Prologue: Into the Light
1. 100 Not Out
2. 33
3. 208 Not Out
4. 175
5. 116
6. 317
7. 117
8. 165 Not Out
9. 65 Not Out
10. 24
11. 333
12. Absent
13. 175 Not Out
14. 105
15. 215
Afterword: C. H. Gayle Not Out 36
Illustrations
The Records
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
This book is dedicated to all those people out there who have stood with me in the struggle: through the good, the bad and – well, there hasn’t been much ugly. Know from me that you can achieve what you want. Understand too that you should live the life you love, and love the life you live. Thank you to my family, friends and fans. One love.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
A dark hospital room in a foreign country. I am flat on my back, wires and sensors attached to my chest and coming out of my groin. I feel like I’m coming to the surface after a deep dive. My breath is short and my head thick. It takes seconds of blinking and coughing to remember where I am.
All alone. None of those closest to me know I am here. Not my mum, not my dad, not my five brothers or big sister or my best friends. I haven’t told them what’s happening, because I don’t want to worry them. Halfway round the world, they think I’m playing cricket.
The cricket is going on without me. I am in Melbourne, in a ward on Bridge Road, just a lofted six from the giant pylons of the MCG. The rest of the West Indies squad have flown west to Adelaide. I am all alone.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
It started in when I was 16. Feeling a little bit out of breath when I hadn’t done anything to get out of breath about. You feel difficult. It’s like breathing but not breathing. You try to catch the air but it won’t come. You lift up your shirt and with a lurch you can see it, your heart ticking and jumping under the skin.
I ignore it and carry on. A sudden movement, and it knocks on the door again. Breathing but not breathing. The skin ticking and jumping.
There is something wrong with a valve. It scares me thinking about it, so I keep playing cricket as if all is smooth and easy. Playing Test matches, feeling like a king, the World Boss, the Six Machine, only for it to come again and again. I have to stop games, signal to the umpire. Down on my haunches, calling for water. Trying not to show any weakness to the opposition, to the leery bowlers, but inside scared scared scared.
Always in my mind. I speak to the West Indies Cricket Board about it, about getting money for surgery. They are hesitant. I speak to the players’ association; they step in.
We travel round Australia, and my heart haunts every hot mile. We come to Melbourne and I make the decision. I’ve never before had any sort of surgery, never been put to sleep. My team-mates move on and I stay back, all alone.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
So here I am, lying in the hospital bed, a drip in my arm, the heart monitor showing green lines. Wires and patches. I’m not allowed to lift anything or have something to drink. I’m not allowed to move.
I was happiest when I was young, when I was carefree. You don’t know the danger and you don’t know responsibility. As life catches you up there is more and more to it: worries, pressures, bills upon bills.
As a kid you just carry on living. Go out and have fun, play cricket and football in the street, talk about girls, shoot birds for breakfast. You don’t know how free you are. You don’t think about what’s ahead of you. You don’t worry about what’s down the road, where you’re going to be, what you’re going to become. You just think about playing cricket, because that’s all you want to do.
And now I am cheating death.
We have a saying in Jamaica: Use sleep an’ mark death. Sleep foreshadows death. You get warnings in life, and the wise man heeds them.
In that moment I realize I have changed. Looking down at the wires, the patches, my heart no longer jumping under my skin, I make the vow.
From this day on, I’m going to enjoy life endlessly. Whenever – God’s will – I get better, I’m going to do everything to the fullest. No waiting, no hedging, no compromises, no apologies. Night won’t stop me, dawn won’t stop me. Wherever I go, I’m going to have fun.
I call my family. Things start to happen. Jamaicans in the city bring me soup and home-cooked specials. My strength comes back, and the vow remains.
I fly home. On my first night I go straight to a club. On my second night I go to a club. On my third night I can’t remember my second night.
I picture a green graph like the ones I’ve been watching on the cardiograph, except this time showing parties per week rather than heartbeats. In Melbourne I’m flatlining. In Kingston there’s a spike that won’t calm down.
And I have a new philosophy to go with my newly mended heart. Just breathe. Breathe. Get out in the air and breathe.
Define yourself, what you want to do. Breathe and let the stress and anger go. And you will be guided accordingly. Your mind will take you places.
It comes to me naturally. You can’t live in the darkness. You must come into the light.
I’m weird. I’m a weirdo.
You think you know me? You don’t know me.
Yuh cyaan read me. Yuh cyaan study me. Doh’ even try study me.
You think you know Chris Gayle. World Boss. The Six Machine. Destroyer of bowlers, demolisher of records, king of the party scene.
You’re right. You also wrong. I am complicated. I am all you see and much more you don’t. My name in lights, my true self hidden away. Sometime the main man, sometime quiet and chill. Sometime the life and soul, sometime the silent man. Confident. Shy. The joker, the observer. All mouth and sweet talk, all silence and down come the shutters.
