CMJ

by Christopher Martin Jenkins

  My room on this first visit was large enough to house a family, with mahogany furniture that looked as though it had been there for at least a century, plumbing that was not exactly state of the art and no shortage of cockroaches for company, especially on that first night when many of them seemed to be seeking shelter from the storm. The hotel has been given a facelift since but what it lacked in modernity then was amply compensated for by the sheer style and colonial grandeur of its public rooms and surroundings.

  This visit by the MCC team was no different from any of the others that had been made by English touring teams over the years to the little country that generations of British had known as Ceylon, a prime source, inter alia, of tea, textiles, coconuts and cinnamon. Even in 1977 the lush green tropical island off India’s southern coast was not considered to be anything more than a convenient stopping point on the route to Australia. In the days of sea travel it had given sides on their way to their first ‘serious’ port of call, Freemantle, an opportunity to break the interminable voyage and get some useful cricketing competition from men whose great natural talent had remained unsung. On this trip, for Tony Greig’s team a sandwich between a long tour of India and a short one to Australia to take part in the extravagant celebration of the centenary of the first Test in Melbourne, Sri Lankan cricketers were doing more than simply wonder whether it was not time that the rest of the world began to take notice of them. They had begun to play more regular games against Test-class opposition and the lobbying to become a full member of the ICC had started in earnest.

  Limited-overs cricket would not transform attitudes and popular taste in India for another six years, when the unexpected victory of Kapil Dev’s team in the final against the almost invincible West Indies at Lord’s dramatically changed the course of cricket history; but in Sri Lanka the World Cup had already offered a chance to compete with the best and the message was spreading that it would not be long before they were playing Test cricket. I blush now to think that when I was asked by radio commentators and others whether this was a realistic ambition in 1977, I answered that they would first need to start playing more than weekend amateur cricket. The truth was that their school and club cricket was already so strong, their technical methods already so correct, that greater experience of three- and four-day cricket, and of different sorts of pitches overseas, was all that they lacked.

  Only five years after that England were back in Colombo to play Sri Lanka’s first official Test and by 1996 they were beating Australia in a World Cup final in Lahore after pioneering the idea of all-out attack in the early overs of fifty-over matches. The buccaneering left-hander Sanath Jayasuriya was the first to open the window and throw away with a flourish the conventional caution against the new ball. It was an even more accomplished artist, Aravinda de Silva, who played the match-winning innings in the final that confirmed his country’s status as a world power in cricket. The other essential ingredients were the leadership of Arjuna Ranatunga, a tubby little street-fighter with an astute mind and a determination never to be cowed by any opposition; the unique genius of the off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan; and the skill of the left-arm swing bowler Chaminda Vaas.

  Muralitharan is, famously, a Tamil from the hill town of Kandy. His success was threatened by a physical defect, an inability fully to straighten his right elbow which gave the appearance that he was throwing rather than bowling the ball according to the laws of the game, but bio-mechanical scientists and modern technology combined to exonerate him. His bowling enlivened every match in which he ever played during a career of astonishingly prolific wicket-taking. That it made him universally popular in his home country belied the shadow that hung over the island.

  Officially the twenty-six-year civil war between the Tamils and the majority Sinhalese, who have formed the Government ever since Sri Lanka was granted independence from Britain, did not start until 1983, but I had become aware of the bitterness of some Tamils in an unusual way many years earlier. At Cambridge I had captained the Fitzwilliam College side, whose star batsman was a highly-bred Sinhalese named Vijaya Malalasekera. He has been a friend ever since and he still remembers the innings he played in the semi-final of the Cuppers competition that year, one that played him back into form and also back into the University team before winning a second Blue. (We managed to win the final without him.)

  On the eve of the semi-final there was a knock on my door late at night from another Sri Lankan, one Kumar Ponnambalam, who had been a fringe player in the side. Why, he asked me, had Malalasekera been picked for the game but not himself? I gave him, as tactfully as I could, the obvious reason, namely the latter’s superiority as a player. ‘I think it is because I am a Tamil’, he replied, unimpressed. I did my best to convince him that I was quite unaware of any such ethnic difference between himself and Vijaya and that my reasons were 100 per cent cricketing. Thirty-three years later, in 2000, Kumar, who had become a leading defence lawyer and an active, although not apparently militant, leader of the Tamil Congress party, was shot dead by an unknown assassin almost immediately after a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber had tried unsuccessfully to blow up the then president, Chandrika Kumeratunga.

  Vijaya has wisely steered clear of his country’s volatile politics but is also a lawyer by academic training, called to the English bar. He lives in a street named after his distinguished father, G.P. Malalasekera, who was a revered scholar and teacher, specialising in Buddhism, and later a diplomat who was Sri Lanka’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union and also High Commissioner to Britain.

  The kindness shown to me by Vijaya, who still recalls my broadcasting from his garden in 1977 clad only in a towel because of the heat and the fact that I had just emerged from a shower when the BBC rang, is typical of that displayed by many Sri Lankans. Whether they are successful businessmen like another even more outstanding cricketer, Sidath Wettimuny, or lowly waiters at hotels, the willingness to look after their guests reveals a generosity and humility that is increasingly uncommon in a selfish world.

