The Character of Cricket Page 18

  At times it has been a harsh one, too. The most disconcerting document at Southampton is Remnant’s contract. Remnant played from 1918 to 1922 and his piece of paper is headed ‘Regulations and Remuneration as to staff’. It begins by saying that not more than twenty-five shillings should be paid to any man taken on as a first-class professional. It then stipulates the hours – ten to seven with an hour and a half for dinner, but ‘to be entitled to a full day’s pay each professional must sign the book kept for that purpose... by ten a.m. and before or after dinner.’ Another section says that ‘cards and gambling are strictly prohibited’. Bowlers not playing on match days are ‘expected to make themselves useful in any manner required’. And although it was accepted that professionals could seek employment during the winter, they were not allowed to do so without the sanction of the committee. You have to be very careful talking about the ‘good old days’ when it comes to cricket – here or anywhere else.

  Mr Secretary James, commonly known as ‘Jimmy’, is a Cheshire man who spent many years in East Africa, where he did a lot of umpiring. He thinks they are lucky in the south of England. The cricket crowds are still well behaved, appreciative and polite. The whole atmosphere is very friendly. ‘We have a small police presence at Sunday league matches. And if there’s the slightest trouble we immediately close the bars. And we throw them out for obscene language.’ The team is young and promising and if the ground is a bit middling he is happy enough. With temporary stands it can accommodate just over six thousand. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I’d rather have six thousand happy than six and a half unhappy.’

  I think this probably sums up the Hampshire philosophy rather well. They have always tended to play cavalier cricket, from Tennyson’s time through to Ingleby-Mackenzie’s, and on to that of Pocock and Nicholas. It wasn’t all that easy to conjure up that summery picture Arlott evokes as I scuffed through the fallen brown leaves behind the pavilion or contemplated the old bell of the liner Athlone Castle which hangs in front of it. But I could see that it was a pleasant place. I asked Mr James if he would be back in retirement and he muttered irascibly that, despite the fine view from his office window, he was lucky if he got a chance to see twenty minutes of a game all day. But next year, he said, with a touch of defiance, he’d be back with his wife and some haversack rations and a couple of deck chairs and he’d sit on the opposite side of the ground and take the greatest possible pleasure in doing nothing whatever but watch the cricket. He is, he claims, never going to sit on a committee ever again.

  I sense that Lord Tennyson would approve the sentiment.

  Trantridge Hardy

  There is no longer a railway station at Trantridge Hardy. For seventy-three years it was connected to Sherborne via a branch line of the old Dorset and Wiltshire light railway, which meandered across those counties from Lyme Regis in the south-west to Bath in the north. It was hopelessly uneconomic and, inevitably, fell to the Beeching axe. Nowadays the only way to the village is the B748 which used to run straight down the High Street but now bypasses it half a mile to the south.

  Trantridge Hardy has always been my favourite village because once, when I was fifteen, staying with my schoolmate Lorimer, I played for them against Nether Mynton. There was an outbreak of Asian flu or swine fever or something equally exotic, and two of the Trantridge men couldn’t play so Lorimer and I were drafted. I batted at number ten and made three not out but, fielding at square leg, I caught a blinding catch off their star batsman just as he seemed to be set on a match-winning innings. It was pure self-defence: a full-blooded sweep off the meat of the bat, head height. If I hadn’t got my hands to it, I’d have been decapitated. The Nether Mynton innings fell apart after that and we won by eleven runs. That evening in The Bat and Ball I first tasted Veuve Clicquot champagne.

  It has hardly changed since then. In fact it must be much the same as it was a hundred or even two hundred years ago. There is something to be said for Beeching and the bypass: they have kept the ravages of the twentieth century at bay. There are no modern houses, no industry, not even a Chinese take-away. The nearest thing to a punk is Lorimer’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who does have pierced ears but would pass as a conventional Sloane on the King’s Road.

  For reasons of sentiment I chose the day of the Nether Mynton match for my visit and I was rewarded by one of the few really beautiful days of the summer. By eleven o’clock, when I pulled up at the Old Rectory, where Lorimer still lives, it was over seventy and rising. The sky was a very pale blue and quite cloudless. There was the faintest suspicion of a breeze – a zephyr if you were in a poetic frame of mind – and the countryside had that wonderful fresh lime green quality which you only get in early summer.