I’m a man who can grind out a Test triple century and then do it again, a man who on a different day can smash 100 runs off 30 balls. I have hit more T20 sixes than any other man in history; I have stood invincible on a ground for two days while every one of my team-mates fell. I’ve opened a strip bar in my own house; I’ve started a foundation for poor kids in my home city.
Complicated.
You think you know me? I party harder than any other cricketer yet I’m strong and mighty when the pretenders have retired. I blow big cash on big nights but saved my sweetest payday for my brother’s heart operation. I hate to run and I love to bat. I speak English to the world and patwah with my friends, the kid from the bad part of town who made it good.
People think I’m arrogant. No attitude towards the game of cricket. That I’m facety – rude, disrespectful. That I don’t care about the sport that brought me up, that I only care about the money.
Maybe they misinterpret things. Maybe it’s the way I bat. I play a lot of shots, and sometimes I get out. Maybe they think I don’t care. Maybe that’s how it looks on television, or through the pages of an old coaching manual. I play my shots and I get out. I get out on 40 so they say I don’t care as much as the man who gets out on five.
Trus’ mi, dem nuh know wah dem a chat ’bout.
I play with smiles and good times, so they think I’m not serious about the game. You see me drop a catch and laugh? You take a bad thing and make a joke of it. That’s how you deal with it. That’s me.
Maybe it’s the women. Girls love me. I love the girls. I’m a hot boy. Arrogant? Nah. This is how we do it in Jamaica, up front and honest. No pretending or stalling. And with the girls I’m good – serious good.
Maybe it’s jealousy. I am the Six Machine. Twice as many T20 sixes as the next man, the highest score, the highest average, the most runs. More international one-day centuries than Brian Lara, more Test matches than Ian Botham, more Test catches than Clive Lloyd. I enjoy every day, and I make people happy.
Who wouldn’t want to be me?
That word is right. Complicated. And I am moody. That’s how I am. My disposition can shift like a storm coming down off the Blue Mountains and swirling round the Kingston plains.
In the dressing-room I’m the biggest clown. In the West Indies team I’m the biggest clown. Most guys say I should do a stand-up show. You’re going to laugh. It’s naturally who I am. I love to mess around and I love to run jokes. If I’m in a franchise team and chatting it, players will just kill themselves with laughter. The way I am, really and truly. I talk a lot of crap. I have fun. I make fun of everything.
Catch me in the bars and clubs and I’m alive.
Shot a ’ennessy. Bounty Killer an’ Vybz Kartel an’ Mavado ’pon da sound system. Bashment music. Beenie Man – ‘Di girls dem sugar . . .’
Sometime those shutters come down. Too many blaggers, too many after my money and name. I’m a human being as well. I have to keep a piece of me for myself. Sometime I’ll have to say, sorry, I can’t take a photo now. You take millions of photos, sign everything in sight, but for that one particular person, you’re the worst person in the world. They might be a fan but they’ll change into a hater. They wouldn’t understand. People get the wrong concept of you, until they get close.
Because no one gave it to me. Everything I have came through the fight. Coming up hard, coming up hungry. From a young age I’m one of the hardest workers in the game of cricket, something amazing that you wouldn’t believe. Most people don’t even know me like that. But once you get close and talk to me you realize: you’re meeting a total different concept, in every way.
Everybody will talk. Everyone will have something to say. Just know in life you will never please everyone. Even when you score a triple century. There will be someone out there who won’t be happy for you, and won’t be happy you get 300. Maybe they want you to get 400. And they still wouldn’t be happy.
Most of my career I’ve spent time looking out for people, and sometime what do you get in return? A slap in the face. Not everyone is appreciative of what you have done for them. So I’m learning. Now I think, it’s your life, and you live it as you want. You have to satisfy yourself first and then others after, for in these days and times no one will look out for you. Try to please someone else and you will lose your true self in the trying.
As a youngster coming up I’ve been facing those things all my days. I know it won’t stop. This is where I am. That’s the way of living, and just understand it. And know not to take it on, because what can you do?
Jus’ breathe. Breathe. Get out in the air an’ breathe. Define yourself, what you want to do. Breathe an’ let the anger go.
It can be hard for me, but it’s become a natural part of my life. We have to deal with it. And don’t get me wrong. It is good fun being me. Runs and girls. Partying across the continents, seeing bowlers shake and stutter. Big nights and big bats and bigger sixes. World Boss and Six Machine. Oh, such fun! And they all know that. They all know that . . .
I wake up before the sun. Rollington Town, east side of Kingston, half a mile or so from the coast, Sabina Park a mile to the west. Cockerels loosening their throats, not always waiting till dawn shows his nose.
