Under a Croatian Sun (22 page)

T
he following week, we had another cricket meeting. By now the would-be players had watched England
vs
India on the hotel television (the only TV in the village with Sky) and they were all excited.

Until we had registered the club, however, we weren’t allowed to bring any equipment in, so the first thing to do was to get ourselves registered, and this gave us our first problem. In Croatian, Cs are pronounced like C for Cedar, and so ‘cricket’ would be pronounced ‘sricket’. So, after considerable discussion, the members decided that the club should be called
The Sir William Hoste Kriket Klub
(SWHKK) and our motto:
‘Remember Nelson’
, Hoste’s battle cry. (Their idea, not mine.)

‘But will they allow us to set up a cricket club?’ asked one of the group.

‘Why on earth not, and who’s “they”?’ I asked.

‘You can’t start a club up just like that, I’m afraid,’ said Luka.
‘You have to apply to be registered.’ He went on to explain that under communism you couldn’t just start up Scottish dancing clubs, Michael Jackson fan clubs, lesser-spotted warbler watching associations and Tommy Cooper appreciation societies whenever you felt like it. The authorities had looked on clubs as sources of counter-revolutionary activity, so starting one had been made as difficult as possible. Even once approved, club get-togethers would be closely monitored by the Secret Police. Of course, get-togethers featuring generals saluting ranks of proletarian mothers wearing five children medals and marching behind phalanxes of missile-bearing tanks were OK, but for anything else you had to apply to the relevant Ministry. (Imagine having to ask permission to start a village cricket club in Yorkshire. That kind of thing could bring down a government.)

‘We just had to put up with it,’ said Luka. ‘That’s what happens when government theory gets bigger than the people.’

‘I never minded the theory so much,’ said Sinisa, the geography teacher. ‘That was just one other annoying political irritant. What I minded were all those damned policemen on every corner.’

Once we had got ourselves registered, I rang everyone I could think of to ask for equipment, and the response was terrific. When the parcels arrived, I took them down to Luka’s and the club members opened them up excitedly. I was whisked back in time. A Gunn and Moore, a Tom Graveney County Pro, even a Colin Cowdrey Truespot! And the smell of Blanco when we unwrapped the pads filled me with the happiness of Proust getting a whiff of his
madeleines
. I was sixteen again.

‘What do we need these big things for?’ asked Sinisa, holding up my nephew’s old pads. I helped him strap them on and he lumbered round the table. ‘I cannot run!’ he declared.

‘Do the other players try to hit your legs with their bats?’ asked another.

‘No they don’t,’ I laughed, ‘but a ball on your leg can be just as painful.’

‘Hah!’ said Sinisa dismissively. ‘We do not need such things. I am sure the men of Nelson also did not fear a small red ball!’

‘You wait until you get the first one on your shin,’ I said. ‘You’ll see!’

I thought I’d better leave it a day or two before telling them about the boxes.

As we needed more players, I asked Zvonko’s son Icho if he’d like to join us. I’d seen him heaving their boat about like a plaything and I could picture his massive arms making smashing drives and slinging down fizzing swingers. I assumed he’d have heard about the cricket from his friends who were members, but he said that, although everyone knew about our meetings, no one knew what they were about. Luka was right. They were embarrassed.

Icho had wanted to try his hand at a new sport, he told me. His fiancée’s old boyfriend was a policeman who belonged to a football-playing crowd, and as Icho was rubbish at football he thought that, if he could show some form in another sport, it might help to get her away from the football-playing policeman whom he suspected she was still seeing.

So we had another recruit, even though he wasn’t exactly joining for the right reason. But what the heck. Brawn is useful in any sport, and with Icho in the club we’d be up to nine. I had a soft spot for Icho, too. I think he had a tough time at home. Zvonko’s idea of raising sons seemed to be to treat them like fruit trees – prune them back hard and you’ll get a sturdier specimen – and I’d never once heard him
praising Icho to his face. If he was good at cricket, it might give him a bit of confidence.

