Nobody knew what to expect at Antigua airport. After all the political posturing of the Deputy Prime Minister, Lester Bird, it was not entirely unreasonable to expect a massive anti-apartheid demonstration.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ snapped Phil, in that disarmingly endearing way he always allays my deepest fears and upsets. ‘All these blighters want to see is another blackwash.’
Phil is getting bored with being right this tour. Sure enough, there were a mere eight demonstrators waiting for us by the transfer bus. It is distressing to note that less and less effort is going into these affairs, and I honestly do believe that the students’ union at the University of the West Indies has reduced them to optional demos’; a defeatist attitude is definitely permeating the weary chants.
There does not appear to be the slightest indication of any leadership or discipline. Attire is sloppy. There is not a single character who seems to be willing just to stay there and to battle it out in the sun for a few hours: no, a few quick airy-fairy wafts, a token gesture, and off. Some actually look as if they have been up all night drinking too heavily. Others are passing around some ‘badly packed cigar’ in a laidback, feeling-no-pain, catatonic trance sort of way. I am, of course, still talking about the demonstrators.
It seems strange to recollect that the major problem at the beginning of this tour was potential headaches with anti-apartheid activists. As the tour has progressed such minor niggles have been relegated to the status of a burst water pipe prior to a full-scale nuclear explosion. The placards now rank no better than beta-minus for artistic content, and delta for technical merit. ‘Racists, go home’ was a rather lacklustre attempt at opening the demonstrating, and any well-trained, fit and even medium-pace eye could run straight through the middle-order, wishy-washy attempts of ‘Go away’ and ‘We don’t want you here’. Honestly, after this tour, the students’ union must do the right thing, and conduct a public inquiry into the disintegration of what originally on paper looked like one of the best placard-toting line-ups in the world.
The England cricket team’s anti-apartheid slogans are in a different league. They are, of course, the subject of constant practice, and are rehearsed and rehearsed until the timing is perfect. Any minor problems of technique are assiduously ironed out, and, as an indication of true professionalism, video recordings of performances are even being mooted.
‘Go home,’ shout the West Indians, monotonously.
‘Gooch, the brute, took the loot,’ counter the England cricket team, with world-class attention to assonance, rhyme and scansion. There is just no contest. Even making concessions for the uneven pace and bounce of the bus, England’s vast superiority with the pithy slogan and the rhyming couplet is indisputable.
We arrived at the hotel to a flurry of inactivity. The rooms were not ready, and even when they were, they didn’t contain any phones. The reception sported the grand total of three telephone lines for a press corps which now boasts seven correspondents for every England cricketer. At 11.30 am the dining room was shut for breakfast and not yet open for lunch. What do you mean, there’s no coffee shop? What on earth do you expect for a mere US$200 a night? You’re the sort that would be demanding air-conditioning and a television set! Honestly, I do strongly recommend that before anyone books their holiday trip of a lifetime to Antigua, please consult the Spanish Tourist and Information Board.
This hotel is just the sort of joint that makes my blood boil: more expensive than Claridge’s, provocatively slow service, and the general attitude sullen and resentful. To add insult to injury, prices were inexplicably and exorbitantly expensive, and the pretension ridiculous. The dining room, for example, was a fairly airless corrugated iron extension, and birds riddled with who knows what contagious diseases were busily pecking at crumbs left on the tables. The food was what a fussy Frenchman could conceivably depict as infect. House rules demanded, however, that gentlemen must wear jackets for dinner. It was tantamount to insisting that ladies wear a tiara to shop at Portobello Road street market (where incidentally the food is exponentially better).
