The British Airways inaugural flight from London to Adelaide was twenty-seven hours of complete relaxation. Unlike most people, I thoroughly enjoy long-haul flights. Responsibility for your own life is wrested from you for the duration, and all you can do is sit back and relax. One of the stewardesses on the London–Bangkok sector was the ex-wife of Geoff Howarth, former captain of New Zealand, but as a tribute to her sheer professionalism on a chock-a-block flight, she only managed to come and chat to me when the plane had actually landed. It was another of those sad tales of cricketing marriages, where long and enforced absences create a gradual and irretrievable breakdown. It is nevertheless the number of such marriages that survive that continue to surprise me, not the number that fail.
As the plane circled to land in Adelaide, rows upon rows of Formula One racing cars hove into view, like so many multicoloured Dinky toys, waiting to be freighted back to their respective workshops. The entire city, hitherto better known for its multiplicity of churches, was still in the throes of post-Grand Prix euphoria. With the few exceptions of people who objected to the inevitable traffic jams, the noise and the influx of the racing world’s ritzy razzamatazz, the majority of the good burghers of Adelaide had been immersed in the hopes of Britain’s Nigel Mansell and his bid for the world championship. Mansell had only to secure third place in the race, and the title would have been his. Tragically, his aspirations burst along with his left rear tyre, and he narrowly escaped with his life. Alain Prost carried off the championship. But in all honesty who cares? Alain Prost is not an Englishman.
The flight had been full as far as Sydney, but we who emerged at the final destination, ‘The City of Churches and Light’, were few. My copious amounts of baggage arrived almost immediately, thanks to the special ministrations of British Airways Special Services Executive, Francis de Souza. The cricket team had flown out heavily subsidised by British Airways, but the national flag-carrier’s well-tapped munificence embraces even sports less familiar, and the British challenge in the America’s Cup is also being generously sponsored by the self-confessed World’s Favourite Airline. Francis’ VIP attentions are reserved not merely for the superstars, but even extend to the vicarious extrusions of same, the wives, and I was unreservedly grateful for the ‘hand’ with my twenty kilos of excess baggage. Most of this comprised gear my husband, spin-bowler Phil, had failed to remember, items any professional cricketer could easily forget: cricket trousers, thigh pads, cricket shirts, England sweaters, spikes, helmet, an extra bat, chest pad, you know, all those relatively redundant peripherals to a four-month tour of Australia.
Hypnotising myself into a Bob Willis-like catatonic trance, watching other people’s luggage swirl around on the black rubber carousel, I noticed gossip columnist Auberon Waugh. His avuncular physiognomy belies his often gloriously malicious mind. He is the sort of elegantly satirical, brilliantly vituperative, unashamed misogynist, whose ‘tripe-writer’ ribbons mere part-time mickey-takers, such as myself, are unworthy to change.
Had he been sent here to report, in his inimitably excoriating fashion, on the ‘Clashes for the Ashes’? I savoured the thought. Sadly not. The distinguished progeny of the author of Brideshead Revisited, Scoop and Black Mischief had been invited to Adelaide in his capacity as wine connoisseur extraordinaire. An indignant Australian senator was so incensed when Waugh failed sufficiently to differentiate between South Australian and Hunter Valley wines in his essays on the Australian grape, she invited him over to rectify any confusion. I should like to put it on record here and now (just in case the good senator is reading), that I too am rather hazy on the organoleptic nuances of said varieties, and would be perfectly delighted to have my confusion dispelled as well.
I was met at the airport by a correspondent from the local press, who inquired whether I would be joining the team on its forthcoming up-country match in Kalgoorlie. Kalgoorlie is celebrated throughout Australia for its gold mines, and for that apparently indispensable adjunct to towns where lonesome men get too rich, too quick: its brothels. Unfortunately, the logistics of taking in the forthcoming Melbourne Cup and making it up to this indubitably colourful fixture were too awkward to contemplate, and I had elected to go for the former.
‘I’d rather go to the Melbourne Cup,’ I explained to the baby hackette in a jet-lagged attempt at flippancy, ‘You get a better class of horse.’
This did not net me too many friends amongst the doyennes of Melbourne society, where it was widely and faithfully misreported as ‘a better class of whore’. If the press want you to be out-spoken, you can bet your bottom, devalued Australian dollar, you are going to be out-spoken.
