Читать книгу David Gower (Text Only) - David Gower - Страница 10

I WAS born in Tunbridge Wells in 1957 on April Fool’s Day (which some people might say explains a great deal) although there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that I was actually conceived in Africa. Sadly, neither parent is available for comment on that one. I lost my father in 1973, and Mum died in what was to be a particularly awful year for me, 1986. My father was in the Colonial Service, having worked his way up through the ranks to become a District Commissioner and then on to a more senior administrative position in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika – which is now Tanzania – and had been there since the end of the War. We lived there until I was about six (at which time the country’s independence brought us home) and my earliest memories are of living in a bungalow down by the beach just outside Dar es Salaam. Our next house adjoined the golf course and was built on stilts, partly to lessen the prospect of finding some of the less edifying wildlife at the bottom of your bed. I can recall the occasional passing snake, which the garden boy would obligingly hammer to death with a rake. He would have been a decent player – middled it every time. I’ve still got a photo of him, actually, posing with the rake and a dead snake. We lived in true colonial fashion with a small retinue of servants, who lived with their families at the back of the property. With no brothers or sisters, I used to spend a lot of my time with them during the day, running around outside their huts, which were a long way from being palaces I can tell you, and accepting the occasional chunk of bread and a cup of hot sweet tea, which appeared to be part of their diet. It made no difference to me whether I was filled up by that or with whatever my mother came up with back in the main house. Basically, it was a very happy and carefree childhood.

My father was an accomplished all-round sportsman. The social life revolved around the Gymkhana Club, where he played cricket, hockey, golf and tennis to a fairly high standard. He also played fives and rugby, and certainly had a greater all-round talent than I ever had. He won a hockey blue at Cambridge, and also had the potential to win one at cricket as well, and perhaps had the talent to become a sportsman if had he not gone to Africa to launch a proper career. Maybe if he’d been alive when I was at university studying law it might have persuaded me not to do precisely the opposite of what he did. It was my father who first put a bat in my hand, although my mother spent as much time lobbing a tennis ball in my direction as he did because he was away at work quite a bit of the time. If it had not been for my mother, I would probably have been a right-hander, because while my father tried to get me to hold the bat the normal way round, it was she who persuaded him to allow natural instincts to prevail. So now you know who to blame for all those lazy nicks to gully. The only other thing I’ve ever done consistently left-handed, in fact, is dealing cards.

The last thing I remember doing in Tanganyika, which has a lot to do, I imagine, with my passion for wildlife now, is going on safari with my parents to some of the northern game parks. There was one close call with a fairly truculent elephant, thanks to the driver of our Land Rover panicking and stalling the engine, but it was a lovely way to say goodbye to Africa, as a child anyway. We finished up by taking the boat down to Cape Town, and from there it was onto the Union Castle and back to England. We settled in Kent, and for my father, now commuting to Victoria every day, it was a different climate, in all senses, after twenty-odd years in Africa. We were there for a year or two before he applied for a job as registrar at the Loughborough College of Education – the idea being that he could still use his admin skill while being close to sporting activity. It was also good news for my own sporting education, in that my holidays from prep school coincided with student holidays at Loughborough and I got the run of all the facilities there. We also had a snooker table at our disposal, although you would hardly think so to see to me play now.

Before long, though, having done a year or so at primary school in Quorn, my parents packed me off to prep school at Marlborough House in Kent, which was a bit of a wrench at the time. It was fairly intimidating at first, and I did the customary bit of bursting into tears when the parental car disappeared down the drive. I remember thinking when my mother sent me my first cake through the post that I wished it had a file in it, but you soon adapt and I spent five happy years there until the age of thirteen. It was a smallish school, about one hundred boys or so, and without exactly being Wilson of the Wizard, I stood out at most sports. I enjoyed rugby as much as anything and was the all-action-fly-half-cum-goal-kicker, and was a big fan of Wales in those days, when, as I recall, Welsh rugby supporters actually had something to cheer about. As the family name suggests there is some Welsh ancestry – not so much on the Gower around Swansea as further west towards Cardigan – although by the time it got to me the blood was becoming severely diluted. I don’t recall supporting Glamorgan at cricket (there is a limit), although cricket was becoming more and more my best sport.

