3. Georgina and the mountain

I taught for 36 years.  For the first thirty of those years I taught geography and then I taught maths.  Incidentally, I hate the way Americans call it, ‘math.’  The word is mathematics and so the short word for it is, “maths!”  

I suppose that ‘math’ is preferable to the way a very highly placed official in a school district in Florida spelt the word.  He was responding to a discussion paper that Caroline had circulated to do with the Maths Strategy in Cayman schools.  No abbreviations or shortened words for him, the pompous oaf.  Five times he referred to the “Mathermatics Strategy.”

I taught maths because when I began the job of examinations co-ordinator, my frequent absences from class meant that I couldn’t really teach ‘A’ level geography anymore.

The new, dynamic Head of Maths suggested to me that as I was numerate and got on well with the weaker students, I might enjoy teaching bottom set maths groups.  What a perceptive woman she is.  I loved it.

One of the problems I had with teaching geography was that I was expected to organise and lead field trips.  I had had enough of the buggers after seven hours a day at school and I certainly didn’t want to be stuck with them for five days, 24 hours a day.  

I was 26 years old and therefore only seven or eight years older than the students.  The biggest problem with organising a field trip was that as there would be female students present, I had to be accompanied by a woman.  Although I was quite friendly with a few female teachers, I found it a bit awkward asking one to come away with me for a few days.

My fear was that I would book accommodation, hire a coach, plan the activities, arrange insurance etc and then have the "statutory woman" pull out.  I made a few approaches but got nowhere.  

A month before the scheduled start of the trip, with financial deadlines looming and with a very real prospect of enforced cancellation, I swallowed my pride and one morning I put up a notice on the staff board pleading for a female teacher to accompany me on a trip to Barmouth, North Wales. 

I was amazed that an hour after the message appeared, Georgina came to see me and offered her services.  I was surprised because I hardly knew her.  I could only remember speaking to her once when I had called her George, and that annoyed her greatly. 

“Haven’t you ever read The Famous Five?” I asked.  No, she had not, she told me icily and so I wrote her off as not my kind of person.  She also had a PhD and insisted that everyone called her “Doctor Peto”.  She had seemed distant and unapproachable.

She never came to the pub after work and she never joined in any of the silly distractions that I organised for the amusement of the staff.  Once, I had been standing near to her in the staffroom when she had scalded her hand with boiling water from the urn.  I and everyone else I knew, would have screamed a series of obscenities.  Georgina said, “Poo!”  

I knew that she wouldn’t be fun to be with, but I had no choice. “Thanks very much,” I said and two weeks later, very early on a Monday morning, we set off.

Barmouth is a lovely town.  The area has everything a geographer could want: coastal features, glacial features, mountains, arable and hill farms and a climate so mild in December that London kids actually listened when you explained why.

On Tuesday evening, we had written up our notes on the day’s work.  I had given them a scintillating talk all about corry formation, roches moutonnées, rock striations, moraines and the U shaped valleys that we would see the following day when we climbed Cadair Idris to see the splendour and the beauty that is Llyn Cau.  

Llyn Cau is an almost perfectly circular lake that is found in a corry some 800 feet below the summit of Cadair Idris.  A corry is a deep depression in the high flanks of a mountain where ice collected and a glacier began to flow hundreds of thousands of years ago.

After I had finished the evening talk, the students had a couple of hours of free time and they went off to play table tennis or whatever. I didn’t care.  I’d act in loco parentis, but I wasn’t going to be a security guard too. 

I’d told them on Monday evening that as only two of them were eighteen, none of them should go to a pub and that girls should stay in the girl’s rooms and the boys in theirs but that was as far as I went.  If they got pissed or pregnant, it was out of my control. I felt I had done all that I could.

Georgina and I were left in the lounge alone. She read a book and I watched television.  “Will you turn that down please?” were the only words she said to me.  At about 9:30 she closed her book and looked at me expectantly.  “What does she want?” I thought.  “Does she expect me to entertain her?”

