning fairies. His eyesight had almost gone, but he insisted on painting the place. We never had the heart to tell him we repaired his handiwork on the quiet.

His dad was one of those extraordinary, ordinary men. He was sent down the pit when he was nine years old, in the days when it was not unusual for 18-hour shifts to begin at 2 a.m. Boys were invaluable in tight, compressed seams. Some were used as ‘putters’, pushing trucks along subterranean lines; others were ‘trappers’, who sat in the dark, opening and shutting a series of wooden doors to allow air to circulate around the mine.

The human cost of coal mining was seared into everyone’s consciousness where I lived. To my parents’ generation, the 1966 Aberfan tragedy, in which 116 children were killed when a colliery spoil tip collapsed onto a junior school, is the equivalent of the Kennedy assassination: everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. My mother was ironing in her mother’s kitchen. Her father was on nights, but she woke him with the words, ‘Something awful has happened.’

Families were so close that a degree of intermingling was almost inevitable. On the day of my parents’ marriage, my maternal great-grandfather and my paternal grandfather recognised each other immediately. They were the same age, despite representing different generations, and had not seen each other for decades. They had grown up together in adjacent houses in Cuckoo Street, and had fought bare-knuckled on the pavements for pennies. Understandably enough, they were driven by social injustice. They had joined the Hunger March to London, staged by South Wales’s miners in 1927. Poverty in the Great Depression had stripped them of everything but their pride and their belligerence. They had railed against means testing, and considered strike-breakers to be the lowest form of life.

My nan and granddad lived at the bottom end of Sarn in a terraced house with an outside toilet, and a small bathroom that adjoined the kitchen. They moved into the new council estate at the top end of the village when it was built in 1951. They lived there, on the corner, opposite our current house, until they died. So much for ‘social mobility’ – one of those airy phrases used by public-school educated officials in Westminster who don’t generally have a good grasp of the real world.

People were conditioned to staying where they were. They tended to be born, live and die in a small area. Dad hailed from Ogmore Vale, just along the valley, where the shale mines provided steady employment, and took entire families underground. It was hardly less bleak on the surface; Mum refused to move from Sarn when they decided to get married, because she wasn’t prepared for the culture shock of ‘living in a place where the clouds descend to street level and you can get lost in the fog’.

His brothers worked down the mine, but he was prevented from joining them because he failed the necessary medical, at the age of 17, due to an irregular heartbeat. He did his apprenticeship as a stone mason, but went to work in the Avon rubber factory when Steve arrived on the scene. The money was good, but he hated the noise, heat and foul air.

He moved to the cement factory, which gave him the chance to feed a growing family, but couldn’t afford the insecurity of his next job, as a central-heating engineer reliant on seasonal contracts. He finally found his niche as a postman, where he walked the walk in Bridgend and the surrounding villages for 28 years before his retirement in the summer of 2014.

He’s happy with his lot, and I understand why. In a spiritual sense, I’ve never moved away from Sarn. I’ll never call anywhere else home, even though I have a place in London. I’ve grown up there: I’ve won Wimbledon on the road, where it straightens, a few yards after our house on the bend; I’ve scored World Cup-winning tries and Test match centuries on the semi-circular patch of grass a little further along, past the house in which Richard now lives with his young family.

I can walk to my infant school, where I screamed the place down on my first day – Mum had literally to prise my grip from the front gate. I obviously got the hang of school, however, as by the time I was in junior classes, I had started playing pick-up rugby on a pitch that could have staged a downhill skiing race in winter.

I got sucked into sport for no other reason than the fact that I loved it. You don’t need a reason to exist, but every kid at six or seven needs a reason to feel like they can be part of a group, or that they have something rather than have nothing.

Sarn is nothing special to look at, but it represents stability. I’m the real Gareth Thomas when I’m there. I’ve no role to play. People know me as the naughty kid, or the tearaway teenager, rather than the rugby player, or the only gay in the village. They knew me as a kid when I wanted to be Monkey, star of the cult Japanese martial arts TV series. They accepted me as the boy who’d always accept a dare, always get caught, and always take his punishment.

In that spirit, I dared my mum to share some of the secrets of my childhood. They say the woman who brought you into the world is the one who knows you best, don’t they? That can be a double-edged sword, but this is her version of living with her youngest son. It is unexpurgated, although God knows I’ve wanted to edit it …

‘Gareth has never changed. Honestly. He’s absolutely never changed. As a boy he was just a walking disaster at times. There’s one holiday story that sticks in my mind. It absolutely typifies him. We were in Malta. It was lovely, chilled and relaxing. One evening, the hotel put on a poolside barbeque, with the food piled on trestle tables.

‘We were all sitting down eating when Gareth suddenly got up. I asked him, “Where do you think you’re going?” He turned to answer me, caught his foot on the trestle table, and the whole lot went down like dominoes. Everything collapsed – plates, food, candles in bottles, well, they all went in the pool. He just looked at me and said, “I’ve told you before, Mammy. I can’t walk and talk at the same time!”

‘Not a thought in his head. When he started playing rugby, he used to lose so much stuff it drove me mad. I had a word with Matthew Harry, who was the captain of the youth team at Pencoed. He used to make Gareth stand in his kit bag to undress so that it would all go straight in. He still managed to mislay something or other, though. You always know where Gareth has been because there’s a trail of shoes, socks, training gear. He’s so untidy. And he’ll never change.