I subsequently read a piece in a British Sunday newspaper gossip column, penned by yet another of those wearisome creatures who have not been within 5,000 miles of the tour, and yet feel they have the God-given right to jump on the inquisitional bandwagon and have a good go at the England team. Well, this particular columnist had apparently heard from a friend of an acquaintance of a woman who used to baby-sit for the budgerigar of a third-cousin-twice-removed-by-a-previous-divorce of a man who used to go to Tupperware parties with an American lady who was staying here, that she was absolutely scandalised by the fact that the England cricketers used to turn up for dinner in the dining room without jackets. Difficult, indeed dangerous though it is to argue with such patently incontrovertible and impeccable sources, I am afraid that for once I must champion the England players’ cause. Brilliant they may not all be, but at US$30 a throw for the sort of stuff that would make even British Rail habitués shudder, not one of them was actually dumb enough to eat dinner in the dining room.
So incensed was I by the sheer pretentiousness of the place that I was finally moved to verse, the results of which I consigned to the manager:
For crêpes bien flambées
I’ll dress as you say.
But
For cold rice and peas
I’ll dress as I please.
I was not at all surprised to receive no reply.
The hotel is now absolutely swarming with press. Regular cricket correspondents are totally outnumbered by news hounds, many of whom have been flown in from Florida and New York in ever exaggerated efforts to catch even the vaguest whiff of scandal.
Lindsay Lamb and Alison Downton, both of whom had travelled directly to Antigua from Barbados, were rather put out when they booked into the hotel a few hours before the rest of us arrived. They were accosted by some dirty old hack of the flasher-mac variety, who told them that they were in for ‘a good time’: the England cricket team, he apprised them, was about to arrive and they would be ‘all right for the week’. The rest of the press loved this rampant sex-machine story, naturally, and dutifully published it as yet another nail in the England touring coffin. What nobody bothered to relate was the codicil. ‘If you don’t manage to score with the team,’ he continued to explain, ‘there’s always plenty of pressmen around as consolation prizes.’ Our hack in the mac at least knew his press boys. As for the cricketers, he had never seen them before in his life . . .
A letter had arrived from my brother, Brendan, the eye surgeon in Kingston. He had noticed an advertisement in the ‘situations vacant’ columns of a medical magazine which purported to be that of a private maternity clinic in Kingston, but which was obviously a covert and rather desperate appeal from Lord’s:
Come and work in a sunny climate;
Free white uniform provided;
No previous specialist experience necessary;
Guaranteed three-day week.
Dear Brendan. It hardly seemed three months ago that I was flying out to see him and all my friends at the University of the West Indies. Waltzing around the Caribbean in this strange England touring bubble, we seem to have lost all touch with reality: with real people, real problems and real life.
On the contrary, life on this final leg of the West Indies tour has moved into the surreal: photographers popping up from behind coconut trees to take subsequently damning pictures of any England cricketer who picks up a glass or so much as speaks (Shock! Horror!) to a ‘woman’; gossip columnists who know so much about what’s going on that they still think Wilf Slack is the cocktail waiter; a praetorian guard of Sun newspaper minders, remorselessly ‘protecting’ the happily reunited Botham couple from the predatory advances of any other newsmen. The scenes are pure undiluted Kafka, although the conversation naturally remains resolutely Pinter.
A few observers are beginning to perceive Botham’s loyalty to one newspaper, the Sun, as deleterious to the team. Far more are beginning to see it as highly damaging to Botham himself. For a reputed £40,000 a year, the Sun is entitled to Beefy’s ‘exclusive’ services, which means that other newspapers find it difficult, indeed, well-nigh impossible, to get hold of Botham quotes, stories and pictures. The Sun’s new cricket correspondent, Chris Lander, who ghost-writes the Botham column is Ian’s friend, mentor and close companion on tour. Lander, prior to his new appointment, accompanied Botham on the well-publicised charity walk from John o’ Groats to Land’s End, and after that the die was inexorably cast. The former Sun correspondent Steve Whiting was relieved of his cricketing post, and the job went conveniently to Lander. Whiting’s wife, who by her own account has been a drug user, has made a sworn affidavit to the News of the World about Botham’s private life. It is quite extraordinary, the amount of money being made available by Fleet Street for discrediting stories about Ian Botham.