  It is no wonder that so many involved with cricket in England hastened to help when the tsunami wreaked its appalling destruction after the earthquake under the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day in 2004. Prominent among them, happily, were MCC, who raised a large sum towards the building of a medical centre and cricket ground at Seenigama on the south-western coast of the island on the site where a murderous wave had washed away homes, livelihoods and lives themselves. I made a moving visit there when Mike Brearley was President of MCC in 2007 and again four years later when, as President myself, I was able to see the progress made under the resolute leadership of Muralitharan’s friend and manager, Kushil Gunasekera. He is one of those rare people who exudes genuine goodness.

  Kushil’s home village of Seenigama was more or less swept away close to the point where 1500 were killed in a train. It has been completely rebuilt with investment from various sources, including MCC and Surrey, who staged matches that paid for two beautifully maintained cricket fields and an indoor school. Upal Tharanga, a hero against England in the quarter-final, comes from a neighbouring village but the number of outstanding young cricketers from the area is multiplying.

  Kushil gave his ancestral home, 250 metres inland from the beach and structurally intact despite being hit by the second wave to ceiling height on the ground floor, as the base for what is now the MCC Centre of Excellence, a complex servicing twenty-eight local villages. It is staffed by a mixture of professionals and volunteers. I met a gap-year student and a retired teacher, both from Australia, and an English couple spending two weeks helping at the diving centre that is providing 100 per cent employment for its graduates. Coral-mining has been banned since the tsunami, partly because the waves struck hardest where the coral had disappeared, but trained divers now get guaranteed employment working on harbours in Colombo and the Middle East.

  The centre is now much more than a medical facility, with a dental clinic, a maternity clinic and pyscho-social support, all unhea
rd of outside Colombo not long ago. Another large room and a shaded courtyard provide space for a large pre-school for children from a widening area, with four teachers. When Judy and I visited they were all seated on the ground surrounded by a huge selection of fruit and vegetables, each priced at a little below market value, which their parents would later buy and take home.

  Other rooms in the spotlessly clean complex offer carefully organised and scheduled classes in business development, computer training, English learning, and a wide range of skills. Amongst them are cookery (it was ‘how to make a pineapple gateau’ on the day we visited) dress-making, candle-making, patchwork, lace-making and ‘beauty culture’, all aimed at increasing the productivity and self-esteem of women and girls. For the men there are classes in electrical and home wiring, plumbing and photography. Both sexes get a chance to learn business skills and IT. Quite recently they have started an outsourcing business (BPO) which is bringing in income from other than charitable sources. The plan is that the whole community project will eventually finance itself.

  The emphasis is on empowering people to find decent employment and on lifting their standards of hygiene and of living generally. Graduates of the educational schemes now teach there themselves and, unlike many other post-tsunami schemes, this one is run without any corruption by highly committed people.

  It is a curious fact of life that calamity brings out the best in most human nature, at least from the moment that the dust settles. While England’s cricketers were making their weary return home after their ten-wicket mauling by Sri Lanka in the World Cup quarter-final, I was travelling north in a Russian MI 17 helicopter chartered from the Sri Lankan air force by the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation. Sir Ian Botham and Michael Vaughan were there too. They are two of many famous sports stars who give their time to support sport-related community initiatives in poor areas as a tool for social change.

  Below us the bustle and skyscrapers of Colombo quickly gave way to paddy fields, farmland, coconut palms, rivers, lakes overflown by flocks of white egrets, isolated villages and miles of thick forest. The journey to Mankulam would have taken at least seven hours by car along the A9. From the RAF’s sports ground in the capital to a rough school field in the war-ravaged north it took us an hour and twenty minutes.

  Surrounded and escorted by armed soldiers, we moved to a large area of brown earth which only two years previously had been a jungle battlefield in the thirty-year civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan army. A few majestic tamarind trees had been left by the military after the mines had been cleared and four giant yellow JCBs had almost finished flattening the area. A small podium, with awning to provide shade, allowed Major General Udawatta, the area commander, to explain that this would be the educational and recreational fulcrum of an urban development scheme at Mankulam, 56 miles from Jaffna, 200 from Colombo.

  The Government, happy to lend support to two sparkling new cricket stadiums for the World Cup but still not doing enough in the opinion of many to rehouse some 200,000-odd civilians displaced by the time of the brutal end to the war in May 2009, was doing the right thing here. President Rajapaksa had granted the national icon Muttiah Muralitharan fifty acres for a project close to his heart. Kushil’s mission now was to do for the battered Tamils of the north what he has already achieved for tsunami victims in the south. I was able to recommend to MCC that we should again become involved with fund-raising towards the cricket facilities.

  It was typical of Botham to want to be involved. Later that day, however, I was embarrassed when, at a press conference in Colombo, he was asked what he had seen in the inaccessible north and gave an over dramatic account of a wilderness scarred by mortar shells, bullet holes and burnt-out trees, most of this from his imagination rather than from what we had actually seen. The truth was that a boy with one leg, the other presumably blown off by a mine, was the only actual evidence of previous horrors.

