David Gower (Text Only). David Gower

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СКАЧАТЬ made out (who dryly observed that I was on course to save half a tusk), I managed to raise around £ 16,000 for the cause. It could have been better, but the irony was that my highest score of the season – eighty-odd not out against Middlesex – came at Lord’s when David was there to watch the game as a guest of Joe Hardstaff. I saw him before going into bat, and responded accordingly. I later suggested, not surprisingly, that he come and watch me more often.

      I am also involved in SAVE, a charity that raises money to buy equipment for use in places like Zambia and Zimbabwe. Its headquarters are in New York, but a friend of mine by the name of Nicholas Duncan, who I first met while playing club cricket in Perth in 1977-78, has now started an Australian branch. On England’s last tour to Australia he organized a fund raising dinner, which I spoke at, and I accompanied a party of tourists on a cash gathering mission to Zimbabwe after the tour. The major target for SAVE in Africa, and especially in Zimbabwe, is the black rhino, which is now being poached out of existence. Another integral part of my involvement with wildlife is my interest in photography, but not everyone shoots animals with a Canon. Sadly, the poacher’s rifle is more common. The only rhinos we saw in Zimbabwe on that trip were on a private farm at Imire, an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Harare, where the collection extended to seven orphans. We did not see any in the wild, and their plight is frankly desperate.

      There was a mixture of English and Australians in our party out there, and, inevitably, we had a game of cricket for the ‘Ashes’. We played on an airstrip near one of the tourist camps using a tennis ball, a piece of wood, and a deckchair for the stumps. Yet again, the Australians made off with the Ashes – and guess who was out to a careless shot? Actually, it was an unplayable ball that swung and seamed both ways. That’s my story anyway. The overall story, I suppose, is that I, like the rhino, also wanted to roam a little more freely than people with metaphorical rifles cared to allow. I only hope that the modern game will continue to cater for the occasional free spirit, and that we do not end up with a clone factory for marathon runners and net addicts. Cricket is too rich a sport not to accommodate different types of character – and it would be a shame if players like myself were to become, like the black rhino, an endangered species.

CHAPTER FIVE

       Out of Africa

      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 СКАЧАТЬ