Paula George

Paula George wasn’t just the only black person in her village, but the only black person in her family. At twelve, she was forced into foster care, at fourteen she left home for good. At nineteen rugby saved her life. But then, at fifty, cancer threatened to take it, within a matter of months.

Auckland, the ‘city of sails’ on the North Island of New Zealand, is over 11,000 miles away from the UK, a distance that felt even greater for Paula George, known to everyone as ‘Georgie’, as she began her treatment for ovarian cancer in 2019. 

With her Kiwi wife, Jo, this part of the world has been home for almost twenty years, since the end of her long playing career for Wasps and England, and where they wanted to raise their twins, Jacob and Taylor. “All of a sudden I felt really, really far away,” remembers the 75-cap former Red Rose captain when we meet in London. “I hadn’t really cried, it was all very much, ‘I’ve got to beat this’. I was really focused, using a lot of skills that we used as an athlete. I was setting goals: this is what I need to do, these are the steps I need to take today.”

Doctors had found a 30cm tumour in Georgie’s abdomen that was also attached to her ovaries and appendix. Her prognosis gave her months rather than years, and the first step in her treatment was having the tumour removed in an arduous eight-hour surgery. After that came six months of chemotherapy. 

“It was hard at the time, I hadn’t really emotionally got into it, I was just ignoring the negative stuff. But then the doorbell rang at the house, and Jo answered the door. I was in this room we’d set up where I could just recover, because I needed to sleep a lot, and Jo brought in this bouquet of roses. I’m Red Rose number 48, and the girls had sent over 47 red roses.

“I just sobbed, I literally held it and just cried and cried and cried,” she recalls. “It was the first time [I had cried] and I felt really connected back to everybody at home. That was incredible, that helped me heaps.”

Once again, rugby was playing a part in saving Georgie’s life. With a group of former teammates around the world supporting her, the time difference that had once been a point of disconnect facilitated an around-the-clock network of support. “I was often awake, with lots of medication I couldn’t really sleep for more than one or two hours,” she says. “I’d be awake in the middle of the night, and there was nobody awake in Auckland, but everyone was awake back home. One of the girls had moved to Canada, and she was amazing because she’d been through cancer, she was super supportive. So, I just had all these time zones, and all the former Red Roses giving me places to vent when I felt really shit and angry, but really safe spaces. I could say ‘this is a shit day, it’s awful’, and they would just be there.

“I was really struggling going into the third round of chemotherapy and Giselle [Mather] called; when I first came into the England squad she really looked after me, I was her bridesmaid and I consider her my best mate. I was telling her about my chemo, and she said, ‘When is it? Right, I’m coming over’. She just turned up and hung out for a week and it just gave me so much energy to face the next part of the journey.”

In the midst of the hardest days of treatment, her teammates gave Georgie an outlet to be vulnerable; as a mum of two young children, that isn’t a luxury she was afforded at home. “In front of the kids I had to be super strong and say, ‘it’s okay, Mummy is just really tired, and I need to sleep’,” explains Georgie. “I was just trying to frame it in language that helped them but that didn’t scare them. I remember when my hair started falling out, I got the kids to actually shave my head rather than them seeing it come out bit by bit, so they felt a part of it.

“But [with my teammates], I didn’t have to be strong, I could go into that group with the girls and just be me. And some days I was really up, some days I was really down, and it didn’t matter. It was all accepted.”

Thankfully, the treatment has been a success for Georgie. When we speak, she has been in remission for five years and just received the all-clear from her doctors. Days are now focused on spending as much time as possible in New Zealand’s wild frontiers with her family, whether that’s camping, swimming or surfing. But as with any cancer survivor, her recovery hasn’t been without its twists and turns; the demands of her treatment may have been over, but it was only the start of her battle to find herself again. “It took a long time to recover from the treatment to be honest. The treatment was the easy bit on reflection,” she admits. “You’re looked after really well, and then you’re done, you’re cured, and you’ve got to do all the rehab. But I remember at that time thinking, ‘Jesus, this is just starting’. I’m broken, like my body, from being used to being an athlete, there’s no muscle left. You’re really broken, and it’s quite a tough journey to come back and find who you are again.