I scored my first century against a school who were one of our main rivals. I was thirteen then, which caused a bit of excitement as centuries were not that common. I had some very good coaching, and the cricket master, Derek Whittome, was a big influence on me at an important stage of my development. I caught up with him again during my benefit year in 1987 at a cricket talk-in evening in Hastings, and he brought along a party of boys from the school. It wasn’t all sport, mind you, and hard to believe though it is I actually paid a bit of attention to my school work in those days. Going back to my early upbringing, I harboured more ambitions towards becoming a game-warden than a cricketer. Dreams, shall we say, of fishing on a game reserve as opposed to outside the off stump. Anyway, I did well enough in the classroom to win a scholarship to King’s School, Canterbury. I was going to sit for one at Repton as well, the idea being to get closer to home, but King’s delivered a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum, and family finances at the time were not quite up to taking the gamble. My father had been to King’s, and not only won most of the supporting trophies going, but also rose to the dizzy heights of head boy. A hard act to follow, and needless to say I didn’t. I started pretty well, getting into the rugby, cricket and hockey teams, knuckling down to my piano and clarinet lessons, and actually studying quite hard. On the cricketing side, the First XI used to play about seven or eight other schools during the course of a summer but also a number of club sides – mostly from Kent, but including the likes of the Stragglers of Asia and the MCC. Now when we played against the clubs, the visiting captain was allowed to invite the boys into The Beverley, which was the pub just around the corner from the cricket field, for the odd half of shandy. Like most people, I suppose, my first taste of beer was pretty foul, but after a few net sessions, so to speak, I began to see the attraction. So much so, that one or two of us decided not to wait for the next club match for our next visit and try a spot of freelancing instead. Inevitably, having cycled with a classmate early one evening and ordered a couple of pints of foaming best bitter, we had hardly started an illicit glass of Kent’s finest hop when in walked a couple of adults we were more accustomed to seeing in gowns and mortars chalking Latin verbs up on the blackboard. I attempted some weak joke, along the lines of ‘What are you having, sir?’ which for some reason failed to reduce the two masters to helpless laughter, and we were duly ordered to leave and await further developments. Fortunately enough, it was a fairly enlightened establishment – no Flashman to roast you over an open fire and not much use of the cane. But although we avoided physical retribution, the next few weeks were not terribly pleasant: confined to barracks, report cards, jankers – that sort of thing.

So that was an early blot, head of school prospects out of the window, but the cricket was going well. I had made the First XI at the age of fourteen, which was by no means a school record, but it did mean that I grew up fairly quickly in cricketing terms. The difference between fourteen and eighteen-year-olds is quite a large one, and, like all sports, if you are stretching yourself against better and more experienced opposition then you learn a good bit faster than you would against boys of your own age. On top of this I was playing club cricket in Leicestershire during the summer holidays, which also broadened my social horizons, as a boarding school is somewhat cloistered, and in my last year at Canterbury I had gone on to captain the side. I made a few cock-ups, of course, but it was all part of the learning process, as indeed was the earlier business of getting caught in the pub. Entering a hostelry so closely connected to the school was not a great idea, particularly when Canterbury has one of the highest densities of pubs per square mile in the country. Ergo, if you are a schoolboy in Canterbury you can find a pub that is unfrequented by authority and have a fairly good chance of avoiding detection – as most of us proceeded to prove.

Anyhow, it seemed like a good idea to get the hang of beer drinking in preparation for a rugby career, having at that time established a nice, undemanding little number as Fourth XV fly-half. We had a choice between rugby and athletics, which involved tedious things like jumping into sandpits, over hurdles, and cross country runs. The only time I did a cross-country run I cannily missed off a third of the course, and still only came about 80th. My big mistake on the rugger field, however, was to play well enough to get into the Second XV where, with King’s having a strong tradition in the sport, they took the game fairly seriously.

The school rugby coach was a Welshman by the name of Ian Gollop, a man dedicated to mathematics and rugby, and who possessed an overwhelming desire to win that was conspicuously absent on the Fourth XV pitch. We even had training sessions, which was not quite what I had in mind when I gleefully kicked athletics into touch. The Second XV backs did an awful lot of running around without the ball – as a foil to our first-team counterparts – and I raised this point with Mr Gollop. ‘Do you really need us for this?’ I inquired, whereupon he told me that if I didn’t like it, I could get on my bike and clear off. So I did. However, this actually turned out to have much the same effect of saying ‘sod ‘em’ to the England selectors fifteen years later, as I then found myself in the First XV. I didn’t quite make it until the end of the season, though. Dropped for ‘lack of effort’.

