Another Bloody Tour E-Book

Frances Edmonds

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 283

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Who can forget Frances Edmonds' explosive cricketing diaries of the 1980s?In 1986 an insider cricket memoir rocked the foundations of the sport - but it wasn't by a player.Frances Edmonds, married to Middlesex and England player Phil Edmonds - a WAG, no less - had the audacity to write one of the most talked-about cricket books of the decade.In Another Bloody Tour, her sharp, often hilarious account of England's devastating 1986 tour of the West Indies, she chronicled the unmitigated disaster of the cricket - along with the politics and scandal that accompanied what became known as the 'sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll tour'. Despite having been repeatedly told she knew nothing about the game, her perceptive, witty and wickedly irreverent memoir of those disappointing months was a national bestseller.Now, almost thirty years on, Frances' account is more relevant than ever. Updated with a new Introduction, here we find that, far more than any other sport, cricket is a microcosm where life in all its grim and glorious facets is vividly reflected.Since the 1980s the sport has changed immeasurably. Money has altered everything. Pay levels unheard of in the 1980s exacerbate the corrosive effects of having a superstar on the team. Leadership, motivation, team building, brand, crisis management, burn-out, the cult of celebrity and the elusive art of harnessing the star performer: these are challenges consistently encountered in every area of endeavour, but nowhere thrown more sharply into focus than by the madness and mayhem of Another Bloody Tour.

Leseprobe

For Philippe-Henri, Kieran, Brendan and Anthony

Contents

Preface

1 The meniscus theory

2 Line and length

3 The cricket widow

4 Jamaica, at last

5 Off the pitch

6 On the pitch

7 Jamaica and Eden II

8 And so to Trinidad

9 Engel makes his mark

10 The media circus

11 Lemon Arbour

12 Dreams or nightmares?

13 Trinidad – again!

14 The world’s news

15 Captain, the ship has sunk

16 Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Scyld Berry (Observer) for moral support and offering to carry my bags.

Matthew Engel (Guardian) for keeping me amused.

Professor Gladstone Mills (University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston) for any correct facts.

The Rousseau family, Jamaica, for inimitable hospitality.

The British High Commissioners and staff in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados for so tirelessly looking after our welfare.

The West Indian Board of Control for all their kindness.

The English Test and County Cricket Board for all the laughs.

Tony Brown and the entire England cricket team for tolerating my presence.

Margot Richardson, with thanks and affection for constant moral and material support. Derek Wyatt, publisher at William Heinemann, who made me do it. (Honest, your honour!)

England Tour Itinerary 1986

January

25

BARBADOS

31

ST VINCENT

31

ST VINCENT

February

1–4

v. Windwards

5

ANTIGUA

7–10

v. Leewards

11

JAMAICA

13–16

v. Jamaica

18

First One Day International

21–26

First Test

February/ March

28–2

v. Trinidad

4

Second One Day International

7–12

Second Test

13

BARBADOS

14–17

v. Barbados

19

Third One Day International

21–26

Third Test

28

TRINIDAD

30

Fourth One Day International

April

3–8

Fourth Test

9

ANTIGUA

11–16

Fifth Test

18

LONDON

Preface

‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ Almost thirty years have elapsed since I wrote Another Bloody Tour, and the words of the great Trinidadian philosopher and cricket writer, C. L. R. James, have never resounded with greater relevance. In writing this diary, I now realise that I was witnessing, perhaps not always consciously, the over-arching themes of life itself being played out ona cricket pitch. The minutiae of names and statistics are always there to be found in Wisden, but what do such arid facts teach us? The abiding lessons to be learned from cricket are not to be drawn from batting or bowling averages. Instead, they reside in daily demonstrations on the field of heroism and cowardice; of resilience and defeatism; of ego and selflessness. They rest upon the eternal and dynamic dilemma between the goals and aspirations of the individual that are ideally congruent with, but far too often at odds with those of the team. Such lessons as these are of universal application, they transcend the game. Far more than any other sport, cricket is a microcosm where life in all its grim and glorious facets is vividly reflected. This is what I understood as I re-read Another Bloody Tour. If only I had understood it then!