One of the major problems would now seem to be that this cricket tour has degenerated into the battlefield of a tabloid circulation war. On the one hand, we have the News of the World maintaining that Botham is the worst thing since a saturated-fat diet, and on the other hand we have the Sun stalwartly insisting that he is the very best thing since sliced wholemeal bread. Interestingly, these two publications are sister-papers – from the same stable. One cannot help wondering whether they are creating news where there isn’t any, in order to increase sales. At any event, perhaps somewhere between the two storyline extremes lies the real truth of the man.
The current danger is that both the great British public, and indeed the not-so-great England cricketers are beginning to confuse media coverage with true significance. Constant attention is often correlated to real importance. Youngsters bred on television, public relations, meretricious glamour, and falling intellectual and moral standards have a distressing tendency to deify popstars and sportsmen, not doctors, nurses or missionaries. That is, and has always been, inevitable. The idols however, especially in the erstwhile clean-cut, ‘play up, play up, and play the game’ arena of cricket must understand that they have a terrible responsibility to their fans and must not, on any account, be found to have the proverbial feet of clay. God knows what damage is being done to teenagers’ minds, beliefs and aspirations by the sensational allegations emerging from this tour.
The first evening in Antigua the team was invited by the sponsors, Cable and Wireless, to a cocktail party at the exclusive and prestigious St James’s Club on the other side of the island. Yes, I suppose I could find out for the pernickety geographers amongst you whether ‘the other side’ means north, south, west or east, but by this stage of the tour, quite frankly, who cares about facts?
The multimillionaire owner of the St James’s Club, Peter de Savary, was sadly nowhere in evidence, but generously the facilities of the Club were extended to the entire team, a gesture which, de facto, put paid to any claims of exclusivity and prestige. The club, nevertheless, does remain the Caribbean hideaway for many of the rich and famous and for prices as low as US$500 a night, for example, you too can rub knees with the likes of Terry Wogan, or so at least one of the sponsors informed me. Nowadays its difficult to believe anything that anybody says.
Most of the genuine cricket correspondents (a virtually extinct breed by this juncture) had boycotted the party. Cable and Wireless had specifically omitted to invite two of the most outstanding genuine cricket correspondents, Matthew Engel and Robin Marlar, because these two writers allegedly omit to mention the names of any sponsors in their copy. Most of the others CCs were outraged, but sadly sponsors these days insist on their pound of flesh. All of the news hounds who were, on the contrary, invited to the party, have understood that freebie pencils and notepads must be repaid in kind. From now on we shall no doubt read about the Cable and Wireless-sponsored ‘Shock, horror, phew what a scorcher’ torrid nights with ex-Miss First Flushing Lavatory 1937. It is becoming increasingly impossible to treat this peripatetic circus as anything other than a very bad joke.
Phil was again furious not to be selected for this Test, and was frustratingly relegated to drinks-trolley manager. He is, I’m afraid, beginning to sound like a latter-day Fred Truman.
‘It’s like a bloody kindergarten!’ he complained disgusted. ‘In my day we used to bowl fifty overs at a stretch, and no arsing around. Nowadays these guys bowl two overs, and then they have to have a drink and a couple of aspirins. It started with Both, and now you’ve got Foster at it . . . [dark muttering] . . .’
I went, with holidaying friends, to watch England bat on the third day of the Test. I had followed the previous two days’ play on the radio, and proceedings seemed to have developed into the hyperbolical lunacy of the Tom Sharpe novels the boys are all so fond of reading.
‘My car, my car,’ wailed one Antiguan commentator, as Botham was brought back into the attack.
It had been suggested that the way Beefy was bowling, David Gower would be better off with seven men on the boundary and two in the car park. Botham was within two wickets of Australian fast-bowler Dennis Lillee’s 355 Test wicket record, and despite being carted all over the park looked as if he might start insisting to bowl from both ends. Foster and Ellison were also given some fairly rough treatment as the West Indian score moved unstoppably on. By the second day’s post-luncheon session, the commentators were becoming more acerbically critical of the England captain’s ‘make Both a hero at all costs’ strategy. The team’s most successful bowler, off-spinner John Emburey, the only man with half a chance of staying the onslaught, was unaccountably called upon to bowl but a few overs in the afternoon.
