Two Sides to Every Story : Don't Stop the Carnival

My mother, a sedentary sports fanatic, introduced me to cricket just as she did to tennis, watching a doubles exhibition match between Ken Rosewall, Lew Hoad, Rod Laver and Jaroslav Drobney.

So on a hot day in summer, we went to Edgbaston to watch the test match between England and the WI. I even remember my dress, a lime green cotton with a stand-up collar. We arrived to find Peter May and Colin Cowdrey dominating the crease and the play, and there they stayed, dispatching the ball chased by forlorn-looking fielders in all directions. What in my ignorance I didn’t know, was that this was a highly unusual occurrence – it was normally the other way round. On our boundary were two young fielders, Collie Smith and Garfield Sobers, and equally as bored with the proceedings as the WI crowd, they exchanged jokes with the crowd, thus earning my undying support and devotion. As far as I was concerned the English players were the most wicked of wicked forcing those young boys to chase ball after ball all day.

Ten years later, with my passion for West Indies cricket and cricketers still intact, with countrywide visits to matches cancelled for the winter, I was buying a plane ticket to Barbados to watch the '68 series.

The word groupie had not yet been invented and being a strictly brought up young lady, I wouldn’t have known it even if it had been. But I guess that’s what I was. Wes Hall, who became a good friend, said they always asked girls which one of the team they wanted to meet! It saved problems later. When he brought the team to England in the 80s I took my own daughter to Gloucester to watch the match and we met up. Later I drove him back to Bristol. He asked me, did I ever sleep with you? I hadn’t but I guess it was the exception.

Anyhow, I travelled out on Boxing Day, as did the team and reporters. I swapped my seat for one next to Lance Gibb from Guyana, who taught me how to spin the ball. On my other side was John Snow, the England bowler, who asked if I had ever met Jeff Boycott. In learning that I hadn't, 'Be warned,' he said, 'Jeff only talks about three things: Cricket, Yorkshire and Jeff Boycott.'

It was true. I met him a couple of days later at the Kensington Oval in Barbados. Admired and loathed for his resistance, in equal measure, it was his dogged determination in Jamaica that contributed to the riot on the 4^th day. And our being tear-gassed.

In the three months we had spent exploring the islands, including St Lucia where you were greeted by the management of the hotel with a tube of insect repellent - it should have been armour, the sand flies were pernicious - or Dominica in which only daylight landings were allowed because there was a huge mountain in the way; or maybe Antigua in which the only water was desalinated, and there was not much of that either - the taps gurgling impotently when you turned them on - or Puerto Rico, dirty and smelly with a hotchpotch of traffic lights and unemployment, or Trinidad, so humid one felt the sky had fallen in, being tear gassed in Jamaica came under the heading of light relief.

As I said, it was the 4^th day, the three previous ones a haven of nothing apart from the pitch cracking, which had my sister and I, the partisan crowd, blaming the English, and the English supporters, both more numerous and vastly richer, blaming the WI team.

For the many cricket fans outside the ground, listening on their transistors, two hours of commentary involving the words, 'Botham pushes forward', was too much. With righteous anger, they decided to liven up the session with a few well-aimed bottles, and these equally swiftly grew into stones. The ringside audience, well natured and enjoying the carnival atmosphere joined in.

It was all very friendly, I hasten to add, and livened up the cricket no end. A bottle reaching the stumps had the teams sprinting for the dressing room. Even the commenters were enjoying themselves, commenting: ‘these guys are so accurate they should be picked for the next test.' Next moment, the riot police arrived. Loathed, feared and hated, in their smart uniforms they looked very much the part. Sadly apart from the knife-like creases in their shorts, they weren't the brightest in the knife box especially regarding the direction of the prevailing wind. They tossed tear gas at the rioting crowd and the wind obligingly blew it back and into the pavilion; gassing players, guests, and me and my sister.

Instantly, we were blinded, unable to breathe or speak our mouths and eyes burning. Gary Sobers and Wes Hall, experiencing tear gas in India, and knowing the drill, fought their way into the mass of screaming, crying, heart-pounding, plus a few vomiting, VIPs. While Wes passed out wet towels, Gary took us by the hand and led us down to the dressing rooms, where the taps were flowing water so we could staunch the burning.

Sadly, not the end of the incident, when riot police began beating up a small boy, lining up to hit him with their batons, Wes Hall plus my sister went racing out into the yard to stop them!

As one might say, a memorable visit. Next stop Barbados.

Already several miles out of my comfort zone, Barbados had yet more surprises up its sleeve. There I saw a ghost … called locally a yuppie. Absolutely, most definitely, no doubt abut it at all. I was renting a room in a very old house just outside Bridgetown. The children who lived next door warned me … they had seen it … this dark grey presence. The house also possessed at least one very much alive mouse, which ate part of the bar of chocolate I had just bought. This was reposing in a paper bag, not two inches from where I was sitting on my bed – and I didn’t even hear it. Not so much as a crackle.

It also had a hotel. Not Sandy Lane which I visited several times – although it wasn’t as posh or as expensive as it is now. I mean the Atlantis in Bathsheba on the east coast, where everyone lived on a diet of fish, and no one bothered to get sick or die. The woman from whom I bought oranges, often walked into Bridgtown to the market, over 10 miles, catching the bus back. She was 83.

Anyway, Enid Maxwell, big wig in government, decided to offer me a job as manager and I somewhat foolishly accepted. How hard can it be, I said?

Three months later I was discovered praying in the refrigerator, ‘please God don’t let anything else happen today.' The refrigerator in question happened to be very large, easily big enough for me to get inside, and for lobsters to get out.

They have been brought up from the beach, that morning, by Reggie, a sweet boy who gardened, at least he did unless it was raining, when he positively could do no work in case he got his hair wet. In those days, over on the east coast, it was widely rumoured getting your hair wet resulted in either death or pneumonia. Anyway, when asked to put the lobsters in the fridge to keep them quiescent … he didn’t.

Oh, did I forget to mention that the larder was kept locked and I had the only key, otherwise the food walked, especially tins of evaporated milk. Had I been paid as badly as the staff, I would have resorted to stealing too.

Anyway back to the lobsters.

If Reggie had put them in the fridge, he had obviously not latched the door, unless one of the lobsters happened to be a relative of Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. When I entered the larder to collect them, they were climbing walls, literally, except for the ones that had gone to earth under the heap of yam or bluggo on the floor, which is hairy and dark brown. Somewhat like the rats that also lived in the larder.

If that had been a single incident, perhaps resorting to prayer might well have been considered overkill, but considering I had maids who lay down on the beds chatting when I wasn’t actively standing over them, and we had to wash sheets by hand in cold water in the yard, and on a Sunday when everyone came to the Atlantis for lunch, we began the day at 6 am picking rice.

Have you ever picked rice? It came in from Guyana in sacks, with tiny stones among the grains. Before we could cook it, these had to be removed by hand – a job for four of us sitting around the table most every day, and especially early on a Sunday when we served a gargantuan buffet lunch for 30 or so people that took siestas on our newly washed sheets.

Despite all that, I was happy in Barbados. Back in Bridgtown, I wrote my first magazine article for which I was paid the princely sum of £25, moved out of my haunted house into a beautiful flat with a frangipan tree in the garden, that scented the washing; worked for Deanie Skinner, who ran a secretarial college, and was most courteously asked to leave the island by the Chief of Police within 14 days because I had no work permit.

So there we are. Did Barbados have any silver linings? Of course, remember I wrote a book, A Fishy Tail.