Young Bradman

90 England as good as ever.’ The schoolboys playing cricket on the Gladesville grass were young Australia too, and might turn out as well, ‘if not in cricket then in other ways’. Yet the patients were also Australians. Gladesville was mostly like a prison thanks to lack of money – politics, in a word. The politicians preferred to have lunch with Jackson, Kippax and Oldfield (and at taxpayers’ expense, presumably!?) rather than see about the insane. If Fletcher had that thought, he was too polite to write it. Bradman went through the great change in his life, into fame, on the tour of England in 1930. As a sign that he knew it, on the day of selection he began keeping a diary. You could not date the change to a day, like a wedding or death. You could not easily point to an event when he was not famous, and then he was. Those near seven weeks between Thursday 6 March, when the seven New South Wales and Queensland tourists took the overnight train from Sydney to Melbourne, and 23 April, when the 15 arrived in London, were a quiet, curious beginning; the journey had no bearing on their business, and yet included, as Bradman put it in The Bradman Albums , ‘a host of things which at one time were only dreams’: crossing the Indian Ocean, Colombo (playing a one-day match, fielding in what looked like white helmets, to keep the sun off the white men’s heads), the Pyramids, Pompeii (in a morning), Rome, Milan, Lucerne, Paris. The diary as set out in the Albums was a record of what Bradman saw and did, rather than a place for sharing deep thoughts. Of the sight-seeing on Sunday 20 April after reaching the look-out at the Hotel Rigi-Kulm, above Lake Lucerne: ‘Coming down was simply too beautiful for words.’ That did not make Bradman unintelligent. Like any 21-year-old abroad for the first time, he had to balance keeping a record and going out and doing the things that he would then want to record. Anyone could have advised The Sydney Harbour Bridge taking shape in about 1930.