The magic. How to explain it? Let’s start with the goodness of Beefy. No, let’s start with Heena and the eight-grand watch. No, let’s start with the freshers and the bulge in their foreskins. No, let’s start with the chaos of the Dharavi slum. No, let’s start with the football in Shivaji Park. No, let’s start at the beginning. Let’s start with a lesson in how to be good.

The date is December 3, 1984. Matthew Spacie is sitting in the front room of his parents’ home at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex watching the nine o’clock news. Forty-two tonnes of methyl isocyantic gas have leaked from a storage tank at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. The government is calling for volunteers to clear the thousands of bodies and dead animals from the streets. “I want to go,” he tells his parents. “I’d like to help.”

That is not normal behaviour for a 17-year-old.

A few months later, he takes a flight to Delhi and a train to Bhopal and seeks work at a huge new orphanage but the city is still in chaos; there are too many kids for too few places; too many bureaucrats playing God. He travelled to Dharamsala and considered joining the Tibetan monks who had sought refuge from China but decided he would do better in Calcutta, where he introduced himself to Mother Teresa one morning after six o’clock Mass.

A tiny, crumpled woman with a huge heart, she had just the job for him. How would he feel about helping the missionary brothers at the leper colony? “Sure,” he gulped. So he crossed the bridge to Howrah next day and was escorted to work. The first hour was tough - the only lepers he had ever seen were in Ben-Hur - but just beneath the surface of the rags and rotting flesh he discovered something he never expected: laughter and warmth and generosity and kindness. These were truly beautiful people!

“Leprosy is absolutely curable,” he says. “It’s a genetic disease and it’s just disgraceful that it’s still around. I could spend a lifetime with a leper and not get leprosy; I’d have to hold hands with you for at least seven years! But we didn’t have one single doctor working in that area. The surgery was done by lepers. They survived among themselves.”

Spacie spent five months in the colony and at a local TB clinic, where he was taught to give injections and dispense medicine. The risk of infection was horrendous but he didn’t know that then. He didn’t know a lot of things. He returned to England with a heavy heart and started a degree in geography and tourism at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham, but he found the transition strange.

Freshers week had started and he couldn’t help but feel angry. “There was this competition on stage,” he says, “where you had to drink as much as you could and then throw up in a bucket. I thought, ‘F***! What’s going on here?’ I joined the rugby club and they had this game: How many pennies could you stick up your foreskin? This was in my first week! I thought, ‘Wow! What an interesting return’.”

It was uglier than anything he’d seen in the leper colony.

He graduated and was offered “the perfect job” at Cox & Kings, the Indian travel specialist, and spent eight years selling India to travel agents in the UK and at branches of the company in Beirut, Jordan and South America. In 1996, he was offered the post of chief operating officer if he moved to Bombay - a dream posting, in a dream city, for dream pay. He was 29, single and soon mixing in all the right circles.

Matthew Spacie had it made.

SIR IAN BOTHAM has never been confused with Mother Teresa but through his walks for Leukaemia Research and his work for the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation he has certainly paid his dues. It’s a Tuesday morning in Mumbai, eight days before the terrorist attacks, and as our car edges towards the city from the airport he is trying to sell me India.

“I love this country,” he smiles, gazing at the chaos beyond the air-conditioned glass.

“I love the culture, the wealth of history; I think the people are as friendly as any you will meet in the world. They are all on the hustle. There was a great incident the other day. I was trying to get from one terminal to the other here and this tut-tut pulls up: ‘Oh Eye-on, I’ll take you.’

“The call me Eye-on here, Eye-on Bottom, so we start bartering. ‘How much?’ I ask. ‘Five hundred rupees,’ he says. ‘What! That’s nearly a hundred rupees a yard!’ I gave him 200. ‘I’m a very poor man,’ he says. ‘No,’ I said, ‘You’re a thief’. ‘Well,’ he said and just laughed.”

“Is it an acquired taste?” I ask. “What?” “India.” “Well, the problem is . . . Australia lost [here] and they are whingeing about this and whingeing about that but some of the best hotels in the world are in India! A lot of these sports guys come over here and they go to the hotel restaurant, watch a movie in the room and wonder why they didn’t like the place! I wouldn’t like it if that’s all I did.”