Birds chirp in the trees. From the chalk factory next door the rumble of machinery. From inside this small bedroom, grunts and snores. Two single beds, five kids: sister Michelle in one, four brothers sharing the other and the floor below. We know the sleeping pattern, whose turn it is for springs and whose for cold concrete. Maybe little Wayney will go next door with Mum and Dad, curl up on the chair and leave a little more room for his bigger siblings.
I wait for the next noise, the one that will soundtrack the sticky day through to dusk: the sound of ball hitting zinc fence. Somewhere, every second, someone is bowling and someone is batting. Street, yard, tennis ball, compress ball. A bat made from bamboo, shared around, stumps chalked on the corrugated iron.
A yawn and a pace outside. Breeze-block walls, wooden boards or flapping cloths over the windows, more corrugated zinc up on the roof, held in place with lumps of concrete. Pale pink paint and faded turquoise. The bathroom in the yard, the step up to it another loose breeze-block.
Into the kitchen, narrow and dark, one wash basin and more concrete in slabs, big cooking pots on either side. Maybe there’ll be water, maybe there won’t. Have we matched up to the bills? Maybe I’ll have to take a bucket and see if there’s an unguarded tap up the road, a hose that somebody forgot to tuck away.
I’m a skinny boy. Just as well. This is a house built for the slight and silent – one storey, sectioned into thirds, a family in each. All of us number one, us the ‘C’ part. Soon Marlene in ‘B’ will turn on her television, and I can watch in secret through a crack in the wall.
Past the zinc fence and into the quiet street. Only stray dogs and cats on the move, slinking into bushes and under beaten-up cars jacked up on bricks. The bottom end of St James Road, just wide enough for a car and a half, pot-holes and weeds taking over. Turn right and it bends round the corner into Preston Road, turn left and it opens up the tight grid of streets beyond – Fernandez Avenue running east–west, Van Street further on, Giltress Street one more on. All small and narrow and dusty, more lights showing now if they’ve stretched to the bills for the electric. Lots of trees, because Kingston is a green city as well as a tough one. Looming over us to the east, steep and dark and forested, the Wareika Hills, where bad men go to hide out.
I stand and stretch. Directly opposite, five quick steps across the bumpy concrete, is a hole in a wall, the secret passage leading to my favourite place in the world: the cricket ground.
The family behind. Father Dudley, already 50 years old when I was born, raised in St Thomas out on the south-eastern tip of Jamaica, into the capital like so many other rural boys to look for work. Mother Hazel, running the ship. Wayne, three years younger than me, Andrew three years older. That’s the Gayles. Then Michelle Crew, four years before Andrew, from a different relationship of Mum’s, and Michael Crew, nine years older than me. Two more brothers, Lyndon Johnson and Vanclive Paris, from Mum’s side again, both old enough to be away working.
The rest of us all jam-pack into 1C. We have our little differences coming up, have our fights, a talk here and there. It’s tight. Andrew and Wayne louder than me, no one louder than Michael Crew. Anywhere.
Michael Crew is like no one else. Natural talent with a cricket bat, natural talent with the good times. So the first sound in the room each morning is Michael Crew coming back from a party at five o’clock, into our bedroom, onto the floor. His cricket kit is already left at the club from the night before. Preparation. At seven o’clock he will spring awake and stroll over to the ground to play. All he might drink will be a beer left over from the night before. Warm beer for breakfast, then go out there and smoke the bowling. He will hope Dad is on the late shift, because Dad is a policeman at Harman Barracks on East Queen Street in the middle of town, and if he’s been on the overnights he’ll be coming in at the same time as the night-clubbers, and if he’s on the earlies he won’t take pleasure in being woken before the hot and dusty beat calls.
We look out for one another. In the struggle coming up, that’s the way it has to be. We bicker but we watch each other’s backs.
You might think your mum has favourites. If she want something to cook and you have to go to the shop to buy, she’ll call one particular name all the time. ‘Christopher? Com ’ere!’ And so you say, hey excuse me, he’s not doing anything, why you calling me? Why can’t she do it? And she say, ‘If yuh nah go to shop, yuh nah getting anyting fi eat.’ So you have to cry and suck it up, and get to the shop and walk. If she’s going to the market on a Saturday, you don’t want to go there. Early in the morning, 6 a.m., carrying the bags. ‘Please doh be me today . . .’
Strict? We get hit with anything she grabs. It’s not so much the crime, it’s if you get caught. Then you’re getting it. One time I said something under my breath about liking my dad more. She heard. Licks followed. Proper licks. As she beat me she say, ‘Yuh like yuh dad more? How ’bout now? An’ now?’