The lessons on the municipal tennis courts took place four days a week, and I must admit: once you’re over fifty, practising for two hours in the heat of the afternoon with an over-enthusiastic group of young men takes it out of you. But I loved every moment of it. I could hear the voice of my games master every time I called out: ‘Keep your head down! – Follow through! – Knee forward! – Watch the ball!’ And how rewarding to see them experiencing for the first time that terrific sensation of hitting the ball just right. I dare say many will go to their graves never having known the feeling, but take it from me, when you get the ball smack in the middle of your bat with a well-timed stroke and it rockets off the blade like a sprung projectile, it’s one of the most exhilarating sensations in the world.

It has to be said that perfect strokes like this weren’t happening that often on the municipal tennis courts. One would think that the skill of hitting a ball would come naturally to Homo Erectus, but it seems it doesn’t. Domigoy made extraordinary windmill motions, Icho waved the bat about like a semaphore flag and Bozo kept letting it fly out of his hands. It would either whiz like an Assegai spear straight at my head or skim like a whirling boomerang across the court until it found someone’s legs.

As for the bowling, there were four who showed distinct promise: two fast ones (Petar and Luka) and two spinners (Sinisa and Filip). The star performer was Petar, who, at six foot five and weighing in at two hundred pounds, was already throwing down some pretty dangerous stuff.

I had tried to recruit Marin, thinking that with his agile build he’d be a pretty good all-rounder, but he insisted that the others
wouldn’t want a Bosnian on their team. Knowing what I did about inter-racial friction by then, I didn’t insist, but three weeks later something made him change his mind, and he asked if he could come along to one of the practices.

On the day, he hung around at the back of the court for twenty minutes watching Petar, and, when he took up a bat, my talent as a scout was vindicated. He moved like a panther and within half an hour he was able to size up almost any ball and get his bat to it.

As our coaching sessions started in the middle of the afternoon, and the heat was fair bouncing up off the hard red earth, by the time we finished we were pouring with sweat and desperate for a drink. We repaired to Zoran’s, who had let us turn his small back room into something approximating a changing room. It’s amazing how quickly a few sweaty men, clammy T-shirts, smelly socks, old shoes, soggy towels, half-eaten apples and packets of cigarettes can turn anywhere into a most frightful black hole of Calcutta, but the familiar smells brought me comfortingly back to the pavilions of West Sussex.

During the drinking, I was able to find out more about the players. Those in their forties, like Bozo, Sinisa and Filip, had resigned themselves to island life, but the younger ones all wanted to leave. Like most young men, they wanted to move to the city and seek fame and fortune. An islander’s life was pretty basic and everything still revolved around the land, they complained. The land had to be tilled, planted, pruned and weeded, and there were roofs to repair, wells to dig and old machinery to be kept working, they told me. Their fathers and grandfathers might have known how to do all this, but they didn’t, and, anyway, they had an education and shouldn’t have to be stuck with that kind of existence.

I took our drinking time as another opportunity to explain
the intangible side of the game to them – that it wasn’t just a matter of the play; it was also about an attitude, a particular way of behaving, a sense of belonging to a group of fellow-minded blokes. To demonstrate this, I told them about W.G. Grace and Jack Hobbs, who in their different ways epitomised the spirit of the game – W.G., the amateur, the robust rogue, the British Bulldog, the heavy drinker who would turn up at the last minute in his tweeds and brogues and smash his way through the opposition bowling. Jack Hobbs, on the other hand, was an entirely different player, I explained. Modest, respectable, sober, he was an example of the ordinary man who could do exceptional things when he had to – and I brought along my
Wisden
to show them that Hobbs still held the record for the number of centuries scored in first-class cricket – 197. (For film buffs, this was a jackpot question in the quiz of
Slumdog Millionaire.
)

Some of the players were inveterate Walter Wolf smokers and they asked if it would affect their play. As I didn’t know, I rang a member of my old pub team (every club has their know-alls, and Peter was ours). ‘Tell them not to worry,’ said Peter. ‘Hobbs, Hammond and Hutton were all great smokers.’

You could hear the sighs of relief when I relayed the information.

