Page 27 - Club Rockley

And a special memory that stays with me clearly, My wife and I, together with John and Jenny Snow and a small group of family and friends set off one lovely Sunday morning, with picnic and drinks cooler well packed, for picture perfect Bottom Bay on the naturally beautiful East Coast of Barbados. Some few miles short of our destination, we stopped for some refreshments at a popular “Rum Shop”, which was quite crowded with nois- ily happy locals: as we entered one of the youngest members of our group caught us up, as he dashed into the Rum shop exclaiming that we had forgotten to put the cricket bat into the car, so the beach cricket match would have to be cancelled. We comforted the lad and ourselves and said it would have to wait for next time and ordered our round of drinks. When we came to leave the Rum Shop some twenty minutes later a Barbadian gentleman came hurriedly round from the back of the shop and presented John Snow with quite a respectable looking cricket bat which he had just whittled out of a piece of wood he had found somewhere ‘out de back’.
Both John and I felt that we should reward the man with a few dollars, but he held up his hands, smiled, and said that it was an honour to make a cricket bat for John Snow; John shook hands with him and the gentleman said:
“It was not what you achieved that I liked, John Snow, it was the way you played the game”
John later said that was the nicest compliment he had ever received. We had a great picnic and a splendid game of beach cricket. Just for the record John’s team almost lost.
John and Jenny Snow, pre-match at Bottom Bay, St Phillip.