I dropped Phil off at an ungodly hour on the morning of 25 January 1986 so that he could join in the pre-departure champagne breakfast at the Excelsior Hotel, Heathrow. I was kindly invited to join the proceedings but since, typically, under a full-length, Blackglama mink I was sporting a pair of bright red ‘Manchester United Forever’ pyjamas, I was obliged graciously to decline.
I returned home to a sad and empty house, a real estate replica of the Marie Celeste: half-eaten pieces of toast and a lukewarm pot of tea, the bedroom strewn with the emptied boxes of sponsored gimmies. (A ‘gimmie’, for etymologists, is anything cricketers receive either free or sponsored. In Phil’s case they range from cars, Johnnie Walker whisky, Hine cognac, Gray Nicholls cricket gear, Austin Reed clothes and Duncan Fearnley sportswear.)
I felt an acute sense of loss and pain and yet, simultaneously, a very real sense of relief, probably the same sort of feeling people experience when their thrombosed haemorrhoids are removed. I immediately contracted a psychosomatic bout of flu, and took to my bed for the day with an armful of scurrilous Spanish magazines: ‘all you never wanted to know about Julio Iglesias’ sex life – twenty times a night, and crooning in between’. Why on earth am I not reading Unamuno?
I woke that night with a start at about midnight, the burglar alarm bleeping loudly and ringing shrilly. Someone in the garden had been trying to force the French windows, the inevitable consequence of everyone in the area knowing Phil, where he lives, and the fact that the England team left today. Distressed and shivering, I turned on all the lights and the radio, fetched a cricket bat from the gyp-room, and in a final, pathetic effort to con any intruder, constructed a sleeping partner from a spare duvet and a cricket helmet. I have been sleeping with him now for three nights, and have genuinely grown attached to him. At least he does not listen to the radio.
Only one week of this cricket widowhood, thank goodness. I leave for Jamaica on 1 February, to join my brother who is an eye-surgeon, a ‘little bannister on the stairway of life’ in Kingston. More of him later. The team arrives there on the 11th, but I shall not be staying with my husband until we move on to Trinidad on the 27th. That encompasses the first six weeks of the tour, and the Word of the TCCB touring notes will be complied with, as it always shall be, now and forever, world without end, Amen.
I had been saying goodbye to Phil for the best part of two weeks and even accompanied him on his mandatory check-up at the Edgbaston Health Clinic. The pre-tour fitness test is always a difficult hurdle to negotiate so soon after Christmas. Phil was concerned about his weight, as well he might be, after a fairly sybaritic festive season. His efforts to diet revolved around foie gras with truffles, canard à l’orange, slabs of Stilton, Godiva chocolates and then a quick postprandial sweat-session reading the Financial Times in the Turkish baths at the RAC Club, Pall Mall.
We drove up to Edgbaston, and stopped at The Plough and Harrow, for a pre-weigh-in sauna. I suggested mega-doses of diuretics, or, failing that, the easy way of losing twenty pounds of ugly fat: chopping his head off. Phil, whose common sense I often have my doubts about, was seriously wondering whether standing on one leg would make any difference to the scales.
All these shenanigans, however, were totally in vain, as nothing escapes Bernard Thomas’s remorseless eye. Bernard has been the England team’s physiotherapist at home and on tour for the past sixteen years, though sadly he has been obliged to retire from touring this year, because of family and professional commitments. He has become the father figure, mentor, and shoulder to cry on for many a homesick tourist, and he and his wife Joan will be sadly missed in the West Indies.
Phil was told to lose four kilos, having weighed in at exactly one hundred. I hit the scales at fifty, so now we all know what is meant by the better half, and precisely why two can live as cheaply as one. Most of the team, it appeared, were just slightly overweight, with one rather dramatic exception who was told to lose thirteen kilos. It would be unkind indeed to mention any names, but suffice it to say that it was he who would opt for the Chinese restaurant rather than the Taj Mahal.
Phil’s absence at least gave me the excuse and/or chance to put in some homework on this here book. My publisher, Derek Wyatt, suggested I read C. L. R. James’s Beyond A Boundary. I did. It was not exactly your average run-of-the-mill cricket book. And it raised quite a few questions about the nature and role of cricket and politics in the Caribbean. Undaunted, I set off with Derek to meet C. L. R. himself.
‘What the hell d’you want to go there for?’ asked our cockney cab driver, more at home with a Park Lane fare than downtown Brixton. ‘Twenty-three muggings in the past week. Not safe for white people.’
‘We’ll take our chance,’ said Derek, undeterred.
We walked the last few streets through a thriving, noisy street market, the stalls piled high with esoteric, tropical produce: huge, dark avocados, monstrous green paw-paws, large ugly bread-fruit, and strange, round, yellowish vegetables, flesh bursting to expose large, black, grape-sized pods – ackee. I stuck close to Derek, feeling like a Burberried stranger in a rainy-day fruit and vegetable paradise, the ubiquitous yuppy uniform of Knightsbridge standing out like a sore, white, showerproof thumb in Brixton.
