Bang, Bang, There Goes The Ball – by Dodwell Keyt
It was only yesterday that my two older brothers and I were playing cricket in the front garden of our home in Mount Lavinia.
Listen to Bang, Bang, There Goes The Ball on YouTube:
At least, that is what my memory tells me. My body has a rather different opinion.
We were three young rascals, filled with enough energy to take on the world and quite convinced that the narrow strip of ground between a bed of canna plants and the front wall of our house was every bit as important as an international cricket ground. To us, it was.
We did not need much. We did not have much. We shaped a coconut frond into a cricket bat, and the three sticks we bashed into the ground became our wickets. Somehow, we managed to get hold of something that resembled a cricket ball, and the match was on.
And what matches they were.
We bowled, batted and ran with all the vigour of the Ceylon cricketing heroes of our imagination. There were no grandstands, no cheering crowds and certainly no scoreboard. None of that mattered. Three brothers had a bat, a ball and a few precious yards of ground. We had everything we needed.
Being the youngest of the three came with certain disadvantages. My brothers naturally regarded themselves as the senior members of our little cricketing establishment, which meant that I was frequently relegated to the outer field. While they enjoyed the glory of batting and bowling, I spent a considerable amount of time chasing the ball and returning it to the bowler. Such was the lot of the youngest brother; the unpaid retrieval service.
There were nine of us in the family, and like most large families we seemed to have developed our own hierarchy. My eldest brother considered himself somewhat above the rest of us and rarely joined our games. Looking back, I sometimes think he was the one who missed out. Then came my two older sisters, who were very close and generally preferred to keep their distance from those of us they probably regarded as the family underlings.
Then came the three of us, the three brothers who always enjoyed a game of cricket. We were close enough in age and temperament to become companions in mischief, and cricket was one of the things that bound us together. After us came my younger sisters. In those days, cricket was regarded very much as a boys’ game, and they had their badminton while we had our cricket.
We played barefoot, of course. Shoes were for going out and being ‘proper’. Rascals did not need shoes to get into mischief.
Our parents encouraged us to go outside and play. My father never joined our cricket matches, but he was always happy to see us using our imaginations and making our own amusement. My mother was much the same. She hardly needed to tell us to go outside because that was where we preferred to be. Occasionally, one of us would come running to her after being picked on by another, as happens in any large family, but before long we would be outside together again. We loved the outdoors, and the tropical weather made outdoor play a natural part of our life.
We did not have a great deal in the way of material possessions, but looking back, I realise we had something far more precious: a family held together by a common bond and love. This was the way of life in those days. I don’t believe my family was particularly special in the way we cared for and loved one another, despite our differences in age and interests.
One particular cricket match remains rather firmly planted in my memory, although perhaps not for the best of reasons.
We were playing in our usual narrow patch of ground at the front of the house in Mount Lavinia. One of my brothers bowled, the other struck the ball, and it disappeared into the bed of canna plants. As the youngest, and therefore the unpaid retrieval service, it naturally fell to me to recover it.
“Hurry, get the ball!” one of my brothers called as the other began running between the wickets.
Determined to prove myself a brilliant fielder, I ran down the slight slope and jumped barefoot into the canna bed.
The moment my foot touched the ground, I screamed.
Hidden amongst the plants was a block of wood with a long rusty nail protruding from it. I had landed directly on the nail, which had driven itself deeply into my foot. To make matters worse, the canna leaves had become caught between my foot and the block of wood, making it almost impossible for me to move.
Our cricket match came to an abrupt end, the score irrelevant. One of my brothers ran inside to fetch Mother. My father was at work, and before long various members of the family had gathered around. After efforts to pull the nail out only produced considerably more screaming from me, they decided to take me to the doctor.
I still remember lying on his examination bed, frightened and very conscious of the piece of wood still attached to my foot. The doctor, however, seemed remarkably unconcerned. He had probably seen many such cricket adventures gone wrong.
“Count the cars going past the front gate,” he told me.
I looked towards the window and began obediently.
“One, two, three…”
I never discovered how many cars went past that gate.
Somewhere in the middle of my counting, the doctor took hold of the block of wood and, with one almighty tug, pulled the nail from my foot.
I screamed. Whatever number I had reached disappeared from my mind completely, but the nail was out.
A tetanus injection followed, my foot was bandaged, and then came the doctor’s consolation prize, a sugary sweet from the jar. It did not quite make up for having a rusty nail pulled from my foot, but at that age it certainly helped sweeten the injury.
For the next few weeks I hobbled about while my foot healed. Missing school had its advantages, but there was one considerable disappointment. Mother, my brothers and I, were due to visit our estates in Mawanella, and because of my injured foot I had to remain at home with my sisters. No school, but also no adventures on our estate.
Those childhood cricket matches eventually came to an end, as childhood things always do. We grew older, life took us in different directions, and eventually Ceylon itself became part of my memories.
Music was certainly around us when we were young, although baila was not the music I remember listening to as a boy. My older sisters were teenagers and naturally far more interested in the popular singers of the 1950s. Names such as Pat Boone, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly came floating into our home over the radio, along with many others whose names have long since escaped me.
My own interest in music developed much later in life, after I had settled in Australia. By the time I reached my mid-sixties and retirement came into view, I had become increasingly interested in painting, writing and music, eventually going one step further and composing songs, and somewhere along that journey I discovered baila. It is a word derived from the Portuguese verb bailar, meaning to dance. I imagine all Burghers of my generation have the urge to dance to a lively baila tune.
I loved it. There is something infectious about its rhythm. It is difficult to listen to baila without wanting to get up and dance. My musical tastes have always been broad, ranging from classical music to rock and roll, and baila seemed to sit quite comfortably towards the rock-and-roll end of my musical world.
Then, one day, two quite separate parts of my life came together: the music I had discovered as an older man and the cricket I had played as a boy.
And that is how Bang, Bang, There Goes The Ball began.
The song itself began in the most unlikely way. A friend and I were playing around with words, throwing a few nonsense phrases about, when the words “bang, bang” appeared. They meant nothing in particular at first, but something about their rhythm caught my attention. Almost a baila rhythm.
Then came the words, “there goes the ball”.
Suddenly, the connection was obvious. Bang, bang was the sound of the ball striking the bat, and almost immediately I was back in that narrow strip of ground in Mount Lavinia, playing cricket with my two brothers.
The words began to find their own rhythm, and the rhythm seemed made for baila. Before long, a few nonsense words had become Bang, Bang, There Goes The Ball, a song about three brothers, a makeshift cricket bat, three sticks for wickets and the simple pleasure of playing cricket in the Ceylon of my childhood.
