by Arunabha Sengupta
“Boy – I was pushing thirty. Hard. Strong as a bull – and at the height of mey power as a bowler. None better, boy. Nowhere – none better. Ask the ole timers – they tell you. But for the West Indian tour to England that year – I didn’t even get an invite to the trials.”
Charlie Adams laments while working on his trade as a bat-maker, sitting in the dilapidated shack of his young neighbour Ephraim.
And when Ephraim asks why he missed out, Charlie gives full vent to his frustrations.
“In them days, boy – the Savannah Club crowd was running most everything. People like me either had to lump it or leave it. Epf It ent much different now, Charlie. Charlie Is different – A whole lot different. In them times so when we went Barbados or Jamaica to play cricket they used to treat us like hogs, boy. When we went on tours they put we in any ole kind of boarding house. The best hotels was fer them and the half-scald members of the team – So in ’27 when we was on tour in Jamaica I cause a stink, boy. I had had enough of them dirty little boarding-house rooms. I said either they treat me decent or they send me back. The stink I made got into the newspapers. They didn’t send me back. But that was the last inter-colony series I ever play. They broke me, boy.”
He ends with a touch of wistfulness.
“Should of known mey place. If I had known mey place, Epf, I’d a made the team to England the following year. And in them days, boy – the English county clubs was outbidding each other fer bowlers like me. But the Big Ones here strangled my future, boy.”
Institutional racism ended Charlie’s career. In the play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, which is based a couple of decades after his days as a cricketer, Charlie’s lot is tragic. In an effort to ensure proper schooling for his immensely intelligent daughter Esther, he ends up burgling a café and thereby in jail.
Errol John wrote Moon on a Rainbow Shawl in 1957. By then he was disillusioned with the lack of good roles for black actors on the British theatre scene.
Having migrated to Britain from his native Port of Spain with the Windrush generation, he tried to make his mark as an actor. He went through uncredited roles in movies like The African Queen, The Heart of the Matter and bit roles in The Emperor Jones and Simba. The stage was a bit more rewarding but by the late 1950s he was plagued by the fetters of his origins.
It resulted in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, an exemplar of Caribbean theatre that challenged the idea that standard English was the norm expected in theatre. A year earlier John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had raised voice and awareness about the post-War experiences making their way onto the stage. And Errol John’s play won the Observer’s playwriting competition in 1957 and opened at the Royal Court Theatre in December 1958 – the second play by a West Indian playwright to be staged at a major theatre after Barry Reckford’s Flesh to a Tiger, and the most significant black play.
In Ephraim, the young Trinidadian who works as a trolley driver, the play gives voice to the entire generation of Trinidadians, including John, who made their way to the Mother Country looking for a better life. ‘This Trinidad has nothin’ fer me! Nothin’ I want’ he says. We perhaps cannot condone his abandonment of his pregnant girlfriend Rosa, but we can sympathise when he says, “I would of been something more than just a trolleybus driver. That I know. Eight hours a day – up Henry Street – down Park Street – Tragarete Road – St James Terminus – Turn it round! – Back down town again! – And around again! O Gord! “
Why did the generation migrate?
Eph explains: “My ole man was nothin’! … He used to drive a transport mule-cart! Everybody stinkin’ dustbin! – Hawk! – Spit! – Crap! Is so funny – yer find I want something better for meyself!”
Charlie Adams, the coloured fast bowler marginalised through systemic racism, belongs to an earlier generation. It is perhaps no wonder that the character is based on George John, a ‘man of the people’ who, according to CLR James, was cold-shouldered by patrician leaders of the West Indies side when he did tour England in 1923.
George John bowled very fast, and could cut the ball into batsmen. On that 1923 tour, he captured 90 wickets at 14.68 … 49 of them in first-class matches at 19.51. When HDG Leveson-Gower’s XI required just 28 runs to win in the final innings at Scarborough, John and George Francis, reduced them to 19 for 6, a batting order including Hobbs, Tyldesley, Rhodes, Chapman, Stevens and Frank Mann, before Johnny Douglas and Percy Fender took them across the line.
John, always reserving his best against MCC, captured 52 wickets against the touring sides at 18.38.
In all he captured 133 wickets at 19.24 in a first-class career spanning 16 years.
George John was the father of Errol John. Moon in a Rainbow Shawl thus gave voice to both father and son.
In a nostalgic ‘in-my-day’ dialogue, Charlie Adams even mentions George John, on which his character is based: “In my day, Epf – I use to get my bats secondhand. An’ sometimes they had to last me from season to season. But my big talent was with the ball. I used to trundle down to that wicket – an’ send them down red hot! They don’t make them that fast these days. The boys don’t keep in condition. Today they send down a couple of overs – they are on their knees. But in my time, John, Old Constantine, Francis, them fellas was fast! Fast! Up in England them so help put the Indies on the map.”
Young Murray, the talented batsman for whom Charlie makes bats, is full of awe for his past prowess as a cricketer, and even fixes a coaching job for him. But by then Adams is already a victim of his circumstances.
The play is often described as ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘a breakthrough in Britain for black writing’. Indeed, it describes the migration story – island lives, hopes, dreams and escapes – with a great deal of intensity. And there are moments in it that can be touching and sometimes poignant.
For example the tarty prostitute next door, who smirks in schadenfreude at the misfortune of her eternal foe Mrs Sophie Adams. But when she cooks a festive meal, she asks her boyfriend to check whether the little girl next door has eaten. ‘She name Esther’
And Esther herself reciting the lines: ‘Now am I a tin whistle, Through which God blows. And I wish to God – I were a trumpet – And why, God only knows.’
The play has had revivals in places as diverse as New York, Australia, Kenya and the Caribbean, and in translation in Eastern Europe and South America … apart from in Britain itself. The second UK revival at the Almeida Theatre in 1988 was directed by Maya Angelou.
However, as Lynette Goddard writes, “A search through indexes of books on post-war British theatre shows the relative exclusion of Moon on a Rainbow Shawl from the larger trajectory of British plays of this period, even though it was a Royal Court Play; as most British theatre histories tend to focus in detail on the white male writers of the same period and since, on Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond, John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker.”
True. Much like George John, and his fictional equivalent Charlie Adams, were marginalised a generation earlier, so was Errol John a generation later.
And hence, we delight in cricket and literature connections, referring to PG Wodehouse, JM Barrie, EV Lucas, AA Milne, Harold Pinter, with Dickens and Doyle thrown in for good measure. We revel in the Allahakhbarries and the Gaieties. All that deserves every bit of our attention.
However, such a significant link between the two domains is often ignored. As are the references to the game that throb in the rich vein of literature in the former colonies.
But that is perhaps expected when The Ashes are still synonymous with cricket in so many mindsets even 71 years after The Two Pals of Mine danced through Lord’s.
Errol John also tried to make it in Hollywood, but there too his roles were bit parts in movies such as Assault on a Queen and Buck and the Preacher.
He died in Camden in July 1988, even as Viv Richards and his men romped through England during the summer of the four captains.
Errol John was born on 20 Dec 1924.