  ‘You’re opening,’ said Lorimer, who runs the family solicitors in Beaminster now that his father’s dead. Lorimer is captain of Trantridge Hardy – another inheritance from his father who was still playing the summer before he died. Still quite a sprightly wicket-keeper, according to Lorimer, even at sixty-four. ‘Only joking,’ he added, laughing at my obvious dismay, ‘We’re at full strength, I’m happy to say. Which is more than we were at Nether Mynton in May. We shouldn’t have played really. Huge puddle at one end and they had a demon leg spinner who found the deepest spot three times out of four. You needed windscreen wipers to play him. We were all out for 32.’

  It’s only a couple of hundred yards from the Rectory to the ground, so we walked down there, Lorimer carrying his old cricket bag, still the same one he had at school. It has holes in it now and the leather corners are all worn away, but I did very much admire the label which said ‘S.S. CARINTHIA. Not required on voyage.’ Also Lorimer’s bat, an antique Gunn and Moore, almost black from countless seasons of linseed oil, and bound and rebound so that it looked like a very old war wound.

  I suppose there are prettier grounds in England, but I’ve not seen one. What’s more it’s even better since the bypass as there is practically no traffic along the High Street, which forms the boundary at the Bat and Ball end. At the other end the pavilion is raised above the field on a grass platform about ten foot up. Players enter the fray down steps cut in the slope. The pavilion itself is white clapboard with a newly thatched roof and a little plaque saying ‘1864. H.M.M.’. This refers to Sir Humphrey Manderson, fourteenth baronet, who caused the building to be erected. His great-great-great-grandson – give or take a generation – was Trantridge’s fastest bowler. Just missed his blue at Cambridge. His partner, marginally slower but steadier, was Ralph Bodger who, under the Youth Opportunities Scheme, had helped his father thatch the pavilion.

  The hills stretch away behind the pavilion – wooded round the edge, bare on top, like a tonsure, which is appropriate since the old pilgrim’s track leads to the home of the Franciscan Friars at Batcombe. The hills make a perfect backdrop.

  If the bowling is from the pavilion end then the midwicket boundary is the church side of the ground. The Manderson alms-houses extend neatly from long-on to deep square leg. Then there is a yew hedge, a short stretch of churchyard, and finally, beyond where a rather fine long-leg would stand, there is the fourteenth-century church of St Anselm, laid on tenth-century foundations with its famous and uniquely leaning eighteenth-century spire. Pevsner was ecstatic about the church, especially the Manderson tombs.

  Trantridge Manor lies about five hundred yards over cover point. In fact the story is that Fearie Constantine drove a ball into the ha-ha one day in the twenties when Sir Alfred Manderson, young Manderson’s grandfather, invited him down to join Colonel ffrench-Drake’s eleven for the final day of the Trantridge Cricket Week. The Manor is essentially Tudor but has been knocked about a bit by Cromwell and others, then ‘improved’, mainly by the Victorians. It’s a bit chaotic, but fun. For the Nether Mynton match the traditional ‘Manderson Marquee’, complete with bunting, had been dutifully pitched the night before.

  Lorimer and I sauntered into the pavilion and he introduced me to one or two of the players: Desmond Gauvinier
, the local vet, a cousin of the famous Tillingfold players, Peter and Paul; the publican from the Bat and Ball, Len Sprott; Mr Midge, the butcher; the Reverend Peter Chamberlain, vicar of Trantridge Hardy and also of Trantridge D’Urberville and Trantridge St Thomas, the neighbouring villages; a writer called Southcott; and a jovial fat man who seemed to answer to the name of ‘Jingle’. (I gathered he was in advertising.)

  The pavilion had an inimitable smell that took me back a quarter of a century: a compound of linseed oil and mothball and mown grass. I was pleased to see that the village’s main cricketing heirloom was still in its glass case by the door of the home dressing-room. ‘Dr W.G. Grace’s pad,’ said the brass plaque. ‘This pad was worn by “W.G.” on the occasion of his visit to Trantridge Hardy on May 17th 1874’. It was true. I had seen the scorebook which showed, preposterously, that the Doctor had been bowled by Squire Manderson for a duck. He had obviously been peeved about this because when Trantridge batted he took seven wickets for only four – including the squire – caught and bowled for two.