  With Botham and Vaughan I watched a cricket match between local schools and later made presentations of vital provisions (double-bed mosquito nets, kerosene lamps, water containers and a torch) to extremely poor villagers. Despite their naturally beautiful surroundings they looked downtrodden and under-fed, but the Foundation had now embarked on a succession of monthly gifts like this. Already they had received 300 essential school packs and 125 bicycles. Meanwhile President Rajapaksa, not a politician to be crossed and certainly one in need of greater scrutiny from a compliant media, was pressing ahead with plans, financed by China, for an airport in his own heartland in the south-east of the island. Enhanced tourism in the east, where many of the island’s best beaches lie, and the Yala Game Park offers sightings of leopards, should follow. Albeit too slowly, life seems to be getting better for the minority Tamil and Muslim populations.

  I may have arrived in Sri Lanka in a ferocious rain storm, and it does seem to rain a great deal, hence the quite extraordinary lushness of the vegetation in every part of the country, but its inviting beaches, its working elephants, its innumerable swaying palm trees and religious sites that extend back 3000 years make it an attractive place even to those without any interest in cricket.

  Nowhere, however, is perfect. Every time one goes there there is talk of a new road somewhere but it never seems to be completed. Journeys to Colombo from more exciting venues like Galle and Kandy are tortuous in the extreme. Much as they do throughout the subcontinent, intrepid drivers of motor three-wheelers dash for the nearest gap in competition with swaying lorries and a variety of cars, motor bikes and scooters, while dogs wander about the road in every village and occasionally get run over.

  Most visitors are supplied with a personal driver and mine have varied in quality over the years. The most charming was an elderly Anglophile who called himself Cyril. Always smartly dressed in a chauffeur’s uniform, his large, circular horn-rimmed spectacles perched under a peaked black and white cap, he was an erratic driver even by day, moving in sudden spurts followed by unaccountable periods in which it seemed that the speed limit had suddenly become five mph. Perhaps he occasionally nodded off. When it came to nightfall it was clear that he could see almost nothing. His method was to line up oncoming headlights with the white line in the middle of the road, then to sway inwards at the last moment, hoping that there was no one coming up on the blind side. He relied, I am convinced, primarily on the deities in whom he believed, an impression reinforced by his insistence at stopping at various temples en route to pray for a safe journey. But, like almost all Sri Lankans he was always eager to please. How could one criticise anyone whose opening questions each morning were always: ‘Have you had your morning dip, Sir? And your bacon and eggs?’

  20

  SOUTH AFRICA

  There is only one way to arrive in Cape Town if you are lucky enough to have the chance and it is not by landing on a strip of concrete in an aeroplane. The first sight of the great slab of Table Mountain approached from the sea one early morning forty years ago is fresh in the mind still. The country has drawn me back time and again since but that first visit early in 1964 was both the most exciting and the most disturbing.

  Only one first experience of a foreign country has matched it since, another arrival by sea, this time to New York after a voyage made free in return for some talks about cricket to a largely uninterested audience of American passengers. So stormy was the crossing in April weather much like that experienced by the fated passengers on the maiden Atlantic crossing of the SS Titanic that the open decks had been out of bounds for most of the trip, but that was forgotten as Judy and I had our first glimpse of New York from the boat deck of Cunard’s most famous post-war liner, the QE2. We slid past the Statue of Liberty at eye level as the Manhatten skyline approached and the ship’s hooter blasted out a throaty greeting to the Staten Island ferry, chugging busily past us like a child’s bath toy. So early in the morning was it, and so freezing the dawn, that my jaws were paralysed by cold and unable to form coherent speech.

  Everything
was less familiar as Cape Town approached on a much warmer morning in 1964. Officially I had been ‘working my passage’ on the twin-screw motor vessel City of York, a beautiful ship that combined the conveyance of cargo with accommodation for 200 passengers. I slept either in the green-painted infirmary, or in a spare cabin that suffered little by comparison with the luxurious ones for which passengers had paid as much or a little bit more than they would have done for the bigger ships of the Union Castle line that plied the same seas from Tilbury to Cape Town.

  From the outset that voyage was bliss. I was given virtually no work to do other than acting in an unofficial public relations role for the distinguished old firm now directed from his office in Camomile Street in the City by my father. I fell in love, or thought I did, with the blonde and beautiful young nurse/nanny but it was only an affair of my dreams, like one of Roy Orbison’s. She already had an amour on board, a worldly wise young officer from South Africa who both talked a better game and looked considerably hunkier than the recently retired schoolboy whose knowledge of girls had been confined to some kissing and cuddling towards the end of holiday dances.

  Only a few months later, inspired by the romantic nature of a voyage at sea, not to mention freedom from the care of exams and the rules of school life, I felt grown up enough to take a much more genuine interest in the opposite sex from which public schoolboys of the time were sheltered. Having made no progress with the sweet and beautiful children’s nurse, however, the best I managed was a comment from an elegant lady on the ballroom floor one evening: ‘You dance like Fred Astaire.’ This from the charming wife of a former Scottish rugby international, Eric Loudon-Shand, who had lost an arm in the war. She and her genial husband must both have been in their seventies.