There is a wonderful set of medieval wall tiles from Tring Abbey in the British Museum depicting the legendary infancy of a particularly mutinous and unappealing Jesus. A charitable interpretation of the sequence might suggest that they are the chronicles of a Child Who Did Not Know His Own Strength, but as one wretched little schoolmate or interfering adult after another is struck dead or buried upside down for doing nothing more than annoy the little Infant, the one theological message to emerge from it is a tough and unambiguous Don’t mess with me.
It is only on the persuasion of a weary- looking and long-suffering mother that the poor victims are brought back to life again, and there is something about the childhood pages of Ian Botham’s new autobiography that brings the tiles irresistibly to mind. The occasional fragment of dialogue and general character of the book are more war comic than Tring perhaps, but from the moment that Botham is born, a hulking ten pounds one ounce, he seems to inhabit a world of legend rather than modern life, defiantly bigger, better and stronger at everything than anyone of his age has any right to be, unafraid of a challenge, unafraid of authority — unafraid of anything except sharks, snakes, crocodiles and heights — a mighty smiter of cricket balls, woodwork teachers, career masters, team selectors or any other dreary mediocrity who tries to get in the way of manifest destiny.
‘From my youngest days,’ he opens his story, ‘I had an unshakable self-confidence and belief in my own abilities,’ and if he seems to have been right about very little else in life he was certainly right about those.
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