‘Please, sir, may I have my ball back,’ seemed to be the captain’s approach every time he had the temerity to snatch it from Botham’s greedy grasp. Commentators were not slow to point out that at four Tests to nil down, and with 474 West Indian runs on the board in the fifth, personal performance and individual statistics should not have been given precedence over best possible team tactics . . .
‘Captain, the ship is sinking’, raged the ear-splitting calypso rhythms from the shed-sized speakers located in the Double-Decker Stand at the Antigua Recreation Grounds. The song, written and performed by calypso king Gypsy, had originally been penned as satirical commentary on the Prime Minister of Trinidad, George Chambers, and the parlous state of his country’s finances. It has sadly become disturbingly more apposite for the beleaguered David Gower, and the shambolic state of his country’s cricket.
‘Oh, dear, what can the matter be?’ and ‘London Bridge is falling down’, the good-natured crowd had sung in Trinidad.
‘Captain, the ship is sinking,’ they chanted in Antigua. ‘Captain, tell us what to do!’
Blowers was in fine fettle in the commentary box: ‘Yes, and it’s a glorious day here today at the Antigua Recreation Grounds, even better than yesterday, although yesterday was absolutely perfect.’ I wonder if anyone will ever collate a collection of ‘Blowers-Balls’?
The other wives and assimilated consorts had been accommodated in relative splendour in the ‘Viv Richards VIP’ Stand, but unaccountably Mrs Edmonds’ complimentary tickets entitled her to nothing more luxurious than a hard wooden bench in the Double-Decker Stand with the hoi polloi. The place was a potential inferno, and would certainly never have passed muster with the GLC (may they rest in peace, together with all their equal-rights-for-gay-whales-one-parent-lesbian-family-Friends-of-the-Earth-anti-nuclear fellow travellers).
Empty drinks cans were constantly being rolled down the corrugated tin roof, creating the most thunderous racket. Rollicking men pranced around with free-style sandwich boards, advertising ‘Stuff Shellfish an Dumplin’ [sic] and enjoining us to go to a neighbouring ‘nite-club’ – in fact the local brothel. The atmosphere was terrific. Non-stop reggae music preceded play. At the beginning of this tour I used to find reggae music a drearily monotonous dirge, a cross between bored and querulous children doggedly reciting their times tables and uncompromisingly bad Gregorian plain chant. I’d purveyed enough of both way back in the convent. Gradually, however, the atavistic rhythms get to even the most impervious of audiences, and you find yourself involuntarily just movin’ to the music. Yeah, man.
Before the match started, the West Indians did quite a bit of flashy fielding practice, presumably so that Viv Richards could show his home crowd what an awfully clever little person he possibly is. The West Indians’ physiotherapist, Australian Dennis Waight, sat all alone in the middle of the field and did the Jane Fonda Workout for Terminally Ostentatious Show-Offs. The England team was nowhere to be seen. Presumably they were in the dressing room doing group therapy: knitting, tatting, macramé.
From the penitential wooden benches in the Double-Decker Stand, there is an unhampered view of the parish church to the right, and the local prison to the left. In between the church and the prison stands the casino. Could there, somewhere, be a moral in all this?
‘Baby, you’re so excitable,’ pounded Amazulu over the loud speakers as the England opening pair walked slowly to the crease. Surely, this could not be intended for, of all people, Wilf Slack? Nor yet indeed for the laconic Graham Gooch. ‘I hang on ’cos I can’t let go.’ No, it clearly wasn’t dedicated to any of our boys.
The most striking characteristic of any Caribbean crowd is the brightness and gaiety of the colours. It was Sunday, and many people had obviously come straight from church, still bedecked in their Sabbath finery, to worship at the other West Indian shrine, the cricket ground. Another noteworthy phenomenon is that ladies, even middle-aged and elderly ladies, have no qualms about coming along to the cricket on their own, and are patently, even frighteningly well informed on proceedings. With television sets here the privilege of only the affluent few, children are brought up watching the national sport live, and osmotically assimilating folk-wisdom from all the surrounding spectators.