  We sat and chatted for a while and then the Nether Mynton team coach arrived and I drifted away from the players and found a deckchair under the old oak outside the saloon bar of the Bat and Ball. The game started a few minutes after noon and a few minutes after that I wandered into the bar and bought a pint of ‘Old Parsnip’ from Len Sprott’s extremely attractive daughter. Trantridge had won the toss and elected to bat. Gauvinier was at number one, an elegant left-hander in an I Zingari cap, partnered by young Manderson, bareheaded and impetuous, who cut his first ball from the Nether Mynton fast bowler for four, then miscued a hook off the next and was very nearly caught by square leg running backwards, but the sun got in his eyes and he fell over and the ball trickled over the boundary for four. Gauvinier came down the wicket and had a quiet word with Manderson, telling him, I presumed, not to be quite so hasty. I sipped my Old Parsnip, which is good beer, real as anything, and I thought of England.

  Village cricket has been dignified with its own national competition sponsored by Samuel Whitbread, the brewers, who make good beer though nothing as delicious as Old Parsnip. They have their final at Lord’s, which is a splendid accolade for the grass roots game and yet not entirely appropriate. I tried to envisage Trantridge Hardy and Nether Mynton battling it out in that cavernous arena before empty stands, and shuddered slightly. Village cricket belongs, I decided, on village greens. It is played by genuine amateurs for genuine fun. Young Manderson executed a definitive Surrey cut and thundered down the wicket with a bellow of ‘Come two!’, thus confirming my thought.

  ‘Here with a Pint of Beer beneath the Bough,’ I mused, and wandered over to chat up Old Fred, the scorer whom I had recognised earlier. He was a small, nut-brown man who worked for the council; mainly as a hedge trimmer. He had scored for the village for fifty years and had done so the day I played against Nether Mynton. Not that he recognised me, though when I introduced myself he said at once:

  ‘Well I’ll be dashed! You were the young lad that caught Major Trumpington in fifty-nine.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, modestly.

  ‘Major Trumpington didn’t like that,’ said Old Fred, ‘He didn’t like that a bit.’

  I watched for a moment over his shoulder, marvelling at the neatness and precision of the dots and numbers as he recorded the progress of the innings; also at the immaculate copperplate as the inevitable happened and he had to write ‘stumped Basset bowled Kerridge’ against Manderson’s name. Manderson had made 32, mainly in boundaries. He had been trying to heave the ball, à la Constantine, into the ha-ha, but played an air-shot half-way down the wicket and could not regain his ground.

  We lunched at 1.30 in the tent. There were trestle tables and ham salad or pork pie and salad, and fruit salad and farmhouse cheddar. Wives and girlfriends joined in, and the umpires and scorers too. Charles Lorimer had to jump up and shoo away someone’s dog which strayed on to the field of play and cocked its leg against the wicket. His father told the Nether Mynton captain about my catch. Danvers and Perkins, both local farmers, talked about subsidies and butter mountains. The vicar defended the Bishop of Durham not very wholeheartedly. Gauvinier, the vet, attacked James Herriot.

  I dozed off for a moment or two afterwards back in the deck chair under the tree. It was hot, and the batting had slowed after Manderson’s first brave onslaught. The Old Parsnip made me drowsy. That and the soporific perfection of the day.

  At tea Trantridge were 182 all out. Nether Mynton ten for one. Manderson took the wicket with a fast full-toss.

  Tea was also served in the tent. There were cup-cakes and egg sandwiches and cucumber sandwiches and marmite sandwiches and tarts. The tea came from an old urn, and was hot and weak and milky and sweet. Old Fred sat with me and told me how he had seen Hobbs and Sutcliffe one year at the Oval and how there had never been a batsman as pretty as Woolley or as inexorable as Hutton but that if old Patridge the squire’s gamekeeper who bowled off-spin for Trantridge for nigh on thirty years had been a Surrey or a Yorkshire man he’d have played for England, but seeing as how Dorset didn’t have a first-class team and how the squire was a hard master – hard but fair, mind – and Patridge having lost the tip of his index finger at Ypres, besides which and one thing and another and it hadn’t been the same since they started covering wickets and this one-day stuff wasn’t what you’d call cricket now was it, not really, but you had to hand it to that Geoffrey Boycott, know what I mean, I mean say what you like but...

