There was, however, a strange incident on the day after my late arrival in Lahore. As soon as the time difference permitted I tried to ring home to let Judy know that I had made it to my destination. In these days before mobiles the call had to be made through the hotel switchboard.
‘No, Sir, that will not be possible, Sir’, said the operator. ‘There are no lines to England because of the hurricane.’
‘Hurricane?’ I said, looking out at a still and sunny morning outside my window. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course there isn’t a hurricane.’
‘Sir, please listen to me, Sir. There has been a hurricane in England!’
Like Michael Fish, I took some convincing.
If only all the journeys could have been as impressive as the one that I took with press colleagues in two minibuses on my last visit to Pakistan in 2005/6 when we experienced the magnificently constructed motorway that links Lahore to Islamabad. The contrast between the normal bedlam of the streets and this shining example of modern civil engineering was unreal. It was like finding a priceless diamond in a muddy puddle. But it was not for the hoi polloi, because the toll charges no doubt exceeded the monthly wages of the majority. Our journey was therefore unsullied by other cars, except for the odd Mercedes sweeping past at high speed, no doubt chauffeur-driven for either an industralist or a politician.
Even then the journey did not go quite according to plan. We made serene progress until one minibus was stopped for speeding by traffic cops (who probably outnumbered the vehicles) and the other one, mine, was forced to stop by an over-heated radiator. The driver had to leave us on the side of the road for a time while he ran to a local farm for a bucket of water.
On the whole transport by road was preferable in both Pakistan and India to flying. Air travel at the best of times is, to my mind, the least attractive form of transport, with the exception only of driving along any English motorway on a Friday and the M25 specifically at almost any time of day or night. Jammed motorways, after all, involve much the same combination of delay, discomfort and stress as air journeys, with an added ingredient of extra danger. (At least the M25 is not yet as permanently clogged as the airport road to the city from Bangkok where I once broke the long flight back from Australia to have a holiday with Judy in Phuket. Drivers on that route have apparently got used to spending all night on the road and carry a suitable receptacle for natural relief.)
That first airport scrum in 1987 was not the best introduction to Pakistan. First impressions were not improved, either, by the fact that both the porter who beat many rivals to seize my trolley at the airport, and the bureaucrat at the desk, did their best to short-change me. Had this been India the mention of the word ‘cricket’ might have cut some ice as we argued our case with the senior official to get onto the flight that would allow us to start work in time to satisfy our employers, but it was only when John Woodcock had the bright idea of telling them that I was ‘C.M-J, the famous cricket commentator’ that at last we made headway. The light of recognition dawned in the receiver’s ear and the rest of the journey was relatively plain sailing.
The popularity of ball-by-ball commentary on the BBC World Service thus proved even more potent than the possible handing over of the precious duty-free Scotch that I always carried on the subcontinent on the advice of seasoned travellers like Woodcock. It may not be so necessary these days but it had medicinal qualities, real or imagined, and could always be used in a minor crisis like this to persuade a reluctant ally.
Not that some Pakistanis of influence were short of their own supply of Scotch. The biggest bottle I have ever seen was at a party in Peshawar some years later when my colleagues and I were asked to an outdoor dinner in the elegant house and garden of the local carpet ‘king’.
The scent of jasmine filled the night air on that occasion and some very decent French wine seemed to be available in plentiful supply for those who, like me, preferred it to whisky or the sweet soft drinks normally offered at more official functions in Pakistan. Could this gorgeous environment really be set in the midst of the most dangerous city in the country, on the edge of the North West Frontier, where refugees from Afghanistan were obliged to set up any sort of home they could find, gun-making was one of the main industries and anyone with the necessary cash could order a bespoke Kalashnikov? It was surreal but enjoyable. At the end of the evening we were addressed by the carpet magnate himself, shown some fabulous examples of what we could buy at any of his main city emporiums and urged not to miss the chance to go home with a beautiful silk or woollen rug, intricately hand-woven, at prices that were, he claimed, discounted especially for us.