‘That one seemed to turn a bit,’ remarked some upper-crust old English gent, as West Indian off-spinner Harper was brought unusually into the attack.
‘Pitched leg, turned off,’ corrected some amiable old West Indian dame, well into her seventies. It was if he’d got the words of the Lord’s prayer wrong.
The crowd gave a rousing cheer as King Dyal took his bow in the Double-Decker Stand. This frail, aged, West Indian gent is a familiar figure both at the Barbados and Antigua cricket grounds, his outrageously garish garb creating a stir whenever he appears. Today he looked resplendent in a salmon pink suit, with off-orange trimmings. By way of adornment he was sporting a mottled yellow and orange carnation in his buttonhole, a canary yellow bow-tie, startlingly white gloves, thick black spectacles, a brown cane and a pinky-mauve trilby hat. He looked about as coordinated as the England team’s fielding the previous day.
After a few overs Viv Richards, the West Indian captain, started acting up again. He wanted yet another ball. Twenty minutes’ play had been lost during the Saturday afternoon’s session because Viv had wanted another ball even then. Nobody could actually establish what was ever wrong with the original ball, apart from the fact that England had managed to accumulate all of forty runs on the board, and the West Indians had still not claimed a single wicket. I’ve heard people talk about Viv Richards being ‘genial’. It must be that old problem of the same words conveying totally different concepts in different cultures. To the casual observer, his demeanour appears to be demonically arrogant in victory, and truculently petulant at the slightest hint of adversity, though God knows on this tour, the West Indian captain has had little enough experience of that. Whatever the critics may say about their current whipping-boy, David Gower, he is every inch the perfect English gent in success and failure alike. On the contrary, after the one match that the West Indians lost (remember that, the Second One Day International in Trinidad?), Viv Richards was moodily unavailable for comment. In my book at least, that is just not the behaviour of a great man or a great captain.
Back to the balls. The original ball had been a Duke. Possible replacement balls, of a similar number of overs’ wear, were only available in Stuart Surridge. No, said the West Indian captain.
He absolutely wanted a Duke. (Well, I mean, darling, don’t we all?) Indeed the bottom line, insisted Robespierre Richards, would be a slightly roughed up new Duke, although this would obviously be an immense advantage to the West Indian pace bowlers. After much acrimonious debate, the umpires, wisely, refused.
Men who turn ugly when slightly crossed are not true superstars, and certainly not the figures for impressionable young fans to emulate. Even Phil, who has seen rather more cricket than I have, which explains, incidentally, why his brains are proportionally more addled, admitted that he had never seen such an appalling display of petulance, and such needless confrontation with the umpires. Of course, adulation of Viv Richards in his home island of Antigua has reached such blasphemous levels that he can do no wrong. The double standards of cricketing establishments all over the world were again quite startlingly evident. My own husband was dropped from Test cricket for two years over an alleged sledging incident with an Indian batsman, but superstars, both black and white, are constantly allowed to get away with murder. Viv, it is true, at the end of the match, when the 5–0 Test blackwash was in the bag, had the grace to apologise to the umpires for his outbursts. Graciousness in success, however, is not a particularly outstanding attribute. Neither is boorish behaviour. Nor manic megalomania. One genuinely begins to wonder whether there could be something wrong with the air in Somerset.
The balls debate was swiftly followed by another major incident. The groundsmen were called on to the pitch to deal with (opinions in the commentary box were sharply divided) what looked like a cowpat, but could equally well have been a doggy turd. It was all fairly gripping stuff.
Meanwhile, in the real world, American F-111s were setting off from English shores to bomb Libya . . .
