Cricket XXXX Cricket (28 page)

It did seem a trifle odd, to say the least, but I nevertheless agreed, promising faithfully to guarantee delivery to the manager. It had, after all, been the same Peter Lush who had encouraged me to write the piece in
The Times
diary, criticising the Prime Minister and the Sports Minister, Richard Tracey, for their failure to send congratulatory telegrams when England retained the Ashes. ‘Not that it will make any difference,’ Peter assured me. ‘Probably nobody reads your diary anyway. Certainly I don’t.’

Oh, naughty, naughty Peter, to get poor debutante hackette Frances E. into such diplomatic hot water. When I returned home to England, it became perfectly clear why ‘Bill’ was at such pains to ensure that I saw the telegram arrive. Back in London, amongst the shoals of unopened mail, envelopes looking like bricks full of American Express counterfoils, invitations to appear in court over unpaid parking fines, and Christmas cards from people who know us so well they had assumed we were in the UK for Christmas, was a very official wodge of an epistle from the Department of Transport and the Environment.

Dear Mrs Edmonds, (it ran)

I have come across several references in the press to the failure of the Minister for Sport to send congratulatory telegrams to the team during their hugely successful tour of Australia, stemming I suspect from your Sporting Diary article in
The Times.

(That was reassuring at least. Even if real punters like Peter do not read the wretched column, at least the other organs of the press plagiarise it.)

This is a trifle irksome. (Oh, dear, the Minister is irked.)

Mr Tracey sent four telegrams, the first on retaining the Ashes, the second on adding the Perth challenge, the third on the first victory in the World Series Cup, and the fourth on the second and the grand slam it brought with it. (Copies of the same were duly enclosed.)

The missive continued:

I enjoyed your reflections on the West Indies tour. This of course is simply in the interest of accuracy, should you wish to refer to the matter of the telegrams in any account you may record of the Australian tour!

Dear, dear, dear! The Ministry of Transport and the Environment had patently decided that a roving Mrs Edmonds was a serious governmental pollutant. The Minister had indeed sent the telegrams, the first one to Perth about a week after the Ashes victory in Melbourne. I wondered whether the Minister had had to be reminded of the fact in the intervening period. Anyway, does it really matter? David Owen of the Social Democratic Party was first off the mark anyway.

The majority of the team was to fly back to England at the weekend, although Gladstone, Lamby, Embers, Jack and Both had made alternative arrangements. Phil and I elected to go to Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef for a week’s post-tour R and R, and flew up on the Friday with our ‘dear old thing’, Blowers.

This island was purchased a decade ago, on a long lease from the Queensland Government, by entrepreneur Keith Williams. Keith, a wonderfully extrovert man, is one of the major developers to have opened up the Gold Coast to the tourist industry, and is now devoting his boundless energies to turning Hamilton into the ‘most desirable tropical island in the world’.

The major attraction is, of course, the proximity of the reef, where imperceptible hours can easily be spent scuba diving and snorkelling, dazzled by the underworld infinities of coral formations and fish. Nearer to shore, all the usual water sports are also available; as well has hang-gliding and parasailing.

Keith invited us out on his supercharged speedboat,
Awesome
, which it most assuredly is. It takes him all of three minutes to do a tour of the island, pointing out ex-Beatle George Harrison’s villa as he goes.

A modern-day Prospero, Keith orchestrates the island entirely along his own lines. Early on, in a joint venture with Ansett Airlines, he created a landing strip out of nothing, and nowadays all but the largest jumbos may put down there. He oversees every development with the eye of a benevolent dictator. ‘Anyone can build anything they want here,’ he claims, ‘so long as I like it.’

He is currently winding up negotiations on the construction of two first-class hotels, which should give a further boost to the influx of tourists. At the moment, most of the accommodation is in self-catering apartments, with the option of eating at any one of the resort’s dozen excellent restaurants.

