What’s
On My Mind: Of Fathers and Sons, and Staying Fit in Outlandish Places by
Aubrey Waddy
January 28, 2014
Fathers
and sons. Where ball games are concerned, usually the competition is
sharp. Sadly, chance had it that I played my father just twice at
squash. And I’ve been on court with two of my three sons about the same
number of times. A small ration for a lifelong squash nut.
My father, Broughton Waddy, was fine man, a specialist in tropical
medicine. He spent the majority of his working life in hot countries,
far from what most of us would regard as comfort. Certainly far from
squash courts. As a newly qualified doctor in 1937, with a sense of
adventure, he went along to the British Colonial Office and said, “What
have you got?” The response was the Gold Coast, now Ghana. For the
friend who accompanied him, the young Dr Aubrey Hodges, after whom I
was named, it was Nigeria.
My father was to spend the next twenty years of his life in the Gold
Coast, up to the granting of independence, when the majority of
colonialists were thrown out. He met my mother there, and that’s where
they started their family. I can clearly remember my last visit as a
child, accompanying my sister for a summer holiday. My father was then
stationed in a town called Kintampo, in the middle of the country.
My father was Australian. He came from a terrific cricketing family,
and to use one of his phrases, he ‘was no slouch’ at the game himself.
In The Parks at Oxford he took the wicket of the great Jack Hobbs,
whose name will mean a lot to English readers. His own father, as an
eighteen year old in New South Wales, top scored against the English
tourists of the time, who included the legendary W G Grace in their
number. His uncle, E F Waddy, would have played more times than he did
for Australia but for another all time great, Victor Trumper.
Ah cricket! The West African savannah is an unaccommodating place for
someone passionate about the game. So my dad hugely relished his trips
back to England each summer ‘on leave’: six weeks of cricket. Not
wanting to waste the first couple of those weeks – fast bowling is as
strenuous as any sports discipline – he had to get fit in advance.
Citizens of Kintampo must have been bemused by the sight of the
respected and vigorous Dr Waddy, running up at full speed to fling a
five and a half ounce leather ball the prescribed twenty two yards at
whoever he could dragoon into batting against him. It might be his
gardener, whose name I don’t remember. It might be his unfortunate
colleague Dr David Scott, who from the sound of it was totally
dyspraxic. And it might be his accomplished cook, Mr Ali Moshi. I
remember one December day Mr Moshi liberally dosing the Christmas
turkey with brandy, as a prelude to decapitation. After the deed had
been cleanly executed, I watched in horror as Mr Moshi, quick on his
feet but decisively outrun, chased the headless bird around the
compound.
I manifest far too few of my father’s admirable genes, but as will
become clear, I’ve inherited a degree of his obsession for sport. Far
away from West Africa, my squash playing started at school. It was
interrupted while I was at university by two major operations in the
space of six months on my knee. After the second of these, stupidly
while my knee was still the size of a grapefruit, I played my two games
of squash with, or should I say against, my fifty seven year old dad,
who had been an effective player in his younger days. It was not a
success. I didn’t want to prolong the rallies with my still ailing
knee, and he was mortally offended when due to his lack of speed I won
points at will with my accurate drop shots.
Happily, we were able to indulge our ‘gentle’ family rivalry with no
holding back when I joined my dad in Nigeria in the summer after I left
university. He was overseeing the health of the hundreds of thousands
of villagers about to be displaced by the damming of the River Niger
and the creation of a vast lake. A social club had been built in
Kainji, the centre for construction, for all the expats involved,
Italians for the dam itself, Canadians for the hydroelectrics and
sundry other nationalities for the roads and the agriculture and the
diseases. This club had two excellent laterite tennis courts, the same
colour and speed as those at Roland Garros. We were perfectly matched,
the two of us, my energy more than countered by my father’s superior
skill. We’d go at it hammer and tongs for an hour or so most evenings.
Slaking the ensuing thirst is one of my great memories.
Ironically, with my father the fittest guy on the planet, he died aged
just seventy of leukaemia, not long before my first son was born. It
will remain my biggest regret that my boys never knew their
grandfather. Goodness knows the fun they would have had with him, and
the effect his wonderful sense of humour and his joie de vivre would
have had on them. And on their cricket. Furthermore, grandchildren
would have given him a new lease of life during what was a frustrated
retirement. The world really was his oyster, not the narrow horizons of
an English town.