Gooch and Slack batted well but the inexorable England domino effect phenomenon soon followed. The West Indians second innings was hell-bent on scoring quick runs. Viv Richards smacked an amazing century in the fewest balls ever – fifty-six. ‘To watch the West Indian captain laying into the demoralised English bowlers,’ said Tony Cozier from the commentary box, ‘is like watching Martina Navratilova playing Little Orphan Annie!’ At 100, Richards went down on his haunches and heroically accepted the thunderous applause of his faithful worshippers. He brushed either the tears or the sweat from his eyes, and the adoring crowd went hysterical. It was such a shame I had witnessed the man’s previous behaviour. I so much wanted to feel impressed.
The rest is history. For the final day of the Test, the Antiguan government declared a national holiday so that everyone could watch England’s ultimate humiliation. How this squared with the Deputy Prime Minister’s injunctions to boycott the cricket is another of those Caribbean political conundrums I have yet to fathom. Gower played a captain’s innings, but failed to save the match. I believe the verbal abuse that he and Downton received from Richards for their last-ditch efforts to save the game by time-wasting was choice, even by professional cricketing standards. Whatever, I ask myself, happened to that game they used to play at Cambridge?
The England team was not quite so irretrievably crumpled, nor indeed so inconsolably devastated as many people would like to imagine after their dreadful drubbing. Many, perhaps too many players feel they have a virtual sinecure in the team. They hope they should have a relatively easy ride in the 1986 summer against the Indians and the New Zealanders, and with a winning Test team place secure their earnings will not suffer. Safely ensconced back in Lord’s after his trip to Barbados, the chairman of selectors Peter May made ominous rumblings about ‘heads rolling’. Last time there was the equally disastrous 1983–4 tour to Pakistan and New Zealand – a tour similarly hallmarked by lack of discipline and shocking behaviour all rolled together with some pretty juicy sex and dope allegations – the rolling heads were not that conspicuous. The captain of that ill-fated England team, Bob Willis, was made assistant manager of this one, and the manager of aforementioned frolicking fiasco, Doug Insole, was promoted to chairman of the Cricket Committee of the Test and County Cricket Board, indisputably the most prestigious and influential position at Lord’s. At that sort of rate neither Tony Brown nor David Gower should lose any sleep. Life peerages are probably the least they can expect.
For some days now players have been making their final departure arrangements, determined to arrive home in England looking shipshape and Bristol-fashion.
‘Do you cut hair?’ asked Greg Thomas one morning in those melodic Welsh, how-could-you-ever-say-no tones.
‘Well I used to cut Phil’s,’ I was obliged to admit shamefacedly, ‘and look what happened to him!’
We watched the ‘bald Eagle’ (as Botham has nicknamed him) emerging from his early-morning swim, the sunshine reflecting and refracting merrily off droplets dripping from his no longer excessively hirsute head. Poor darling. I have had to stop him wasting my extremely expensive pH-balanced Redken shampoo. At this stage, let’s face it, a can of Pledge and a duster will do.
Our final day in paradise was probably just one too many. Wrapped in a towel under a coconut palm, I lay shivering from the shock of a jellyfish sting which encircled my entire waist. The wretched, formless, ectoplasmic beastie had nabbed me whilst swimming, and the most excruciating sensation of branding irons immediately ensued.
‘Stop making a fuss,’ said Phil. ‘It’ll go away in a couple of days.’ Greg ‘Blodwen’ Thomas was somewhat more sympathetic than my own dear husband, and spoke in a disconcertingly knowledgeable, lilting fashion about the ‘poison seeping into your central nervous system’. Inevitably and immediately, my central nervous system began shaking, even more nervously, and I retired even further under the tree.
As I hugged my throbbing scarlet torso, and scratched the ranges of mosquito bites all over my legs which were pulsating gaily in unison like some prickly, pink Pyrenees, it occurred to me that you really can have too much of a good thing. Suddenly, a twenty-pound coconut came crashing down from my protective palm tree, missing the notorious Edmonds’ grey matter by mere inches, and smashing a nearby bottle of aloe suntan oil into the tiniest of smithereens.