As a youngster you know when you’re going to get beaten. You don’t want to go in the house. You wait until late, late, late. You don’t even go for your dinner. You stay by the neighbours’ house a long time, but you can’t hide. Di morning yuh wake up, sun be over you, yuh get a beatin’ same way. Sometimes you just got to man up and take it. Get it over.
I get licks with slippers, the broomstick. Trust me, you name it. Proper licks. As soon as she loses her grip, you run. You gone. I never try to retaliate. Just take your licks, because that’s the respect you have for your family. You can’t raise your hand. You try it, you get more beaten. Keep it simple, keep your eyes shut and your teeth clenched.
People think we grow up in Jamaica on rice and peas. Maybe in some other parts of town. Rice and peas is the Sunday treat, maybe with yam on the side. Rice and peas is out of reach on a normal day, because the coconut cream and the bacon you need to cook it proper are also out of reach. Saturday you look forward to, because Saturday might mean chicken foot soup. The other five days you hope. You hope, because sometimes dinner is just a ball of flour and water, squashed into a puck, fried and served with a lump of margarine on top. You don’t forget that, once you’ve eaten it for a while. You don’t forget those hard dry pucks at the end of a long hot day. Yuh don’ know struggle till yuh live dis life.
Birthdays come and go. There are no cards and no cake, not where we come from. A birthday jus’ another day you hungry.
You learn instead to await the seasons. You look forward to the rain coming in May, and then again and much harder in September and October, when it is sticky and humid all day long, because then you can play in the rain, and when the tropical storms strike and the water is pouring off the roof like a wall, then you are even happier, because that is how you shower. And you can run into the yard for your bucket and pots and pans and try to grab as much as you can, because the bills come round too fast. We all learn to improvise. When the electricity gets cut for the same reason, lots of families hook up to the overhead wires to take it for free, bridge-lighting, not safe and definitely not legal but often the only way. We make bottle torches, filling a beer empty with kerosene and jamming a rag or roll of paper in the neck. A dangerous game, but we all need a light in the darkness sometimes.
Christmas is the big deal. Christmas is the big one. Because Christmas you’re going to get a good meal. Not just one meat kind but sometimes, if you can afford it, two – some chicken, maybe some ham too. I used to look forward to that ham all year. I’d eat it alone even now. Two meat kind on yuh plate! You wished every day could be Christmas, so that every day you could have meat on your plate.
Someone boils up a Caribbean speciality called Sorrel. Ginger, sliced thin. Cloves. Dried sorrel buds. All in a pan with water, to the boil, then cover it and let it alone to steep over Christmas Eve. Strain it off, pour it over ice. Maybe a little lime juice, definitely some sugar, maybe a little rum for the adults. A deep red, a sweet taste.
The smell of Sorrel is the smell of Christmas. The sound of Christmas is firecrackers in the street. Getting the older boys to buy some from Mr Lenny’s shop on the corner of Fernandez Avenue. Out in the street, lighting the clappers, throwing them and running like a duppy, a ghost, chasing you. You’ll hear the entire street going off – duh-duh-duh-duh – and then the entire city. Duh-duh-duh-duh! Leaping around, fingers in ears, lighting more, throwing more. All the way from Christmas to New Year, you have to have something to light.
I am still a quiet boy. I don’t say much. I watch and I listen and I learn. I see Dad go out to work with a whistle rather than a gun, a small man, and already I am growing tall. He is a foot shorter than his own father, and the genes seem to have jumped a generation. From Dad there is no sport. He has never held a cricket bat. He has never played a match. Without me being aware of it, he has already given me enough of a gift: before he settled with my mum, a lady friend from the old days who had moved to England wanted so much for him to join her that she sent him the fare from Kingston to Birmingham. When he returned it she sent it again. When he returned that too she sent it a third time. Three tempters outside off stump, and he refused to play a shot at any of them. And so I grow up next to a cricket ground in tropical Jamaica, rather than in cold and wet England. I play outside every minute of the warm day rather than being trapped inside by the wind and sleet. If you’re going to be short of money for bills, better be so in a country where no one needs heating. If you’re going to be hungry each day, better be so on a street where you can climb mango trees to grab a little extra, or jump the neighbour’s fence to smash and grab on their ackee tree for more.
Outside is where we want to be. Running races down the street. Football on the corners, this end of the road against that one. Making bingie catapults and firing stones at the birds in the trees in the hope of bagging a little skinny meat for the plate later on.
Our first wicket: bowl with your back to the zinc fence, stumps on the wall opposite. About 10 feet in length, the ball pitching on the lumpy street, perfect for working your reactions. That sound of ball pinging off fence – four if you drill it along the ground, six if it hits flush, but out if you clear it entirely. Pushing a ball into the toe of an old sock that’s no longer fit for service, tying the other end to a branch and just hit it hit it hit it.
