LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

in my first year and you were not meant to play football until the second. My ally was Richard Hibbitt, the deputy headmaster who was in charge of games. He saw how keen I was, made room for me and was soon asking my parents for permission to pick me for the school team. That was all the encouragement I needed, and by the ripe old age of seven I was already practising my autograph for the day when I would be famous.

      I didn’t have to wait long for my first appearance on national television, although Songs Of Praise from St John’s in Yeovil was not exactly what I had in mind. At the time the family attended church fairly regularly, and as the church choir was struggling for numbers I was drafted in. I should point out that my singing talents, which are legendary, had no bearing on my selection. I was so bad that when the big day came I was told politely but firmly to mime. Ironically, when the programme went out, I was the chorister who received the most attention from the cameras. Indeed, my ability as a mime artist was to stand me in good stead in pantomime later on in life.

      Considering the number of times I have been called upon to scribble my name since then, all that handwriting practice at the age of seven was of great use. Not that you would ever have convinced my parents or teachers at the time: for them it was another distraction from the real job of inwardly digesting. My form mistress at Milford, Mrs Olwyn Joyce, was heard despairingly telling my parents that she wished the school had been built in a traditional style rather than with modern, panoramic windows. Being easily distracted by the sight and sound of a bouncing ball, I was forever staring out of the window watching other classes playing games and wishing I was out there with them.

      There were no such problems with Mr Hibbitt. He even forgave me for breaking a school window since the damage had been caused by a cricket ball. Although I had been bowling daisy cutters at the garage door from the age of six and disappearing into the local park for games of cricket at every available opportunity, Mr Hibbitt showed me that there was money to be made from sport when he placed a pile of coins on a good length on the pitch and told us that if we managed to hit them, the cash was ours. I cleaned up, as I did later when, at thirteen, I made my debut for Somerset Under-15s against Wiltshire. The deal was 6d per run, and my score of 80 ensured a jackpot which my Dad was forced to cough up but did not risk again. Needless to say, my one great sporting achievement at Milford came in the form of a six which Mr Hibbitt reckoned would have carried at either Taunton or Lord’s. Then, one sports day I took part in a contest to see who could throw the cricket ball furthest on the playing fields of Buckler’s Mead.

      I was standing at the throwing line when the teacher doing the measuring in the distance shouted at me to have my go. It had to be pointed out to him that not only had I already done so, but my ball had landed many yards behind the spot where he was standing. Later, incidentally, in the summer of 1968 the same thing happened when I managed a record throw of just over 207 feet in the Under-13 tournament of the Crusaders’ Union National Sports Day at Motspur Park in South London. The judges did not believe the distance I had achieved with my first throw and made me throw again. They measured this one and I came home with the Victor Ludorum Cup for my age group and a record that stood for many years.

      By the time I moved to secondary school at Buckler’s Mead, my sheer bloody-mindedness about getting my own way was well established. In general, I enjoyed myself. My lack of aptitude for an academic life was well-known by my mates who christened me ‘Bungalow’. I got into a few scrapes and scraps, but when the punishment was handed out I took it without complaining. The most serious incident came when I walked out of a woodwork lesson and never went back. Woodwork and I never really got on. I would start to make a coffee table and the legs would get shorter and shorter until all that was left was a big tray. My dovetails never dovetailed and I had no interest at all in the subject. The end came when I was in the workroom one day and the teacher, a Mr Black, suddenly turned round because someone had been mucking about behind me. There were no questions asked, he just walked up to me and whacked me on the head with a T-square. I was so angry, I was shaking. I wanted to flatten him there and then. Instead I told him I was going to do him a favour and leave the room. I went straight to the headmaster, explained what had happened and told him I was not the sort of person who would go home bleating about what had gone on in school. I said that I was never going in a class with Mr Black again, and I got my way.

      Adolescence brought the usual horrors for me and my family. My ideas about fashion were to cause one or two run-ins. I was a teenager at the time when platform shoes were all the rage – the first time around. Quite naturally I wanted some, whatever Mum said, but shortly after I eventually got hold of a pair, I realized that she might just have been right all along. Mum was always keen to be with me when I bought clothes because she was rightly fearful of the consequences of my colour blindness. This time I spurned her offer and went into town on my own with the inevitable dire results: blue flared trousers, a bright orange shirt with a huge collar, and a pair of immense platform shoes. Mum and Dad were going out that evening to watch some five-a-side football at a local sports centre and I told them I would join them later in my new gear. In the process of putting on this ghastly costume, I managed to trip over my shoes and rip the trousers.

      Mum also noticed around this time that I had begun to open my eyes to the possibility that girls might offer more than pig-tails to pull. When I came home one day and announced casually that I required some Lifebuoy soap, Mum’s response was immediate.

      ‘What’s her name?’ she inquired.

      ‘Margaret,’ I told her.

      ‘And what is the attraction?’

      ‘She can run faster than me.’

      We all have at least one tale from this grisly adolescent period which we pray will be forgotten about on Judgement Day. Mine involved my sister Dale and her pet hamster. My return home for the weekend from the Lord’s groundstaff, where I had been taken on as a ‘trainee cricketer’ following a recommendation by Somerset, coincided with its untimely demise. On hearing the news, I went up to Dale’s room, removed the hamster from its cage and, paying scant attention to her grief, proceeded to swing it around by its tail to make sure it really was dead. Dale somehow failed to see the funny side.

      I was a real charmer to Dale and my other sister Wendy, putting live spiders in their beds etc., and once I very nearly caused our charwoman, Mrs Whittle, to have a heart attack. I decided it would be great fun to deposit a large plastic snake behind a chair she was about to clean. You could hear the shrieking all down the street.

      Every youngster threatens to leave home at one time or another. My big moment came when I announced to Mum I was off to London to see the bright lights. Within ten minutes, there waiting for me in the hall were my bags, packed and ready. When it dawned on me that if Mum did not clean my cricket gear I would have to, I thought better of it. But the real battles at home were over my absolute determination to make a career out of sport. My parents were worried about what would happen if I failed to make the grade or was badly injured, not that the thought ever existed in my mind. When, after I had succeeded in escaping from school at fifteen, Somerset arranged for me to go to Lord’s, Roy Kerslake, a prominent member of the county’s cricket committee, had to do the hard sell on my Dad who was worried that if it should all fall apart I would be a 16-year-old with no qualifications. What swung the decision for him was being told that those who failed to make it to the county circuit would often use their groundstaff experience to find jobs coaching cricket at independent schools.

      As far as I was concerned, however, the only choice I had to make was which sport to concentrate on. I already had an offer to join Crystal Palace football club. The manager at the time, a West Country man named Bert Head, wanted to sign me and I asked Dad for some advice as there were other clubs, five from the First Division as I recall, who were after me as well. Les said ‘Right, son. I think you are a better cricketer’, and that was the decision made. Had the offer come from Stamford Bridge, things might have turned out very differently because I was a Chelsea fanatic. When my turn to choose the bedroom decor coincided with their FA Cup winning run of 1970, I gave Mum a Chelsea rosette so that she could buy the wallpaper and bed covers in exactly the right colours. She drew the line when it came to the carpet, but even so the name Chelsea was stencilled all over the house, and when they beat Leeds United in the Cup Final replay at Old Trafford, I went up to my room with

Скачать книгу