“As an athlete your identity is all about being strong, especially in rugby,” continues Paula. “I never was the biggest player, but I was strong, and when you get to a certain age as a female everyone says you’ll be alright, you don’t have to be strong – it’s acceptable to be broken like that. But it wasn’t to me. 

“I’m an older mum, but I just want to be able to do all those things with the kids. Most people say, ‘Jesus, how can you do that?’. So, a strange thing that’s come out of it is that I don’t think I would have been this fit, I wouldn’t have pushed this hard to be healthy, if I hadn’t gone through that.” 

Georgie had to be resilient throughout her illness, but she’s always had to be. Growing up in Kenfig Hill, a small village near the south Wales coast sandwiched between Port Talbot to the west and Bridgend to the east, she was dealt a challenging opening hand. Her family story is complicated, the strands of which she is still working to gather, but her mother fell pregnant after her father, who was in the army, returned from a tour of Afghanistan. They decided to get married, believing the child to be theirs, but while he’d been away Georgie’s mother had had an affair with a man from the American military who’d been doing his rest and recuperation in the UK. This meant that Georgie started life as a black child, the only black person in the village, born to two white parents. “Wales is not a very forgiving place,” says Georgie. “I know they got hate mail. My grandmother, who was a white Welsh lady, also got hate mail. It was that kind of thing, that’s how small-minded the whole place was, and as a kid, I found that hate mail. It also made the local newspaper; it was that horrific.”

From the moment she was born, through nothing but the accident of birth, Georgie’s experience of life was one where she was not accepted. It characterised much of her early years in Wales, particularly at school where, out of 1,600 children, she and an Asian boy were the only two who were non-white. “Growing up in Wales, the word nigger was really common,” she says. “The boys would go around making monkey noises and all that kind of stuff. It was just toxic, like why do they feel I’m not good enough? Why would you call a human being those things? It was just constant hassle, so you’re always kind of armouring up and always protecting yourself.” 

Given Georgie’s family circumstances, she wasn’t offered the respite of a safe space at home either; her four half-sisters, all of whom were white, weren’t quite able to understand what she was going through. That situation only grew worse when her mother left home but was unable to win custody of a then twelve-year-old Georgie. “The courts of the day kept all of us together, so I was left with my stepfather who didn’t want me, he just kept me because that was the only way he could keep the other girls.” Soon afterwards, he was injured in a mining accident, which meant the girls were sent to a foster home in Caerphilly. She and her sisters later returned to her stepfather in Kenfig Hill, but just before her fifteenth birthday, she left home for good. “I just knew I couldn’t live there. I was desperate to go to university and I knew that was my exit route out of the village. Two other people in that whole village had left, and they’d gone to university, so I knew I could get out that way. The lady who was my PE teacher [Miss Avril Roper] was going to take me in, but then my grandmother, my stepfather’s mother, so not really my gran, but a gran in all other ways, she said, ‘come live with me’.”

Georgie finally had some form of stability, but by fifteen she had already experienced enough pain for a lifetime. With no outlet for her emotions, she often resorted to violence to protect herself. “I was always fighting, I was a real scrapper,” she acknowledges. “I would physically attack kids who would say things to me because I wasn’t going to take it. Guys were bigger than me and they learned to kind of back off. I knew they’d stop if I could physically attack them, so I did. One of my teachers, who I got to know when I hit sixth form, used to say to me that I was this silent, terrifying ball of rage, she felt like I was always about to explode.

“One incident I remember, it was actually at junior school, a kid called me something really shitty and I grabbed him, and I remember really clearly pushing him up against a wall and turning him upside down,” she says. “I remember getting the cane for it because I was fighting, and the headmaster said to me, ‘why did you do it?’, and I said, ‘because he called me a black bastard’. Why am I not going to fight? I got the cane, he got the cane, but it wasn’t addressed, we both went back to class and just had to say sorry to each other.”

