As a rule, it seemed a good idea to stay in the same hotel as the Pakistan team when on tour. But the danger was that one got too close to the team and got caught in the crossfire of personality clashes. I got on well with the players, but the gap in years was widening. So, too, in our interests. The players tended to be single-dimensional and theirs was a flat world, cricket was the centre of their universe. My world was multidimensional and though I read the sports pages, I also read the other pages. I wanted to enjoy England beyond its cricket fields.
I had first come to England in 1951 from the United States, and had spent some idle time in London and in St. Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex. These were not wasted years, because I remember them fondly. I have written about them in my book, As Time Goes By. After I joined the PIA, I started to make flying visits to London, business trips with little or no time to do anything beyond my work, moving from my hotel to the offices of our advertising agency and back to the hotel.
This time, I had the chance to unwind and though the cricket schedule was hectic, there was time enough to broaden my mind. It is often said that you can’t tell a country from its major cities. I would never have gotten to know the United States if I had stayed only in Los Angeles. The same applied to England, though London was something else. Hate London as much as you want to, it is to London one escapes, it is the port in a storm, a nest when one’s own nest has blown away. Everyone loves two cities, his own and Paris. Everyone has two homes, his own and London.
This was a time when England was faced by a labour shortage due to those who were unwilling to do manual or menial work, and immigrants started to arrive from Pakistan. They did not come as a flood but as a trickle, and settled in the Midlands and in the North. One did not see too many of them in London and the city was not then littered with curry-houses. PIA was already beginning to do good business carrying these immigrants, people who would be transported from villages in Mirpur and Syhlet to a far-away country. They spoke not a word of English and looked ridiculous and felt uneasy in what amounted to borrowed clothes of another culture, like so many Charlie Chaplins.
There was, at this time, a small-pox scare. One passenger of a PIA flight was suspected of having brought small-pox when he fell ill. The British media had a field day and passengers arriving from Pakistan were checked to see whether they had been vaccinated. The airport authorities demanded to see physical evidence, having no trust in the health certificates. This was, in a sense, the beginning of Paki-bashing. After Pakistan had lost the first test match ignobly, a Pakistani friend of mine who had settled in England had said to me: “First the small-pox and now this cricket team.” His cup of grief was full.
One day, I received a quite unexpected call from a friend of my boyhood days in Poona and Bombay, Zavareh Kabraji. As a boy, Zavareh had been the prototype of ‘Dennis the Menace’. He had gone to the Dufferin, a training ship for the merchant navy, anchored outside Bombay’s harbour. Zavareh was now the Scindia Steamship Company’s representative in London and had prospered, though the imp in him had not diminished. He had a live-in girlfriend, Sonya, a Parsi girl who had an English mother and thus she was fair and had blue eyes. Actually, I had met her on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley and had been introduced to her by Piloo Modi.
I had last seen Zavareh in June 1947, when he had come to see me off at Bombay’s Ballard Pier when I was leaving for the United States. Our friendship had deep roots and we just continued from where we had left off. I would see a lot of him on this tour, some hilarious, happy hours. Though he was now a grown-up, respectable man, the Scindia Steamship Company had not taken the ‘boy’ out of him and his blue-eyed girlfriend watched closely over him, on general principle, disapproving of me. Zavareh, it seemed to me, was straining at the leash, resisting with all his strength, attempts to domesticate him.
Pakistan’s next match was against Surrey at The Oval, the ‘other’ cricket ground in London, on the wrong side of the Thames, in working-class London, Kennington, and people went to watch cricket and not perform a pilgrimage, as they did when they went to Lords. I had been to The Oval in 1953, when I had driven with Colonel Leslie Berry in his Hillman Minx from St. Leonards-on-Sea. We had gone to see Linday Hasset’s Australians and had watched Lindwall bowl to Peter May, a brief burst from the great fast bowler that had so unnerved Peter May that he had been dropped from England’s team. Peter May would be playing for Surrey against us.
The commentary-box was high atop the pavilion and one got a panoramic view of London from there, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben clearly visible. Be that as it may, the players looked like miniatures from that great height. Pakistan beat Surrey in an exciting finish, with only three minutes to spare. Ijaz Butt had scored a century in the first innings, and Saeed Ahmed in the second. But the innings of the match had come from Peter May. He belonged to the fast-vanishing breed of cricketers who brought a cultured arrogance to batting, the country squire amidst the tillers of the soil. He did not labour for his runs, they just came, as if he had been left them in his inheritance. I don’t know if Neville Cardus had written about him, but only he could have done justice to this classical batting. The win against Surrey did much to raise the morale of the team and the team certainly needed to have its morale raised.
I got a letter from the BBC, asking me whether I would like to appear on the programme My Kind of Music, that was a forerunner of Desert Island Discs. I would select my ten favourite pieces of music and songs and be interviewed on them. I agreed and was invited to meet the lady who would be doing the programme.
She was a somewhat matronly lady, but bright-eyed and I hit it off with her. When I submitted the list of my favourite music, she was a little surprised that it was entirely Western music. I told her that I didn’t think the BBC music library would have Noor Jehan or Kanan Bala or Saigal. “Yes, we would,” she said. I stuck to my list. I had chosen pieces from Beethoven, the Choral from the Ninth Symphony, the Violin Concerto and also some ‘goldie-oldies’ Paul Robeson singing Ol’ Man River, Arthus Tracy’s Harbour Lights, Jerome Kern’s Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and Jo Stafford’s rendition of Some Enchanted Evening.
As the music played, we talked through it and I started to reminiscence. Harbour Lights took me back to Poona and our house on Boat Club Road and the Muttah Mulla river. I spoke of the HMV gramophone with the megaphone that we owned. With Paul Robeson’s OI’ Man River, I spoke more about Paul Robeson than the song and Jo Stafford’s Some Enchanted Evening took me back to my student days in the United States. I spoke softly, as if, those memories were fragile. I was in good form. But the credit goes to the lady who interviewed me. She let me do the talking and egged me on. The programme had just the right pace. She did not let me get sloppy. “Let’s get on to Beethoven,” she said. And I told her about a concert I had gone to at the Hollywood Bowl with my friend, Lizzie, who had steered me away from juke-box music and to Western classical music. It seemed to be a small price to pay for my continuing friendship with her.
Music has been a soothing influence in my life and I listen to it whenever I get lonely. People have come and gone in my life, but I have managed to remain connected to them through music. It’s made me think of them. BBC got a positive feedback from the programme, and I was flattered that it was aired twice. I got some fan-mail. I was delighted that the BBC had discovered that I was more than a cricket commentator.
But the main business was cricket, and I was soon on a train to Swansea in Wales, Dylan Thomas country as well as that of Aneurin Bevan’s, the British Labour Party’s enfant terrible who had locked horns with Churchill in Parliament during the War, and had accused him of being a “petrified adolescent.” I had met Bevan when he had come to Karachi and like my interview with Gaitskill, this, too, had been off-the-record. The British Parliamentarians kept to the tradition of keeping their quarrels at home and not shooting of their mouths, when abroad. I had a feeling that I would like Wales.
