Читать книгу No Win Race. A Story of Belonging, Britishness and Sport онлайн

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Cricket had always been a feature in the stories that my parents told me about Jamaica. They grew up in Galina, a small district in the hilly parish of St Mary in the northeast. St Mary had been the former residence of playwright Noël Coward who lived in a place called Firefly. Apparently, Coward did not like to entertain guests there, so he kept a guesthouse by the sea called Blue Harbour where he hosted major public figures such as Errol Flynn and Sir Winston Churchill. Author Ian Fleming’s 15-acre Goldeneye estate was also in St Mary. As a teenager in the fifties, my mother, Magnore, would ride her bike from Galina to Goldeneye to deliver Fleming’s groceries. It was not until my mother moved to England in 1961, a year after my father, that she found out that Fleming had been famous.

At an age when I was studying for my GCSE exams, my father had already left school, lived alone, and had been earning money by selling stones and limes by the side of Galina’s dusty main road. His one-room shack had no running water, no toilet. My mother during her school years had been doing the books and shopkeeping for her uncle Frank or ‘thumbing’ a lift to go to the places where she could sell fabrics.