Derek Pringle, once of Cambridge University, Essex and England, by now my successor on the Daily Telegraph, had heard the sales pitch before, having toured the country both as player and journalist. He was determined not to be beguiled again by one of these rugs, having bought several in the past from his friend Waqar, son of the carpet king himself; but, a few weeks after the party, he found himself once again in a large store in Lahore, looking at one beautiful rug after another as they were unfurled invitingly before him. Waqar sensed from experience that English resolve was starting to falter as a particularly beautiful piece with a scarlet vegetable dye held his eye for just too long.
‘You are an old and deeply valued customer, Mr. Pringle’, he said. ‘Look at the colour. Look at the quality of the wegetable dye. Please, name your own price.’
‘I could not possibly tell you what I’d pay for that, Waqar: it would be a complete insult.’
‘Mr. Pringle’, was the response. ‘It would be a pleasure to be insulted by you.’
A deal, naturally, was done.
Most of the things that went wrong on trips to Pakistan were due to a misunderstanding of some sort. It was occasionally necessary to share rooms at the more obscure venues. John Thicknesse was drawn with Peter Baxter before and after one such match. Before breakfast on the second morning, John, virtually an insomniac, said to his room-mate: ‘I know people say I’m selfish but I’d like you to know that I was awake at three o’ clock this morning and felt like a cigarette so I went outside into the corridor to smoke it. I passed the time of day with a soldier. We must have talked for ten minutes without either of us understanding a single word the other was saying.’
During the later tour of 2000/2001 ‘Pring’, Peter Hayter and I went on a trip by steam train up the legendary Khyber Pass, close to the border with Afghanistan, an area familiar to the British for centuries and to readers of novelists from Kipling to Khaled Hosseini of Kite Runner fame. Most days on a tour were working days for journalists so we were extremely lucky to find both a free Saturday to make the journey and a lull in the troubles that allowed the would-be tourist enterprise to organise the trip while we were there.
It was sufficient of a novelty for villagers to gather by the edge of the track cheering as the old British engine chugged its way up the steep passes to rugged hills with bare slopes the colour of a kestrel’s breast. The train was powered by two vintage locomotives built in the 1920s and now converted to oil-fired motion, one pulling from the front, the other pushing from behind. The route covered only 31 miles each way but took most of a vivid sunny day, passing through 34 tunnels and over 92 bridges and culverts. The steam safari climbed more than 3900 feet to Landi Kotal, within sight of the Afghan border. It was unforgettable, not least for various parades en route by military bands and lunch at the smart and immaculately maintained barracks of a regiment of the Pakistan army
Pakistan is, naturally, acutely conscious of its other contentious border, with India. In Kashmir, that mountainous and beautiful state that in the case of many of its citizens would rather have its own independence, troops from the two nuclear powers have been firing at each other almost daily for years. Much less seriously, indeed as if they are taking part in a sport, the guards of the rival armies have, until recently, met each other every evening of the year in an extraordinarily choreographed demonstrat
ion of military pride at the border post of Wagah.
I am glad to have seen this extraordinary performance at first hand. Deadly serious though it was below the surface, it was a bit like attending a football derby match. Imagine two rival groups of soldiers bristling with aggression at each other like the All Blacks doing their traditional haka at the start of a rugby international and you will have an idea of the spectacle. I found it entertaining and rather funny when I saw it on the Pakistan side of the border, not least because a bas-relief of one of the heroes of the country on an arch close to the border gates – probably the young Jinnah – looked uncommonly like John Le Mesurier in his role as Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army.