It was a relief and a release to be off our own ‘today is Friday it must be Sydney’ tour, and fascinating to watch the collegiate behaviour of other people’s. A healthy contingent of Japanese had just flown into Hamilton, though not quite so healthy as the state of their ever-hardening yen against an ever-depreciating Australian dollar. They were all, of course, extremely polite, and were all, of course, earnestly intent on learning the noble art of scuba diving in a mere two-hour session at the swimming pool . . .

The morning after our arrival on the island, after a superb lobster and mud crab dinner in the ‘Outrigger’ with Blowers and Peter and Pauline West (Westie, just retired from the BBC, has been covering the tour for London’s
Daily Telegraph)
, Phil and I took the chopper up to the reef for a look at the sub-aquatic action. Apart from us, everyone else flying up the reef that day was Japanese, and there were a few minor linguistic problems. There was one of them who seemed to have some vague notions of the English language, presumably picked up from a Berlitz teacher with a very pukka accent. This, however, was doing him absolutely no good in his efforts to communicate with indigenes operating in the English-based patois commonly referred to as ‘Stryne’.

As we were leaving at 11 am, and returning at 3 pm, our driver to the heliport thought it wise to advise us that there would be no lunch provided. I thought this a superfluous piece of information. Surely no one in his right mind would have expected an otherwise ubiquitous Big Mac outlet to be glistening brightly, red and white, on the Great Barrier Reef?

Our Japanese friend with the vague notions of English had patently been elected team interpreter, and jabbered something quickly to his uncomprehending mates. Goodness knows what the misunderstanding was, but before you could say ‘Sony Walkman’ they had all disappeared, to return ten minutes later, each bearing twice his body weight in club sandwiches and hamburgers. Phil and I shared a helicopter with four of their number, Phil very sensibly sitting in the front and chatting to the pilot, and I very quietly sitting in the back, watching their diminutive frames forcing down these vast quantities of fodder.

In charade-type gesticulations, I did my best to convey the impression that stuffing oneself with convenience food immediately prior to a forty-foot submersion was possibly not the most sagacious course of action. They thought I was very funny, filmed my Jacques Tati efforts on their video cameras, and offered me some chicken nuggets.

It was a glorious day out on the reef, not a cloud in the sky, but the strong wind created quite a swell. The instructor gave us each a handful of bread with which to attract the multitudes of fish feeding on the reef. Some distance away I could see Phil, arm outstretched, totally encompassed by swarms of bright blue chrome fish, gaily striped sergeant-majors and duller, but eminently more edible coral trout. It was a wonderland of multicoloured corals, brain-shaped, stag-horn-shaped and fungus-shaped. The shoals of fish, in no way inhibited by the presence of humans, came up to us unabashed and cheekily nibbled at our fingers in their efforts to relieve us of the Hovis. The blistering sunshine refracted dazzlingly through the water. The only sound was that of your own breathing. Such tranquillity. Such peace. It was then I felt the shadow of a large body fall across me. It was a shark . . .

Back at the pontoon, the last of the Samurai were busily puking their hearts out. No matter, it was all good biodegradable stuff, quite a well-balanced and finely masticated diet of first-rate protein and carbohydrates, and the fish were lapping it up. It is, however, very difficult to be properly sick whilst trying to maintain ‘face’, to hang on to a pontoon in a twenty-five knot wind, to empty the ‘Fairisle’ chunder from your mask and mouthpiece, to balance two heavy oxygen tanks on your back, and to look interested in what the semi-Anglophone interpreter is giving you by way of advice from the instructor. The unblemished white porcelain complexions of the ladies incidentally had sprouted a distinct green willow pattern design . . .

It was not a very large shark, about five feet from toothy-looking jaws to tail, but then again I am not a very fast swimmer. Story of my life. All style and no stamina. I had heard stories about divers thumping sharks in the eye, but on the other hand I thought it better to let him make the first move. No point aggravating him unnecessarily. It was nice to think still in terms of ‘other’ hands. Perhaps soon I would not have that luxury.

My life flashed before me in a second. It seemed to contain an awful lot of empty bottles, and a couple of unfinished books. Not much for the obit columns to work on there. I wondered whether Phil would demand a refund on the return half of my chopper fare. I did not feel the cold fingers of panic grip my stomach, just the dreadful sense of irony that I should be sloughing off the mortal coil to feed a fucking fish.