It was after moving in with Gran that Georgie began to find other ways to cope. One was a love for English – reading and writing becoming a form of expression, and words an alternative weapon to violence. Along with A levels in PE and maths, this would help her achieve her dream of making it to university, and ultimately out of her hometown, going on to study sports science at the Cardiff Institute. 

Another outlet was the sports field. Georgie had only sporadically got involved with organised sport when she was young, opting instead for rough and ready kickabouts in the playground with the boys. She had tried her hand at all sorts and turned out to be naturally gifted. “Really randomly I actually got into the junior Wales squad for javelin,” she remembers. “I went along to a championship, and I was a new kid on the block, and I got a bronze. But there was no joy, no love for it like I got in team sport.”

Netball was Georgie’s first love. With a well-meaning kick up the backside from her PE teacher Miss Roper, she started playing for the school team and, less than two years later, was joining up with the Wales international squad. By 1991, the same year she completed the final year of her degree, she was jetting off to Australia for the 1991 World Cup, where they placed an unexpected seventh from twenty countries. 

For most, representing your country on the world stage would be the sporting pinnacle, but for Georgie, who’d picked up rugby in her first year at university, that seem to pale in comparison to what rugby gave her. “I did throw a rugby ball around when I was a kid growing up in Wales, but that was just what you did. I was eighteen or nineteen when I first formally went to a training session. I remember breaking through a gap, and I just went head down. I did this massive fend and they went flying, and I scored. I was like, ‘am I allowed to do that?’ and they said, ‘yeah, you can do that all day long’. And that was it, I was like, ‘shit, I can be as physical as I want’.”

For years, Georgie had wrestled with the emotions inside her, and with rugby she had finally found a place where she could fully express herself and where she felt completely free. “I loved netball, it was a really cool sport, but there was a part of me that was really held back, because it’s got to be controlled. But in rugby, all of that was encouraged. I loved that physicality; I loved that intensity of using your whole body. You go to rugby, and all of that anger can come out, you can be super physical, and you can empty everything but in a really good environment. Not only is it accepted, it’s also celebrated, and that helped me get rid of all that pent up angst and rage.

“There was no sport like rugby for women. Netball is so structured; you’re not even allowed to leave your third. I’d often get called up for the physicality of my defence in netball, but in rugby there’s that physical camaraderie that you don’t have in other women’s sports. It’s all very controlled and acceptable.”

Adding to her already hectic 1991, Georgie then turned out for Wales in the first-ever women’s Rugby World Cup. “Most people don’t realise that, I have five caps for Wales, but after that I gave it up, it just wasn’t that good a standard. Netball had been really professional, it was a great setup, the coaches were amazing, the culture was lovely. Respectfully, looking back, Welsh rugby was just carnage.” A few days before we speak, an independent review into the Welsh Rugby Union found a toxic culture of bullying and discrimination in the organisation. “It doesn’t sound like much has changed,” she remarks. “It’s exactly the same scenario, it’s like taking it back decades, it’s the same shit. It doesn’t surprise me, if I’m being totally honest.” 

With a passion for rugby now deep in her bones, she decided to move to London in search of the best standard possible. “I played for Richmond for a year,” she says. “I loved the rugby, the standard was really good, but they weren’t quite my tribe. I then got invited to go for a trial with Wasps, and immediately I knew they were my tribe. Lawrence Dallaglio once said that Wasps was for the waifs and strays of the world and we accepted everyone, it was that kind of club.”

Arriving at Wasps, for the first time in her life Georgie felt like she truly belonged. “I’m often aware of places where I can fit in and where I don’t fit in,” she explains. “I think that comes from growing up in a village where you’re the only black person. Belonging and taking up space is super important to me; no matter who you are, everyone has a right to be in the world. With rugby, for me, that was probably the first space I found where I 100-per-cent belonged. Wasps was the first true place where everyone loved you for exactly who you were; it was this little oasis of amazingness where you never had to change anything about yourself.”

