The First Six

by Alan Crook

By the time he was ten my brother was five feet eight inches tall. That in itself was unusual but the fact that he was lily white and had a massive crop of bright red hair as well taught him a plain truth of life. He was very unlikely to blend in to the background. His appearance could have been a severe drawback but for one very valuable asset. He had a smile that stretched from ear to ear and it readily occupied his features.

His smile bought him friends and melted all manner of conflict, it generated an air of fun and promoted an flow of bon-home that was irresistible. But he had enemies, lads who were jealous of his ability and as a result he found himself in problems as well. The fact that he was so tall for his age meant that folk took him to be older than his years. Even in the classroom he didn't come away unscathed. On at least one occasion there was a visiting teacher who sent him from the room thinking that he should have been in a higher class.

Older boys picked on him because he stood out. Shorter boys picked on him for their failing ego's sake. Adults picked on him because they were confused by his contrasting age cum size. Lily white, bushy red hair, very tall, he wasn't so much a boy as a mobile target practice. Fortunately he didn't just rely on his smile, life taught him to be very tough as well.

          The extraordinary by product of his life style was that he developed an adult attitude to those who suffered because they were different. No more was this very evident than his friendship with Gabriel Whitaker.

          Gabriel Whitaker didn't emerge from his chrysalis until he was eight years old. Up till then he was confined to bed in the hospital. He was confined to bed in his home. He was confined to bed in America, Canada, India and Switzerland. He had travelled the world and yet he had never been out of bed.

          The sad truth is that Gabriel Whitaker had been struck down with Polio when he was three years old and from that moment onward he viewed the world from his bedroom until he appeared at our school on his eighth birthday.

          He was skinny, no, puny would be more adept. When he did stand he was barely two foot six inches from the ground. As for his weight if it wasn't for his callipers he would have been blown away in a strong wind. Everything about his appearance was weak. Even the colour of his skin and hair spoke the language of sickness. He spent most of his earlier days in school in a wheel chair and on his first day in particular he seemed to get in the way of every moving thing within the confines of the playground.

          There was however, a radiance and a spirit oozing from him that declared to all mankind that this was no wimp that they were messing with. In his pathetic scrambled little body he was the opposite in every way from the leviathan that was to befriend him. By far the saddest difference between my brother and Gabriel was that no smile lit his face. He wasn't sad in himself but life seemed to have dealt him so many blows in his young years that he carried a burden for all who cared for him.

          Along with his sad demeanour came the aggravation merchants. It was ridiculous really to think that even in a school full of children whose lives had been shattered through the conflicts of the second world war, there was no room for a charitable attitude.  Confined as he was to his wheel chair didn't mean that there weren't bullies who tried to better him. He was more than a match for them. I became used to watching him reducing his opponents to shambling away regretting their actions towards him.

          The fact is that our school was by far the least equipped school to meet Gabriel's needs. The lower school was literally just that. It met on the ground level whilst children from the age of seven upward had to climb two flights of stairs to the upper levels for their classes. Gabriel was part of the upper school.

          In one sense he was ahead of his time. He was part of a new way of thinking that aimed to get children with disabilities into mainstream schools. Today, thank goodness, it is an everyday attitude but in the fifties it was not such a regular feature.

          The most miserable opponent of  Gabriel was the school caretaker. It was his job to carry him up the stairs to his classroom. His attitude was one of what he called the old school. "Boys like him should be put in special schools!" I actually heard him say this to the head whilst standing over Gabriel. The caretaker would find allsorts of ways to make him wait at the bottom of the stairs just to press his point home. But he was to get his comeuppance.

Our head was a war hero he had lost an arm and a leg during the war. He was a very godly man. I have every reason to believe that it was directly down to him that Gabriel was allowed to come to our school in the first place. Against such odds a normal chap would have swum with the tide but our caretaker thought otherwise.

          My brother wasn't in Gabriel's class and for some weeks he kept apart from him on the usual age gap structure that children employed. By the time the autumn weather was bighting so was the caretakers stubbornness. Gabriel Whitaker was stuck at the bottom of the stairs with a cold wind doing it's best to finish off what the polio left undone. My brother never left a challenge go, he gentle tossed Gabriel over his shoulder and I picked up the wheel chair. We floated up the stairs and from that moment on Gabriel and Melvyn were joined at the hip.

          Of course everything about his actions was wrong. But we thought it perfectly normal. Here was a person in need. We had the strength. He was light as a fairies cough. So up he went and he carried on going up that way until he went to senior school.

          Gabriel's parents showed all the signs of a couple who had struggled in every way to get their son into society. They had spent so much of their time and money travelling the world. They tried this cure and that approach and the best they had to show for it was the little waif that needed so much caring.

They were far from the normal couple that lived in our part of town. His dad was the only person in the area who went to work in a suit and came home looking like he had just been out for a walk. My father walked to work in clogs and overalls he came back covered in sweat. His mother lived in limbo until it was time to collect Gabriel from school and then she poured herself over him to the point of smothering him.

Sadly his mother had a chip on her shoulder the size of a small tree. She looked down her nose at her neighbours and never wasted an opportunity to tell them of her past glory. The days when she lived in the cosseted world of her father's money and how her husband was a manager. She failed to point out that they were now poor as church mice. That every spare penny went to one special medicine or another in a vain hope that the situation would change.

The truth is that her heart was so confused that she her sense of direction had been swallowed up along with her past luxuries. As for her son going to our school in the roughest part of Blackburn, mixing with riff raff; there was no doubt as to her true feelings. Their finances didn't stretch to a nice house in a nice part of town. The only school prepared to take her son was ours. All the hoi polloi establishments she aspired to were closed to them in one guise or another. As for friendships with us boys her son was far too weak for that.

It truly was a peculiar position. He desperately wanted friendship. She desperately wanted help. His dad desperately wanted rest. The only clog in the system lay in a false class barrier and condescending outlook, but all things were well and truly blocked. Gabriel was determined to unblock them. The key lay in the giant who carried him up the stairs.

I can't say there weren't tears and confrontation between Gabriel and his mother; but after a month of Melvyn carrying him up the stairs, she broke down and allowed us into her home. I felt like Gabriel was laying foundations for another move, and I wasn't wrong.

In Lancashire there was one religion that ninety nine percent of boys subscribed to; CRICKET. In Blackburn we had utopia, a covered cricket ground. It didn't start life that way. To every one else it was a warehouse without the side walls but to us boys it was Old Trafford or Edgbaston and at least once a week it was Lords. Games played in this hallowed hall were serious affairs as was cricket to us boys. I was a star in my own right. As a fast bowler I was very fortunate and always had my ego boosted  by the members of the team that I was picked for. My brother was even faster than me and more often than not on the opposite side.

The result was that my brother and I were constantly engrossed in cricket. The ground being covered meant that we lived the entire year wrapped in the arms of cricket. It was the main way that we related. Not surprising then that we dragged Gabriel into our world. It wasn't that he took much dragging.

After a long spell his mother actually allowed him to play at our house and that is were he grew up.

Melvyn was determined to try all things out with Gabriel. To Mel it was perfectly normal to teach some one how to bat. Gabriel found himself propped against a wall with a bat in his hand whilst I curbed my speed with the ball. He was passable. I am sure that it is hard to imagine a lad leaning against a wall with a cricket bat but that is were he was and were we spent at least two nights a week gradually speeding things up.

Spending most of his life on his back did little for Gabriel's foot work but his hand eye co-ordination was electric. At first I was bored and I thought Melvyn was just doing Gabriel a favour. I wouldn't have stayed but for the fact that I was made to by Melvyn's  charm, and his height and his muscle. However reluctant I was at the beginning I was soon to swallow my doubts.

I speeded up and so did Gabriel. I don't know what his mother must have thought. Often Gabriel would go home with bruises that would make me cringe, but he had spent so many hours in pain it was no big deal to him. He told his mother that he had done this or fallen there and she actually swallowed it or so we thought. As the weeks passed he gradually gained strength. He even mustered a little colour from somewhere. He could actually stand for about five minutes as we stretched him further.

Playing with us was gradually allowed to playing with boys in general so to the cricket ground, he was dragged. Eventually the strain of sitting and watching became too much. To our joint horror he wanted to play. The laughs and jokes went on for weeks. No one took him seriously and that included Melvyn and me.

We had been taking him to the ground for about a further two weeks when we gave in and let him pad up. He was so small that even with callipers on the straps on the one pad that we had still stretched around his leading leg. My brother was elected his runner and I was to ball to him. When he reached the crease his mother reached the boundary and screamed. I was in full flight and I released the ball at a speed that he had become used to.

Gabriel swung the bat with a grace that belied his stature and met the ball with a force rarely given from such a manoeuvre. The ball rose past the mid on position and carried on rising over long on the fell well over the boundary. In my mind the ball took ten minutes to reach this point. Long before it landed every lad on the pitch and off was applauding, both opponents and his team. I didn't watch the ball at all I was only told of its flight. I was looking at Gabriel's face.

A smile grew in that moment, more than that it beamed from his very soul. Lads ran onto the pitch. His mother ran onto the pitch but stopped when she saw what had happened. He was hugged, he was punched, he was held aloft, he was accepted and he was smiling. His mother went home alone.

 That first six was reported to all the fathers and his own father heard the story from men at his works inside ten minutes of the ball hitting the ground.

That first six saw his mother break all her barriers she even gave my brother and I a pack of biscuits.

Gabriel went on from that moment wearing a smile that could melt even more than Melvyn's, eventually he became a surgeon and always acknowledged that that first six was the turning point of his life.