Before the national flag of each nation was lowered ceremonially, as it was every evening from the 1960s to 2010, when it was decided to replace the ceremony with something more gentle, the brass-studded border gate was locked at sunset after hand-picked soldiers from each army, all tall, handsome, bearded warriors in super-smart uniforms and head-dresses topped with a fan like peacocks’ tails, goose-stepped towards each other, stamping their feet like angry goats. On the Saturday evening that I attended, fiercely partisan citizens of each country lined up on vantage points on each side of the gate, cheering like rival groups of football supporters, half in amusement but half, too, in patriotic fervour, as the soldiers strutted and glared menacingly at one another. As they were about to clash, the Pakistanis in blue-grey salwar kameez, the Indians in khaki, veered slightly and what looked likely to be a blow to their respective opponent’s head changed in the last instant to an aggressive salute.
Pakistan and India have fought three full-scale wars since Partition in 1947 and the horrendous terrorist murders in Mumbai in 2008 interrupted cricketing relations for the umpteenth time. Seen from an objective angle the racial and religious differences seem stupid but, of course, in all human relations old wounds go very deep and there are those in whose interest it is to keep them festering. Blessed, indeed, are the peacemakers.
As in India, so in Pakistan, such contrasts! The best French restaurant at which I have ever eaten, the Café Aylanto, is in Lahore’s fashionable Gulberg Three district where, alas, a bomb has exploded since my last visit in 2005, with fatal consequences. Without fuss or inflated prices, its chef served those with a taste for Western food. It was worth the hectic journey after dark, by taxi or motor rickshaw, from the hotel that served much less deliciously simple food, far more expensively.
Other places, naturally, were less satisfying. On that last England tour to Pakistan, when the England team that had triumphed against Australia in the summer quickly began to disintegrate because of injuries to Michael Vaughan, Simon Jones and Ashley Giles, several of the press party were unable to find beds at the prime hotels in Multan and Faisalabad. At the Shiza Inn – soon subtly renamed by Jonathan Agnew off the air – I slept in a hat because the air conditioning was so fiercely cold. The dining room staff were immensly obliging I remember but one evening I disturbed a large rat in the so called ‘Business Centre’, a room off the small hotel’s main foyer, when it emerged curiously from a gaping hole in the wall that it obviously shared with wires of various colours. It jumped over my feet and scuttered through the open door towards the reception desk.
Filing stories from there to London was painfully hit and miss, so I got to know that room well. Later, when I collected my last batch of laundry, two of my shirts began literally to crumble like biscuits as the threads of cotton parted from each other. Naturally, I complained to the manager, who responded with a classically Billy Bunterish excuse: ‘Sir, it was not that the iron was too hot, it was that your shirts were very poor quality.’
In Faisalabad we stayed at the Chenab Club, which had a well-maintained grass tennis court and some old-fashioned charm, albeit a little too old-fashioned. The only things that my sensitive stomach would accept from the unchanging menu were the soup, oily though it was, soggy plain rice and the Cornetto ice-creams that were usually available for pudding like manna from heaven.
One or two of the rooms at the club had bathrooms with the once familiar ‘squatter’ facilities, with footmarks thoughtfully marked on either side of the hole in the floor to show the user where the feet should be placed. My own had a bathroom shower that produced jets of either stone cold or red-hot water, with no temperatures in between. Still, one could walk to the ground and occasionally spoil oneself with a more expensive meal at the Serena Hotel. Moreover, the Chenab was far superior to the bed and breakfast lodge where my travel agents had deposited me for three nights during the previous tour, with another journalist, Ted Corbett, and his long-time partner, the statistician Jo King, both of whom were more stoical about the modest (but well-maintained) accommodation than I was.
When I arrived my room had so many mosquitoes that I was bound to be a mass of itches the following day; trying to swat them was as difficult as catching the snitch in a game of quidditch, so I asked the landlady, who was eager to please, to fumigate the room whilst I went off to enjoy the tasty open-air barbecue in the sharp evening cold of the garden at the Serena. When I returned, after a watchful walk at full pace through dimly lit streets, the room was so full of chemical spray that it was like walking into one of the old pea-soupers of 1950s London. Not only were mosquitoes certain of death but so, I felt, was I. Happy days.
