Under a Croatian Sun (28 page)

T
he summer came to an end, but the autumn brought its own spell. The green rows of vines had turned orange and brown, and the hills were wrapped by the morning mist in a mystical veil. The days were still warm, but the air was clearer and the light sharper. The breeze off the bay swayed the cypresses along the shore, fanned the branches of the mimosa and ruffled the feathers of the swallows chittering away on our telephone wires about their imminent departure. The bay was now a deep dark blue, its surface speckled with white horses, and the wind blew in differently from the sea. It came in gusts, riffling the woods on the hills, bending the pines along the shore, skittering the russet-coloured leaves around the squares and humming up and down the narrow streets as if playing a game. Olive trees creaked and shutters banged.

A small amount of rain fell, which tinged the parched brown grass of the cricket field with green and gave a wet gleam to the Astroturf pitch. Luckily, the nets weren’t
affected, which was just as well, since we now needed more practice than ever. The MCC had telephoned! The MCC – the most important cricket club in the world! I nearly dropped the phone when they rang. They had learned about us from the articles on the cricket sites and wanted to come and play us. When I recovered from the shock, I managed to say that, although we would be greatly honoured, we might not be quite good enough, but the fixtures secretary very decently said that they’d field a minor team. This did little to allay my nerves, and even the club members, after an initial display of bravado, were somewhat cowed by the prospect. Never in my dreams had I imagined this would happen.

Of course, except for the players, no one else on the island knew who the MCC were, but the players soon made sure that they did, and by mid-October the tension was building. The nets were in full use every afternoon and the coach’s videos were on Zoran’s bar TV every night.

On the day, we waited nervously as the fabled club came off the ferry, and were relieved that they seemed to be as easy-going a bunch as we could have hoped for. Most of them had come with wives or girlfriends. (Luka and Petar had brought up the possibility of another inebriation campaign, but this time my moral scruples held firm. Besides, there might be an MCC black book where clubs suspected of foul play were listed. We’d blot our copybook completely if our name got into that.)

So, that evening, the visitors were treated to a sumptuous meal and only a smattering of Petar’s vineyard products.

The next morning, the sun was high in a clear blue sky as the captains shook hands on thirty overs a side and tossed. It was a hot day with no wind and a thin heat haze hung over the hills. The smoke from burning piles of vine leaves snaked upwards into the blue where the buzzards circled slowly on the thermals,
and the monastery bell struck ten o’clock as the white-clad SWHKK figures fanned out across the field. Bees drifted lazily over the gorse, butterflies flitted about the flowers in the long grass, and beyond the boundary was an old man with a whetstone sticking out of his pocket leaning on his scythe to watch. All the scene needed, once again, was a church, a vicar and a village blacksmith.

Would Petar and Domigoy be decimated by their fast bowlers?

But with some defensive blocking and cautious chipping away at anything off the wicket, they both notched up a few runs and after two overs it was eight for no wickets.

We were up to their bowlers! We weren’t going to be decimated.

Their second bowler was doing slow right arm stuff with a bit of turn, and although most of his balls were uncomfortably accurate, Petar and Domigoy had the measure of them. There were a few close shaves, and eventually in the fourth over Domigoy took an over-confident swing at a fast spinner and got caught in the slips. Luka was the next in, and with his signature scarf around his waist he strolled confidently onto the field waving his batat the clapping crowd, but I knew how nervous he was. He didn’t want to repeat his duck.

Blocking the first few deliveries, he worked at the bowling cautiously while Petar began to hit out. The spinner’s balls now got the full force of the new oversized bat and he was peppering the boundary with anything off the wicket. By his third over, Luka had got the measure of the spinner, too, and was putting most of his balls through mid-wicket – but then trying to get an extra run he got himself stumped.

Filip was next and gamely faced the fast bowler. The first ball he drove forward, and silly mid-off, no doubt emboldened by
his stumping of Luka, dived for it. I could see him trying to stop himself, but too late he remembered that the pitch was on a slab of concrete, and his thigh hit the edge of the helipad with a nasty sounding crunch. Players and spectators gathered round. The gash didn’t look good. Petar looked up and said to me, ‘Ha, ha! He is ruined!’

