Cricket XXXX Cricket (16 page)

Not, of course, that I spent much time in physical propinquity to the ground. There was too much going on that week to take time out watching run-choked draws at the WACA. The day before the start of the Test, I had been prevailed upon to address the Western Australian section of the Lord’s Taverners. In England, the Taverners do a lot of good work for handicapped kids, but in Australia their efforts are focussed more on providing sporting facilities for children in need.

Prior to my departure a few telexes had arrived in London from honorary secretary Harry Sorenson, inquiring whether I would care to be the first woman ever to make the keynote speech at a Lord’s Taverners’ thrash in Australia. These telexes I studiously ignored, much as Phil and Paul Keating do income tax returns, hoping that in the fullness of time they would merely fade away. Mr Sorenson, however, is more tenacious than that. I met him on our first trip to Perth for the state match, at a Lord’s Taverners’ cocktail party thrown in honour of the two teams. Malleably good-natured as I am, after two flutes of Moët I had acceded to his request. I woke up the next morning, as ladies often do after New Year’s Eve parties, wondering what on earth had possessed me to say yes. I had done quite a bit of public speaking at school and, for want of competition, even won the odd English Speaking Union award. There had been no choice in the matter. Being embarrassingly useless at games of all sorts in those less than halcyon convent days, the majority of my leisure time had had to be spent in more satisfyingly vocal pursuits. Whilst my Amazonian contemporaries thwacked hell out of one another on the lacrosse field, and bashed one another’s shins black and blue with ladylike dexterity on the hockey pitch, I wimped out unobtrusively into extra drama, singing and public speaking lessons. I had extra piano lessons too, although they were more of a penance. Mother Benigna would rap me painfully over the knuckles for imperfect renditions of mindlessly repetitive arpeggios, whilst the acme of my musical aspiration was simply to bang out bad boogie, hard honky-tonk and passably simplified imitations of Burt Bacharach.

I had spoken a few times at the Cambridge Union too, deliberately fatuous and apolitical stuff whilst my meaningful left-wing peers were all but throwing themselves under steamrollers over American involvement in Vietnam, or whatever the ‘in’ outrage of the day was at that time. Now, after a decade of public speaking silence, I was on the podium again for a thirty-minute speech.

A greater than normal percentage of ladies turned up for the lunch at a major international Perth hotel, where over 350 people assembled to hear the life story of the beast of burden that is the professional cricket widow. It was reassuring to see Mrs Ian Chappell, Mrs Rod Marsh and Mrs Greg Shippard attending in kindly supportive sorority. A reporter from London’s
Sun
was also in evidence, presumably to see if any aggro of the pink-gin-swilling-dodderers variety could be created out of this, another
private
fundraising function.

It is true that there were people rolling around in the aisles, but whether this was due to my often misunderstood sense of humour, or to violent attacks of gastroenteritis from the inevitable prawn cocktail, was not entirely apparent. The speech revolved around life with PHE and the difficulties of living with a character who must be the world’s most unhandy man. There was the episode when I came home from a conference in Brussels, and found that he had been having a go at Do-It-Yourself. I walked into the bedroom, and there over the Edmonds’ connubial couch was a mirror perilously affixed to the ceiling.

‘What’s this for,’ I asked, ‘so I can watch myself having a headache?’

‘The trouble with you, Frances,’ Phil retorted, ‘is that I cannot remember the last time you said you enjoyed having sex.’

‘Why should you?’ I replied. ‘You weren’t there.’

It was all in a good cause.

The next morning was a very early start. Doing guest spots for the Sydney-based breakfast television show
Good Morning Australia
generally involves getting up fairly early, but this was ridiculous. Since Perth is three hours behind Sydney, we went on air at 4.30 am, which involved getting up at 3 am. I wandered around the vast lobby of the Merlin at 3.45 am, waiting for the taxi to arrive. The night staff gave me some unashamedly funny looks. All tarted up, with full television make-up, waiting for a taxi at 3.45 in the morning, I must have looked like somebody’s discarded hooker.

The one good thing about doing breakfast TV is that it does leave you the rest of the day free to feel absolutely knackered. I am beginning to feel, in a minor sort of way, how Selina Scott must have felt after a couple of years of this routine.