We started to talk.  It wasn’t easy.  She didn’t know me and I certainly didn’t know her.  I don’t think that she had mixed anyone like me at Oxford where she had been until two years earlier.  In desperation, I made some flippant comment about short-term hopes and long-term fears.  I got no response and silence returned and lasted for several minutes.  

Suddenly, she started to cry - proper tears - and then, she was sobbing uncontrollably.  I had never experienced anything like this before and I didn’t know what to do.

When she had calmed down a little, I led her gently towards the washbasin in the corner where I hoped she could splash her face and feel better.  We hadn’t spoken since she started to cry.  We had almost reached the basin when she started crying again.  

She turned and flung herself at me and burying her head into my shoulder, sobbed louder than ever.  After another minute or two she had stopped crying but just hung on to me and we stood there, locked together in the middle of the room.

The inevitable happened. The door burst open and in came Spiro.  “Sir, are you going to come and play ……. Oh, sorry.”  

Spiro, if by the remotest chance you are reading this, it was not what you thought and certainly not what you told your mates.  

Georgina disengaged herself from me, picked up her book and went off to her room without saying a word.  To this day I remain baffled.  I must have said something to upset her so much but I have no idea what it was as it was never mentioned again.

On Wednesday morning, the coach parked below Cadair Idris and we set off along a pretty track through woodland.  I had told everyone the previous evening that the walk would take about three hours.  We were going uphill all the time but it was a gentle climb and very pleasant.  Georgina and I walked together.  I found that she enjoyed the juicy bits of gossip I told her about some of her colleagues.  As she knew very few people very well, there was a lot to tell her.  

I had suggested to Georgina that she walk at the tail of the file to pick up stragglers but she either misunderstood my request or ignored it.

After we passed the tree line, the gradient became steeper and Georgina began to struggle.  

“You didn’t say it was going to be this steep.” 

Then I made a big mistake.  “It gets a lot steeper.”

After a few more minutes she sat on a rock.  “I need a rest.” 

I estimated that we had covered about a third of the horizontal distance and a quarter of the ascent.  I wasn’t tired and nor were the kids.  They were all having a lot of fun running around us playing with four or five Frisbees.  Eventually I coaxed Georgina to her feet and we set off again.  She was painfully slow.

“I can’t go on,” she said. “I’ll stay here. You carry on and I’ll meet you back at the coach.”

You’ve got to go on,” I said.  “Suppose one of the girls needs the sort of help that only a woman can give. Come on and try and enjoy it. Anyway, we’re nearly there.”  I knew we weren’t but I had to lie.  

As we climbed, some of the boys started to take the piss.  They knew very well why we were going so slowly and every time a false summit appeared, they’d shout, “There you are Miss, the top.”  There are a dozen false summits on that route.

Conversation between us had totally ceased.  She plodded, head down, looking neither left nor right and so completely miserable, that she missed all the wonderful views to be seen. Every ten minutes she stopped and sat on a rock, silent in abject misery but at least she wasn’t crying.  I noticed that she hadn’t got her rucksack.

“Where’s your bag?” I asked her.

“Back there.  It was too heavy.  I’ll pick it up on the way back.”

After four hours we reached Llyn Cau.  We had lunch.  Georgina didn’t have any as it was in her bag.  I offered her some of mine and she took it without saying a word and then sat 50 yards from the rest of us and ate alone.  I did my bit about corries, rock lips and glaciers etc.  We were all aware of an ‘atmosphere’.

Then, we started back.  Georgina found her bag where she had left it and walked 200 yards behind the last of the group down the mountain.  She sat on her own on the coach.  

Later that evening at about nine o’clock, after the students had left us alone once more, I spoke to her for the first time since mid-afternoon.

“You OK?”

She ignored me.

“How about this, Georgina?  Let’s say that you have just realised that your wallet fell out of your pocket while you were having lunch and it’s still up there by the lake.  How much would there have to be in it for you to go back tomorrow and get it?”

“Five hundred pounds?.......Five thousand?....... a million?” 

She gave me a look of total contempt.

