and disasters, the wins, defeats and close finishes, the sunny days and the wet ones, all memories every cricketer locks away for the dark months when the summer game is in hibernation.
When my father finally lost his eyesight and all his money in the early 1950s, our family were uprooted from our modest bungalow in Surrey to two rooms of a multi-occupied Victorian relic in Brixton. The accommodation lacked finesse, but it was within walking distance of the Kennington Oval at a time when Surrey had the greatest county team of them all. I camped out at The Oval during the summer holidays as a devoted spectator. It cannot have been so, but memory insists that the sun always shone and Surrey always won. And what a feast they offered. Peter May’s bat rang like a pistol shot, and the suffering ball bounced back from the pavilion pickets before a fielder had even moved. May’s batting once got me into a frightful scrape.
I had borrowed my father’s precious gold stopwatch to time how long it took a May off-drive to reach the boundary, and in pressing the stop button it slipped from my fingers and smashed open on the terracing. The innards sprang out. The watch looked terminally sick. So did I as I confessed all to my father. ‘Tell me,’ he said, gingerly holding the watch by a broken spring, ‘about Peter May.’
May was one of many great players in that Surrey team. Tony Lock, menace shining from his bald pate, bowled the unplayable ball and caught the impossible catch. Jim Laker ambled gently to the wicket, but his off-breaks spun and spat at the batsman. The thin man, Peter Loader, was fast as a whippet; and Alec Bedser, the great medium-pacer, stately as a galleon, tormented batsmen with nagging accuracy and a leg cutter no other bowler has ever matched. Decades later he told me he discovered the leg cutter by accident, and had taken two years to perfect it. ‘It’s a leg spinner, really,’ he confided, ‘but you need these to bowl it properly.’ Thereupon he held up the enormous Bedser hands and chuckled. These were golden days of sun and shadows, Tizer and sandwiches, and I shall never forget them.
The 1950s were also a time of massive immigration to England from the West Indies, and many of the new Britons settled in Brixton. The house we lived in was for a time multi-occupied and multi-racial, and it provided a good primer on poverty for a future Conservative Prime Minister. I knew the immigrants as neighbours. I lived with them. I played with their children. I shopped with them in Brixton market. I saw them for what they were: men and women seeking opportunity and a new life in a land immeasurably more wealthy than the ones they had left behind.
Others, more fearful, more suspicious, saw them in a harsher light. They feared for their jobs and their livelihoods. They were frightened of possible turmoil in their neighbourhoods. Bigots and foolish men inflamed these fears. Pessimists predicted trouble. Brixton became a powderkeg of racial discontent. People waited for it to blow. Waited for the riots, the lawlessness. They waited in vain. The new Britons settled in. The dire predictions of conflict proved to be wrong.
In my youthful innocence, I wasn’t surprised. Instead of inciting fear, the bigots and pessimists should have gone to The Oval, where, when the West Indies played, it was carnival time: the atmosphere was noisy and full of fun as the crowd enjoyed glorious days of cricket. For those in the packed ground the painful reality of life in Brixton was put aside, even though at close of play it was still there. Prejudice and hardship were daily companions to the new Brixtonians. Dr Johnson, who knew London two hundred years earlier, had it right: ‘This mournful truth is everywhere confessed/Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed’.
Slow rises worth – but it did rise. And the West Indians’ cricket, the way they played and the way the team conducted themselves in victory, did much to help. A few years earlier they had taken on England at her own game, in her own country, at the very headquarters of cricket. And they beat her on merit. Perhaps no win in cricket ever had such social significance as Ramadhin and Valentine’s destruction of England at Lord’s in June 1950. A big hundred by Clyde Walcott set it up; it was then won by the charm and guile of the cricketing sophisticate’s delight: the art of great spin bowling. It was intelligent cricket – the West Indies out-thought England as well as outplayed them. As a result, all West Indians walked a little taller in their tough lives because their national cricket team had lifted their morale. No wonder the calypso rang out in celebration: ‘Cricket, lovely cricket’, indeed!
This is a classic illustration of the power of cricket. It can uplift whole communities – whole nations even – or cast them down. And because cricket is played largely in the mind, and reflects the society from which the cricketers spring, it can imprint the character of that nation indelibly upon the minds of those who watch the way in which a national team plays.
When not at The Oval, I spent hour upon hour defending a Brixton lamp-post against the bowling of any passer-by. Only my half-brother Tom and our mutual friend Butch were regulars, and only bad light, in the form of nightfall, stopped play. In 1966 my love of playing the game reached a premature end when a car accident in northern Nigeria left me with a leg so shattered it was almost lost; but that did not mean I would never again pick up a bat.
As Prime Minister, in 1991 I attended a meeting of Commonwealth Heads of Government in Harare and opened the batting in a charity match with the Australian Prime Minister, Bob Hawke. The previous evening Bob had entertained his fellow heads of government with a selection of Australian and trades union songs, most of them unrepeatable, as we shared more beers than was wise. The following morning, since I had not held a bat for years, I had a net before the game. As I looked around the lovely Wanderers ground, I was flattered to see that it was filling with spectators, although my Press Secretary Gus O’Donnell, never one to let hubris pass unchallenged, did wonder aloud whether they might have come to see their local hero Graeme Hick, who was due to bat at number three.
Bob Hawke and I opened to gentle bowling, and began to settle down, with Bob stealing the bowling towards the end of each over. I didn’t mind: it was a joy just to be there. We tapped the ball here and there, and ran our singles. After a few overs the wisdom of the Hawke strategy was revealed: ‘Off you go,’ said the umpire, waving us off the pitch as he added, rather pointedly, ‘It’s time for the real cricketers.’ A roar of applause greeted our departure.
Hawke had scored over 20, while I had less than 10. ‘Did you know we didn’t have long?’ I asked him as we trudged back to the pavilion. ‘Jeez, yes,’ he admitted, a Cheshire-cat-sized grin splitting his craggy features. ‘Didn’t you know, John? Arrh, heck – I thought you did.’ Not for the first or the last time, I noted that Australians play hard.
Our host in Zimbabwe was the President, Robert Mugabe, in the years before he encouraged militants to force out white farmers and steal their property. In 1991, Mugabe talked to me fondly of cricket. ‘It civilises people and creates gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen!’ From beyond the grave, Lord Hawke would have approved, though he, like me, would have regarded land theft as most definitely ‘not cricket’. Hawke would have disapproved too of the mismatch between Mugabe’s sentiments and the outcome of his policies: his government all but destroyed Zimbabwean cricket.
Forty years after I first visited The Oval, I came to know the Surrey club from the inside. During my years in government The Oval was a sanctuary where cares were put aside. Upon the morrow of defeat in the 1997 general election I bade my farewells to Downing Street and the Queen and headed to The Oval for a leisurely lunch and a soothing afternoon of cricket. Nor did the balm fail me: ‘You had a rough decision, mate,’ called out a gnarled regular, before turning to more important matters. ‘This boy is a good bat.’ Indeed he was: it was a young Combined Universities batsman, Will House, later of Sussex, who played a fine cameo innings. Since leaving office I have been able to step back into the pleasures of cricket as if it had never been interrupted by the rude reality of politics.
No one has ever had a sufficient gift of tongues to do justice to the charm of cricket. In fact we cannot even be sure how – or when – the game began. Folklore