‘He was a lovely lad, but no angel. At school he was a waster, especially when he went up to Ogmore Comprehensive. I was working part-time in a children’s home at the time, and it was pure coincidence that I knew the head of the middle school, Mr Evans. He had done his year’s teacher training at what was the local secondary modern, when I was a pupil there.

‘He kept on sending for me to talk about Gareth’s behaviour. I was busy bringing up three children, and one day he asked to see me at nine o’clock. He didn’t turn up until quarter past nine. I’d had to change my shift to get there, so I was furious by the time he came in through the door. I just went for him. I said, “The next time you send for me, Gareth’s either been physically or verbally abusive to the staff or another child, or he’s been truanting. Other than that, I don’t want to know.”

‘I’m not a fan of teachers, to be honest. Richard had this gift in school, where he always did well. Poor old Gareth was coming up behind, in the year below. Teachers would say, “Gareth is nothing like Richard.” They just couldn’t help themselves. They have a sense of expectation, which is usually misplaced. They lose patience.

‘They used to say Gareth had a poor concentration level. I told them to teach him in a way that kept him interested. They said that when they took a ruler off him because he was tapping the desk with it, he began tapping the floor with his foot. What was I supposed to do about that? Tie his legs together? Once I was sent for because he’d broken a fire alarm. His story was that someone had pushed him, and a tennis racket had gone into the alarm. Oh, and he’d smashed a lampshade, with a rugby ball …’

In my defence, they did give me the rugby ball. Eventually, the teachers just sent me out to the playing field to make my own amusement.

I went back there recently. The school closed in 2010, and it has basically been abandoned. Returning was a strange, eerie experience. The rugby posts remain upright, but they are rusting; the long-jump runway and pit is only marked by an indentation in the overgrown grass. My favourite unofficial classroom, the black hole – a tunnel between teaching blocks where the bad boys and girls used to go for a cigarette and other forbidden, extra-curricular activities at break-time – has been filled in. There were poignant reminders of normality; a long-forgotten box of pencils on a broken grey cabinet – and the classrooms are generally a wreck. The fire alarm by the door had been repaired, mind …

To be honest, I hated school. I’ve a natural aversion to authority. That’s why I had a lot of problems with coaches, especially when I first started playing. Most were ex-teachers. It wasn’t a question of a lack of respect, but I was conditioned to rebel against anyone who spoke down to me. I just couldn’t handle that, even later in my career. It explains why I learned nothing from any of my international coaches, until Steve Hansen became Wales coach.

The most illustrious example of the teacher-coach is Graham Henry. He has done everything in the game. He led the British Lions and the All Blacks. He was even knighted for services to rugby. Yet when he was in charge of Wales between 1998 and 2002, the so-called Great Redeemer and I never got on. I found him arrogant and ignorant; he found me chippy and unpredictable. He had his teacher’s pets – senior pros and top blokes like Rob Howley, Scott Gibbs and Scott Quinnell. The rest, even those of us with 50 or so caps, were treated like second-class citizens. Henry used to annoy me by comparing me unfavourably to other players in front of the group, for no apparent reason. His knowledge was immense, but the tone of his voice and the self-importance of his body language meant it never got across to me.

I have a simple philosophy, in rugby and in life: treat others in the manner you’d be expected to be treated yourself. I believe coach and player, teacher and pupil, are engaged in a 50-50 partnership. That’s why school never got the best out of me. They never worked out that, suitably inspired, I loved learning. The boy they dismissed as feckless and unruly has grown into a man who loves being challenged. Set me a task, and I will do everything I can to master it.

Most people know me as Alfie, after Alf, the Alien Life Form, the central character of an American kids’ TV programme that was popular in my early teens. The series charted the misadventures of a loveable rogue from the planet Melmac, who follows a ham radio signal to Earth and crash-lands on the garage of the Tanners, a suburban middle-class family in the San Fernando Valley in California.

It was daft escapism. We loved his capacity for chaos, especially his constant attempts to eat the family cat, the ironically named Lucky. We were watching one day after school when Stephen Hughes, one of my mates from the estate, suddenly exclaimed, ‘You look exactly like him.’ Since Alf was huge, with pronounced ears, a pig’s snout and a gorilla’s torso, it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

I won the retaliatory wrestle on the carpet, but the name stuck, along with its derivatives: Alfonso and Alfredo. I still have a miniature version of the puppet, which takes pride of place on one of my sofas at home. Apart from some trophies, awarded during long-forgotten school sports days, it represents the most enduring legacy of my time in the state education system.

I find I can communicate easily, and was pretty decent at English at school. The problem with the subject, though, was where the classroom was situated, at the end of a block. It meant I looked out over a steep grass bank, down which the younger boys were rolled in one of the school’s initiation ceremonies. Tennis courts and a playground littered with old tractor tyres were on a plateau above this bank, while our three rugby pitches lay beyond. The open space teased me, beckoned to me. It was where I was accepted and admired.

Sport gave me status. As soon as the bell went for playtime or the lunch break, I’d come alive. I’d be the first selection in the pick-up matches. That validated me. So, when we were herded back into the classrooms, I preferred fantasy to facts. You wouldn’t believe how many matches my imaginary teams won out there, though the teachers who recognised my glassy-eyed reveries for what they were probably had a decent idea.

I understand why they decided to cut their losses with me and devote more time to those who wanted to learn. As a captain, I’ve made the same choice. Concentrate on those who are on your wavelength, prioritise the ones who care. Those who don’t want to engage, or become a distraction because they think only of themselves, are energy sappers. Fight the battles that are worth winning, with the troops you can trust.