The numberless door was opened by a huge, burly and not-entirely-delighted-to-see-us West Indian.
‘Who are you?’ he enquired brusquely.
‘Derek Wyatt, publisher, William Heinemann,’ replied Derek, ‘And Frances Edmonds, wife of self-confessed England all-rounder, Phil. We’ve come to see C.L.R.’
The surly expression broke into a beaming smile: sunshine after clouds. ‘Come in,’ he said, ‘You’re very welcome. I’m C.L.R.’s nephew.’ We all started to smile, and shook hands. A great weight of unspoken suspicion, it appeared, had been lifted. How fortunate, intoned Derek, sotto voce ma molto pedagogico, that I had neglected to wear my favourite Krugerrand bracelet.
The nephew, we learned as he directed us to his uncle’s room, had made a television documentary for Channel Four on Viv Richards, the West Indian captain, a programme we had both seen and enjoyed over the Christmas period.
C. L. R. James was sitting in his chair, a thin, frail old man in his eighties. His pure white hair contrasted sharply with his dark brown skin, and his entire face was lit by the penetrating bright blue eyes. His long, elegant fingers moved rhythmically to the soft cadences of his speech, and his hands shook alarmingly as he drank warm milk and honey. Prisoner of this feeble frame, he might be, but his mind and intellect still penetrated Sabatier-sharp: a brand-new Porsche engine in a 60s Cinquecento. The ideas and anecdotes flowed in a seamless continuum of conversation, only occasionally punctuated by the odd far-away look, pregnant with memories of things we could not possibly begin to know or comprehend. The room was lined with bookshelves heaving with weighty tomes on art, music, history, Marx, politics and literature as well as cricket. A video of Mozart’s Don Giovanni balanced with precarious incongruity on a copy of the 1984 Wisden. This was the room of a Renaissance man.
In a spidery hand, he autographed my copy of Beyond a Boundary, a semi-autobiographical account of his childhood in Trinidad, and experiences as a journalist in England. It embraces cricket, cricketing personalities, philosophy, sociology, culture, politics and art. It constitutes compulsory reading for any visitor to the English-speaking Caribbean, and a seminal work for cricket aficionados everywhere.
‘The tour will go ahead,’ said C.L.R. ‘Oh, some of the anti-apartheid activist lobbies will make a lot of noise, they’ll make their political point. But they love their cricket too much in the West Indies to let it be disrupted.’ At the moment, much of this activist energy is being perversely focused around Bernard Julien. B.J., a brilliant all-rounder, is now a pariah in his native Trinidad, banned from cricket for life for joining the ‘rebel’ West Indians who went to South Africa in 1983. It seems quite grossly unfair to the anti-apartheid movement that the relatively affluent, professional England cricketers should have been banned for a mere three years for an action which involved a life ban for more impecunious, struggling West Indian amateurs. The choice of Gooch, Emburey, Willey and Taylor to tour the West Indies so soon after the expiry of their sentence is therefore causing much dissension in West Indian political circles, despite an International Cricket Council ruling that no country must attempt to interfere with the selection policy of any other.
‘How is it,’ asked Derek, ‘that even Clive Lloyd, a man so universally loved, admired, and respected, a captain capable of galvanising a unified and unbeatable team after years of inter-island bickering and jealousy . . . How is it that even he could not stop the West Indian Rebels from going to South Africa?’
C.L.R. shook his snowy head in slow and silent sorrow. Every man, he appeared to be saying, every man has his price.
It is difficult, objectively, to be hard on the West Indian Rebels. West Indian cricketers are not paid at club level, and as amateurs they are therefore obliged to seek work in order to make a living. In developing countries, where 30 per cent unemployment is the norm, this is easier said than done. The players who went to South Africa, unlike our own, were on the fringes of the Test side, and therefore struggling financially, since the monetary chasm between Test-players and ‘also-rans’ is enormous.
For people, however, who have struggled long and hard to cast off the white imperial yoke, who have fought and died to achieve emancipation, independence and racial pride, ‘sorties’ to South Africa to make a few bucks can never ‘officially’ be forgiven. The cankerous tendrils of apartheid are deemed to contaminate any sportsman who has played there. Who should say whether this is right or wrong? In the West Indies it is simply inevitable. It remains a part of the world where it is dangerously ingenuous to think of cricket as a mere game. Caribbean cricket forms an integral, probably even a predominant part, of a complex social, political, and philosophical nexus, a web from which it is totally indivisible.
‘Cricket is the only unifying factor in the West Indies,’ said C.L.R. ‘The West Indies have absolutely no sense of history. No sense. The only thing they have in common is cricket. And that is precisely why the tour will go ahead. Cricket is the only thing that binds them all together.’
We left C.L.R. to his books, his thoughts and his Caribbean memories, and emerged once again to the icy flurries of Brixton rain. The next three months will tell whether the Grand Old Man of West Indian Letters still has his finger on the political pulse.