I was also asked about food, but all I could tell them was that Mike Gatting was the only player I knew of who’d managed to keep to a sensible diet through his long career, and his stomach was there as proof of it.

The attitude of both the young and the old to their home life I found something of an eye-opener. After drinking, they would all go home and sit in an armchair with the paper or in front of the television, and from that vantage point watch their wives or mothers doing the housework, the cooking and probably the
children’s homework as well. That their wives and mothers had probably spent the day working just as hard as them never seemed to cross their minds.

In defence of the male population, I did occasionally hear some of them discussing the best way to cook certain dishes, so perhaps the idea of men in the kitchen was catching on – but it certainly hadn’t got to the stage where I could interrupt the talk of fishing or politics in a bar with a new recipe for
Isles Flottantes.

Strangely, food is generally discussed by village women in terms of being for the men of the house alone. We were coming out of the local store one morning when a neighbour leaned confidentially towards Ivana and said, ‘And what are you giving
him
for his lunch today?’

Ivana hadn’t even thought about it, and mumbled something about warming up a stew she’d made yesterday as her nose grew an inch longer.

‘Seeing the way that they feed their men,’ I said as we left, ‘the villagers might think you’re depriving me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Might I remind you that, just because you don’t like the smell of bacon in your hair, a bacon ban has been in force in our household since the day we came back from honeymoon. That would be considered a
prima facie
case of deprivation around here. If I spread the word, I think I’d get a lot of sympathy.’

In the middle of July, one of the club members, Dali the postman, had a word with someone in the Town Hall and, hey presto, our application for membership of the Vis Winegrowers Association was suddenly accepted. I thought this a pretty significant step forwards, but Zoran was typically disparaging.

‘Nah! That’s just a sop. They’ll string you out forever, you’ll
see. That always happens like this when you’re dealin’ with ignorant bastards. Bastards, the lot of them! Like I told you, it’ll get you down in the end. I tell you; a place like this can bend iron.’

As usual, an up-beat take on the matter.

But how much longer would it be before I was also referring to the authorities as ‘bastards’?

On the bright side, my involvement with wine had already produced one good side effect. After two thousand years of winegrowing, the discussion of drink was an indispensable part of island life, and now that I was seen to be involved with wine, even some of our less friendly neighbours would talk to me (about wine matters only, of course).

‘No wonder we’re always talkin’ about wine,’ said Zoran when I told him this. ‘We’ve been the greatest winegrowing island in the Mediterranean since before Christ was born. Don’t give up on it. One day you’ll get a vineyard goin’ and you’ll be part of a great tradition. The Romans reckoned Vis had the best wine in the Adriatic. When we were the capital of Illyria in 200 BC, the Head of the Alexandria Library came here on a state visit and wrote: “The wine from the island of Vis surpasses all others.” Of course, once our Comrade Brothers started telling us what to do, that was the end of our great wine tradition. Oh, yes! Once The People’s Wine Cooperative was up an’ runnin’, we had to give ’em all our wine an’ they’d send it off to Poland or somewhere in return for pig iron and sump oil. So, after a year or two, no one cared any more, an’ our wines began to taste like the stuff you get from Bulgaria. But we’re makin’ some decent wine again these days, an’ that’s good news for you, my friend. We’ll be gettin’ known again as a top-class wine region just when you’ll be bottlin’ your first vintage!’

‘If I’m not pushing up the daisies by then.’

He gave me a questioning look.

‘That means if I’m not dead.’

‘Bravo! Spoken like a true islander! You’re learnin’ to be as miserable as the rest of us. I’ve trained you well!’ He then wagged a finger. ‘But if you keep on drinking like you do, you’ll be pushin’ your daisies up all right.’

That was a bit rich, coming from him, but I let it go.

‘How come all you English drink so much, anyway? Look at what your friends drink. Their wives, too. Those women you brought round the other week sure gave my white
Vugava
a beatin’. They got through a bottle each.’

‘We don’t let our women drink like that,’ grunted Zvonko.

‘You don’t let Daska drink because she’s at you with the frying pan if she does,’ said Zoran with his usual tact.