Even in those early days I realized I was a touch closer to the Baron de Coubertin’s philosophy than Ian Gollop’s. Critics have since earmarked it as a failing, a character defect, and maybe they’re right, but I’ve always liked to win. Life’s much easier when you win – it’s just that I sussed out from a fairly early age that you don’t always. I actually had to learn and develop a stronger competitive spirit at school, where I made the discovery that losing in itself is not something to tear your hair out over, but not performing as well as you can certainly is. I remember playing in the school squash competition against a lad I should have beaten. I’d won the first game, and was so far ahead in the second that I almost felt sorry for him and relented. Then, of course, I started to play very badly, and to cut a long story short, got stuffed. That annoyed me so much that I actually felt ashamed of myself. So it’s not so much the winning or losing – it’s more that if I feel as though I’ve played as well as I can, I feel okay. Translated in to cricket, if you’ve done well, scored a century maybe, but the side has lost, there’s definitely a feeling of disappointment but you’re not personally depressed.

I used to play a fair amount of tennis with a good friend of mine from Leicester, Tim Ayling, and to be perfectly frank he can beat me anytime he wants to. As I recall, the only time I’ve ever won a set off him was when we had not prepared in the regulation manner, and he was slightly more pissed than I was. But as long as I’ve felt I’ve played hard and competed against him, I’ve enjoyed the game. It might sound a bit futile, but I’d sooner play out of my skin and lose than beat an inferior player. But as for the so-called lack of a competitive streak, I once played tennis with Robin Askwith when he came up to stay with me in Leicester a few years back, and for all Askwith’s charms and abilities, he happens to be deformed. He’s actually got one leg shorter than the other, which he’s hidden quite well in most walks of life, but it doesn’t do much for his agility on a tennis court. He’d also done something to his ankle, so he could barely move at all to his left, which is where I kept hitting the ball. By the end of the game, he was barely able to crawl into the shower, and he said: ‘If anyone says you haven’t got a competitive streak in you, I am living proof to the contrary.’

I don’t think you can get through sixteen years of first-class cricket, with a reasonable amount of success, without some kind of competitive edge. It’s all about maintaining a balance in many ways. For instance I play golf, or a strange version of it, not too often and not too well a lot of the time. But if I can make a contribution, make the odd par here and there, then I’m happy, but if I go round like a total novice, and spend half my time hacking out of bushes or failing to drive past the ladies’ tee, then frankly, I get bloody irritable. Going back to the rugby, and the ‘lack of effort’, I scored plenty of points with the boot, and also popped over for a few tries – but apparently there was something wrong with my work-rate. Even in those days, it seems, skill took second place to sweat. Micky Stewart would have loved Ian Gollop. Generally, I think my philosophy has stood me in good stead. I’ve never been one to mope around looking miserable after losing, which in some ways is a good thing, and in others bad. Putting on appearances to suit other people is not really me, but I now know, for example, that had I looked a touch more suicidal after losing a Test match to India in 1986, I might not have been relieved of the England captaincy. I felt bad about it, but to the man that mattered – Peter May – not bad enough.

King’s has a fabulous setting, well worth a walk round if you are ever in Canterbury, and most of the school is within the Cathedral Close. To get to breakfast in the morning there was a walk of about 250 yards past one of the great cathedrals of the world, and a passage through a dark alley reputed to have been haunted by Nell Gwynne. You are surrounded by architecture dating back to the eleventh century, and wherever you go you are surrounded by history. I can perhaps appreciate it better now than I did then, because as you became older as a schoolboy boarder, your main thought is not so much ‘Look how beautiful this all is’ as ‘How do I get out of here?’ You are well aware of one or two social attractions outside, and basically you are walled in. The gates are shut, wander lust strikes (or just lust), you get a bit thirsty and your mind is not so much on Latin or cricket as mountaineering. A young man’s thoughts lightly turn to spring, or to be more accurate, springing out.

There was a light on top of one of the walls we used to climb, and you had to move pretty quickly to get over without being spotted. It was a bit like Colditz really, although the penalties for a break-out were perhaps not quite so serious, although the penalty for failing to negotiate one of the spiked railings was fairly severe. I remember one lad losing his footing one night, and instead of the planned evening out he ended up with the school matron applying several layers of sticking plaster to his posterior. Mostly we made it though, and the prime job then was to get around town without detection.

Two of my better friends at King’s were one Andrew Newell, the headmaster’s son, and Stephen White-Thompson, the Dean of Canterbury’s son. Andrew was similar to Alec Stewart in as much as he did not let his background prevent him from being one of the boys. The point, however, is that between the two of them it was not very hard to acquire a key that gave one access to the postern gate, and thus an easy exit to the town and beyond. It was relatively easy to take away a key for long enough to get a copy cut, which of course ruled out the need for crampons, pitons, and the possibility of reporting to matron with a punctured posterior. I nearly got rumbled once when one of the masters found this strange key in my possession and gave the relevant gates a try. Fortunately it had been cut badly, and only worked if you waggled it around in the lock, so I got away with that one.