“You don’t get it do you, you fucking moron?  I fucking hate fucking Wales.  I hate fucking Cader fucking Idris.  I hate fucking Llyn fucking Cau shit.  I hate fucking glaciers, corries and whatever fucking other fucking bullshit you were fucking well boring us all to fucking death with today”

“Got that, fuckface?”

I nodded.

2. Life's Ironies

Have you realised, as I have, that one of life’s cruellest ironies is that good things happen to you, or you learn something new, too late in life for it to have any real, long-term benefit? 

When I was seventeen, I would have given anything to have been able to fart at will.  I had mastered the art of swallowing enough air to let out a really good resounding belch but the fruity fart eluded me.  My school friends could all seem to do it, but I couldn’t. 

While in the sixth form at school, I went with thirteen other students on a geology field trip to the Isle of Arran off the west coast of Scotland.  There were two male members of staff who led nine boys and five girls, and we stayed in Youth Hostels.  That wouldn’t be allowed today as a female teacher would have to be present.

The boys and the two teachers shared a dormitory with bunk beds.  The five girls had a room to themselves. I’ve no idea what they got up to in there.  

We spent all day walking up and down high hills. (When does a high hill become a low mountain?) and admiring and sketching sills, dykes and memorably, Hutton’s Unconformity.  I’ll tell you what that is later.

The evenings were spent with lectures and background reading.  It was certainly not a holiday and we were all in bed by ten o’clock, tired and exhausted.  There was no light pollution on Arran and so the nights were pitch black and the darkness in our dormitory was so impenetrable as to be solid.  

One night, ten minutes after we had all gone to bed, somebody farted.  Someone else giggled.  A minute later came another fart from a different part of the room and this one was of Olympic qualifying standard.  It came ripping and roaring around the dorm and I swear that it echoed.  We all giggled.  

From then on, the farts came thick and fast.  It was impossible to tell who was doing what but the only thing that I knew for certain was that none of them was mine.

Eventually, the trip leader, Kenny Gardner, the teacher of Advanced Level geology, said, “OK, that’s enough. Will you stop now please?” and they all did, just like that.  

“Right,” I thought, “Here’s my chance.  They’ve all stopped but I’ll start.”  

I tried and tried but it was completely beyond me.  I finally gave up when I realised that I was much more likely to crap myself than ever produce a fart.

Nowadays, I can fart whenever I want to but at my age, the opportunities for ‘show farting’ are non-existent.  Involuntarily farting is a different matter.  

Anyway, Hutton’s Unconformity is a classic, world-famous geological feature.  People who care, come from all over the world to see it, study it, sketch and photograph it.  Even after all these years, I can still remember it vividly.  We had heard all about it the night before and it lived up to all our expectations.  

We walked everywhere on Arran and by the time we got to the site, it was lunchtime.  Mr Gardner gave us a very brief introduction and then we sat on the surrounding rocks to eat our Youth Hostel-provided, packed lunch.  Lunch was brief as we still had a lot to see and of course, a lot of walking to do. 

“Five minutes,” shouted Kenny, as he walked off somewhere.  "Be ready in five minutes."

We got out our sketchbooks, notebooks, pens and pencils, and sat in a group in front of Hutton’s Unconformity ready to take notes.  

We already knew that it marked a division between rocks of two different geological eras hundreds of millions of years apart. The older rocks dip at an angle of about 50°.  Above them are rocks that are almost horizontal.  The two rock groups contain completely different fossils and the feature proves that the lower rocks are older and experienced aeons of earth movement before the other rocks were deposited on top and must therefore be younger.  

Hutton, for the first time, cited it as evidence that the age of the Earth could be based on scientific data and not upon evidence from the Bible.  Study of the Bible, by Archbishop Ussher, put the date of the creation of the Earth on October 23, 4004 BC, so that now in 2010, it is 6014 years old.  

The exposure stretches for about 400 yards along the coastline.

When Kenny came back it was obvious that he was seething with anger. He was almost shaking with fury.

“Who did it?” he screamed. “Who did it?  We aren’t leaving here until someone owns up.  I mean it.  We’ll stay the night out here in the open if necessary.  Who was it?  Who did it?  Who has vandalised this site?”