There are other thrills. Riding the bus out to Norman Manley Airport to watch the big planes bumping down and roaring away. A morning trip to Hope Botanical Gardens, north on Mountain View Road past the floodlights of the National Stadium, turn right on Old Hope Road rather than the left that takes you to Bob Marley’s old house. Bumper cars and a little zoo. Lion could be meagre, doh matter. We seeing a lion!
This is my world. And the centre of it is through that little hole in the wall opposite the house: Lucas Cricket Club.
Lucas Cricket Club, 100 years old. Lucas Cricket Club, the first in the country where poor black men could play the ruling whites. Lucas Cricket Club, the starting point for so many, the schooling ground, the scruffy university of the beautiful game. Lucas, the reason I made it in cricket, the reason I escaped.
Nobody knows who made the hole in the wall. You could climb up and over, but the wriggle through is easier. And then you are onto the outfield – not a pristine rolled green like you might find in England or Australia, but a lot of dry dirt and sand and little patches and smears of tired grass in between. There are trees around the boundary, shade trees planted by the government 60 years before, and there are more zinc fences, marking the back of more one-storey sections, dirty red where the rust has kicked in and sometime whitewashed to smarten them up and break the monotony.
The wicket is another Jamaican speciality. Rolled brown mud, not a blade of grass on it, wetted and rolled and wetted and rolled until it looks and plays like polished stone, the strip cut north to south so no batsman is ever playing directly into the sun. The scoreboard is wooden and rickety, a low black-painted platform with the big white letters marking the total, the wickets fallen, the target score and the overs completed. On top a tall board with numbers 1 to 11 running vertically down, an old rusted ladder leaning against it so boys can shin up and keep each batsman’s tally up to date. I love scoring the board when the games are running. If I get to score the book, even better. Definitely worth getting in early for.
The pavilion is a mustard-coloured concrete block in the south-west corner, just in that bend from St James Road to Preston Road. The pillars are painted pale blue, and so are the metal security grilles that are locked down when only the bad men are about and hunting the bats in the storeroom or the bottles of rum in the small bar. In front of it, under a tin-roofed veranda, is a concrete terrace, the ideal place for pick-up games with just a bat and wet tennis ball so it skids on high and fast. There are no other buildings and there are no seats, just the thick grey boundary rope and the grass under the trees beyond. Nets? One concrete strip on the far side, looking east, nothing around it but grass and dust. Our nets have no nets.
George Headley, one of the finest of all West Indian batsmen, learned his skills here. Frank Worrell, the first black man to captain the islands’ Test team, finished his career on the same wicket. Now it is me, and I am raw talent. Doesn’t seem to matter that Dad can’t catch and Mum never dug in a stump – I can just pick up a bat and play. Something is naturally there, just as it’s there in Michael Crew, and in Andrew, and later in Wayne. Michelle too. From barren soil all of us can play. All of us have the gift; given a bat and a moving ball, we can make the sweetest of contacts.
I’m always a leftie, and I’m always bowling right-handed. That’s just the way it comes. I can bat right-handed, and I can still make that sweet contact, but leftie feels so natural only a fool would question it. Six brothers, three left-handers, three right-handers. A well-balanced line-up from Mum. What a six-a-side team we would make! Perfect combinations all the way through.
Maybe it was unavoidable. It was like growing up next to the Maracanã, and being allowed to play football on the pitch whenever we wanted. St Andrews, and having the run of the Road Hole. You start life with the game in your eyes, and you have to get involved, because it is all around you every day. Each morning, the same start: look out at Lucas an’ see if anyone about. Elder brothers playing. Friends playing. Every kid in Rollington Town. And so everything that goes with it becomes instinctive as well: feeling so at ease with a cricket bat and a ball that you carry them wherever you go, whether being taken for a haircut up the road or sent to Mr Lenny’s for flour, hanging around the scoreboard hoping to carry up the numbers, hanging round the pavilion to see if you can blag the job of pushing the water cart out to the players when the drinks break calls. And when I use that bat, the reaction from anyone nearby is always the same: ‘Oi-yoi! Yuh time dat ball so sweet for a young skinny kid!’
You might think us lucky to have one of the great spiritual homes of West Indian cricket on our doorstep. Well, we don’t. We have two. Off that bottom corner of St James Road, maybe 50 metres from my shared bedroom, is Kensington Cricket Club – the Everton FC to our Liverpool, just the width of Preston Road separating it from Lucas, no more than an underarm throw from one pavilion to the other. So close, and so far apart, the fiercest of rivals. The home of fearsome fast bowler Patrick Patterson, famous for his ‘perfume ball’ – the delivery that passes so close to the batsman’s nose that he can smell the leather. The home of Wavell Hinds, who I will open with so many times for the West Indies. Beat Kensington and all the empty bottles from the celebrations will be thrown over the road from one outfield to the other. Lose and they will send back their own.