I was doing well with the work and sport, but the blots on the copybook were beginning to add up, and discovering girls was next on the agenda. On one particular occasion the school had been granted a day off for some reason or other, though this was due to finish with a roll-call at round about six o’clock in the evening. I had made it as high up as a house monitor, which in terms of high office would hardly give you vertigo – roughly equivalent to lance-corporal I suppose – but I thought at the time that it might be enough not to qualify me for roll-call. Wrong. I’d actually disappeared off to Ashford, which was about a twenty-minute train ride away, to meet a girl I had met at one of the dances that the school occasionally organized, and after a couple of drinks we decided to see a James Bond film at the local cinema. By this time, apparently, we had both been reported AWOL, and as we came out of the movie the search party that had been put out for her came upon us strolling down Ashford High Street. She was dragged off, not quite in chains, and off I went to catch the train back to Canterbury. Unfortunately, the events of the day – in particular the sojourn in the pub – had left me drained, and I woke up at the end of the line in Ramsgate. I did manage to hitch a lift back to Canterbury, where a vast tub of hot water awaited, and it was back to the ranks – an unfamiliar feeling then, if not now.

In most respects, school had gone reasonably well. I’d enjoyed my sport, and if I had also enjoyed one or two extra curricular activities too well for an unblemished record, I’d studied hard enough to end up with eight O levels, three A levels, and one S grade in history. I sat the history exam for Oxford, and although I wrote quite competently on half the questions, I found myself rambling on at one stage about King Arthur, a man whose career I had never actually studied. I was, much to my surprise, invited up for an interview. So I spent the next few weeks swotting up on Arthur, before driving up in the family Anglia (the car which we had brought back with us on the boat from Africa) for the interview. Unfortunately, Sod’s Law struck, and most of the interview consisted of questions about what Richelieu and his mates were doing at the Court of Louis XIV, all of which I’d just about forgotten. Needless to say, it did not go well. Another piece of misfortune was that I had applied to St Edmund Hall, which had quite a sporting reputation, but apparently at precisely the time they were starting to think about their academic reputation. Bye, bye Oxford.

I already had a place at University College, London, but between my mother and the headmaster at King’s it was deemed to be a good idea to stay on at school and try for two more A levels. This is where I lost enthusiasm. In the summer of 1974 I had played a few games for Leicestershire 2nds and their under-25 team in the previous school holidays, and had rubbed shoulders with the likes of Micky Norman, Maurice Hallam, and Terry Spencer, scored a few runs, and had an offer to join the county the following season. This also had an extra bearing on a distinct lack of application concerning these two extra A’s. So I went to the headmaster, told him I’d had enough, and he more or less agreed that I was wasting my time. My mother was upset, of course, but off I went to Leicestershire and said, ‘Here I am, I’m yours for the summer.’ Mike Turner said, ‘How much do you want?’ I replied, ‘How about £20 a week?’ He said, ‘I’ll give you £25,’ and we shook hands on it. This to me was bliss, though the wages and my attitude to the game have both changed somewhat since.

I’d enjoyed my previous summer’s cricket, and Leicestershire represented the next beginning in my life. I’d arrived at Marlborough House at the age of eight which was a bit intimidating, starting again at King’s was much the same, and believe it or not, so was turning up at Lutterworth for Leicestershire 2nds versus Middlesex 2nds. Even though a certain amount of natural eye and ability got me through okay, the one thing I remember most from those first senior games was how much I struggled against the turning ball. Good spinners take a long time to develop, and I had hardly any previous experience against this type of quality bowling. Still, here I was back for a full summer, living at home with no overheads and no commitments, and getting paid what for me at the time was a handsome amount of pocket money. I knew I would be taking up my university place in London come October (Mike Turner was the first to advise me not to abandon the academic option), and although to a certain extent I was playing as the carefree amateur, deep down I think I was already two thirds of the way towards full time cricket. The summer of 1975 did nothing to alter that view. Leicestershire won the championship for the first time in their history, in which I featured in about three games, and I also played in half a dozen Sunday League matches.

I was never that committed to university, where the only thing we really had in common was the fact that the place was situated in Gower Street. I was supposed to be studying law, but in the six months I was there I learned a good bit more about kebab houses in Charlotte Street. The best way to put it is that we parted company by mutual consent the following summer, and almost before I knew it I was playing in a Benson and Hedges quarter-final at Worcester. I forget who was missing from our side, but I opened the innings and got thirty-odd, which was satisfying enough at the time, even if we did lose a high-scoring match.