I was certain that he thought that it was me because he kept looking my way.  However, as I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, I couldn’t really own up to anything.  I really would have confessed to absolutely anything because after sitting on a bleak beach in northwest Scotland for an hour and a half in March, we were all getting very cold.

There was an impasse.  After another half an hour of sitting in silence on jagged rocks, giving each other questioning looks, we were all shivering and very uncomfortable.  One of the girls was whimpering.  Then, the other teacher, David Thurgur, went over to Kenny and whispered something in his ear. 

“Let’s go,” said Kenny immediately and off we went.  Off to look at another bloody dyke and believe me, when you’ve seen one dyke on Arran, you’ve seen all the dykes on Arran.  

Later, as we walked between sites, my mate Nick, told me that he knew what had happened:  

During lunch, he had needed a poo and had gone about 80 yards away to some bushes.  While there, he saw Mr Thurgur approach the rock face with his geological hammer and carefully and painstakingly carve “LCGS  1964” into the exposure.  (Lowestoft County Grammar School 1964).  

Nick said it was a really nice job and looked great.  I wonder if it is still there.  It should be.  

The matter of the desecration of the historic site was never mentioned to us again but I wonder if the two teachers ever spoke to each other again.

Another thing I learnt to do much too late for it to have any lasting benefit, was to play an on-drive along the ground.  I could always clout or slog the ball over midwicket but it is a shot fraught with risk and often ends up as a catch and therefore the end of your innings.  

Suddenly, during the cricket season of 1995 when I was 48, I found that I could hit the ball just as hard, in the same direction but along the ground and therefore with absolutely no risk of getting out.  I have no idea what I was doing differently but whatever it was , it worked.  If I had discovered how to do that 35 years earlier, I would have certainly been a better player than I ever was.

Last week, when I had to go into a bank in George Town, Grand Cayman, something else happened that never happened to me when I was 20.  I went to customer services and was greeted by a really beautiful young Caymanian woman in her mid-twenties who wore a name badge - Sandra.  She was delightful and I was captivated.  

I sat opposite her in a booth and ogled.   I'd had to go to the bank because a standing order that I had set up a few weeks ago was not being paid and I had to sort it out.   
A minute into proceedings Sandra looked over my shoulder, waved and said, “Hiya girl, like the shirt.”  I turned around to see another beautiful girl walking past wearing a bright red blouse.

“Do you like my shirt?” I asked. 

She stared at my grey, drab T-shirt.  “It’s a bit dull but I suppose that it suits someone of your age.”

What a fantastic put-down.  “Thanks,” I said.

She needed to know my account number at the other organisation that was to receive my monthly payments but I didn’t have it.  I sat in front of Sandra and rang them on my cell but they refused to give out any details over the phone.  I was told that I would have to go in.

“Walk there.  It’s good for you,” said Sandra. “Exercise is good for you.  You’ll lose weight too.”

“Do I look fat?  I’m not walking.  It’s half a mile away and it’s 95 out there and I’ve got a bad knee.  Besides all that, I’ve got an exercise bike at home and I use that every day and please don’t give me that look, because I do.  Do I look as though I need to lose weight?  Do I look fat?”

“Well, you’ve got a bit of a tummy.  Do you drink?”

“Of course.”

“I mean alcohol.”

“No”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes”

“Never?”

“Not for three years.”

“Do you regularly get out of breath?”

“Yes, I do sometimes.”

“Sometimes isn’t regularly.  Do you eat a lot of cookies and candy?”

“No, I don’t but I do have a lot of sex,” I said, getting a little irritated by now with the cross examination. 

Sandra said nothing.  Her face was expressionless as she looked down at her desk and shuffled her papers around.  

“Oh no,” I thought. “You’ve done it now, you pillock.  You’re in Cayman, not in London. She’s a nice, unmarried 25-year-old Caymanian girl.  She almost certainly goes to church twice on Sundays.  You idiot.  You total, stupid idiot.  She won’t think that was funny.  She’ll probably report you for sexual harassment.”