The phone was ringing as I returned to the sordid sanctuary of our hotel room. The collection of cricket kit, clothes, memorabilia, books, ‘gimmies’, toiletries, rancid laundry bags, coffins, computers, word-processors, executive toys, electronic chess, papers, silly hats, bottles of Johnnie Walker whisky, and half-used tubes of sunscreen has now reached disturbingly seedy hazard proportions. One hotel room does not accommodate two Edmondses. Phil, heaving like a beached whale in between the Janet Reger, could not quite bestir himself to answer the call. It is interesting how a man who can happily wake me up at 4 am with the World Service, is, whenever possible, resolutely comatose until 9 am should I be obliged to make an early start. The call was from Alan Bond’s personal assistant, David Michael. Did I want to go out sailing that day with Eileen Bond?

Did I want to go out sailing with the legendary ‘Red’ Bond? Do fish swim? Is the Pope Catholic? Do David Gower and Frances Edmonds indulge in the odd glass of Bollinger? Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?

Sailing with Eileen is about as far removed from the twelve-metre concept of the sport as you can get. Sailing with Eileen does not mean winch-grinding, or sail trimming or tacking, or anything in any way remotely strenuous. Sailing with Eileen means boarding one of the sumptuous Bondy cruisers (that day we sailed on
Southern Cross II;
the mega-million dollar
Southern Cross III
, just purchased, was still being fitted out), rocking forth comfortably to the starting line, maintaining spirits high with anything from bottles of vintage Dom Perignon to tinnies of the company product, as Eileen calls the Bond produced Swan Lager, taking a brief respite with an oyster and crayfish lunch, and returning replete with the Dom or the company product to watch the sequence of events. It is a splendid way to watch other poor blighters throwing thirty-odd tacks, and breaking their backs sailing a twelve-metre in a thirty-knot wind.

Eileen is great fun, the warm and generous household power behind the Bondy throne. Married to Alan when they were both teenagers, she still takes a keen interest in the manifold ramifications of the enormous Bond empire, and pointed with obvious pride to the Observation City hotel, which the Bonds had built to accommodate the hoped-for influx of tourists for the America’s Cup. Eileen, who runs her own successful interior design company, had organised the decor for the entire place and the tropical swimming pool has to be seen to be believed. Looking out over the Indian Ocean, with peerless views of the racing, Observation City must surely be the place to stay at the moment.

I took to her immediately. I like any woman who has a reputation for being a legend in her own lunchtime, will sing Irish songs where and when she feels like it and remains resolutely herself. She has a shock of flaming red hair, hence the nickname, a heart of gold and a couple of kilos of diamonds liberally distributed over her person.

‘Well, Alan owns the mine. Why shouldn’t I wear the diamonds?’ she asks. Truly a woman after my own heart.

Some of the less flamboyant, more conservative, perhaps even envious elements of Perth society dismiss the Bonds as ‘new money’. Bond answers such sniping by pointing out that he made his first million by the time he was twenty. Now nearing the half-century mark, he reckons that makes him an old millionaire. Besides, as Nancy Reagan is apocryphally credited with saying: ‘Better
nouveau riche
than not
riche
at all.’

That day the Bond syndicate’s
Australia IV
was sailing against Syd Fischer’s
Steak
’n’
Kidney.
Sadly for us, the Sydney yacht was leading by quite a substantial margin. Spirits aboard
Southern Cross I
became proportionately lower. Jody, Eileen’s youngest daughter, went downstairs to watch the television in sheer frustration and despair. All of a sudden I remembered that I had been awake since some ungodly hour, and felt overwhelmingly tired, I asked our hostess whether she minded if I took a quick nap. There were, after all, three magnificently appointed state rooms with en-suite bathrooms on board.

‘You just go into my bedroom and lie down,’ said Eileen, concerned, ‘and make sure you cover yourself up. If there’s anything you want, you just phone upstairs.’

Eileen Bond is clearly first and foremost an extremely soft-touch mother.

By the time I woke up, the celebrations were in full flow. One of
Steak
’n’
Kidney’s
sails had become entangled in the rudder, and
Australia IV
had romped home victorious.

