There is a story that Rob Page enjoys telling.
It is an anecdote more than a story, one which flitters familiarly through time and is tethered to no specific date, but a story nonetheless. Of the time, as a child, the front door of the Wales manager’s home in Tylorstown would never endure a lock, lest he lock out the irresistible shrills of the friends of his mother, the clacking of their hush puppies on the wooden flooring announcing their unexpected but expected arrivals, like a bus station’s incessantly whirring intercom.
It is the clacking which Page recalls most viscerally, then the scent of a freshly-baked, still-warm something wafting through the tight hallway that he, on any given day, would instinctively sprint through and out of the unlocked door, down to the streets, the fields, in the open air of an inexhaustible Rhondda valleys sky to play kick-a-can with friends until daylight slipped behind the ridges – and then he’d play for a little while longer, until he knew he had exceeded his mother’s patience and his tea was irreparably cold.
