postcards home

I looked at the weather forecast last weekend, and managed to get a last-minute booking. For a week’s holiday at home.

A week of sunshine, warmth, all the windows wide open, a breeze through the house, my feet happy in Birkenstocks, linen dresses getting an outing, coffee in the sunshine in the old churchyard opposite St John’s and Trinity (could almost be in France), swimming in the local pool, reading, quilting, and listening to Florian Gadsby who is so articulate, focussed, thoughtful, and only thirty-one ffs. (I’ve just started reading Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Reinventing Your Life - if this is his first act, I can’t begin to imagine his second).

And there’s been cricket. We went to Fenner’s, the beautiful Cambridge University ground, where you just wander in for free, marvel at the immaculate green grass, sit in the shade under a tree, try to follow the ball, and ponder the seam of cricket which has run through your life.

[Brian Statham in his Stockport back garden]

Cricket was in the background when I was growing up. All the boys I knew loved it, played it, watched it on TV and, occasionally, at Old Trafford. It was an integral part of summer, like the ice-cream van, water fights with Fairy Liquid bottles, and the smell of philadelphus. I also remember everyone’s excitement when Brian Statham moved to a house at the end of our road after he’d stopped playing, but also the great disappointment that he never came out to bowl a few fast balls with the young fans. He was modest and retiring, and if his renown hadn’t preceded him, you’d have been non-the-wiser that he was one of cricket’s all-time greats. (And lest you think it was all about male cricketers in my youth, my Mum who played cricket at school used to tell me about the wonderfully named Rachel Heyhoe-Flint.)

[John Lennon on the set of ‘How I Won The War’ in Almeria, 1967]

I can’t remember what was used for stumps, but it would have been a makeshift set-up and capable of being moved quickly every time a car came along. I like the way cricket can be played anywhere as long as you have a bat and a ball - many of which went through the windows in our road. With a little ingenuity and creative thinking, the stumps can be made out of what’s to hand (good transferable knowledge for all sorts of situations in life): board and box (above), dustbin lid leaning against a brick, empty dustbin, lamp-post, stack of wooden crates, tower of bricks,

bottles with sticks.

[‘Cricket in the Hayfield’, Lake District, by Joseph Hardman - a match in a hayfield which has been recently harvested]

It is also possible to turn almost any flattish area into a cricket pitch, and create an idyllic pastoral image,

[part of a window by MEA Rope which was originally in a church in Haggerston]

an East End spectator sport (dogs welcome, useful fielders),

]’A Cricket Match’ (1938) by LS Lowry]

or a grittier, bleakly optimistic vision.

[Brian Statham, fast bowler, c1960, perfect diagonal and balance]

Brian Statham, though, played at the highest level, in classic white flannels on beautifully maintained green grass, and with proper stumps. He features in the book I read this week, Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes, co-authored by the historian David Kynaston whose series on post-war Britain has greatly influenced my thinking in recent years.

[Reggie Schwarz bowling a googly, c1909]

Now, I have very limited technical knowledge of cricket so have no way of picturing actions from arcane terms such as leg-break, second slip, googly and silly mid on - it’s just all flying arms and legs to me - but I enjoy reading about the personalities, strategies, complexities, and psychologies of cricket. The fact that some people are still debating Brian Close’s innings on the final day of the 1961 Ashes test match at Old Trafford is frankly bewildering (we’ve never moved on from the 1966 World Cup, either), but the book offers a good study in contrasting captaincy styles, the culture of Gentlemen (money, privilege, public school, Oxbridge, the City, urbane ‘shamateur’), and Players (unprivileged background, state school, no university, often northern county, professional) which persisted for so long. Dorothy Whipple uses the Gentlemen/Players tension and all it represents to great effect in The Priory.

While I’m on the crick-lit, I highly recommend Following On (2016) by Emma John who was obsessed with the “comically bungling” England team in the 1990s who were “a byword for British failure”. Also Wisden, aka the “bible of cricket”. One summer, the young, cricket-mad Tom brought the most recent Wisden with him on holiday; I spent a great deal of it on a sun-lounger testing him on batting and bowling figures, and got to know an awful lot about players such as Sachin Tendulkar and Marcus Trescothick. And did you know that there is a whole article about John Lennon and cricket in the 2022 Wisden? Perhaps not.

[The Australian pace attack recreating Abbey Road album cover, 2005 Ashes series]

I’m not sure Wisden ever included this wonderful photo, though.

Over the years, I watched a large number of school cricket matches, and gradually picked up enough knowledge to understand the basics of how cricket works. I learned most, though, from the commentary on the radio and Test Match Special (often with nice cake discussions). This takes such skill and I have huge respect for the best; Shane Warne was always my top favourite, so wonderfully relaxed, incisive, knowledgeable, funny. Nobel laureate Harold Pinter regarded cricket as the greatest thing on earth and said, “The attraction of the overseas broadcast wasn’t so much England’s performance, it was the commentators…the cricket seems almost peripheral”. And this is the powerful appeal of cricket for me - not so much the technical stuff as the associations and evocations, the memories, the sounds, the colours, and the almost lyrical descriptions it inspires.

[‘A Cricket Match’ (c1987) by John Heritage, good cricket quilt inspiration]

I once made an ‘Ashes’ quilt while listening to/half-watching a series and absorbing the hours of gentle voices interspersed with solid thwacks of ball on bat.

This was when we lived near Windsor and were able to go to the Oval to watch exciting Surrey T20 matches, and one very special time Tom and I were given tickets to a Test match.

I loved it, loved the pace, the rhythms, the crowd, the whites, the calm/soporific periods followed by sudden explosions and drama, the view of the gas holder, one of the most famous, perhaps the most famous of all. (We sat a couple of rows behind three of the four McGann brothers, which added further (non-cricketing) interest.)

[The last cricket match at Ferrybridge C Power Station before demolition of the cooling towers in 2019]

As photos of the Oval demonstrate, cricket is not all village greens and Rose Bowls and can be played with the most incongruous backgrounds. The contrast of tiny white figures and wide green spaces with gigantic industrial structures was something that you used to be able to see from the train as it passed closed by Ferrybridge. Philip Larkin captures the scene from the south-bound train from Hull in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: “They watched the landscape, sitting side by side/—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,/ And someone running up to bowl…”

[‘Playing Out Time in a Difficult Light’ (1902) by Francis Cunningham Batsford]

But these huge structures are nothing like the terrifying image in The Hopkins Manuscript in which RC Sherriff describes a small Hampshire village trying to prepare itself in its last days before the moon crashes into the Earth. The villagers play a final game of cricket by the light of the moon that “hung like a great amber, pock-marked lamp above a billiard-table, so vast and enveloping that the little white-clad cricketers moved without shadows to their appointed places on the field”.

But I’m going to end on a giggly, silly high note. If ever I need to laugh, I listen to this:

The weather’s changed, and it’s raining again as I finish this holiday postcard from home. Just in time for Wimbledon. So, anyway, did I ever tell you how much I love watching tennis? Ha, no. Another time.

Happy Sunday!