I arrived at the new and commensurately sumptuous Adelaide Hilton. It was midday, and Phil was playing at the Oval in the state match against South Australia.
He had remembered. There, in the bedroom, on top of the television, lovingly juxtaposed between a pile of laundered (at least we’re making progress) jock-straps and cricket socks, was a floral display. Nothing too ostentatious, mind you. No, indeed on reflexion about exactly the same size as the floral displays ubiquitously dotted throughout the entire hotel. And the same selection. ‘Happy Tenth Anniversary, darling’, it proclaimed, in suitably non-person-specific terms of endearment. It was signed ‘PH EDMONDS’.
I was appropriately overwhelmed, and reflected that even if Philippe-Henri had forgotten how to sign his name in anything other than autograph, room-service or credit-card fashion, at least he had remembered that it was ten years since the outbreak of inter-Edmonds hostilities. Ten years and one day to be exact. I had left England on 29 October, and arrived in Australia on 31 October. Somewhere in between a twenty-seven-hour international flight and an eight-hour time difference, 30 October, the actual day of the original mental aberration, had been lost, snaffled up by lines of longitude.
Well, the darling boy, whose memory is about as good as Kurt Waldheim’s when it comes to remembering emotional occasions which involve expenditure on small tokens of undying love and affection, had at least not forgotten this decadal notch on the yardstick of conjugal bliss. I have to admit that underneath this taut exterior of armadillo-feminism, I had been missing him.
‘And I’ve been missing you too,’ he admitted, in one of those intimate moments when, according to women’s magazines, men are supposed to tell you you’re wonderful, beautiful, adorable, desirable, etc. ‘There’s been nobody here to aggravate me.’
The tour so far has been fairly eventless. The management’s blanket ban on players writing, broadcasting or giving interviews to the press has resulted in fairly lacklustre, if occasionally critical, media coverage. Every member of the press corps shall henceforth be receiving exactly the same statement from the manager, Peter Lush, the assistant manager, Micky Stewart, or the captain, Mike Gatting. According to many of the hardened journos who have already decided to dispense with the press conferences, the ‘Gattysburg Addresses’ (as the captain’s desperately non-sensational, well-coached and relentlessly innocuous statements have been christened), are ‘basically tremendously wise’. There is a lot of ‘cricket-wise’, ‘batting-wise’, ‘bowling-wise’, ‘Ashes-wise’, ‘fielding-wise’, and ‘practice-wise’, together with a ‘tremendous’ amount of ‘basically’. Gatt, patently, has assimilated the art of saying much which means nothing; with such a thorough grasp of international diplomacy, maybe he should be chairing the Eminent Persons’ Group.
No, there has been little yet of the ex-Miss Barbados variety of copy for the press to get hot in the word-processor over. There have been a few up-country matches, one in Bundaberg against a Queensland Country XI where the odd bottle of the notorious local rum was dutifully downed, one in Lawes against SE Queensland Country, and another against a South Australia XI at Wudinna which was rather more colourful. The tiny plane chartered for the flight from Adelaide hit a storm, and pavement pizzas of the ongoing variety were in fairly generalised production throughout the England camp. The manager, Peter Lush, was even f
ined by the team’s social committee for succumbing like the rest. At the back of the plane, not entirely unamused by their faint-hearted Pommie teammates’ gastroenterological turmoil, sat the non-pukers, Zambian Edmonds and South African Allan Lamb – iron constitutions, these colonials.
It would be hard work not to like Allan Lamb, and he certainly rates as one of most people’s favourite tourists. I have never met anyone with quite as much energy, merriment and good-humoured mischief in him.
At the very beginning of the tour, five of the team – John Emburey, Ian Botham, David Gower, Phil and Allan Lamb – took a seaplane excursion off the coast of Queensland. Thus confined, there was not a lot anybody could do when ‘Beefy’ Botham took the controls, other than stare hopefully at the aquatic environment and say a few earnest prayers. Starboard, they noticed a pelican, following them with interest. Suddenly the bird started to hover, its beady eye focused meaningfully. Finally, with an unerring sense of direction, it swooped on its unsuspecting prey, engulfing the unfortunate creature in its capacious mouth. ‘Henri!’ shouted Lamby to my husband. ‘Looks like Frances has arrived!’