I stood up to leave.  Sandra looked up at me.

“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “it could work.”

“What?”

“What you said you do a lot of.  If you did it really energetically, you’d lose weight.”

“No, I wouldn't.  It's not like England here.  It's much too hot to do anything energetically in Cayman."

Then I suddenly had a thought.  Was she flirting with me?  I looked at her again and she smiled her delightful, captivating smile.  I think she was.

And that’s something else that never happened forty years ago!

 

 

1. Bad Umpiring Decisions & Good Pub Quizzes

There are two people who might be reading this whom I know for certain have never played cricket and will know nothing about cricket umpires and the impact they may have on a game.

One is Caroline’s sister’s husband - my brother-in-law, Matthias.  The other is Gary whom Caroline and I met with his wife, Katie, in Miami.  Matthias is German and Gary is American.    

Matthias speaks fluent English and I first met him some twelve years ago before they were married, when Joanna and he came to Wood Green to visit us.  We went to our local pub.

In 1998, the Henley Arms in Myddelton Road, Wood Green was a proper pub.  It hasn’t been done up since 1958 and the only ‘gastro’ thing about it was that you can eat either crisps or peanuts.  It was smoky and crowded with people who got their hands dirty to make a living.

One of the regulars stood out because he was different from everyone else.  I’d noticed him several times.  From Monday to Friday, he would arrive at 12 noon carrying a large bag.  He would sit at the same table in the corner, take three or four very large books from his bag and then occasionally write things on to large sheets of paper.  At five p.m. every day he left.  The pub was his office.

One day, I was sitting at a table some way from him while waiting for Caroline to meet me and wondering what he was doing.  

To pass the time, I was attempting to do the Times crossword and I had completed perhaps five clues. Caroline arrived at last and sometime later I went to the toilet.  When I returned three minutes later, Caroline greeted me with a very smug expression, brandishing a completed crossword.

Caroline is incapable of lying and I soon found out that the man in the corner had come over, picked up the newspaper and her pen, and then filled it in as quickly as he could write. 

I got to know him very well after that and found out that his name was Mike Laws and that he was, "The Times Crossword Editor."  He has had an interesting life.  After Cambridge, he had fulfilled a lifelong ambition and became a postman and he remained a postman until he was over fifty.  He stopped when he started compiling crosswords full time.

That evening, the four of us entered the pub and realised that the weekly quiz was about to start. I looked at our ’team’ and decided that we had potential and would enter.  

Matthias was doing a PhD in some branch of physics; Joanna was paid to advise on environmental issues; I specialise in sport in general and cricket in particular, while Caroline claimed to be an expert on 80s pop.  It was in the bag.  

The only thing that bothered me was that one of the available prizes on display was 200 Rothmans cigarettes, but as one of the others was a monster bag of liquorice allsorts, we paid our entry fee and took our seats.

Mike was the question setter and the question master.  It was not easy but Matthias lived up to the stereotype of a German scientist and kept us in contention.  Joanna, Caroline and I added a little.  

Round five was interesting.  Words were given and we had to give a definition in four words or fewer.  Only a professional wordsmith could mark such answers.  The first one was, “parsimonious.”  That’s the kind of word that makes you think, “Now I know this.  Let’s put it in a sentence and think about it.”

“Mean spirited,” said Matthias immediately, while that process was going through my head.  I stared at him.  “Like penurious,” he said to help me out.  

Round six was on pop music and Caroline exceeded all our expectations by correctly naming Phil Oakey as the only constant band member of the group, Human League. 

However, Caroline really became the most talked about person in the pub during the interval activity.  During the 20-minute break, every table was given ten small bowls of crisps and we had to identify all ten flavours.  Caroline did it all on her own and would not enter into any discussion with us on the matter.  Our table scored 10/10.  The next highest score was 5.

Now to the point: cricket umpiring decisions are sometimes bad and a player can suffer because of a mistake.  It is really only an issue if the umpire makes a wrong decision because of ignorance of the laws of cricket or if he cheats.  I have witnessed both.