Four games stand out from all those that I have seen in Pakistan. The first, during the 1987 World Cup in which I later switched to India for a number of the later games, was played on an exhausting day that started with a long journey in a dingy bus to the Municipal Stadium at Gujranwala. We started well before the sun had risen and arrived back at the hotel at around midnight. It was England’s first game of that tournament following their long but happy tour of Australia, who were destined to beat them in the final at Calcutta. A two-wicket victory in the opening game against the West Indies was thrillingly achieved with three balls in hand after Allan Lamb had unleashed one of his occasional volleys of balanced, pocket-battleship hitting. Courtney Walsh conceded thirty-one off his last two overs, twenty-two of them scored by Lamb. It seemed exceptional at the time but Twenty20 has made such bursts of scoring look almost pedestrian.
The amazing final day of the Karachi Test in 2000 started unusually for me. At the time a builder from Brighton (an English version of Basil Fawlty’s friend O’Reilly as it happened) was creating an outdoor sun-room for us at home and I thought it would be a good idea to import some cane furniture from Pakistan to furnish it. Consequently, before play started I went off with our excellent travel agent, Bilal Ahmed, to a furniture-maker whom he knew. I ordered a full set of tables and chairs, plus two of those wonderfully comfortable looking chairs known as ‘steamers’ that they used to have on passenger liners, and paid the craftsman up front for the lot. I was delighted with the price and he with the business.
There were two snags, the more serious becoming apparent many weeks later when Bilal contacted me with the best price he could get for the furniture to be shipped to England. It was about fifty times the cost of the furniture itself, meaning that I might just as well have gone to our local Garden Centre. I told him to find a good home for all those beautifully made items.
They would, undoubtedly, have been superior to anything bought in England, which would probably be imported in containers anyway. Craftsmanship in Pakistan, as in India, is generally superb and they can produce almost anything to a high standard. I have, for example, well-cut cotton shirts, comfortable leather slippers and a leather briefcase, not to mention rugs, that have lasted far longer than their modest price suggested they would.
The other problem with my visit to the furniture-maker was that our negotiations took quite some time, so I got to the ground a bit late, having, like all good judges, confidently predicted yet another of the batsmen-dominated draws that are typical of Tests on the flat pitches of Pakistan. On the contrary, Ashley Giles was in the middle of an outstanding spell of left-arm slow bowling that netted
him three for 38, including the crucial wicket of the masterful Inzamam-ul-Haq. Rapid blows followed from Darren Gough and Craig White so England were suddenly presented with a relatively easy target to gain a rare victory. It became, in fact, only the second ever achieved by England in Pakistan where, to date, only six of the twenty-four Tests played between the two have not finished in a draw.
Moin Khan, the home captain, was determined that the status quo should not be disturbed but Mike Atherton and Marcus Trescothick got the touring team off to a rollicking start, chasing 176 to win. In the second worst display of deliberate time-wasting I have seen, excelled for nefariousness only by the West Indies at Port of Spain ten years earlier, Pakistan bowled forty-one overs at a rate of five minutes an over before bold batting by Graham Thorpe and Graeme Hick enabled England to scramble home in virtual darkness in the forty-second. By then the fielders could not see the ball but the batsmen just about could. It was laudable umpiring, notably by the senior official Steve Bucknor, to insist that play should continue.
I should add that many an England captain would have done his best to slow the game down, if rather less blatantly than Moin, when faced with defeat. Still, it was a singular triumph for this particular captain, Nasser Hussain and his close ally, Duncan Fletcher, who were beginning to turn the national team towards better things. Writing the various stories and end of tour verdicts for The Times that evening at the Pearl Continental hotel in Karachi, knowing that I would be flying back to a family Christmas at home, was long and hard labour, but wonderful too. There is nothing so uplifting to readers of the cricket pages in the depths of winter as an England victory overseas, especially one so unexpected as this.
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