It didn’t take long for England to come knocking. After her last cap for Wales in 1991 she had to undergo the three-year stand-down period before she was eligible for the Red Roses, and so her first experience with England came in a strictly watercarrier/tackle-bag based role for a 1993 tour to Canada. “We were bashed to pieces by all the big girls, but we were just happy to be over there.” 

Her first cap, almost too poetically, came against Wales in Bridgend the following year. “They were out to kill me, man,” she recalls with amusement. “What I didn’t know at the time was Heather Stirrup and Sarah Wenn, who were the England second rows, their job was to grab hold of me and pull me out [of rucks]. Afterwards I was like, ‘what’s going on?’ and [Heather] said, ‘We could see them coming at you, so we just went, ‘back you go, back to fullback’.

Full-back was a brand-new position for Georgie, not that she was going to let such a small detail stop her making her debut. “I mostly played as an outside centre for Wasps in those days, but Steve [Dowling], who was coach at the time, he called me and said, ‘can you play full-back?’. Jane Mitchell, who was the incumbent, was injured and couldn’t play. I just said, ‘yes’, but I had no idea how to play full-back, I was clueless. I just remember watching all these videos and replays of David Campese, Christian Cullen, guys of that era – what do they do, where do they position themselves? I think I had an okay game, but that’s how I started playing full-back. It’s such a technical position but I had no idea at the time. 

“I just wanted to be on the field,” she admits. “Those girls were so good, I just wanted to be as good as them and play rugby to that standard, which was just next level. People like Karen Almond were amazing; even in today’s culture she’d probably still be the best kicker in the world. When she said she was going to kick it, you just turned around, your points were done.”

As seems to be the theme in Georgie’s sporting life, things moved fast. Having impressed in England colours, she was picked in the squad for the 1994 World Cup campaign in Scotland, a tournament that England won, revenging their 1991 final loss to the same opposition by beating the United Stated 38-23. Throughout the tournament Georgie had been getting plenty of game time as a super-sub, and even got a start against Scotland, but the medal around her neck was only bettered by the golden memories. 

“At the end of that tournament, I wanted to be the number one full-back. And Jane helped by moving to America!” Soon, the 15 shirt had become hers. She grew into her new position far quicker than she expected and, with 33 caps to her name, she was asked to be England captain in 2000. “I was really shocked when I got named captain. There’s all these people that you could pick from, why me? It was Pete [Kennedy] at the time, and he said, ‘I see leadership potential in you, and I think it’ll make you a better player’.”

Did Georgie see herself as a leader? “Yes, but not in that kind of traditional formal sense of holding the role, more just getting the best out of people around me. I remember when I got announced, Susie Appleby came running up to me and was bouncing around and hugging me. When I saw how everyone else reacted, I was like, ‘okay, maybe if everyone else is happy that I’ve got it, then I can do this’.”

Leading England to a 41-10 victory over Spain in Barcelona in her first game with the armband, Georgie set her sights on the World Cup coming two years later in the same city. England had missed out on the final for the first time in 1998, hammered 44-11 in the semi-final by a dominant Kiwi side that went on to win the first of their six World Cup trophies, beating the USA 44-11 in the final. “We got schooled by the Kiwis, they were amazing,” recalls Georgie. “They turned up out of nowhere and they were something special. Laurie O’Reilly was their coach; he was an amazing coach and he’d taken them to the next level. They had Louisa Wall on the wing who was just like a female Jonah Lomu, she was just so big and strong. They could pass over distances we couldn’t pass.

“A few people retired, but there was a group of us that went, ‘that’s amazing, we want to rise to that challenge, let’s work to the next World Cup and see how good we can be. If they can play to that level, why can’t we? What do we need to do to get to that level?’ We weren’t as big, we weren’t as strong, our skill set wasn’t as good, so we had loads of work to do, but it was really exciting.”

