The school rugby coach was a Welshman by the name of Ian Gollop, a man dedicated to mathematics and rugby, and who possessed an overwhelming desire to win that was conspicuously absent on the Fourth XV pitch. We even had training sessions, which was not quite what I had in mind when I gleefully kicked athletics into touch. The Second XV backs did an awful lot of running around without the ball – as a foil to our first-team counterparts – and I raised this point with Mr Gollop. ‘Do you really need us for this?’ I inquired, whereupon he told me that if I didn’t like it, I could get on my bike and clear off. So I did. However, this actually turned out to have much the same effect of saying ‘sod ‘em’ to the England selectors fifteen years later, as I then found myself in the First XV. I didn’t quite make it until the end of the season, though. Dropped for ‘lack of effort’.
Even in those early days I realized I was a touch closer to the Baron de Coubertin’s philosophy than Ian Gollop’s. Critics have since earmarked it as a failing, a character defect, and maybe they’re right, but I’ve always liked to win. Life’s much easier when you win – it’s just that I sussed out from a fairly early age that you don’t always. I actually had to learn and develop a stronger competitive spirit at school, where I made the discovery that losing in itself is not something to tear your hair out over, but not performing as well as you can certainly is. I remember playing in the school squash competition against a lad I should have beaten. I’d won the first game, and was so far ahead in the second that I almost felt sorry for him and relented. Then, of course, I started to play very badly, and to cut a long story short, got stuffed. That annoyed me so much that I actually felt ashamed of myself. So it’s not so much the winning or losing – it’s more that if I feel as though I’ve played as well as I can, I feel okay. Translated in to cricket, if you’ve done well, scored a century maybe, but the side has lost, there’s definitely a feeling of disappointment but you’re not personally depressed.
I used to play a fair amount of tennis with a good friend of mine from Leicester, Tim Ayling, and to be perfectly frank he can beat me anytime he wants to. As I recall, the only time I’ve ever won a set off him was when we had not prepared in the regulation manner, and he was slightly more pissed than I was. But as long as I’ve felt I’ve played hard and competed against him, I’ve enjoyed the game. It might sound a bit futile, but I’d sooner play out of my skin and lose than beat an inferior player. But as for the so-called lack of a competitive streak, I once played tennis with Robin Askwith when he came up to stay with me in Leicester a few years back, and for all Askwith’s charms and abilities, he happens to be deformed. He’s actually got one leg shorter than the other, which he’s hidden quite well in most walks of life, but it doesn’t do much for his agility on a tennis court. He’d also done something to his ankle, so he could barely move at all to his left, which is where I kept hitting the ball. By the end of the game, he was barely able to crawl into the shower, and he said: ‘If anyone says you haven’t got a competitive streak in you, I am living proof to the contrary.’
I don’t think you can get through sixteen years of first-class cricket, with a reasonable amount of success, without some kind of competitive edge. It’s all about maintaining a balance in many ways. For instance I play golf, or a strange version of it, not too often and not too well a lot of the time. But if I can make a contribution, make the odd par here and there, then I’m happy, but if I go round like a total novice, and spend half my time hacking out of bushes or failing to drive past the ladies’ tee, then frankly, I get bloody irritable. Going back to the rugby, and the ‘lack of effort’, I scored plenty of points with the boot, and also popped over for a few tries – but apparently there was something wrong with my work-rate. Even in those days, it seems, skill took second place to sweat. Micky Stewart would have loved Ian Gollop. Generally, I think my philosophy has stood me in good stead. I’ve never been one to mope around looking miserable after losing, which in some ways is a good thing, and in others bad. Putting on appearances to suit other people is not really me, but I now know, for example, that had I looked a touch more suicidal after losing a Test match to India in 1986, I might not have been relieved of the England captaincy. I felt bad about it, but to the man that mattered – Peter May – not bad enough.
King’s has a fabulous setting, well worth a walk round if you are ever in Canterbury, and most of the school is within the Cathedral Close. To get to breakfast in the morning there was a walk of about 250 yards past one of the great cathedrals of the world, and a passage through a dark alley reputed to have been haunted by Nell Gwynne. You are surrounded by architecture dating back to the eleventh century, and wherever you go you are surrounded by history. I can perhaps appreciate it better now than I did then, because as you became older as a schoolboy boarder, your main thought is not so much ‘Look how beautiful this all is’ as ‘How do I get out of here?’ You are well aware of one or two social attractions outside, and basically you are walled in. The gates are shut, wander lust strikes (or just lust), you get a bit thirsty and your mind is not so much on Latin or cricket as mountaineering. A young man’s thoughts lightly turn to spring, or to be more accurate, springing out.
There was a light on top of one of the walls we used to climb, and you had to move pretty quickly to get over without being spotted. It was a bit like Colditz really, although the penalties for a break-out were perhaps not quite so serious, although the penalty for failing to negotiate one of the spiked railings was fairly severe. I remember one lad losing his footing one night, and instead of the planned evening out he ended up with the school matron applying several layers of sticking plaster to his posterior. Mostly we made it though, and the prime job then was to get around town without detection.
Two of my better friends at King’s were one Andrew Newell, the headmaster’s son, and Stephen White-Thompson, the Dean of Canterbury’s son. Andrew was similar to Alec Stewart in as much as he did not let his background prevent him from being one of the boys. The point, however, is that between the two of them it was not very hard to acquire a key that gave one access to the postern gate, and thus an easy exit to the town and beyond. It was relatively easy to take away a key for long enough to get a copy cut, which of course ruled out the need for crampons, pitons, and the possibility of reporting to matron with a punctured posterior. I nearly got rumbled once when one of the masters found this strange key in my possession and gave the relevant gates a try. Fortunately it had been cut badly, and only worked if you waggled it around in the lock, so I got away with that one.
I was doing well with the work and sport, but the blots on the copybook were beginning to add up, and discovering girls was next on the agenda. On one particular occasion the school had been granted a day off for some reason or other, though this was due to finish with a roll-call at round about six o’clock in the evening. I had made it as high up as a house monitor, which in terms of high office would hardly give you vertigo – roughly equivalent to lance-corporal I suppose – but I thought at the time that it might be enough not to qualify me for roll-call. Wrong. I’d actually disappeared off to Ashford, which was about a twenty-minute train ride away, to meet a girl I had met at one of the dances that the school occasionally organized, and after a couple of drinks we decided to see a James Bond film at the local cinema. By this time, apparently, we had both been reported AWOL, and as we came out of the movie the search party that had been put out for her came upon us strolling down Ashford High Street. She was dragged off, not quite in chains, and off I went to catch the train back to Canterbury. Unfortunately, the events of the day – in particular the sojourn in the pub – had left me drained, and I woke up at the end of the line in Ramsgate. I did manage to hitch a lift back to Canterbury, where a vast tub of hot water awaited, and it was back to the ranks – an unfamiliar feeling then, if not now.
In most respects, school had gone reasonably well. I’d enjoyed my sport, and if I had also enjoyed one or two extra curricular activities too well for an unblemished record, I’d studied hard enough to end up with