You cannot escape it. Cricket is like a father to me, there from birth. And I love it back because I am good at it.
Cricket in the air, cricket in every view. Sometimes there’s trouble when we transgress from outfield onto cut strip. At the centre of Lucas is a man named George Watson – player, chairman, groundsman, security all rolled into one. He may as well be the owner of the club because he’s so protective, and he is on to us all the time. Everyone is scared of him. Doesn’t matter who you are – he fight you, he beat you. He is married to my aunt, but don’t think that gets me special treatment. If ‘Sorro’ catch you – and he spots you so easy we think he’s got 10 eyes – you got to go, because he’s coming for you with some big stones, and that man has got an arm that’s fierce strong and nasty accurate. So we leave someone on lookout duty for him, and as soon as his bicycle is spotted, his legs pumping on it, the shout goes out – ‘Tek ’way yuh self!’ – and we scarper. And because they can’t afford to have the hole in the wall patched up, we are back as soon as his tyres disappear back inside or up the road.
A little gang of us has grown, from St James Road and Preston Road and then Jackson Road and Madison Avenue running up the east side of Lucas and Fernandez Avenue completing the square around the ground to the north. There is Kevin Murray, nice with bat in hand. There is Popeye, and there is Rambo and Tiddler, and there is Fanny-Boy, and all you need to know about Fanny-Boy is that he has that name because his mum is called Fanny. All of us tight, none tighter than me and John Murphy. We do it together: pulling out lumps of clay from the outfield when the rainy season churns it up, making gun shapes out of it and chasing each other round the pavilion. Playing ninjas, jumping over walls, stealing ackees, grabbing mangoes. Serious fun.
Together we head off to Rollington Town primary school, left out of my house and two streets north. At three storeys high it is the tallest building in the low-lying district, the same pale blue and yellow as Lucas, and the other critical institution in our young lives. A fence around it topped with barbed wire, and then inside a quadrangle with the names and faces of great Jamaicans painted on the wall – Alexander Bustamante, Norman Manley, Marcus Garvey. Wooden slats for windows rather than glass, the multiplication tables for each number inscribed beneath them so you can’t miss the education even if you wanted to.
We start early, in for register at 7.30 a.m., so if Dad is on the earlies we get ready together. He doesn’t wear a uniform unless he’s on the beat, so it’s me looking smart, in khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt, the same as all kids across the city. The big excitement of the early morning comes with the government truck stopping by to let off supplies of milk and Nutribun, a special bread roll dosed up with protein and energy to get the kids through the day. We love those trucks. As a youngster in Grade One you time the truck every morning and every minute you want to be the one who actually helps unload it. If you miss out on unloading, you compete to push the trolleys up to the rooms, because occasionally you might get a free milk or a free bun. Everyone loves Nutribun something special. It is the unofficial national dish for kids, and when you have to run home for your lunch and your lunch is only cornmeal porridge, you love them even more. Some of the milk might make it home with your dad, and maybe a bulla too – a simple little flat pastry, another Jamaican staple, to throw down the hatch at express pace.
The school knows we like to run free and it imposes its rules upon us. On the blue-and-yellow-painted gates is a hand-drawn code of conduct, 15 red NOs to warn you before you enter: NO bare feet, NO explicit language, NO shouting. NO exposed undergarments, NO midriff blouse skirt, NO hair rollers. NO weapons allowed.
Inside it is just as strict. In Grade Two we have a teacher named Mrs McKenzie. She is feared not only because she is strict but because she backs it up with a t’ick belt, a huge leather one that she wears around her waist not for holding her dress in place but for dishing out the hurt. Her big thing is you coming into her class after lunch break with sweaty clothes. So when you come back in from your break, she’ll go around and check your back to see if your shirt is wet. And if your shirt is wet, off come the belt, back go the arm and smack! Yuh get spank on yuh back!
She love to hit you on the back. So what we learn to do when we’re playing is take off our shirt and put it aside and run around half naked. And then two minutes before it is time to go back to class, everyone will try to dry off – flashing our shirts around, blowing on each other’s backs, making sure everything is in order. When that doesn’t always work, we come up with a strategy: if it do happen that we go into class and your shirt is actually wet, put a school book down your back. She’ll still lick you, but this time when she’s hitting she’s hitting a book. And then we fake the reaction – ‘Aaaagh! No miss, no!’ An’ wiggle an’ grimace an’ screaming out fi her to stop. And when she looks the other way we will turn around and smile and wink and laugh.
I take a liking to English and to social studies, geography, history. Maths I struggle with, although of course I have a soft spot for the numbers four and six, and I know that two hurts a bowler more than one, that four hurts him more and six hurts a bowler more than he can bear.