Their mantra was to be the best in the world, and the group had to push themselves hard. Support from Loughborough University took their strength and conditioning work to a whole new level, and the programme as a whole slowly grew to be more and more professional. “It was a really cool transition period to be involved in,” says Georgie. “We still had shit crowds, but to see us on the field get better and better was super special.” Under her leadership England won back-to-back Grand Slams in 2000 and 2001, a narrow 22-17 loss to France in the first iteration of the women’s Six Nations in 2002 denying them a flawless run to the World Cup. “We achieved what we wanted to achieve,” she says. “Apart from that very last thing at the World Cup final. We lost 19-9.”

England had fallen at the final hurdle to the Black Ferns. Fast forward to 2022 and that experience was at least useful, when the Red Roses once again fell at the final hurdle to the Kiwis in the most dramatic of finals. “I was working on the sidelines in the last World Cup, and Sunter [Sarah Hunter] was walking up, this lone white jersey. Sunter just came straight over and started hugging me and she said, ‘Oh my God, you’re exactly the person I need to see right now’. I just said, ‘You’re okay, you guys did amazing’. I was just devastated for them because I knew exactly what it felt like.”

That most recent World Cup in New Zealand, with over 42,000 fans packed into Eden Park for the final, was evidence of the new heights that women’s rugby has soared to since Georgie’s playing days – for comparison, her 2002 final drew a crowd of eight thousand. But Georgie, like all players of her generation, knows the women’s game can’t get complacent. “You’ve got to strive to innovate,” she says. “I think the next frontier for our game is to ask the hard questions. We’re not used to dealing with them, but we’ve got to invite them, get used to answering them and be really honest with them – we want to know why a coach made a decision at that time, we want to know about the strategies. 

“If we want to be taken seriously, we can’t reject criticism, every sport has that critical analysis, that’s what brings your fans in. But that also pushes our standards. If you’re getting asked, ‘you always take the ball into contact, why don’t you release it?’, as a player you go away and do extras and get better at it.”

With the rise of the women’s game it would be easy for Georgie to look back and yearn for what today’s players have, or indeed what the men’s game has always had, but that’s just not the way Georgie views it. “We were on a journey man, we were on an incredible ride. We were really in our own world, we felt like it was our world that we created. I felt like we were a separate sport, a separate entity. I was one of the ones who was against us amalgamating with the men’s union, but I just didn’t want anyone to mess it up. Now I’d say [the RFU] are probably world leaders in how they’re supporting their women’s national team. But that’s still very recent.

“We didn’t care what others thought,” she continues. “People would attack us, but I’m like, ‘I don’t give a shit, don’t watch me. I’m not asking you to watch me, all I want to do is run with the ball’. I didn’t care if there was one man and his dog on the side line, I just wanted to play. 

Georgie was never one to seek out the limelight, but she certainly left a legacy in the Red Rose shirt, one she hadn’t quite appreciated until recently. “At the World Cup I met so many people that kept saying, ‘I played rugby because of you’, and I had no idea. Alex Matthews, she came up to me and said, ‘My dad cut out a little newspaper clipping of you, I stuck it up next to my lights and at night, when I’d go to sleep, I’d go, ‘I want to play for England’. That made my World Cup.

“That was when my partner said I had to share my story, and share it all, because a lot of people would get something from it. I’ve only really been talking about my past for the last five years. You go through a major traumatic thing like cancer and suddenly you look back and go, ‘what do I need to sort out?’ 

“A lot of it came up in counselling, which I’d tried before and hated because I didn’t want to sit and ruminate on my past, and then suddenly the time is up. But my new counsellor was great, and we came up with this phrase ‘you wouldn’t be who you are now if you hadn’t had that experience’. She’d ask, ‘do you like yourself now?’ and I could say, ‘yeah, I really like myself’. It’s part of my history, my foundation, but this is where I’m at today. I live most days pretty happy, and there’s not a lot of people who can say that. It’s a real gift.” 

Story by James Price

Pictures by  Ben McDade and ShutterStock

This extract was taken from issue 24 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.