“But weren’t you like that once?” I inquire.

“No.” “Never?” “No, I’ve always had that little bit of devil in me. I always wanted to get out and have a look - especially if someone told me not to. We would get all the warnings, ‘You’ve got to be careful of this’ and ‘Don’t do that’ but it seems stupid to me if you come to these places that you don’t go and have a look.”

“You’re making me feel guilty now,” I confess.

“Why?” “I spent the whole day yesterday locked in my hotel.”

He laughs. “I just find the poverty really oppressive,” I explain.

“Yeah, well, there is poverty,” he concedes, “and some of the sights you see - the maiming of children for begging - are pretty scary, mentally scary. But you’ve got to put it into perspective. There is poverty but there is also opportunity. Mumbai, per square foot, is the wealthiest capital in the world . . . so you’ve got to absorb it all and get into the flow of it. You’ve got to get off your arse and out of your hotel and have a look.”

“Are you telling me it wasn’t difficult the first time?”

“Of course,” he agrees. “I was shocked at some of the stuff I saw. I remember coming home one night near the Gateway of India. We were staying at the Taj [hotel] and I went out for a walk and I was horrified by the lepers - you don’t see them in the daytime; you see them at one or two o’clock in the morning. I was shocked by that . . . by the begging . . . by the kids.”

“What about this morning?” I ask. “We are about to visit the biggest slum in Asia and I’ve been dreading it for days. Don’t tell me you’re looking forward to it?”

“I don’t look at it like that,” he says. “I look at the positives; I look at what is being done for these kids. You can sit there and moan about the negatives - that’s very easy in a country like this. It’s much harder to look for the positives.”

“I’d prefer not to look,” I confess. “If you don’t look, you don’t learn,” he insists. “And if you don’t learn, you don’t know.”

He changes into a navy Laureus T-shirt and steps from the car. We have arrived at Dharavi.

In his book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, the author Suketu Mehta advises: “The best reason to visit Mumbai is to see how a city can survive and thrive against every rational expectation.” The same could be said of Dharavi, its largest slum. A teeming maze of impossibly narrow lanes and corrugated shacks and stores, you could fill a book with the smells and sights and sounds.

The worn tyres being pared into sandals . . . the woman sifting for nuggets through garbage . . . the old plastic toys being melted and remoulded . . . the hum of the sweatshops and the sewing machines . . . the kid with six crates of Coke balanced on his bike . . . the butcher slicing meat on a slab supported by squawking, caged chickens.

What would Hugh Fearnley-Whitting-stall make of it? “Yeah, not a good place to be a chicken,” Beefy smiles.

Almost a million people have made their homes in this ancient mangrove swamp where as many as 18,000 people are crammed into a single acre. One thought dominates as we complete our tour: Imagine what that’s like! To live here! When it rains here! To raise kids here!

We’re back in the car now, heading for the more affluent suburbs of Mumbai and lunch with Matthew Spacie.

“Have you met him before?” I ask. “No,” Botham replies, “but to do what he has done here must have taken a lot of patience, and a lot of effort and time to get people’s trust.”

“What about the argument that says that it’s people like him, not sportsmen, who deserve knighthoods?”

“Absolutely, but how many people are doing this kind of thing that we never hear about? That’s the amazing thing. They have no personal interest, no personal gain; it’s just something they feel they should do and it takes over their lives. The first question I’m going to ask him is why? What drove you? What turned you? There will have been something that tripped the switch for him and I’ll be interested to hear what he says.”

THE moment that tripped the switch? Spacie isn’t sure. Life kept getting better during those first years in India. He was playing rugby at Bombay Gymkhana - the most exclusive club in the city - and won five international rugby caps at inside centre. “Playing for India was an interesting experience,” he smiles. “The crowd would do a Mexican wave when we touched the ball.”

The Bombay Gymkhana was close to Fashion Street in the southern half of the city and every night at training, the street urchins would congregate and stare at them from the fence. Matthew started to engage with them and suggested to his teammates that they give these kids some time and teach them how to play.

