Growing up in a profoundly Celtic household, I was aware from a very early age of the labyrinth of inoffensive but powerful superstitions that intermittently governed the lives of my uncles, aunts and, especially my grandmother.
In Dublin years ago, a cab driver, having confirmed that I was Australian, asked me if I had any Irish lineage, and I said, ‘My grandmother came from Cork,’ and he nodded with weary tolerance and said, ‘Yes, they all do.’
She really did though and, in the crowded house of which she was the benign dictator except when my father came home on leave, she was the source and curator of a whole world of lore that she in her turn had grown up with in Ireland – what to do when you passed a funeral; turning the calendar page early; a picture falling from the wall; dealing with spilt salt; tripping over in a cemetery; and, of course, among many others, Friday the thirteenth.
This is the one I remember best from those days probably because that baleful date really did come round now and then, but I also recall that it was usually a bit of a fizz. The tabloids would make something of it, but as for good, honest-to-God bad luck and evil circumstance, it was rarely up to much – not to the sensation seeking gaze of a small boy anyway. Age and maturity put a lot of healthy superstitions in their place and so numerous Friday the thirteenths have passed me by without a flicker until just recently when, because of some reading I’ve been doing, Friday 13 March 2015 struck a chord. It was the forty-eighth anniversary of the death of Frank Worrell.
One of the greatest of all West Indian cricketers, Worrell was a brilliant batsman, a fine bowler, a quintessential all-rounder. Though he did not have the magnificent natural gifts of his team mates – Everton Weekes and Clyde Walcott, the other two famous ‘Ws’ – or the outrageously abundant talents of the up-and-coming Garfield Sobers, Worrell was a natural leader, a unifying and inspiring figure towards whom his team felt unshakable loyalty and commitment.
His many obvious qualifications for the captaincy of the West Indies cricket team, however, were seen in the 1950s to be outweighed by one serious disadvantage. He was black and it was assumed that the Cricket Board would re-appoint wicketkeeper-batsman Gerry Alexander as captain on