The combination of gravitational pull and ubiquitous coconuts has turned the hotel’s garden into an aerial minefield. Only yesterday, another plummeting missile just missed a News of the World correspondent, almost braining him, or at least, almost expelling what was encapsulated in his head. The entire team was of course, suitably distressed.
‘Just another inch,’ said eyewitness Phil . . . It’s a good job, I mused philosophically to myself, that Sir Isaac Newton wasn’t born in Antigua.
On our last night in Antigua the BBC and ITN camera crews threw a farewell beach party for the team at the eponymous Shorty’s. Each crew generously donated a couple of hundred pounds for the purchase of comestibles, and more importantly, drinkables, and asked participating members of the press for a £5 contribution as a token gesture to defray expenditure.
Pressmen, as every British High Commissioner or Governor General on this tour would probably bear me out eloquently, are always the first to come and the last to leave any ‘freebie’ cocktail party. For this particular gathering, however, the thought of parting with a fiver so shocked and horrified the majority of our egregious press corps that only a few of them showed up.
And after signing a sworn affidavit, and accepting an undisclosed five-figure sum, yes folks, I, Miss Ex-French ‘O’ Level 1978, am going to name those I saw:
Dominic Allen (London Broadcasting Company)
Ted Corbett (Daily Star)
Matthew Engel (Guardian)
Chris Lander (Sun)
John Jackson (Daily Mirror)
Graham Otway (Today)
Peter Smith (Daily Mail)
Some, presumably, spent the evening poring over their expenses – along with the rest of their copy.
Departure day was not exactly funereal, though there were a few bleary eyes as the team began its two-leg trip back to London, leaving Ian Botham behind for a quiet, restful week alone with his wife and the odd Sun reporter. First, we flew from Antigua to Kingston, a three-hour flight spent playing silly crossword puzzle games and filling in our Customs and Immigration forms. A few of the press were coming back with us. Matthew Engel, in particular, was intent on filling in his forms with a degree of irrelevant veracity that was highly liable to have him thrown in the slammer yet again.
‘Passport number.’ That was at least one question we could all answer, without undue mental stress.
‘Type of passport.’
‘Large, blue, rectangular,’ began Matthew.
‘Are you (or any member of your party) carrying illegal drugs?
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to take the Fifth Amendment on that one,’ he continued, punctiliously. I swear that boy has not been the same since they locked him up with Geoffrey Boycott.
The baggage took ages to arrive at Kingston, and we hung around for at least an hour in the arrivals’ hall playing optional practice with an erratic red, bouncy ball.
‘Too little, too late,’ growled one ancient be-hacking-jacketed old gent recently arrived from London. He was, one supposes, perfectly right.
We spent the intervening time between our arrival in Kingston and our subsequent departure to London at Captain Morgan’s Harbour for a final swim in the Caribbean sunshine. Everyone was pleased to be going home, and these last few frustrating hours lay heavily on our hands.
The return British Airways flight was uncomfortably full, the team travelling home in the relative comfort of club class, and the Ginger Group in steerage. It was a far cry from my first-class voyage out, with hopes so high and enthusiasm so irrepressible. Nevertheless, the unflaggingly cheerful Allan Lamb; the master purveyor of edibles and drinkables, Mike Gatting; and even the generally fun-restraining spectre at the feast, Phil Edmonds, kept us supplied with plentiful quantities of the old bubbly stuff.
‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to charge you corkage on that,’ one mincing little British Airways steward suggested menacingly to Lindsay Lamb. He didn’t, I can assure you, make the same suggestion twice.
We arrived to a bitterly cold, grey day in London, and were ushered into Heathrow Airport’s brand new Terminal Four building. The England team’s baggage took two and a half hours to arrive, as each and every item was not only checked by trained sniffer dogs, but also carefully hand-searched. For the first time I was struck by the full ignominious enormity of what has happened. England cricketers, once considered the country’s sporting diplomats, the glorious game’s roving ambassadors, were now relegated to the status of international dope-pedlars.