Lamby and David Gower seem closer than ever on this trip. In bygone days, Botham and former England captain, ‘una tantum’ assistant manager, Bob Willis comprised the Gang of Four. Willis, after England’s last disastrous tour to the West Indies, is no longer administratively with us, whilst Botham seems to be keeping very much to himself and his Australian promotions agent. This leaves the Allan and David duo together, as tour veterans of many years’ standing.
David, whom Lamb has nicknamed ‘Shaggy’, a not entirely inappropriate sobriquet, designed to convey the deep-pile carpet effect of David’s unruly, blond curls, seems lost. It is received wisdom that I have all the maternal instincts of a funnel-web spider, but I do have an extremely soft spot for David.
Last year had been such a traumatic year for him. An only child, whose father died many years ago, it came as a body-blow when his mother died weeks before the England team set off to the West Indies. That uncompromisingly dreadful tour ensued, and David, as captain, was inevitably first in the media firing line when it came to handing out the brickbats: no team discipline; want of application; lack of leadership; failure to implement anything even vaguely analogous to a strategy; and so on. He took it all with that indefatigable good humour and charm which uninformed pundits often perceive as indifference. It must be difficult for captains in adversity to know quite how to react to the cricket world’s vultures in the face of unremitting criticism. Some, such as ex-Australian captain, Kim Hughes, break down and cry. Some, such as current Australian captain, Allan Border, become uncommunicative, refuse to field press questions, threaten to resign and earn the nickname ‘Grumpy’. Throughout the press onslaught David remained his own laid-back, superficially insouciant self. However, absence of overt, aggressive histrionics drove the bloodlusters even wilder. Any layperson, picking up a British newspaper during that period, would have been forgiven for believing that David had done something rather ill-defined, but nevertheless deeply reprehensible. What in truth he had done was to lose to the best team on earth in its own Caribbean backyard. No one else, in the circumstances, could have done a better job. The noose however was already around his neck, and he was given but a short-term, probationary home captaincy against the Indians the following summer.
The rest is history. Chairman of Selectors, Peter May, who has done for the art of communication what Benson and Hedges have done for world health, summarily dismissed David after the First Test defeat at Lord’s. It is not, as the old adage runs, what you do, it’s the way that you do it, and the many people who have grown to admire and respect David will never forgive the ungracious ineptitude with which he was given the push.
Vice-captain Mike Gatting was duly appointed captain in his place. Mike, who had had his nose broken by Malcolm Marshall in the first One Day International in Jamaica had returned to the West Indies to play in only one Test match, the last. His reputation therefore, if not his good looks, had managed to survive the Caribbean experience intact.
The choice of England vice-captain for the home series proved conclusively, to me at least, that certain cricketers’ peccadillos are far more easily forgiven than others. Graham Gooch, who having led a rebel tour to South Africa, spent much of his time in the West Indies feeling mortally aggrieved that a few black politicians should make a few moral points about ‘Judas money’, had finally to be persuaded forcibly to stay on the tour at all. Donald Carr, then secretary of the Test and County Cricket Board (TCCB), was obliged to fly out to Trinidad after the fourth Test to convince Graham to continue on to the final Test in Antigua. Who will ever know what was said or promised? Suffice it to say that the man who led a breakaway rebel tour to South Africa, the man who was not entirely sure whether or not he ever wanted to be on tour in the West Indies, the man who subsequently decided that he was not available to tour Australia, was nevertheless granted the honour of the vice-captaincy of England. David Gower, meanwhile, was left completely out in the cold.
And that is how things stand at the moment. David, who has three full tours of Australia to his name, who has more Test experience than the entire touring selection committee put together, has not even been made a selector. There is fairly generalised outrage in the roving press corps at this glaring, almost insulting omission. It is interesting, is it not, how a certain ineffable sense of fair play tends to triumph in the British media? Once a chap has been trampled on sufficiently, suddenly everybody decides it is high time to rehabilitate him. Erstwhile hatchet-job men are now realising what an extremely good and decent person David Gower is. Indeed, in the idle hours I spend counting how many clichés Bob Willis can fit into one sentence of his Channel 9 television Test match commentary, I often wonder how much better David would have fared as captain if he had had the current managerial support group. The combination of manager Peter Lush’s public relations background, his confidence in dealing with the press and (perhaps his greatest asset) his inalienable common sense, together with assistant manager Micky Stewart’s reputation as a no-nonsense disciplinarian, removes many extraneous pressures from a captain’s shoulders. The skipper is thus left free to devote himself to the job in hand: leading his men on the field. On overseas tours, nowadays, that it is more than sufficient. But enough of all that for the moment. Back to a favourite, and exponentially more interesting topic: MOI!