‘Petar, you’re not supposed to say things like that,’ I hissed. ‘That’s called “not being a good sport”.’

‘Good sport?’

I tried to think of a way to explain it, but ‘It’s just not cricket,’ was the only thing I could come up with. Petar looked puzzled. After all of my talk about ‘fair play’ at drinking time, it looked as if I hadn’t done a very good job. Maybe there was a video that explained about sportsmanship.

The game recommenced and Filip continued to do well with the quicker stuff even though he still got confused by anything that was given a bit of air. The canny spin bowler saw this and came up with a something. What Filip did to it was one of the most extraordinary shots I have ever seen. There’s no cricket term for it; it was more like a football movement. There’s not even a word for it in English, but in France it’s called L’Echarpe and in Spanish: La Rabona. It’s when the player brings his striking leg behind his standing leg to kick the ball (Ronaldinho of Brazil being perhaps its greatest exponent). And this was the kind of shot that Filip played. But all it did was to deflect the ball straight onto the stumps. Filip turned to stare at the splayed sticks like a schoolboy at his broken bicycle, and for a moment I thought he was going to throw another ‘cricket rage’ scene, but this time he took it on the chin and plodded back to the pavilion.

Our next few batsmen acquitted themselves decently enough and Icho put on a particularly impressive display of dealing with some tricky spinners. This brought bellowed cheers from his
new bride who he had, it seemed, lured away from the football-playing policeman. I was pleased to see that island life had mellowed her taste for Travis and Perkins facial accessories. When Icho first brought her over, she was extravagantly studded about the face, but the display was now restricted to three, though I dare say there were others in unseen places.

All this time Petar was wielding his oversized willow with great effect and he was racking it up, but at the end of twenty overs we were 78 for 7.

Quite a crowd had come along for the lunch. I even saw Don Romolo (never one to miss out on a free meal), arriving and collecting a fair-sized gorse bush in the bumper of his Wartburg before managing to park it. Luka noticed his arrival, too, and took him a glass of wine.

‘I know I’m the least frequent member of your congregation Don Romolo, but right now we could do with some prayers.’

Don Romolo looked up and raised the glass to heaven. ‘Faith works wonders, my son!’

‘Rubbish!’ muttered Filip in the background. ‘It’s all to do with application to the job in hand.’

After lunch the visitors took to the field and we sat apprehensively. The two opening bats walked in wearing protective helmets. Was this was standard MCC equipment, or had they had advance intelligence of Petar’s bumpers? I thought it best not to ask.

Petar thundered down onto the helipad and hurled down a fizzer. It was right on target and the batsman had to block it. He did the same with the second ball, too – and to our amazement, by the end of the over they hadn’t managed a run. A maiden over against the MCC! A collective sigh of relief went round the team. Maybe we weren’t going to be trashed after all. Their
opening bats then scored three singles off Marin in the second over, but his balls were now truer on the wicket and had a nice swing to them. They certainly weren’t carting him all over the place like the Australians had a few weeks before.

In the third over, a sharp catch bagged by Luka drew a warm round of applause, and in the fifth, a loping ball from Marin was driven straight into the hands of Sinisa at silly mid-on. But Marin had put so much extra spin on the ball that he sprained his wrist and had to be replaced by Icho. Icho had been glued to Marko’s bar TV and it looked like he’d been paying particular attention to intimidation technique. He stood at the wicket staring at the batsman and then running up at a brisk pace with his new round arm technique (the forearm flexing perhaps a little bit more than the regulation 5 per cent), he delivered a humming off-break that shot up off the matting and caught the batsman’s pad.

A bellow of ‘How’s that!’ in a Croatian accent erupted from every man on the field, and the umpire (ours) raised a finger.

The batsman clearly disagreed, but shrugged and walked back, the umpire’s verdict unchallenged. Sometimes one can feel very proud of one’s fellow countrymen.

In the next over, a ball with a hairy fizz on it from Petar glanced off an MCC bat and was caught in the slips, bringing tumultuous applause from the side-line and an enormous grin to Petar’s usually impassive face. (The hours spent watchingShane Warne had paid off.) Then in the next over, a ball came off their captain’s protective stroke and Bozo leapt backwards at the wicket to catch it one handed. Masterful play!

But even so, by the end of the twenty overs, the visitors had overtaken us with some wickets in hand. Nonetheless we had endured the onslaught of the MCC, and hats, gloves, and bats were thrown into the air as spectators converged onto the field.
The MCC men looked slightly fazed by the onslaught of fierce embracing, but they submitted decently enough.

Petar was the man of the moment, and his team mates tried to lift him onto their shoulders, but his mass defeated even six strong men and he ended up being dropped onto the ground. He got up and dusted himself down.

‘I am not ruined!’ he said, grinning at me. ‘That is being “good sport”. Yes?’

After an evening of jollity and when we had managed to get the MCC back into their rooms, I sat on the bench outside the hotel. The waterfront was almost deserted. A courting couple wandered between the shadows of the palm trees, the fishing boats swayed gently in the inky water, and the moonlight gleamed off the rippled surface of the bay. A sense of utter contentment overcame me. Two hundred years after Captain Hoste drew stumps and sailed for Plymouth, we had a team up and running again that was able to give the MCC a fairly decent game. No mean feat. Would we do even better next year, and would island cricket now carry on for ever? I didn’t see why not. Perhaps one day we might even have a real pavilion and a real changing room, where men will complain about the ridiculous decisions of their captain, compare sprained ligaments and bruised shins, and tell awful jokes like we do back in west Sussex. And will there be honey still for tea?

I hoped so.

The engagement party for Marin and Tanya was announced the day after the MCC left. It was to be at Darko’s, high above the central valley. Darko had turned his family’s farmhouse into a restaurant and had decorated it with every object he had ever made, collected or loved. Empty demijohns, horseshoes, yokes, scythes, harnesses and pieces of RAF aircraft had been piled on
top of each other like geographical strata, and it gave the tumbledown farmhouse a unique sense of place.

Tanya’s aunts were out in force that evening – tall aunts, short aunts, fat aunts, thin aunts. I’ve never seen so many aunts together at one time. They were catching up on the gossip (having first completed the prerequisite check for life-threatening draughts), and were clapping at the good news and making signs of the cross at the bad. But the two families weren’t talking to each other. They were standing in separate groups. Tanya’s relations, led by Draga doing a passable impersonation of Cruella de Vil, were glaring at Marin’s family, and the Bosnians were eyeing their hosts nervously. Luckily, Marin and Tanya were both so busy greeting everyone that I don’t think they noticed, but, for us, the tension was palpable.

Once we were sitting down, Darko brought out a cauldron of steaming lamb and then bowls of roast potatoes and the special salad he made of caper leaves and tomatoes soused in vinegar. Once that was demolished, he brought out one of his lambs for the children to play with, and that was an instant success. They patted it, fed it with a bottle of milk and squealed with glee when the lamb butted them for more. Then, thinking that they’d like his donkey as well, Darko hauled the poor beast up on to the terrace. It was a lovely, old moth-eaten specimen with enormous ears, and stood uncomplainingly as the children swarmed all over it – while mothers hovered behind muttering about contagious diseases and washing hands afterwards.

By the time we’d finished the pudding and a lot of wine had been consumed, the cold war began to thaw, and the aunties of the opposing sides opened negotiations on the matter of the bridal linen – and, most importantly, how it was to be embroidered. One even dared make the audacious suggestion
that the linen should not necessarily be white and that heavy embroidery wasn’t what the young wanted nowadays, but this was treated as progressive heresy by the majority. As the older generation, they asserted, they had a duty to make sure the tradition of embroidery was handed down to the next generation. At one point, I thought the question of the bed linen was going to start another Balkan war, but, in the end, the wiser element prevailed and it was agreed that perhaps not everything needed to be embroidered, but the marital bed linen and tablecloths certainly did. That settled, they then itemised every sheet, pillowcase, tablecloth and napkin required, and a heated debate ensued about exactly who was going to supply what.