In the 70s, league cricket started in Middlesex and there were no ”neutral” umpires.  Every club was expected to provide its own.  Ours was Sam.  

Sam was well into his seventies and despite having to stand for over three hours at a time, he loved it and he umpired more than 100 games a year.  He once told me that he hated the winters because he never got to meet anyone from October until March.

Sam was a really nice guy but hopeless as an umpire.  He was so bad that he was well known throughout the county.  He lacked knowledge and insight. He gave me out LBW once when I had scored 87. 

I was surprised as I was sure that it had pitched outside leg stump and would have gone on to miss leg stump. I said nothing, made no gesture and just walked off.

The golden rule for umpires is never to engage a batsman in conversation after giving a decision against him.  It opens the gate for all the batsman’s anger and frustration to come spilling out.  During the tea interval, Sam came up to me and said,

“Bad luck.  I thought you were going to get a hundred.  Pity I had to give you out.”

“You didn’t have to give me out, Sam,” I said.

“Yes, I did.  I thought it might just have clipped the leg stump.  It was touch and go.”

“So, you had doubts?”

“Oh yes.  Still, never mind.  There’s always next week.”

(Cricket law states that if there is ANY doubt in the umpire’s mind, the benefit of that doubt must be given to the batsman. It’s the law!)

The following season Finchley - my club - was playing Enfield.  It was the last game of the league season and we were second, four points behind Enfield.  All Enfield had to do to win the league was not to lose.  If the game was drawn or they won, the title was theirs. 

In those days there was no limit on the number of overs bowled in an innings.  There was nothing in the league rules to prevent Enfield from winning the toss and batting for 6 hours, ensuring a draw.  For us to win, we would have to bowl them out and then score more than them.

Enfield won the toss and batted.  It was very boring, as they took no risks at all and just blocked ball after ball.  After two hours they were 40 for 2.

Then, out of nowhere, our quick bowler produced a ball that pitched just short of a length and reared up at the batsman’s throat.  He was taken completely by surprise and in his attempt to avoid the ball, stepped back on to his wicket.  One or two of us may have appealed but I didn’t.  There had never been a more obvious case of, ”Out, hit wicket.”

But, the batsman stayed.  Some of our younger players began to harangue him.  I walked up from first slip and said to him, “You’re out mate. Hit wicket.”  He was unmoved and stood his ground.  I turned to Sam and made a formal appeal.

“How’s that?”

“Not out,” said Sam.

“But the bails are on the ground.”

“Don’t worry,” said Sam, striding down the wicket toward us, “I’ll pick them up.”

The game was drawn.

Sam was also responsible for another of my foreshortened innings. Finchley was playing a “friendly” all-day game against an Australian touring side.  We batted first and were about 180 for 3.  The Aussies in their endearing way made a concerted, orchestrated, 11-man appeal every time the ball passed the edge of the bat or hit a pad.  It was very annoying.

I played at a ball from their leg break bowler and was completely beaten by a googly (don’t ask - life’s too short) which went down the leg side.  It was extremely well taken by the keeper who, in that irritating way that top-class keepers do, flicked off the bails with his right hand and let out a huge appeal.  I wasn’t concerned, as I knew that I had not lifted my foot and had not left my ground.

I was disconcerted to then hear the fielders shouting, “Yes!  Well done Wayne.  Great take.”  I looked round to see Sam, the square-leg umpire, waving his right index finger in the air.

After the game, which we lost, Sam came over to me. “Why did you walk?  You weren’t out.”

“Sam, you gave me out.”

“No, I didn’t. You walked.”

“Then why were you waving your finger about?” I asked him.

“I was pointing at the keeper, telling him that he must stop making frivolous appeals.”

Syd, a friend of some thirty years, emailed me recently and suggested that we were both born out of our time and that if referrals to the third umpire had been in place when we played, he would have much better career bowling figures than he has.  

I replied that my batting average, instead of being in the thirties would be 117.64 if all the LBW decisions that weren’t out, all the catches that were really bump balls and all the run outs that never were, could be taken out of the equation.  

Unfortunately for Syd, his bowling average would actually be much worse!