Allow me to put this diary in context. The disastrous England cricket tour to the West Indies in 1986 was rightly consigned to the sporting annals as a national disgrace: it was the so-dubbed ‘sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll’ tour. For reasons that will emerge, I was lucky/unlucky enough to be caught up as a ‘trailing spouse’ on this Calvary of a tour and, mainly due to the paucity of decent Chablis in the Caribbean, could find little else to amuse myself apart from chronicling events as they unfolded. No one, and certainly not me, could have anticipated the maelstrom that would ensue once the diary was published. Not only was I the first woman and, a fortiori WAG, to have demonstrated the chutzpah to write a book about cricket, a hitherto male-only preserve but, even more controversially, this shameless iconoclast resolutely refused to bow down and worship at the shrine of sporting celebrity. I had chanced upon and mined a hitherto untapped resource; the rich comic seam that underpinned our pantheon of cricketing deities. The fall-out was immediate. Those idols of clay-footed disposition understandably took the hump; the be-blazered, MCC ‘egg-and-bacon’ tie brigade turned quite purple with apoplexy and the book became an overnight bestseller.

If we look around and contemplate the number of female sporting pundits, writers and commentators in the media nowadays, it is perhaps difficult to comprehend the extent of the controversy generated but, back in the eighties the impact was fairly seismic. Suffice it to say that, alongside some very gratifying plaudits, I received my fair share of green-ink hate mail. In addition, never until then had I been either personally or professionally exposed to the bores and bigots of overt misogyny. One exponent, the now disgraced BBC presenter Stuart Hall, ended up in prison thirty years later on historic charges of sexual assault. Scratch the surface of the misogynist, the homophobe and the racist, I consistently observe, and you will soon find an inadequate and a bully.

Today, as the challenge of dragging sports media and coverage kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century endures, it is gratifying to witness a certain degree of progress in terms of diversity. Still, however, and far too often it is cosmetic and illusory. In sport and in sports media, just as in the media generally, the upper echelons of politics, the judiciary and the boardroom, Macho Man continues to call the important shots. After all this time, the Utopia of equal opportunity still seems frustratingly remote although the disruption of a new global economic order is beginning to shake things up. In its own small way and in its day, I would like to think that this book caused a minor distaff disruption to the smugness of the status quo.

With the benefit of three decades of hindsight, it would be tempting to indulge in the sort of Olympian wisdom usually reserved for Nobel Prize winning economists, the sort of folk who excel in magisterial analysis of the contributory factors leading up to an international banking crisis but whose stratospheric scholarship, sadly, only kicks in once the world’s economy is already in tatters. I would dearly love to pretend that, whilst studying the cricketing kaleidoscope of the 1980s, I could foresee the storylines that would eventually emerge: the perennially ‘bad’ boys who would end up as knights of the realm and the fundamentally good ones who would end up committing suicide; the marriages that, despite absence, distance and well-publicised infidelities, would manage to survive and thrive and those including my own that, despite the best will in the world, would struggle; the impact of technology and the enormous influx of money on the coverage, character and development of the game; and the increasing democratisation of a sport which, since its inception, had been deployed as an instrument of the British Empire by an elite ruling class determined to instil their own imperial values throughout that comfortingly pink swathe of colonies that once dominated the world map.

I cannot in all honesty claim, however, that I foresaw any of these developments and yet, in rereading this diary, I do observe the emergence of perennially relevant themes: issues surrounding leadership, motivation, team building, brand, crisis management, burn-out, the corrosive cult of celebrity and the elusive art of harnessing the star performer. These are challenges consistently encountered in every area of endeavour but are nowhere thrown more sharply into focus than by the misery and mayhem of Another Bloody Tour.

Frances Edmonds

London, 2015

1 / The meniscus theory

Some marriages, so they say, are made in heaven. Ours was conceived, the apposite deity presiding, in the Eros.

The Eros was not, as its name might erroneously imply, some sleazy marital (or indeed pre-marital) Aids shop, but an extremely cheap and cheerful Greek restaurant in Petty-Curie – the sort of joint where much stodge was purveyed, and little money changed hands. It was favoured by perennially impecunious, tired and often commensurately emotional Cambridge undergraduates, or anyone who genuinely didn’t give a proverbial toss about high-fibre low-cholesterol diets, or the middle-age spectres of arteriosclerosis and myocardial infarcts.

It was in this Hellenic calorie parlour that I was first introduced to Philippe-Henri Edmonds. With true Rabelaisian fervour he was whacking into a gargantuan deep-pan pizza, and a double portion of chips, the lot awash in a slick of olive oil and tomato ketchup. It was difficult to decide whether to feel unbearably queasy or extremely impressed – few sober undergrads were wont to take on a double portion of Eros chips.

