Page 196 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

statuesque raven-haired exotic with great presence and an interesting, and very
alive, face, by no means beautiful, but imbued with vivacity and personality. I
decided that she and I had to meet.

That evening, we did. Why I had not seen her before was because she had
been until then the subject of the superficial ministrations of Pocock. She,
Virginia, was well-named, being full of self-confidence and ready intelligence,
always immaculately dressed. She was an Australian model, returning to Sydney
to continue her career after the mandatory (for Australians) European trip. As
somebody in that business would probably be, she knew how to handle herself;
although I had her attention when I brought her to my cabin for a (very friendly)
drink, at which time she fitted beautifully into a tight and nicely revealing sari,
she made it clear that snuggling was all that I was could expect. I got the message;
also, that she could, in extremis, handle me without difficulty.

I had been to Cape Town on Mantua, but the arrival of Canberra was an
altogether more significant matter. The ship was dressed overall and we received
a substantial number of dignitaries, for large ships of this importance just didn’t
come down to this part of the world (which is not to say that the city was ignorant
of ships, the British company trading to South Africa being Union Castle, the
owner of very fine vessels, but all of which carried substantial cargo due to the
vagaries of the passenger trade). Cape Town itself being a most attractive city,
even without ascending Table Mountain, the passengers poured ashore. What
they actually found, however, was a torn society.

South Africa was going through one of its tumultuous periods. The country was
blessed by magnificent scenery, great weather and abundant natural resources. Its
religions were Dutch Reformed, rugby and cricket. Its curses were a deeply divided
population, the divisions being the whites (both Boer and ‘British’), coloureds
(Indians, of which Gandhi had been one, mixed races, miscegenation being banned,
‘honorary whites’, which is to say Japanese, Koreans and later the Chinese) and the
Blacks, who were regarded as little more than paid slaves, of low intelligence and little
potential. One common factor between the races was a love of cricket, a game made
for long sunny days, perfect green pitches, and Pimms for the spectators. In the 1960s
the unlikely had happened inasmuch as a man of mixed race, Indian and Portuguese,
had risen to the top in South African cricket, but who, because of his racial mix, was
not allowed to play at the first-class level. He, Basil D’Oliviera, was condemned to
the lower leagues of South African cricket (which meant coir pitches and segregated
crowds, with black spectators corralled behind barbed wire fencing) until his skills
and reputation came to the attention of John Arlott, the Walter Cronkite of British
commentators. He, with a deep brown voice and a warm Hampshire accent, was a
revered BBC (the only game in town) commentator, and he had sufficient influence
to persuade D’Oliviera to come to England to play for a minor club, from which he
soon graduated to one of England’s leading county sides.

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