Salisbury tales

These days, I suppose, they would call it a gap year. In my case, it was nearer two. Idling around Africa with a rucksack, that is. Zimbabwe was called Southern Rhodesia then, and in 1961, in my early twenties, I chased a haughty blonde Virginia Veitch from London’s Earls Court, whose pa worked for Barclays in Harare (then Salisbury) and who, when I arrived with gormless grin — ‘Dwarling, ’tis me!’ — smartly sneered, ‘Get lost, punk.’ Africa was a large place to get lost in when you were a bum and broke. Nevertheless, between sweltering subbing shifts for the local Herald and sending back naive chancer’s dispatches on flimsy airmail to the Manchester Guardian (each spiked to death on arrival), I did volunteer for a bit of (strictly) whites-only cricket at the Salisbury sports club. But the bowlers were too hostile, the wickets too fast and the sun too hot for a Stroud Straggler village bat brought up on the muddy molehills of north Glos, and I gave up after a particularly humiliating first-ball blonger against the tobacco farmers of Trelawney (played-on, off my ear).

I am transported back this week to that exclusive bougainvillea-blossomed little colonial field (close by Pres. Mugabe’s des res). England’s cricketers play on it with sullen grudge, sent by the same fuming mandarins of Lord’s who, little more than a decade ago, were whining about not being allowed to ‘build bridges’ by playing against a then altogether more obnoxious regime to the south.

The most rewarding cricketing I had in old Salisbury was watching in awe the Rhodesian Springbok Colin Bland practise his fielding. He would stand a single stump in front of a hockey net and at full pelt and from every angle and distance, 18 times out of 20 his throw would ping it out of the ground.