He was, in those days, an extraordinarily striking man: 6’3” tall, tanned, sporting a Blues’ blazer and a shock of blond hair. He is still 6’3 ” tall, but has subsequently lost the tan and the Blues’ blazer. Now he’s losing the hair. I often ask him if he’d continue loving me if I were 15 stone and balding. Sister, whoever said life was fair?

More intriguing than his physical presence, however, was the Zambian accent. Having spent my formative years closeted in an Ursuline convent in Chester, I had never had the dubious pleasure of ‘colonial’ contacts. I must admit that, to this day, I retain a vaguely snotty penchant for Wykehamists and Ampleforthians: for chaps who open your car-door first, help you on with your coat and offer to carry your bags. But in those days, men like that were in plentiful supply. The real buzz was a Zambian who called you ‘Honey-Man’; could leap-frog over a row of four-foot-high traffic meters down Trinity Street; and could pick you up physically and carry you home from a party, if generally deemed necessary. It generally was!

Our first dinner date was arranged at The Turk’s Head Restaurant, opposite Trinity College. It was a hostelry much frequented by American tourists, visiting parents and undergraduates who had either amnesed or ignored the last bank statement. The entire episode is indelibly etched on my memory, since Phil paid the bill, finished the wine and we didn’t argue. Such a confluence of events chez les Edmonds is about as common as Halley’s Comet. Since then, we have argued about more or less everything: politics (I don’t have any); religion (he doesn’t have any); and money (neither of us ever has any).

Life as an undergraduate could be very pleasant. I was reading Modern Languages, and spent most of the time three steps removed from reality in the University Library. The UL, as it was commonly referred to, had quite a lot going for it. Apart from the fascinating phallic symbolism of its structure, it boasted the best chocolate cake in town, and the cafeteria was always full of would-be miscreants. No one, bar a few wizened dons from the last century and a couple of elitist habitués, could ever locate the right book. Freshers were advised to enter with a ball of string, like Theseus looking for the Minotaur, so that they could trace their way out of this literary maze when they had given up hope. One commodity thus in plentiful supply was other potential skivers: characters who, on the least suggestion, would be happy to make up a punt-party and leave the thesis until some undefined mañana. A very social sort of place, the U L . . .

After a year of Machiavellian hatchet-jobs on other far more suitable candidates, I politicked my way to President of the Cambridge University Italian Society. My ‘kitchen cabinet’ ran the Society with tremendous brio, and very much all’italiano – into an unprecedented budgetary deficit. We then did the only honourable Italian thing to do: we resigned.

Phil, meanwhile, seemed to be doing some abstruse external degree from Fenners, the Cambridge University cricket ground. Land Economy was a course virtually unheard of by anyone except rugger Blues, cricket Blues, rowing Blues and a few despairing tutors. It was not absolutely mandatory to be sporty and non-academic to read it, but it certainly helped. In the 1970s there was an apocryphal tale about Emmanuel College. At the entrance interview the Senior Tutor would throw the hopeful candidate a rugby ball. If he caught it he was given a place: if he caught it and drop-kicked it into the waste-paper basket he was awarded an ‘exhibition’; and if he caught it and sidestepped the standard-lamp he was made a ‘scholar’. Such men read Land Economy.

Phil spent the winters playing rugby as a number eight for Cambridge, having previously played for England Schools, though he got very bored training – they never seemed to use a ball – to persevere for his Blue. His summers were spent playing cricket for the University at Fenners. That was the place to watch cricket: clutches of undergraduates strewn around the ground in the late afternoon searching for any displacement activity rather than study, books half-open in a desultory sort of fashion as a weak excuse for real swotting. But I have always, and shall always, maintain that the only real way to view a game of cricket is through the meniscus of a large gin and tonic. The scientific principles (something to do with angles of refraction and the movement of balls off pitches) were explained to me once on a balmy, post-Tripos, June evening by a rather dishy physicist from King’s. The theory has long since been confined to oblivion, but I’ve never forgotten the practice.