I am finding it very difficult to establish a regular sleeping pattern, since my circadian rhythms would appear to be seriously out of kilter. I assume this is what other folk advert to as jet-lagged. It does not help sharing a room with Philippe-Henri Edmonds, whose insomniac idiosyncrasies are legendary in the England cricket camp. Four players have been granted the privilege of a single room this tour: Mike Gatting, the captain; John Emburey, the vice-captain; David Gower, in appreciation of his seniority; and Phil Edmonds, by virtue of the fact that he is such an impossibly awkward blighter that nobody else will share with him. His relentless attempts to tune into the BBC’s World Service on the radio are positively Heath Robinsonian. Coils of wire, attached to extruded coat-hangers, wrapped around television aerials, affixed with drawing pins to the ceiling and festooned across the outside balcony make the Edmonds’ hotel love-nest appear more like an electricity generating station, or a nuclear fusion power plant, than a connubial boudoir. He is awake every morning at 5 am, and orders that Aussie/American favourite, steak and eggs. Being woken up at 5.15 by some fifteen-stone nutter watching breakfast TV and eating steak and eggs in bed beside you certainly adds a completely new dimension to the phenomenon of morning sickness.
Australian television is dominated to a large extent by commercial channels. The ABC (the Australian equivalent of our BBC) would appear to have a hard time competing with the Murdoch, Packer, Fairfax, Bond, and Holmes à Court media empires. The copious amount of advertising is most intrusive for a newcomer. Not only do the channels devote a lot of time and airspace
to advertising products, but even more energy seems to be devoted to promoting themselves. Channel 9, Kerry Packer’s old outfit, which generally achieves the top ratings, is a case in point. Most of the evening news time is devoted to the message that the news is coming and that it will be absolutely spiffing when it arrives. Consumers, I believe, should be allowed to make such quality assessments for themselves, and not have them gratuitously foisted upon them. Perhaps the marketing whizz-kids are not sufficiently convinced of the value of their own product. Or maybe this is just the Aussie way. With luck Alan Bond’s buy-out of the Packer TV empire will change matters.
The Aussie way of depicting history, incidentally, is possibly worth a mention. Not that I can blame the Australians for their somewhat distorted account of the infamous 1932–3 ‘Bodyline’ series; all chauvinists play with facts. The Hayes–Schultz film of that name however, is currently being screened as I write, and although I was not personally doing the rounds in the heyday of Bradman and Jardine, I am none the less prepared to take it on higher authority that the entire production bears as much relation to the truth of the matter as Marilyn Monroe’s death certificate. There is such a thing, of course, as dramatic licence, but in this case dramatic licence moves into the realms, if not on occasions of invention, then perilously close to fiction. On a purely physical level, for instance, the public sympathy odds are stacked heavily in Australia’s favour from the outset. Australian batsman Don Bradman is tall, dark, seraphically good-looking, with incandescent watery blue eyes and a fair monopoly on righteousness. In truth, Bradman was never more than of very average physical stature, and was to conventional film-star good looks what Robert Redford is to Test cricket. The English, on the other hand, are with few exceptions an irretrievably dastardly bunch. Jardine is depicted as a demonic obsessive, whose ears stick out at forty-five degrees to his head and wiggle satanically as he plots the ‘leg-theory’ downfall of ‘Bradmin’ and the entire Australian ‘crickit’ team. Apparently the real Jardine was an elegant patrician, and by no means the unequivocal bounder and cad he would appear to be in the film. None of this, however, is half as significant as the actual timing of the screening. Old resentments for things which happened over fifty years ago still run deep. Jardine’s restricted use of leg-theory, which compared to the relentlessly murderous assaults of Lillee and Thomson in their heyday was a positive picnic, continues, nevertheless, to be a controversy which epitomises the perennial and not always entirely friendly rivalries between the mother country and her former colony. As the 1986–7 ‘Clashes for the Ashes’ begin to warm up it is interesting that certain sectors of the Australian media see fit to remind us that when all is said and done, all Aussies are fine, bonza folk, and equally all Pommies are bastards. Come to think of it, one day that might make a good title for a book.
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