My bad knee stopped me playing squash soon after my father died, so my
sons never saw me play. No matter. They were inspired into other
sports. I did tell them, though, a lot about their grandfather, of how
he made major discoveries in tropical medicine, notably establishing,
in the face of scorn from desk bound experts back in the UK, how the
debilitating disease river blindness is transmitted; how he played a
big role in the eradication of smallpox; how he was able to save
literally thousands of lives threatened by epidemics of meningitis by
trekking - up to thirty miles a day - through the bush to dispense the
then newly discovered miracle sulphonamides. I encouraged them to read
his memoire of his time in the Gold Coast, ‘Life and Death in the
African Bush’. This concludes with what he thought was a forlorn hope:
that all the achievements of the colonial ‘Medical Field Units’ would
not be frittered away.
Winding the clock forward twenty five years, I discovered that my
muscles had become so atrophied that they no longer overstressed my bad
knee. So I started playing squash again. And, what a thrill, the boys
have now seen me play, and a couple of them have been on court with me.
It’s not easy against lightning quick, thoroughly unskilled, young men
to hit a cold squash ball just high enough for them to be able to get
it back, but not so high as to allow them to win all the points with
their rapidly improving drop shots.
In part due to the Ghana connection, my youngest son Josh spent 2010 in
that country, but far from Kintampo, as a volunteer for an educational
charity. This has led to a happy closing of family loops. Josh wanted
to go back to Elmina, the town where he was based, to catch up with his
Ghanaian friends. He had truly taken to life in Ghana in the same
manner as his grandfather. I was keen to go back out there too, and it
wasn’t difficult to persuade Josh’s brothers that it would be an
exciting trip. My underlying wish was to give my sons a stronger
connection with their grandfather.
Finally we settled on two weeks in November, at the end of last year.
This fitted with my boys’ various priorities and fell neatly between
two of the regional English Masters tournaments. Nevertheless, two
weeks off squash was going to seriously impair what these days passes
for my fitness. So, full circle, bemused Ghanaian citizens, this time
from Elmina, were able to watch an eccentric ‘bruni’ (white man)
attempting to do shuttle runs on the soft sand of the magnificent beach
to the West of the town. Perhaps one or two of them came from families
who had moved south, and were descended from the Kintampoans who sixty
years earlier had flinched as my father thundered towards his
pressganged practice cricket partners. Who knows.
The story has a good ending. We made a pilgrimage north to Kintampo,
now less than a day’s drive from the coast when it had been at least
two in the 1950s, hoping to find my father’s house. We did indeed find
the house, derelict but still standing. I was able to wander round
inside, fifty eight years after I had last been there. Somewhere
outside in the compound, twenty two yards of the laterite dirt were
probably still pitted by the repeated impact of an eighty-mile-an-hour
cricket ball. Even better, we met up with an elderly man, Mr I W
Frimpong, who as a lab technician had worked with my father for five
years. Mr Frimpong remembered my sister and me from 1955, and we had a
lovely chat. And best of all, we discovered the existence of the
‘Kintampo Health Research Centre’, for the education not of doctors but
of rural health workers who would not be drawn to money making in Accra
or Kumasi but would minister to the rural people whom my father loved
so much.
And better even than the best, we found that one of the principal
buildings at the Kintampo Health Research Centre is known as the ‘B B
Waddy Block’. Bother cricket. Bother squash. That was very emotional.
Aubrey Waddy is an English
writer and squash player, on the verge of 65 and what-happens-next!
Aubrey is a consultant in the medical device industry, and apart from
this and writing, spends his time titrating squash against the
diminishing capacity of his bad knee. He returned to the game twenty
five years after retiring from a moderately successful amateur career,
and surprised himself by achieving selection for the English o-60s
Masters team for the 2011 home internationals.
Aubrey’s writing credits include the first ever novel to be set in the
world of competitive squash, “Sex and Drugs and Squash’n’Roll”, and in
June 2012 he published his second novel, “Just Desserts”. The books are
available on Amazon, Kindle etc.
Aubrey has three sons, and lives with his new partner Alison, by
fortunate chance - or judicious selection - a physiotherapist, outside
of London.
