Driving Ambition - My Autobiography Read online

  The time we lived there was neither long enough for us to feel completely at home, nor short enough for it to seem like one big holiday. I think my parents had a much harder time adjusting than the kids did. The change of lifestyle definitely had something to do with it, but another factor was that South Africans were viewed with some suspicion by the Australians. The daily news reports of violent oppression definitely seemed to make an impression on them, and to some extent anyone from South Africa was guilty by association.

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  As the end of our time in Melbourne neared, my parents had difficult decisions to make. The straightforward option was to return to the easy lifestyle we had left behind in South Africa. I think by then, though, they had started to become a little concerned about what was happening back there. There were signs that the country might combust as the black majority increasingly flexed their muscles against their white oppressors. The future was far from certain at that time and it would have been a significant risk to go back to South Africa expecting everything to be the same as when we had left. The other option was to sit tight and make Australia our new home.

  As my parents were mulling things over, my father was offered another business opportunity. Some of his former colleagues from South Africa were trying to expand their business in the UK and wanted him to come over to help them in their endeavours. Facing a tough choice between staying in a country where they felt like outsiders and going back to a country on the brink of political turmoil, my parents had suddenly been presented with the perfect way out.

  There were some logistical difficulties to overcome. My eldest sister, Gillian, was nearing her final school exams and would have to stay in Melbourne for three months longer than the rest of us to complete them, before heading to England to pursue her dream of becoming a vet. My father stayed with her, which left my mother, myself and the two middle sisters, Sandra and Colleen, to forge a path ahead in the UK. We arrived at the end of August 1986, jetlagged and disorientated, and headed out to leafy Buckinghamshire, where we were to start our new life.

  My school had already been selected by my parents on a reconnaissance visit several months previously. The headmaster, who was mad about rugby, had been persuaded by my South African lineage and the fact that I had played in Australia to find a place for me, despite having no room on the waiting list. The school was called Caldicott Preparatory School and it sat in forty acres of grounds on the edge of the historic woods of Burnham Beeches.

  As its name suggests, it was a genuine prep school. Uniforms had to be smart and hair needed to be cut. Work had to be done diligently and on time. In many ways, it was like going back in time to a bygone age. It was one big institution, full of rules and regulations, but I loved it. For a boy who was becoming increasingly fanatical about sport, the school had everything. A beautifully manicured array of rugby pitches and facilities for basketball, swimming, hockey, athletics, tennis, squash and, of course, cricket. I immersed myself in it all with great gusto.

  It was around the time of my ninth birthday that my competitive side really started to reveal itself. I simply had to win at everything. I remember as if it was yesterday the tears of despair that I struggled to hold back if I lost a game of tennis to my sister, Colleen, who was a very accomplished player (and five years older than me). It hurt, and I did not like it. The same went for my new school. I desperately wanted to be the best at everything, even going as far as to demand to be given another chance to audition for the choir when my initial tone-deaf attempt wasn’t deemed up to scratch. Fortunately, the school encouraged that competitive attitude. In academic studies, we were all given a finishing position in each subject at the end of term. I always wanted to be number one and was prepared to go through hours of revising Latin verbs or geographical locations in order to get there.

  I am sure that my attitude probably grated on a few people, but I was enthusiastic and tried my hardest at everything. On the sporting field, in particular, I was beginning to show some promise. Despite remaining frustratingly small – one competition I could not win – I quickly established myself in all the teams in my age group. I don’t think I was significantly better than anyone else at any sport, but I was pretty good at all of them, including cricket.

  In my second year, I was captaining the colts side, combining a bit of dodgy left-arm chinaman bowling with my left-handed batting. By the end of my third year, I had made the school’s 1st XI, where I stayed till I left the school three years later. When I look back over the end-of-year reports, I am not entirely sure what I did to merit getting into the 1st XI at such a young age. I certainly never scored all that many runs. Perhaps it was my ability to catch the ball and the lack of a wicketkeeper in the years above, because in my first year I set a record for the most stumpings ever (27), thanks to an excellent leg-spin bowler called Richard Toothill.

  The cricket coach was my geography teacher, a man by the name of Philip Spray. He had been a decent cricketer himself and was very passionate about the game, while never one to suffer fools gladly. He obviously saw something in me and persisted in making sure that I practised proper shots, rather than just trying to whack the ball around everywhere. I followed his advice, perhaps through fear of disobeying him, and although I could never hit the ball off the square, a solid cricketing technique was eventually developed.

  Caldicott, though, was mainly a rugby school. It held the distinction of winning the national prep school sevens tournament, played at Rosslyn Park, more than any other school, and everyone was proud of this record. The headmaster, Peter Wright, was particularly keen to make sure that we kept that record in place and even arranged an exchange scheme with a school in Cape Town called Bishops, in which Caldicott’s best rugby players were swapped with the best from Bishops, ostensibly to broaden their education, but in fact to strengthen the rugby team.