  And there was honey from the parson’s bees.

  Then I went back to the deck chair and I thought of England again and Nether Mynton got to 179 for nine and Lorimer brought on Mr Midge, the butcher, who bowled very slow leg breaks. The Nether Mynton number eleven hit the first one for a scampered three to the long leg boundary, then with the scores level, the other batsman, a strong, cocky estate agent, went for glory, got a top edge and was beautifully caught by Lorimer’s son, Charles.

  ‘Funny old game,’ said Lorimer, over a pint in the Bat and Ball, ‘but a fair result.’

  ‘Very fair result,’ said the Nether Mynton captain.

  ‘Dream catch,’ said Gauvinier.

  ‘Dream match,’ I said, savouring another pint of Old Parsnip. A perfect game in a perfect village on a perfect day. The apotheosis of cricket at its most bucolic, least pretentious and most blissfully elusive. If Trantridge Hardy and its pitch and its team didn’t exist, you would have to invent them.

  Lord’s

  Cricket grounds are like seaside resorts. They come alive in summer with the sunshine and the deck chairs and the bunting and the bands, but like seaside resorts I find them oddly appealing out of season when they are empty and windswept. I see that this is perverse, but there is something romantic about the melancholy of deserted stands, the odd piece of flapping canvas, sea-gulls standing on the square, dejected but undisturbed.

  One chill day in winter I came in to Lord’s for a game of Real Tennis. They were rebuilding the squash courts and changing-rooms, so for once the tennis players, usually consigned to a rather poor relation status behind the pavilion, were allowed to change in the Middlesex and England dressing-room. The dressing-room felt as if it had been untouched since about 1947 and the days of the Compton-Edrich ascendancy and, perversely, that too gave it a strange romance. When it is titivated, as it presumably will be, it will become much harder to think of those Brylcreem heroes actually padding up in that very room. It had snowed during the night and I was playing early. The whole of the ground was covered in white and there wasn’t a footmark on it. I have never seen Lord’s looking better.

  Even in season there is something about being at Lord’s on a very quiet day. One day early in summer I was walking towards the Nursery End when MCC were playing the MCC professionals. I had vaguely assumed that MCC would be represented exclusively by retired majors in Eton Rambler sweaters. I paused. The scoreboard said that MCC’s opening bat was 58 not out. He looked oddly familiar and not
a bit like an Old Etonian major. It was Geoffrey Boycott. I bought a scorecard and settled down. Seconds later there was a bowling change. The captain was bringing himself on. ‘Mr D’s bowling’, said a knowledgeable voice, and sure enough it was the tall thin figure of the Lord’s coach. He beat him once too, going for the sweep, hit him on the front pad. Not out, of course, but a moment to savour. G. Boycott, Yorkshire and England, versus D. Wilson, Yorkshire and England. I suppose there might have been thirty of us in the ground. Better that, oddly enough, than thirty thousand.

  The inescapable Cardus seems to have had a similar notion, though not quite so extreme. ‘A hundred times,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘I have walked down the St John’s Wood Road on a quiet morning – that’s the proper way to enjoy Lord’s: choose a match of no importance, for preference one for which the fixture card promises “a band if possible”. I have gone a hundred times into the Long Room out of the hot sun and never have I not felt that this is a good place to be in; and if the English simply had to make cricket a national institution and a passion and a pride, this was the way to do it.’ I particularly like ‘a band if possible’! Lord’s, of all grounds, should always have a band.

  Playing Real Tennis at Lord’s – a new recreation in danger of becoming obsessive – I’ve seen the place often out of season and also learned something about that curious extramural activity which takes place behind the pavilion (no, not THAT sort of activity). Real Tennis seems to come naturally to cricketers, at least to batsmen. Douglas Jardine was the Oxford number one; F.R. Brown was good; Colin Cowdrey and Ted Dexter especially so. ‘The stroke is like a cover drive,’ says Henry Johns, leaning elegantly into a textbook batless demonstration in the pro shop. ‘Batsmen find it easier than bowlers because they can read the spin and follow the flight.’ Norman Cowans, who spent a winter as a young pro, impressed everyone with his cheerfulness and his dedication but it was obvious that he was never going to be one of the world’s great tennis players.