The education that counts comes from a special lady, a teacher named Miss Hamilton.
She is not my grade teacher, but she coaches cricket and football, and in each other we rapidly understand there is promise and knowledge. She soon spots that I don’t like to run, that I will just hit it to the fence so I can save my energy. I spot that she can bowl and bat as well as any man.
The playground gritty asphalt. Although they have painted sections of the breeze-block wall green and blue and red there is nothing pretty about it, a few palm trees leaning over from one side and the wires from the telegraph poles getting in the way of any lofted hits. No shade and certainly no chance of a true bounce, but that tightens our reflexes still further. When Miss Hamilton comes in with her full pace, you are ducking and swaying like those palms in a November hurricane.
She puts out cones for us to shuttle through, in and out, working our agility, rearranging them and telling us to clip our shots precisely between them. She teaches us the long barrier when the ball comes to you fast in the field and how to soften up your hands for the catch when it comes in the air. She hangs a ball in an old stocking of hers to make it come further and faster than in the sock, making us move our feet according to the swing and angle, stepping into it to drive and keeping the head still when it comes in sharply to our skinny legs.
They talk about the strength of a woman. Miss Hamilton teaches me that too. She understands everything about the technical side of the game, and she makes all of it fun. She knows I can bat, and she knows I have rough edges. Because of my hand–eye coordination, because I can hit it so well, I don’t bother moving across to the ball. I’m tall and lanky so I can reach out and send it away. She knows too that it’s a cultural thing, that all Caribbean kids do it because the big stars do it, going back to calypso cricket. We’re thinking, why do we need to bother with this when the big names are not?
There are shouting matches. They finish 10-0 to her. Because of my height she makes me her centre-back in the football team, but I won’t run: even if I have the ball and there is no striker on me I will call my team-mate over to clear the ball for me. She lets me off because I will bring her a nice glass of fruit punch at half-time.
And 25 years later I still call on her. I still call her Miss Hamilton when I do.
Each day becomes all about sport from sunrise to bed. As soon as you come in from school, you put down your bag and head straight back out onto the Lucas field. Your parents might want you to stay back and pay more attention at school. But it is a big cricket field, there is football and cricket action, and you can’t wait to reach it. So that’s it – you jump the wall, you’re gone to play. Only when Mum calls you in for a good tea do you come, a treat like fried-egg sandwich or maybe even stewed peas, beautiful and hot with steam coming off it. But we don’t eat together. I want to play cricket so as soon as the food is finished I’m gone. As soon as I eat I’m out of the house until late.
Brothers will sometime fight. When you get your own bamboo bat, and something goes wrong in your innings that you think is right, you take your bat and take it away and say the game is finished, because you want the best of everything. Brothers follow you with mouths wailing and fists flying. Sometime you come back with bruises, and Mum grab one and Dad grab one and say, I tell you not to fight, and your mum beats you on top of it as well. Unbelievable. Double blow.
But most of the time we are free to run. This is the Caribbean, and there are no limits on where we go and what time we have to be back. Trust kids to play out. There are so many of us, what harm could come? No child is staying indoors, not when so few have televisions. All the fun is outside.
So many different games. Mama Lashie a favourite. One boy get a stick, he plays the mama. His stick plays the lashie. If he catches you, you get licks. You have the whole of Lucas and the whole of Kensington outfields to run and hide, and run you will, because Mama Lash wants to lick you good. All the kids in the grid of streets playing, all running from the lash. If him catch yuh, yuh get lick. You just don’t let him get you. Once you’re running, you don’t stop running. And di lick a pain into yuh heart, it no a play lick. It wail up yuh skin. Real Mama Lashie.
Stuckie is another simple one. Stuckie for Stuck and Pull. Two sides, as many players as you want. You have to get back to your base, and they have to stop you. If they touch you, you’re stuck on the spot, and only your partner can pull you free.
You pick mangoes from trees when the owner is looking elsewhere. If someone has some bottles at the back of the house, you jump the wall and grab them as well, because you can take them back to Mr Lenny’s or Lecky’s on the opposite corner and get a few cents for the deposit. It’s a two-man job: one is on the lookout, one is up the tree. I’m never the climber. I’m the lookout; I’ve got the height. There are two main flaws. Sometimes someone gets stuck up the tree – di lookout see someone com’, him a gone, you still stuck up tree . . . Second flaw: you hear the rattle of the dog chain. Then you better get out. No stealth getaway. Better jump a fence fas’!
Every cent we can find we spend on food. Up to Mr Lenny’s, his shop painted sunshine yellow with a green door, Jamaica colours, up to Lecky’s store and bakery, the exterior walls bands of purple and yellow and green paint; on the yellow, hand-painted in square block capitals, ‘Home of the famous Lecky’s CRUST & CHEESE’.