Suddenly, as if from nowhere, our instructor appeared, and the shark turned its belligerently carnivorous attentions on him. Now, I am as full of the milk of human kindness for my fellow man as the next woman, but I could not help but see this as anything other than a very definite step in the right direction. The two were within inches of one another, seasoned diver and five-foot sharkette, when the instructor lifted his arm. Whoopee! Perhaps a swift right hook to the snout, that would teach the blighter a lesson . . .

The next thing was the perfectly incredible spectacle of the black be-latexed diver and the white-tipped coral reef shark muzzling one another affectionately. The pet shark, Sophie, was completely harmless, and even if she wasn’t, she had so much to eat on the reef that she certainly wouldn’t be bothered with tough old boots like me. Or so they assured me, a full thirty seconds later, as, traumatised, I reached the pontoon in true Dawn Fraser style, not to be enticed into the water again that day.

There comes a time in every married woman’s life when she feels the need to do something totally out of character, something she would subsequently rather forget, something she might be too ashamed to admit even to her best friend. It is more than often due to the not uncommon sentiments of frustration, loneliness and boredom. Modern psychologists sometimes refer to this phenomenon as the ‘Talking to the Husband Syndrome’ or THS for short.

Perhaps it was simply a case of delayed shock. Loquacious at the best of times, the confrontation with the shark had thrown me into severe verbal overdrive. So bad did it become one day that I was even moved to talk to Philippe-Henri. I had to. He was the only person in bed with me at the time . . .

The Derby and Joan of the England team, we are, by now, old hands at this touring lark: the joys of success in India, the mortification of defeat in the West Indies, the phoenix-like renaissance of the team in Australia, we have seen it all.

More than anything, of course, it was interesting to discuss the essential differences between the disastrous Windies tour last year, and the triumphant march through Oz less than twelve months later. There can be no doubt that Australia proved much tamer opposition than the West Indies, especially in the bowling department. In the Windies there were the likes of Marshall, Garner, Holding, Courtney Walsh and (particularly in Jamaica) Patrick Patterson, constantly assailing the England batsmen with ‘throat balls’ and giving the Windies a marked psychological dominance from the outset. Even as early as the island match against Jamaica, before the First Test, their pace-men were out to undermine England’s confidence. We both remembered the spectacle of Walsh coming in to bowl against David Gower, and visibly moving up several gears in a definite attempt to frighten England’s prize scalp. In the dressing room everyone took heed of the warning so clearly being issued: there was to be plenty more of this to come.

The effect of this on England, apart from completely understandable bouts of the Caribbean equivalent of Montezuma’s Revenge, was an almost immediate disintegration in morale. As a consequence of anticipating the worst, batters, even top batters, got it firmly lodged into their heads that they would inevitably receive the unplayable ball at some stage. They therefore felt that they absolutely
had
to play shots in between those unplayable balls. Nobody was prepared to play ‘à la Boycott’, to hang around, to stay there, to wear the fast bowlers down, and to try to hit any bad ball that came their way.

The rest is history. In the First Test in Jamaica, playing on a variable wicket, the fast boys just annihilated England, most of the English batsmen going down playing shots. That, along with Gatting being smacked in the face in the one-dayer, reinforced the general apprehension for the rest of the tour.

Therein, if anywhere, lies the major difference between the two tours – the state of the Englishmen’s minds. In Australia, despite some very lacklustre performances in the State matches, particularly against the Aussie left-armers, it was obvious that the Australians were never going to dominate England psychologically, and neither were the English batsmen ever going to feel uncomfortable against the sort of pace they could generate.

From then on there were various lucky windshifts which served to pull England out of their doldrums. Gower being dropped on nought in the first innings in the First Test was perhaps the most crucial turning point. He went on to make fifty-odd, which overnight lifted him out of his own personal crisis. And then, of course, there was Botham’s blistering 138 in the same match which completely restored England’s shattered confidence in their own abilities, and engendered the general feeling that 400 runs should always be possible against that sort of attack.