TRUE STORY: Over and Out
I have told this story many times whilst on stage and maybe because I tell it on stage nobody believes it, people tend to think that I’ve made it up for show business reasons. So now I want to set the record straight, this is all true.
St.Matthias School does not exist anymore but it used to be on Farm Street, Hockley, Birmingham B19. At this school for some strange reason the boys only played football, the girls played hockey, rounders and netball, but we only had football.
In assembly one morning our headmaster told the school that because the school now had an Afro-Caribbean pupil (that’s me), he would now like to change things a little. Words like multiculturalism weren’t used very much then, but he made it clear that at this school there should be something for everyone. He then proclaimed that the school was to have a cricket team and that I was to be the Captain.
In 2004 it may seem obvious that not all Black people love cricket but back then in 1960 something, this headmaster just failed to believe that I couldn’t stand the game, he insisted that I was a ‘born cricketer’. Well let’s face it, sometimes people do play down how good they are at a sport in the hope that the opposition will be unprepared and this is what the headmaster and many others thought that was what I was doing. Every time I repeated my hatred of the game people smiled, when I told my fellow pupils that I had never handled a cricket bat I was told to ‘stop messing about’, I felt well and truly stereotyped.
It took one bowl to get me out forever. I remember it well, as I stood waiting for the ball to arrive I shook with nervousness, I wanted to go home. The ball bounced in front of me and almost flattened an ant, as it came up I went to strike it but it came up so fast I couldn’t see it, the ball hit my right hand and broke my longest finger. I ran to the medical room shouting things like, “I hate cricket” and “Mom” and I’ve never played cricket again.
Some weeks later I was approached by the headmaster as I was drinking my free school milk and he asked, “Are you any good at boxing lad?”. I replied “No”, trying not to look Afro-Caribbean, “but I am very good at formation flying........sir”, I said.