It’s a treat to dream of. A thick fold of pastry, dyed yellow by egg yolk and turmeric, wrapped around a big chunk of cheese the same colour. Sit out on the rusty metal chairs on the terrace when the iron security grilles are opened up and pulled back, take shade under the parasol and blow your fingers as the heat from the crust burns the tips and sizzles on your tongue.
We make a drink called suck-suck. Mix up fruit syrup with water, maybe lemon or cherry or strawberry. Pour it into little clear plastic bags, tie each one up, freeze it. Your own bag-juice. Take it out when time is hot, go and sell it on the street for funds or take them back to Lucas, drinking in the shade of the scoreboard.
Best of all is when we run a boat. You might call it a cook-out, or a barbecue. We run a boat. Under the big shade tree at the deep-midwicket boundary, making a pit from a few stones and rocks with firewood burning inside, pot on top. Everybody will trump up and put some money together, see if we can stretch to some curried chicken back or dumpling, real rich persons’ food. You might break off to go to the wicket to bat. Between overs the smell is drifting over and tickling your nose and stomach. You shout out. ‘How far da boat reach?’ When will it be ready?
At times we want to run a boat but we don’t have the funds. If it’s a weekend we might wake early, go out with our bingie slingshots made from a nice bit of elastic and y-shaped piece of wood and see what we can find perched in the trees around the boundary. There might be ground doves or squits, the best stones or a choice marble saved for the biggest birds. There is a knack to it that only some have – creeping up quiet, get as close as possible. If you have it, like John Murphy, you’re known as a marksman. Me? I’m no good. If I make any contact I’ve done well. Only one time do I ever shoot one out of the air, and then not only is it a nice big pigeon but it comes from a Kensington tree as well. One-shot wonder!
You might have to hop a fence to pick up your bird. You might have to stare down a guard dog to grab it, and then fly like the winged beauty you’ve just downed to get away from that dog without him downing you. When you do, what a breakfast! Seasoned up like chicken, fried up with bread, a crispy bird in your stomach to set you up for what’s ahead.
We hustle in the streets to get some money. Unguarded backyards aren’t the only places you can find empty bottles. They’re there in the Lucas pavilion as well, only you have to get past George Watson and his 10 eyes to reach them.
John Murphy is the brave one. He’s the one who jumps the fence while I keep the lookout. If we have success, we can run a boat. If we just grab a few, it’ll be a crust and cheese or maybe sneaking into the movie theatre for the big picture.
But Sorro loves to fight. And Sorro knows that when our water is cut off we sometimes take our buckets to the cricket club taps, and sometimes we even stretch his hose from the pavilion to our house and hope he doesn’t spot us.
Now George Watson is a good man. An aggressive man, but a lovely man. He’ll look out for you too. He will be influential in my career, pushing me in the club, helping me to play at the highest level. Him also know everybody afraid a him. And he is the man who knows the spot where we hide.
When he catches you he gives you hell. He rides at you with his bicycle. He locks you up in the changing-room. Then he lets you go, and as you race past he beat you with anything to hand – a switch, a stick, a stray front pad. Lock up four or five, me an’ Wayne an’ Tiddler, pull the grille an’ you have fi run pas’ da switch.
All the while, you eat, you sleep, you get up and you play cricket again. And now my cricket is serious as well as my easy passion.
I’m still skinny. The muscles won’t come till later. My bat a light one. But the timing is still there too. I can pick up the line of the ball as soon as it leaves the bowler’s fingers. My head just knows where to go, and my arms and hands follow and then the bat. So I caress the ball away. I ease it through the ‘V’ between mid-on and mid-off. I’m not lumping it over the ropes, I’m persuading it. I have confidence in my ability, and when you have confidence you can persuade anything to do whatever you want.
I discover that I can bat and bat and bat. I can just carry on when others get tired or bored or make mistakes and get out. If I turn sideways I’m so lanky I almost disappear, but when I’m at the crease I’m like a brick wall.
We’ll play from morning straight back to it gets dark. Cricket early, then you play football, then you switch back again. Always busy, every day.
Sometimes you’ll bat on the concrete in front of the pavilion, sometimes in the nets that don’t have nets. There are always people to bowl to you, but it’s not every day you’re going to bat, so you grow to love the other side of it, and I become a bowling freak too. Of course! I don’t want to be standing around with nothing to do, I want to be involved all the time. At school I’ll open out fast with the new ball, then when the shine come off I’ll continue to bowl spin – some off spin to start, some authentic leg spin to monkey with their minds. I will bowl straight through the innings. One end is basically mine. I control it. And I field first slip at the other end, and then I’m opening the batting.