“I realised very quickly that it wasn’t about rugby,” he explains. “It was the sense of self-belief and achievement and focus. For the first time they had rules and discipline. You smoke or take drugs? You don’t play. You don’t train? You don’t play. They had never had that before. They now had to turn up for the first time in their lives.”

A Pied Piper, leading the way from the slums, he secured jobs for the kids and took them hiking at weekends. But inevitably there were problems. “I screwed up,” he says. “I made the far-too-simplistic assumption that these 16 and 17-year-old-kids I was dealing with could change. I got them all jobs through the network of people I knew but within two months every single one of them had left.

“There was no work ethic. These guys had never left their communities. They didn’t understand that you had to sweep the floor sometimes at work or even travel to work.

“They didn’t want to work on a Monday! And that’s when I realised that I would have to start with younger kids, of seven or eight, and build it up. It was a really big lesson for me.”

He started working with a charity, Akanksha, that ran 30 schools in the slums. “I was brought up in a seaside town and you would see these grannies on these mystery tours - you pay five quid and don’t know where you’re going. I decided to do the same with the kids. I would hire a bus - a Magic Bus - and take a different school each weekend to the mountains or the beach. Dharavi is only two kilometres from the sea but most of the kids had never been to the beach before. And that was the start of it, I suppose, the birth of Magic Bus.”

Imagine, for one moment, the joyous faces of those kids. Imagine the sense of wonder on the Magic Bus as they were whisked from the squalor of the slums to the verdant landscape of the mountain retreat with its plush hotel bed. Imagine the walking and the climbing. Imagine the food and the fun and the release. Now imagine the tears when they find they have to go back. It was his second big lesson.

“Sunday night on that bus was horrific because those kids knew they weren’t getting this again,” he says. “It wasn’t good enough to take a school, give them two great days and say, ‘See you next year’. They were shattered. It was horrible. We were doing more damage than good. I thought, ‘Right, we have to build this into a proper programme’.

Convinced of the benefits of sport to development, he established Magic Bus and started with 400 kids. There was a weekly sport session, day trips to shops and banks (“This is how the world works, kids”), weekend camps in the mountains and individually tailored programmes. “There was no point in telling a street kid he should clean his teeth twice a day when he didn’t have running water.”

Things started to snowball. Ashoka, a global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs, offered him a fellowship in 2002. The Kadoorie family built a custom-made adventure centre in the hills and Laureus offered the support of their Sport for Good Foundation. Two years had passed since his first trip with the kids; he had used his savings and donations from friends to take 1,400 kids to the hills of Matheran and the beaches of Ali Baug. But now he had reached a crossroads. How much was he prepared to give?

“I think you are born with measures of empathy about certain things; I always go with the guy who is not winning and that’s probably what flicked the switch. It was lovely having a big salary and hard to leave the job I left but I’ve never really worried about material things.”

Six years have passed since he left his job. He has married, earned an MBE and helped transform the lives of more than 18,000 children. Eighty per cent of those kids now go to school (up from 20% when he started). Seventy-five per cent of those kids achieve sustainable livelihoods when they graduate from the programme. Forty per cent of his 150 staff are graduates. But it’s not about the numbers. It was never about the numbers . . .

A MAN stands at the counter of Asprey’s in New Bond Street, London, surveying the new limited edition IWC Da Vinci chronograph. This guy has an eye for detail. He notes the crocodile leather strap, the convex sapphire glass, the innovative stop-watch display, the weight (119 grams), the water resistance (3 bar), the power reserve (68 hours), oh, and of course, the price tag (£8,400). But it’s the engraving on the back that most intrigues - a drawing of smiling, carefree young girls playing handball.

“Who did this?” he asks. “What does it mean?”

Heena Javed Shaikh is 15 years old and lives in a Mumbai orphanage for girls. Life has dealt her some pretty cruel cards but you would never guess from her smile. The Magic Bus helps. She has ridden it to the mountains and the beach but the thing she enjoys most is the handball. She plays every week in competitions with friends.

We join her on a hot and muggy Tuesday afternoon at Shivaji Park in Mumbai. She’s not complaining. It has been easily the most exciting day of her life. Kapil Dev and Ian Botham have just presented her with a prize. She’s never seen so many notebooks or cameras before. She has never been to a press conference. She smiles and exits the stage without saying a word but returns five minutes later. There is something she wants to say.