  Despite my size, I developed into a pretty good fly-half and captained the side in my last year. Unfortunately, we were unable to keep up the tradition of winning the national sevens tournament, coming unstuck in the final against Millfield. I still remember the kick from our full back that was snaffled up by their tearaway winger, who ran in the try to break all our hearts. So near yet so far.

  My father, who had rugby running through his veins, loved coming to watch the games at the weekend alongside my mother. He was a passionate supporter and would dissect the whole game afterwards, discussing with me where it had been won and lost, the poor kicks, missed tackles and so on. When it came to cricket, however, he was a less comfortable spectator. Throughout my time at Caldicott, and more so at Radley College later, he would find a private place to watch me batting, such as a clump of trees or somewhere on the far side of the ground. I am not sure if he just got nervous or simply didn’t want to be disturbed by the incessant chatter of other parents, but that habit remained with him throughout my career. God knows how he dealt with it during a Test match.

  Two incidents stick firmly in my mind about my time at Caldicott. First, when I was eleven I failed to make the Caldicott team for an athletics multi-event tournament because I no-jumped three times in the trial. Though I was far better than my replacement, the athletics coach ignored my pleas to give me one more chance and named the team without me in it. It was a serious blow to my ego, as I wasn’t used to being left out of teams. (Perhaps the athletics coach was trying to teach me a lesson.) I then turned up to watch my team-mates in the competition, which was being held in London, only to find that one of the senior team had not shown up. I was hurriedly put in the Under-13s team and managed to come stone last in every event. It was humiliating beyond compare, and although the parents all congratulated me for ‘giving it a go’, I had experienced my worst nightmare. Losing and me didn’t go together very well.

  The other, far worse, moment, had to do with boarding. The rules of the school stipulated that at the age of eleven, boarding became compulsory. This was meant to prepare the pupils for life at the senior public school, to whic
h the majority of boys graduated. I was fully aware of the fact and was even looking forward to the ‘freedom’. When the moment came, however, I found it extremely hard. My parents lived less than three miles away from the school and I saw them at the end of each week, but they might as well have been on the other side of the world. Plenty of tears were shed in the dormitory over those first few months as I came to terms with living away from home for the first time.

  It is quite surprising that I reacted in this way, as two of my sisters had been boarding for a few years and my eldest sister was away at university. Our house had gone from being a very vibrant place, full of energy, fun and sibling rivalry, to somewhere much quieter. In effect, I was an only child during the school term, with just my mum and dad and our faithful dog Zoe for company. I am sure this was one of the reasons that boarding school made sense for my parents – it would allow me to be with friends – but it still took some getting used to.

  That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy my time at Caldicott immensely. It was a closeted world, but it suited me down to the ground. I loved the sport, I loved the close friendships I made there, and many of life’s important lessons concerning respect, treating others fairly, operating as a team and having manners were drilled into me there on a daily basis.

  My holidays around this time consisted of either a trip back to South Africa to visit relatives or whatever my exasperated mother could come up with to get me out of the house. For the most part, my sisters were away, supplementing their student loans with holiday jobs, usually involving working in pubs. My father, as always, was working hard, commuting from Beaconsfield to Croydon, where his business was based. He was gone by seven in the morning and was rarely home before the corresponding time in the evening. Great swathes of time, therefore, were spent at home with my mother.

  I have never been at my best with nothing to do. Inactivity usually led to lethargy and by the time I reached teenagehood, sleeping until noon was not out of the question. My mum, therefore, went out of her way to make sure I was as occupied as possible. Occasionally, she took me with her into work, teaching disabled adults in Maidenhead, but mainly she arranged for me to play sport. That meant days spent at the tennis club with other kids who had similarly been dumped by their parents, and the pro, a guy called Peter Willetts, became our surrogate guardian for the day. I also gained membership of Burnham Beeches golf club, and with Rob Easton, who had joined the club at the same time as me, I would spend countless hours on the course or on the driving range trying to emulate the swing of Nick Faldo, who was world number one at that stage.

  There were plenty of other activities too, such as trips to Alton Towers. What there was little of at that stage was cricket. Until I was fifteen, cricket largely finished at the end of the summer term, in early July. Two and a half months of holiday were spent doing just about every other sport apart from cricket. I am not entirely sure why that was the case – perhaps it was because I was never really a part of a county set-up, or maybe it was because my parents concentrated on club tennis – but, apart from the odd colts tournament for Gerrards Cross CC, my cricketing education stopped on prize-giving day. Not that it really mattered, though, as the cricketing education I received at my new senior school, Radley College, was first rate.

  I arrived at Radley as a young, naive and rather small thirteen-year-old and was immediately intimidated by the place. For starters, the boys around me (there were no girls apart from one, who was the daughter of one of the teachers and unsurprisingly popular) were more young men than boys. They seemed enormous, with broken voices and tree trunks for legs.