Eileen, in a wonderful choice of culinary metaphor, was devouring a steak and kidney pie. She was in fine fettle.

‘I bet Syd Fischer wishes he had kissed the Pope’s ring,’ she laughed.

She admits to being a tiny bit superstitious. During the final round against the New York Yacht Club in Newport, she had been wearing a jumper when
Australia II
won its first race against Dennis Conner’s
Liberty.
It was a bulky knit job, with a fur koala bear up a gum tree appliquéd on the front. She kept on wearing it, laundering it in the evening, and wearing it again the next day until
Australia II
had won the Cup. Forget Ben Lexcen’s radical winged keel and John Bertrand’s seamanship. Not many people realise that it was Red’s jumper that secured the Auld Mug for the Aussies.

Unfortunately, our mates on
White Crusader
had had a bad day, vanquished by
French Kiss
after trouble with their sails. It is such a dicey business, this twelve-metre sailing lark. There are so many variables, vagaries and vicissitudes to cope with, apart from the already complicated business of plain sailing.

‘We’ll have lunch next time you come to Perth,’ said Eileen, handing me her address and telephone number as we moored. I would have to put some practice in on the Irish ballads.

Phil arrived home in a foul mood, berating everyone and as usual muttering darkly about ‘negative fucking tactics’. He lay on the bed zapping from TV station to TV station. I think remote control devices should be banned from all households comprised of more than one person. They are the most anti-social invention since garlic capsules.

It is perhaps a hallmark of Western civilisation that we all need space. Space to sit in, space to move in, space to live in. On my flight to Australia, I sat next to a beautiful petite Malaysian lady. From her perfect poise throughout the twenty-four-hour flight, it was perfectly obvious that the space afforded by a club-class seat would have been more than enough for her to set up house in. Whilst I tried every possible angle and posture in increasingly redundant efforts to doze, she just folded up as neatly as a Pac A Mac and went to sleep for hours. But I am, unfortunately, a real Westerner and living in the close physical proximity of a small hotel room with one large cricketer for months on end is becoming a bit of a trial. Different circadian rhythms, the fact that I want to work when he wants to watch the dot on the television screen once all the broadcasts have finished, all these problems, which are in no way so acute in normal living quarters, become further and further exacerbated in a rabbit-hutch environment. It is also very difficult to write if there is a bed in the immediate vicinity. The tendency is to lie on it and the inevitable kip ensues. But that is my own specific problem. I am merely beginning to realise, albeit in a luxurious sort of way, that a lack of living space must engender aggression, and on a large scale, intense social strife; what our urban developers often forget is that most people prefer their relatively spacious slums to an all mod-con, no social nexus, high-rise box.

Being in such a negative fucking frame of mind himself, old Edmonds decided that he no longer wanted to go to the Elton John concert that evening. Elton is doing one of his show-stopping tours here in Australia, complete with the entire Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and has invited the team to any one of his three performances in Perth. He certainly loves his cricket, Elton, and according to Phil talks knowledgeably even on the finest subtleties of the game. It was just too bad that we missed that concert. We went along the next night only to find that the performance had been cancelled. Unsubstantiated rumours abounded amongst the bitterly disappointed fans that Elton had been out that afternoon on a businessman’s yacht, and ended up well and truly ratted. Although that seemed – to me at least – like an eminently more sensible way for a superstar to be spending his time, the bad-mouthers were shamefacedly obliged to eat their words some weeks later, when their hero was taken into a Sydney hospital for throat surgery. Two nights later the two cricket teams were invited by the West Australian Trotting Association to the trotting races.

I had never been to the trotting before, and therefore hid the TV remote control from Phil in an effort to encourage him to come along. It was, however, the fact that we bumped into some whizz-kids, out from the City of London to advise the Bond Corporation, that tipped Phil’s scales. They too had been invited, thanks to Swan Lager’s sponsorship of the sport, and so we all set off together.

Received wisdom has it that Australian trotting is irredeemably rigged. Don’t belive a word of it! My card was ‘marked’ by one of the sponsors putatively in the know. It may well have been that the gentleman in question was a numerical dyslexic, but suffice it to say that I won not one, by now fairly worthless, Australian dollar. Indeed, I would have done far better to follow my original instincts and stick to cricket-related horses: