Andy's story, at last

Last week, Andy Ganteaume, a Trinidad and Tobago cricketing hero, launched his book: My Story: The Other Side Of The Coin. It is an enlightening tale of the vicissitudes of life for a man born in the West Indies in 1922.

Ganteaume's story tells much of the conditions facing someone who had talent, but was neither from the approved social grouping, nor willing to offer automatic deference to it. Especially important is his interpretation of the circumstances that led to his renown as the centurion of one Test match, with a batting average of 112, higher than Don Bradman's.

Ganteaume relates how the tensions surrounding his refusal to embrace his spot on the social ladder influenced the decision to curtail his Test career. It is an intriguing aspect of the book, and though it is told without rancour, it reveals other dimensions of Jeffrey Stollmeyer and Gerry Gomez, both icons of West Indies cricket. It is a side worth hearing if one is to truly understand the nature of the environment and the forces that shaped the future of West Indies cricket.

Andy will be 86 in a month's time and has spent a lifetime rich in its involvement with cricket. It is clear that he was always a keen observer of events and social undercurrents, and he conveys this with the same understated simplicity that his good friend, Sir Everton Weekes, did in his story: Mastering The Craft.

Sir Everton was there at the launch and repeated his lament that young cricketers do not read. It is as true of them as it is of youth today. Few read, and few of them have the capacity to even understand what they are reading. By the time they get out of school, many are so ashamed of their weakness when it comes to reading, that they try to shut it out of their lives. They do so by avoiding jobs and situations that might call on them to read because they are embarrassed at how they will appear when they fumble.

They aren't reading, but why? These functionally illiterate young men and women don't wish to have it known that the world of books is alien to them. So they have created a masking culture that has designated reading as the activity of nerds, something that macho or cool (or whatever it's called) people just don't do.

This year, I took an early decision that every Christmas present I had to give was going to be a book. Adults, children, readers, non-readers, everyone. The challenge was then to find appropriate books. It wasn't too hard once I got into the bookshops, and thankfully, Trinidad still has quite a few decent ones. It turned out to be more of a pleasure than I expected, because it meant that I had to think of each person's tastes and try to match it with something suitable.

In focusing my mind on them, it struck me how lovely and quirky the people I know are, and in a way it was like gazing at them afresh and renewing my fondness for them. I hope they feel some measure of goodwill towards me when they see the books. When my nephews and nieces were much younger, I always gave them books as presents. One day, one mother revealed to me how they used to groan at my literary thrusts, and I paused for a bit.

But I think it is time we try to actively re-instil the joys of reading into the lives around us. It seems to me that the more we treat reading as a classroom activity, the more inclined children are to avoid it elsewhere. If we partake of it with pleasure at home as well, if we make sure there are a few books lying around in easy reach, something might happen.

You never know.

* This column is republished with permission from the Barbados Nation, where it first appeared.