We drove to John Arlott’s flat. He looked exactly as I had imagined him to be. In South Africa we had often listened to John’s broadcasts, and his voice, the way he talked about cricket and the humour which he found in little incidents, gave the impression that he was a warm, friendly person. As I stopped in the doorway waiting for him to say, “Come in,” I remember thinking—he looks just like his voice.
Within seconds, he had me chatting like a long-lost friend. I suppose in some ways he was that to me, because he had started mentioning me in his newspaper columns and in broadcasts five or six years before.
Although I knew of him as a writer and a broadcaster, I couldn’t understand why he needed so many books. The room was lined with them.
John tried to reassure me that I would find everybody anxious to help me settle down and made me promise that, if I had any difficulties with which he could help, I had to get in touch with him right away. He was sure that, with John Kay looking after me, I would be protected from the worst that Lancashire could offer!
John Kay had sent back the hired car which we had used from the airport and we travelled to Middleton by train. Each hour brought a new experience. As I stepped aboard the train, another wave of doubt swept over me. I thought, “Oh my God, not one coloured person on the train! What am I getting into here?”
Although my skin is not noticeably different in colour, I was as conscious of the difference as if I had been a coal-black negro. When you have grown into manhood separated always as black and white, never travelling on the same public transport, eating in the same restaurants, going to the same hotels, being in the same house, sitting at the same table, drinking from the same cup, using the same lavatories, it is not easy to begin to do all these things, without an instinctive mental shying away.
As we had walked along the platform to the train, I was fascinated that everyone doing the lifting and the carrying was a white man. Nowadays coloured immigrants are employed in great numbers on the British public-transport systems. I suppose, even when I arrived, there were coloured people working at the station. But, because I saw white men doing the job which I had previously seen only coloured men do, I would not have noticed any coloured workers, even if they had been there.
John Kay took me into the dining car for a meal and he saw that I was now becoming quite frightened. To have sat down publicly at a table for a meal with a white man would have meant trouble for both of us in South Africa. I was so scared that it was only when John reminded me about it later that I remembered that it had happened.
Indeed, I recollect very little about those first twenty-four hours. I can recall getting off the train. I was wearing a green scarf because of the cold. This was high around my face and I could see very little of what was going on. There were five men waiting for us, all of them Middleton officials. One was George Harwood, the secretary. I was put into a car but I didn’t hear what was said or even see what was happening. I heard someone mention a golf club and dinner. All I can really remember of the golf club visit was seeing television for the first time. It was an outside broadcast and the rain was teeming down. I wanted to touch the screen to see if it was wet.
Not until nearly midnight did I arrive at the digs which had been found for me with Mr. and Mrs. Lord, who were to be my “parents” for the next year. They could not have treated me better if I had indeed been their own son. I often look at two photographs—one of my mother and one of Mrs. Lord. Mother is older and her skin is darker, but both are smiling into the camera, both wear glasses and both have the same warm friendly eyes, both the same smile. I can see a likeness, even if others cannot.
That first night Mrs. Lord was worried about me. She was sure that coming from that lovely hot sun into an English night would cause me to freeze to death unless she packed the bed with hot water bottles and blankets and lit every fire in the house. Certainly this was one of those April days in England which would have changed Robert Browning’s mind about wanting to be there.
I must have been completely exhausted when I fell into bed that night. That tiredness, plus Mrs. Lord’s determination to make me comfortable, sent me to sleep until five o’clock the next afternoon!
The following morning I walked the streets of Middleton and I saw the white man as I never thought him to be. To segregated Africans, the image of a white man is a white shirt, a hat, an umbrella and a smart city suit. For the first time, I saw white men wearing overalls, working in the roads, sweeping the streets, emptying the dustbins and delivering the milk. These were jobs which I had seen only coloured people do.
For a white man to do these things in Africa would be to downgrade him. When I saw the Englishmen at work in Middleton, it gave these jobs a new dignity. Later I realised why. In South Africa the African must sweep the streets, but he cannot then go home, have a bath, put on a suit and go out unchallenged into the world around him.
Having now been away from Africa for nearly ten years, that does not seem a very dramatic thing to say. Indeed, it is the sort of thing others have said for many, many years and some have chosen to say it with aggressiveness and bitterness. This is not the effect I ever want to give. I have been hurt but I do not want revenge.
During the height of the crisis in late 1968 when it was announced that, if I were not going to South Africa as a Test player, I would be sending comments from South Africa on the Test matches, concern was expressed that these might be angled to stimulate more controversy.
Those who voiced such fears had either forgotten or were unaware that, in the years I had been in England, I had revisited South Africa and spent many months there. I had travelled around the country giving lectures and coaching and never once allowed conversation or comments to intrude on things other than cricket. I had also contributed fairly frequently a column under my own name in South African newspapers about life in England—life as a cricketer.
Never, with a cough or a comma, had I consciously said or written anything that could be considered racially contentious.
I was grateful to have the chance of a summer alone in England before Naomi came to join me. The life of a professional cricketer is a man’s world. Although I missed Naomi very much, being alone did mean that I could be quite single-minded about learning to live in the new world. By the time she joined me, I had more confidence. Perhaps not enough for both of us, but at least it was better than if we had both arrived frightened and confused as I had done.
It was a very slow boat which took me back to South Africa at the end of the 1960 season. I was going back to collect my wife and my child, who was soon to be born, and I was bringing them back to the life which we had always dreamed about and which was indeed as good as the dream itself.
The dream had not been uninterrupted, indeed the first few weeks in Middleton had been more like a nightmare. I was not the only one in that Lancashire town who thought that a ghastly mistake had been made. But, by the end of the month, I had begun to adjust my technique. I recovered from my bad start and finished the season with 930 runs with an average of 48.95 and 71 wickets for an average of 11.72. Middleton had given me a new and better contract and were going to pay my fare and Naomi’s back to England the following spring.
From The Basil D’Oliveira Affair, 1969