“I never thought that I would ever get a big platform,” she says, nervously. “I never imagined that my drawing would be used at such a big level and will be seen by people across the world. While making the drawing, I remembered the match that my team had won while playing at Reay Road. I had enjoyed playing that match. Magic Bus has taught me a lot of lessons.”

Matthew Spacie smiles. The press conference ends. Botham is drawn into a football game with the boys and ends his day covered in sweat. As he climbs into his chauffeur-driven car and prepares to leave for the airport, Heena has returned to the bus for the ride back to the orphanage.

She is staring out of the window with her friends as Botham’s car drives past and they wave their arms and send him on his way with a huge cheer. Thirty girls, pretty girls with no homes to go to. Thirty pretty girls with no reason to smile. But step on Matthew Spacie’s bus and everything seems possible. Magic.

Botham boards the Magic Bus

A week before the bombings that left almost 200 dead, Ian Botham took time out from commentating on England’s one-day series against India to support the Magic Bus charity in Mumbai. Botham was travelling as an ambassador for the Laureus World Sports Academy and was accompanied by his former rival, the Indian allrounder Kapil Dev.

The project was founded in 1999 by Matthew Spacie. A former pupil of Felsted School in Essex, Spacie was working for travel company Cox & Kings in India and playing for the local rugby club when he noticed the huge numbers of children watching his team every week. Most were street kids and he encouraged them to come to the club for coaching. Spacie recalls: ‘The epiphany for me was seeing all the clichéd stuff you hear about with sport - the self-esteem, the discipline, the focus - coming true. These kids were changing before my eyes and I realised we were building something quite powerful.’ He quit his job in 2002 to expand the initiative to include other sports, such as football, which would also appeal to young girls.

Nearly 20,000 children from the Mumbai slums have passed through Magic Bus. Before its launch, only 40% of the children had attended school. Now the figure stands at nearly 85%. Spacie, right, was awarded an MBE in 2007.

Botham said: ‘It has been an honour and a privilege to see how sport can bring hope and happiness into the lives of these children, who come from such difficult backgrounds. It is a great sadness that so many of them have so little expectation of what most people would regard as a normal life, but at least Magic Bus can make a difference and I have been happy to come and give my support.’

‘This is going to be the longest pub crawl of all time’

In 1977, the year he made his Test debut, Ian Botham was at the Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton being treated for a broken foot when he visited the children’s ward. So moved was he by the plight of those suffering from leukaemia that he promised to pay for their annual party. He worked with and raised money for the hospital for eight years.

In October 1985 he stepped up his efforts to raise money for Leukaemia Research. During his first sponsored walk, which took him from John o’Groats to Land’s End, his daughter Becky was born.

As ever with Botham, the walk did not pass without controversy. On one leg of the journey the allrounder punched a police officer. There was another run-in with the law when it was claimed in a newspaper that Botham had been smoking cannabis on the walk. A police investigation found no evidence for this.

Since then he has completed a further 11 long-distance treks. The most famous route was that taken across the Alps in the footsteps of Hannibal. Like the Carthaginian general, Botham made the trek with elephants, which prompted protests from the Animal Liberation Front and Brigitte Bardot .

Within the UK, there have been walks through Wales, where he was accompanied by Charlotte Church and Catherine Zeta Jones, far right, and along the east coast and south coast. The 12th and most recent was the ‘Great British Walk’ last month, which visited nine towns across the UK.

Other celebrities from the world of sport and showbiz who have accompanied him on the various walks include Jimmy Greaves (‘Christ, Beef, this is going to be the longest pub crawl of all time’), Gary Lineker, Daley Thompson, Ian Rush and Eric Clapton, left. Botham freely admits he has often kept himself refreshed along the way by drinking ‘Rocket Fuel’ - tequila and orange Fanta. ‘It is absolute dynamite and the great thing is that no one need know you are actually drinking booze to keep you going.’

Botham was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List of 2007, principally in recognition of the £10m he has raised for cancer and leukaemia charities over the past 30 years. This month, Botham was working with one-time rival Kapil Dev for the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation and their Magic Bus initiative (see above). For more information on their work in India and elsewhere, go to laureus.com/foundation