  The facilities were at once impressive and overwhelming. The school was set in 800 acres of Oxfordshire countryside. Sports pitches extended as far as the eye could see. There was even a nine-hole golf course, as well as some of the best drama and music facilities you could possibly imagine. The school had its own rowing club, young anglers could practise their fly-fishing on ‘college pond’ and there was even a pack of beagles for those who fancied country sports. All of this was in addition to the extensive main facilities, which were not surprisingly based around academic work and housing for the pupils and teachers.

  It was, in short, a huge institution and it had a whole host of rules and regulations. For instance, there were sections of the grass you were not permitted to walk on; there were jobs, or fags, that the first-years had to do on behalf of their boarding houses; and there were academic gowns that had to be worn all day long. We thought nothing of playing cricket in our break times without even bothering to take off our gowns and we never once worried about how absurd we must have looked to a casual passer-by.

  In fact, it seems bizarre now how quickly I came to think of all that as normal. I never really considered how fortunate I was to be at a school adorned with such incredible facilities and opportunities. It was just how it was. That was my school, and that was my life. It was only much later, having spent some time at Middlesex with cricketers from far less affluent backgrounds, that I really started to appreciate my good fortune.

  And I genuinely was fortunate. Every hobby or passion was catered for, from opera singing to hovercrafting, with schoolmasters ready to spend endless evenings and weekends running extracurricular activities. At the same time, the boys were all being primed to get the requisite GCSEs and A levels to go to university.

  On the rugby field, our coach was Steve Bates, who was scrum-half for Wasps at the time and, in the days before rugby union turned professional, made his living from being a schoolmaster/rugby coach. On the cricketing side, Andy Wagner, who had played cricket for MCC young pros and Somerset, forged an outstanding combination with Bert Robinson, who had been the school cricket pro for over fifty years, since his days of playing for Northamptonshire.

  Under their tutelage, my cricket really started to develop. By the time I was in the second year, I was bolstered up to the colts team (in effect, playing for the age group above mine), and by the summer of my third year I found myself in the school 1st XI. That is not to say, however, that I was the real star performer in the school. That label belonged to Robin Martin-Jenkins, son of the late Christopher, who was in the year above me and was already being talked about as a future England all-rounder. His contributions to the team, with both bat and ball, were often the difference between winning and losing. In fact, I even had some pretty good competition in my own year, with Ben Hutton, who later went on to be my best man and colleague at Middlesex, showing that cricketing talent can indeed run in the genes, from grandfather to grandson.

  Although I was not a stand-out like Martin-Jenkins, I made improvements every year, and once I’d managed to get the particularly unpleasant monkey off my back of never having scored a century – against an Australian touring side, at the age of fifteen – I started to come into my own as a cricketer. By this time, with a couple of others from the school, I was starting to represent Oxfordshire Under-19s in the summer holidays, thus extending my cricket season from two months to four months.

  When I look back at the cricket I played at school, what surprises me is that I never really dominated. Surely a future England captain should have been head and shoulders above his peers at that level? Certainly the likes of Alastair Cook and Marcus Trescothick were making significant waves before they reached the age of fifteen. I can’t really put my finger on why that wasn’t the case. Perhaps it was because I was still playing all those other sports, from rugby to golf and everything in between. More likely, though, it came down to motivation. I think that I was always motivated to prove to everyone that I was good enough to deserve to be playing at the level I was selected for, but not beyond that. I wanted to show people that I was at least as good as my team-mates, but I never looked towards the real stars of my generation, who were donning their county tracksuits, because I didn’t really come up against them. In short, I was quite content being a big fish in what was a very small pond, the Radley 1st XI. Maybe I wasn’t confident enough in my ability
or even bothered enough to push myself harder, but at that stage cricket for me was a recreation, not a future career.

  If I have one criticism about my time at Radley, it is that everything was geared to getting good A levels and proceeding along the well-worn path from school to university and then, in many cases, to the City. Pupils who headed into other careers, from music to drama and of course sport, seemed thin on the ground. Also, I was definitely influenced by my parents, who placed great emphasis on attaining the necessary grades to follow in the footsteps of my sisters, who were making their way in their chosen fields of veterinary science, medicine and accountancy. Cricket as a living did not seem to be on the agenda.

  At the end of 1995, I left Radley College, after five incredible years, armed with some lifelong friends, many memories and the more than adequate three As and a B at A level. Those qualifications hide the fact that I really didn’t work very hard at school. There were too many other things to do, and my attitude was always to do as little as possible, and leave things as late as possible, before attempting my schoolwork.

  I am a little embarrassed about it now, as at times both my teachers and my father were forced to rack their brains to find ways of getting me motivated enough to do my work. Academic ability was never the problem; diligence and application, on the other hand, were more of an issue. At one stage, during the year before my A levels, I was forced to hand a sheet of paper, devised by my father, to the teacher at the end of the lesson, who would in turn attest to the level of my attention over the preceding forty minutes. My friends thought the whole thing hilarious. I definitely did not.