My initial ideas on cricket and cricketers were all engendered at Fenners. Cricket was a hobby and played for fun, although in our day (1970–73) the Cambridge team was of truly first-class standard. Six of the players played for counties in the summer vacation, and the captain, Phil’s predecessor, Majid Khan, was a future captain of Pakistan. Cricketers there were undergraduates from more or less similar backgrounds, sharing, at least, similar aspirations, expectations and IQs. How very different the professional game . . . In the summer, Phil would play for Middlesex County Cricket Club. It never occurred to me for a minute that this was anything, or ever would be anything, other than a holiday job. I never watched him at Lord’s during that period, since as a Modern Linguist it was incumbent upon me to go off to Spain, France or Italy and imbibe as much Chianti (oops – what a give-away) Culture as possible.

It was a deeply traumatic year, 1973. We all graduated, and few knew what to do next. The far-from-academic Land Economists rapidly became millionaires, property magnates and captains of industry. The rowing Blues, not generally perceived as being Mensa material, emerged in subsequent incarnations as Euro-Bond experts and Fund Managers. And the double-first, summa cum laude Classicists and Modern Linguists just sat around filling in job application forms, stunned by the terrible onslaught of reality. Fortunately for me, thanks to one of those complete gratuitous quirks of fate, 1973 was the year when the United Kingdom acceded to the European Economic Community. The Common Market, as many people are now beginning to appreciate, was established primarily as a job-creation scheme for otherwise totally unemployable modern language graduates, which is why, pursuant to the Sellar and Yeatman definition of historical phenomena, it is a Good Thing.

The Commission of the European Communities in Brussels, suffering from a total dearth of English-speaking conference interpreters, was prepared to train modern linguists for six months in simultaneous interpretation. This is the procedure used in multilingual and international organisations to facilitate comprehension between different language groups. The interpreter, for example the English interpreter, sits in a soundproof booth, wearing headphones tuned into the proceedings, and translates any foreign-language-speaking delegate into English simultaneously, or, to be absolutely accurate, about half a sentence behind the original. The interpreter speaks into a microphone which relays the translation to any delegate who wants to listen to an English version of what is being said.

It is stressful work: the interpreter must listen, translate in his or her mind, and speak – all at once. It is impossible to keep this up for more than half an hour at a time, and so interpreters work in teams of at least two, and more often, at the EEC, three. There is a great esprit de corps among the interpreters in the booth, and nearly all my great friends belong to the profession. They are all very bright and well-informed, speak four, five, sometimes six languages, and are generous and supportive people. I usually find them easier to relate to than some of the ‘Madame Lafarge’ characters knocking around in professional cricket ‘knitting circles’.

An acute sense of humour is also an asset for the job. Take the French interpreter in a meeting on artificial insemination who translated ‘frozen semen’ as ‘matelots gelés’ (frozen seamen), and a German interpreter whose construction of ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ percolated through as ‘the vodka was OK, but the steak was off’. Diplomatic incidents, however, are rarely the interpreter’s fault, although Anglo-Hispanic relations were hardly improved at one European summit, when Mrs Thatcher was believed to have ‘thrown a Spaniard in the works’. John Lennon would have enjoyed that one.

The training at the Commission was a tough six months, especially after a rather laid-back three years in the ivory towers of Cambridge. We were being paid to be taught, and no shirking was tolerated. The same criterion is sadly not of universal application in that gilded Eurocracy. I emerged from this baptême de feu much chastened, a fully fledged interpreter and a little Eurocrat to boot. Huge Euro-salaries started accruing. Tax-free sports cars were purchased. Duty-free booze was readily available. A large flat was organised off the Avenue Louise, the smartest shopping street in Brussels. Designer clothes packed the wardrobe. It was heady, it was affluent, it was fun.

I hated it, pined for London and wanted to return home. Phil calculated how much I was earning (about five times more than the average county cricketer), told me stop whingeing and persevere. True love is a many-splendoured thing . . .

In my book at least, 1975 was a disastrous year. Phil was selected to play for England against the Australians at Headingley. He did not bowl particularly well, but with a debutant’s luck was rewarded with five wickets for twenty-eight runs. I remember a commentator remarking at the time that Edmonds had often bowled much better, and achieved far worse results. Balls, it occurred to me, are like women: good ones often get smacked about, and bad ones roll men over. Just ask Alexis Carrington.

Since coming down from Cambridge, Phil had divided his time between cricket for Middlesex in the summer, and working for a property company in the winter. His degree in Land Economy and his entrepreneurial inclinations had led him inexorably into real estate. Philippe-Henri, as the name suggests, is half Belgian, and the Belgians, as the adage runs, ‘are born with a brick in the stomach’ – they love property. Playing for England, however, tipped the precarious balance, and Phil was lost to cricket. What a blow! Professional sportsmen, to my lights, were a species apart: a race developed to entertain the masses, and to pander to the plebeian craving for ‘free bread and circuses’ – that declining Roman Empire equivalent of the Giro d’Italia and Match of the Day. Certainly, suitable consorts in my bailiwick did not include ‘slow left-armers’. Try explaining that to your friends on the continent!

There was no England tour in the winter of 1975. Graeme Pollock, brother of the great Springbok fast bowler Peter, invited Phil to South Africa to play for Eastern Province. He was accommodated in the Grand Hotel in Port Elizabeth, the capital of Eastern Province, but fairly provincial for all that. It was not entirely consistent with my idea of a hotel, neither was it particularly grand, and someone there was obviously keeping a very sharp eye on Edmonds’ incoming mail. I used to sign all my correspondence using one of the honorary titles we had so munificently bestowed on one another in the Cambridge University Italian Society.

My nom de plume was ‘la Contessa Francesca Elena Maria di Moriarti’. If it was imperative to impress, as when for example we were trying to extract sponsored booze out of Martini, I might add the odd ‘Beata e Magnifica’ for good measure. We also created a ‘Conte E Pericoloso Sporgersi’ (it’s dangerous to lean out of the window), inspired by the injunctions on Italian railways, and a ‘Contessa E Vietato Fumare’ (No Smoking), filched from the same source.

We shall never know who was reading my missives, but rumours soon abounded around Port Elizabeth, aided and abetted by the Eastern Province coach, Don Wilson (Yorkshire and England), that royalty was about to grace them with a visit. Don, who was in on the joke, advised the team that although grovelling was no longer absolutely de rigueur, a definite inclination of the head and the appellation of ‘Ma’am’ was certainly expected. Eventually Phil had to step in when Don started contemplating lining the team up to meet my plane at the airport. They were all genuinely disappointed when the truth had to be told, but nevertheless the title stuck in cricketing circles. To this day our vice-manager, Bob Willis, calls me ‘Contessa’, though occasionally he does get the first vowel wrong.

One enchanted evening, over some monstrous lobster thermidor (crustaceans in South Africa seem to be sired by the scaly equivalent of Moby Dick), Phil said, in that ‘please breathe into this breathalyser’ tone of voice that our boys in blue have perfected: ‘Better choose yourself an engagement ring while you’re here in South Africa.’

I could not help thinking that Mr Darcy would have made a rather more elegant job of what I took to be an impassioned proposal of marriage, but there again I don’t suppose Mr Darcy’s line and length were up to much. I did suggest that Phil might come and help me make my choice, but he obviously felt that it was all a bit wet, and pleading fielding practice, nets, circuits and impending psychosomatic pains in the wallet, told me to sort it out for myself.

An ally in extravagance was patently necessary, and I rang Inez Pollock, Peter’s wife. The Pollocks had made us part of the family in Port Elizabeth, and Inez was my big mate.

‘Inez,’ I said, ‘Phil has told me to go and buy an engagement ring.’

‘Fine,’ said Inez. ‘How much has he got in the bank?’

‘Four thousand rand,’ I said.

‘Great,’ she said. ‘We’ll spend the lot. Teach the blighter to do his own shopping!’

We were married eight months later, on 30 October 1976, and, on going to press, are still together.

2 / Line and length

I am, by now, a relatively hardened tourist. Since Phil’s debut for England in those distant days of 1975, I have tried to fit my freelance interpreting around his cricket excursions. I slipped into Auckland for the second stage of the 1977–8 Pakistan–New Zealand Test series. And I was there to see my husband’s unqualified disastrous tour of Australia in 1978–9, when he had that much celebrated contretemps with one Michael Brearley.

The storm broke during the Second Test at Perth. Phil was twelfth man, perhaps not a job ideally suited to his Coriolanian temperament. But nevertheless he had fulfilled his duties of organising the team’s lunch and drinks for the midday interval. Unfortunately, as the team left the pitch, some ribald Antipodean made an ultra-personal remark to Mike: Mike’s amour-propre was wounded, and, miffed, he rounded on Edmonds and started shouting at him for not being sufficiently and ostentatiously subservient in his twelfth-man function.

Now it may well be that the author of the ex cathedra encyclical, The Art of Captaincy, is not readily recognisable in this tale. It is imperative to remember, however, that this was all well before Ian Botham regained the Ashes and Mike Brearley was apotheosised for it. In those days he was a mere mortal and subject to the odd trantrums like the rest of us. Suffice it to say that these two Cambridge graduates nearly came to blows (note the civilising effect of education) and had to be prised apart by John Lever.

‘Pack your cricket kit, and buy some tanning oil,’ said Geoff Boycott to Edmonds. ‘You won’t be playing any more cricket on this tour.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Edmonds. ‘Brears knows he’s overreacted,’ a fact Brearley subsequently admitted in the book Phil Edmonds – A Singular Man, by Simon Barnes. But Edmonds, as usual, was wrong, and Boycott, as ever, was right.

By the time I joined the team, Mike was still not speaking to Phil. Phil admitted that he would be happy to speak to Brears, but only through a medium. It was all a great standing joke among the lads, but it was certainly no joke for me. Touring is bad enough when a cricketer is playing, fully involved and in the thick of it, but it takes a special kind of passive equanimity to sit contentedly on the sidelines for three months, watching others playing and receiving the garlands of success, especially if one feels that omission is arguably due more to personal rather than cricketing motives.

Phil was frustrated and intensely bored. Many tourists in such circumstances, especially the ‘good’ ones, take to the bottle: highly therapeutic mentally, if somewhat detrimental physically. Phil, unfortunately, hardly drinks, and although still very ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ with his teammates, he became introspective, uncommunicative and generally rather bloody in his dealings with me. I took solace, like so many other shunned, ignored and isolated wives, in white wine and credit cards. Enough plastic-fantastic girls, and men become completely peripheral. American Express really does do nicely.

The Brearley–Edmonds mutual non-admiration society persisted long after Australia. Phil’s likes and dislikes, however, have never had much bearing on my attitudes to people. I have always found Mike a perfectly amiable, sensitive gentleman, and I gradually began to perceive him as a closet ally. We seemed to share at least one objective: to put Edmonds off playing cricket. I constantly cherished the hope that Phil’s exclusions and omissions would precipitate his move into the City, where his agile brain and business acumen would have made him megabucks long ago.

Phil, in many ways, is a man out of his era. He would have been far more at home in the days of ‘Gentlemen’ and ‘Players’, plying his business interests for a living, and playing cricket, as he did at Cambridge, for the sheer love of the game. Sadly, nowadays, first-class cricket is a full-time professional occupation, and it must be rather tiresome for a man capable of doing other things to have his hopes, expectations, credit-rating, material wellbeing, and general happiness all predicated on the vicissitudes of an English summer, and the wicket at Lord’s taking spin.

Yet Phil perseveres. Every year he threatens Middlesex and promises me that he is giving the game up, but that demon gadfly of talent unfulfilled and opportunities missed has spurred him on to another season. Meanwhile, Mike Brearley, the legend, ‘The Greatest England Captain of All Time’, has been created by a combination of the hyperbolics of the popular press and the Herculean exploits of Ian Botham. He has become the guru, the fundi, the éminence très grise of English cricket. Nowhere, mind you, is it easier to pass muster as an intellectual than on the professional cricket circuit. In the land of CSE, he with the GCE rules. And how dumb, mon cher Philippe-Henri, to be on the wrong side of a legend.

Phil bore missing the next five tours with admirable stoicism, the kind of stoicism that having several strings to one’s bow permits. The only time he really exploded was when three relatively second-string off-spinners were selected for the 1982–3 tour to Australia, and no left-armer.

‘Anybody,’ wrote Matthew Engel of the Guardian, ‘as long as his name is not Edmonds,’ and if Matthew writes it, then it must be true. (All right, so what if he is my favourite cricket correspondent? Why else would a dyed-in-the-wool Thatcherite like me be buying The Grauniad?)

Towards the end of the 1984 season, a move was afoot to have Edmonds selected for India. Phil has always been convinced that selectors get all their ideas from the press. Well, why ever not? Where else would they get them from, poor darlings? Indeed, if we could only be sure that they were all reading Engel, English cricket would probably be the healthier for it. At all events, with a Gower wind prevailing, Phil was reinstated for the tour to the sub-continent, and they set off for Delhi in October 1984 to fly straight into the tumultuous aftermath of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination.

Five-month overseas tours must surely be a quintessentially male aberration. Vic Marks, in Marks out of XI, his brilliantly wry look at that tour of India and Australia, opines that it is not the number of failures in cricket marriages which is astounding, but the number that actually survives. Most cricket wives get a pretty rough deal. The summer is spent dealing with festering sacks of rancid jock-straps and sweaty cricket socks, with consorts racing up and down the motorway, playing away half the season, and never at home at weekends. If, for the winter, the accolade of an overseas tour place is bestowed, a wife’s joy at the honour and the glory must inevitably be muted by the thought of four or five months keeping the home fires burning. Women stuck at home with young children, while husbands are gadding about in exotic locations, enjoying superstar treatment and the attentions of accommodating groupies, may well feel an understandable degree of resentment.

Phil and I have always led quite independent lives, in any event, and pursued quite separate careers. I am at home less often than he, and have never felt that short separations are in any way deleterious to a marriage. On the contrary, an independent woman can call more shots and lay down more ground rules than an economically dependent one. Such relationships of equal partners are not, of course, the easy option. The combination of an irresistible force and an immovable object is, so the scientists tell us, intense heat, and the Edmonds household bears the scars of many a Vesuvian eruption. In the very early stages of marital bliss, throwing plates at Phil used to be my favourite cathartic expression of annoyance. In the end I gave up. He took to throwing them back, and his line and length were exponentially better than mine.

It is difficult to understand the putatively pernicious influence that wives are alleged to wield on tour. Players whose wives join them are generally in bed by ten o’clock, after a cosy tête-à-tête dinner, or the standard room-service club sandwich, rather than tripping the light fantastic till all hours down at the disco, with the unleashed lads.

In India, Phil would return to the hotel at about 4.30 pm, having bowled thirty-odd overs in the sweltering heat, and fling himself on to the bed looking banjaxed. I was all ready to hit the high spots, such as they were at outposts of the Empire such as Nagpur, but he just unloosened his surgical corset and complained of a violent headache. I ask you, is there any other marriage in the world where the man wears the corsets and contracts the headaches?

Wives’ trips aren’t subsidised, nor even tax-deductible. It is difficult to conceive of any company or organisation which would expect such frequent and lengthy absences from its male employees without making some token contribution to a consort’s travel. Subsidised trips on the cricket front seem, of necessity, to be limited to the egregious members of the Test and County Cricket Board. A piece by Richard Streeton of The Times on 13 January 1986 included the gem that ‘senior officials of the Test and County Cricket Board would be willing to fly to the West Indies to seek personal pledges from heads of government there that England’s forthcoming tour can go ahead’. Willing to fly off to the Caribbean in January? The noble selflessness of it all! No doubt a few more personal pledges will be sought in the apposite way by the appropriate senior officials as the tour progresses. Lord’s may well be the bastion of all that is establishment and reactionary, but surely even at Lord’s they have installed a telephone.

The India tour was a fairly traumatic experience for the team. Mrs Gandhi’s assassination and the ensuing riots with Sikhs murdering Hindus, Hindus murdering Sikhs, and everyone grasping the opportunity to have a go at the odd Muslim, meant that the entire series was in jeopardy from the outset. Being virtually ‘under siege’, and corralled together in the Taj Palace Hotel in Delhi nevertheless generated an excellent team spirit. Worse, however, was yet to come.

The British Deputy High Commissioner in Bombay, Percy Norris, was assassinated the morning after hosting a cocktail party for the team. The murder was officially attributed to some obscure Middle Eastern terrorist outfit, but Phil for one remains convinced that it was a Hindu protest against Sikh militants being allowed to shout their mouths off with impunity in the United Kingdom. A people who lived through Mrs Gandhi’s ‘emergency measures’ might understandably demonstrate a rather nebulous grasp of basic democratic principles, such as freedom of speech. It might well have been difficult for certain Hindus to comprehend that merely because Sikhs were allowed air-time on English television, this did not indicate an official British sanction of what was being said.

There was a degree of concern for the England team’s safety, but practice in the vast Wankhede stadium in Bombay went on regardless. Every player would have been a sitting duck for a strategically placed sniper, and these warm-up sessions became known, not entirely jovially, as ‘Target Practice’.