boys and at ’em’ enthusiasm must have fallen on deaf ears. Tolly was more Falstaff than Flewellyn.
Back at Eton, before that little episode, he sadly, but entirely correctly, preferred Carrick-Buchanan’s agility between the goalposts to my own. I did however achieve the splendid job of Keeper (captain) of the second eleven. Tolly was also the cricket master in charge of Lower Club, and sadly I never had first-hand experience of the way in which he coped with that. It would not have been boring.
Keeper of the soccer second eleven, or ‘Team B’, as we proudly called ourselves, was not a particularly distinguished post, but it led to my first sortie into the world of journalism, which turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. We had a considerable fixture list, which included a game against Bradfield College’s second eleven at Bradfield. The Eton College Chronicle felt compelled to carry an account of even such insignificant encounters as this, and for some reason I was chosen to write the report. We were taken by bus to Bradfield, where we joined a mass of boys for a lunch which it would have been tempting to let go past the off-stump. Then we changed into our soccer stuff, climbed a steepish hill and found a well-used and pretty muddy football pitch. I enjoyed writing my account of the day’s events, and it duly appeared in the columns of the Chronicle. Unfortunately, it elicited a hostile response from Bradfield, who made a complaint which promptly came to the ears of Robert Birley, Eton’s large and formidable-looking, but in fact kind, rather shy and immensely able, headmaster. He was to us a remote, Genghis-Khan-like figure who hovered somewhat ominously in the background. Birley was known, unfairly in my view, as ‘Red Robert’. This merely meant that he had realised somewhat earlier than most of the school’s supporters the urgent need for change if a school like Eton was to survive. Many reactionary hands were thrown up in horror.
Anyway, one morning I found myself ‘on the Bill’, which meant that I was summoned to the headmaster’s schoolroom at midday. When I arrived, more than a trifle worried, I was told in no uncertain terms that what I had written about Team B’s midwinter visit to Bradfield was extremely offensive, and that I must without delay write a number of letters of apology. Apart from a general dressing down, I don’t think any other penalty was exacted. I still have a copy of this most undistinguished entry into the world I was to inhabit for just about the rest of my life. I have to admit that in the circumstances it may have been a little strong in places, although it is positively mild when judged by today’s standards.
The Michaelmas half in 1954 will always remain firmly in my mind, and for cricketing reasons too. England were touring Australia in the hope of hanging on to the Ashes they had won in a nerve-racking game at The Oval the previous year. There were one or two exciting newcomers in the England party, especially a fast bowler called Frank Tyson and a twenty-one-year-old called Colin Cowdrey, who was still up at Oxford. I found the whole series quite irresistible, and would tune in to the commentary from Australia under my bedclothes from about five o’clock in the morning. This was always a bit of a lottery, as the snap, crackle and pop of the atmospherics made listening a difficult business. Sometimes the line would go down altogether, and the commentary would be replaced by music from the studio in London. Those delicious Australian voices of the commentators, Johnny Moyes, Alan McGilvray and Vic Richardson, added hugely to the excitement, and John Arlott was there to add a touch of Hampshire-sounding Englishness.
First came the intense gloom at the end of November, when Len Hutton put Australia in to bat in the first Test in Brisbane, and England lost by an innings and 154 runs. Every afternoon I would rush to the corner of Keates Lane and the High Street, where the old man who sold the Evening Standard took up his post. I would thrust a few coppers at him, grab the paper, and turn feverishly to the back page. I had devoured what was for me the peerless, if at that time depressing, prose of Bruce Harris well before I got back to the Boys’ Entrance. The second Test in Sydney began in mid-December. The anxiety was enormous, and it seemed as if the end had come when Australia led by 74 on the first innings. But all was not lost, because Peter May then made a remarkable hundred, leaving Australia with 223 to win. They failed by 38 runs with Tyson taking six wickets, bowling faster than anyone can ever have bowled before. The game had a marvellous ending, with a stupendous diving leg-side catch behind the wicket by Godfrey Evans. Phew! I lived every ball. We won the third Test, in Melbourne, but I had to wait until early in the Lent half for England to make sure of the Ashes by winning the fourth Test in Adelaide. After that, to general relief at Eton, normal service was resumed.
Another diversion that winter was being prepared for my confirmation in December. At times the process was up against pretty tough competition from events in Australia, but GWN, who prepared us for the Bishop of Lincoln, was able neatly to combine events in Australia with those in Heaven. After that heavy defeat in Brisbane I was not at all sure about the Almighty, but GWN’s gentle manner and instructive way of putting things across gave meaning and relevance to the whole business of Christianity. Up until then I had felt that religion did nothing more than get in the way of things, what with endlessly having to tool off to chapel and listen to those interminable sermons. My family and one or two of my surviving godparents foregathered in College Chapel on a Saturday late in the Michaelmas half, and the Bishop of Lincoln laid his hands on our heads and turned a group of us into fully paid-up Christians. Then there was the excitement of going to my first Holy Communion the next morning, and the dreadful worry of whether or not I had got my hands the right way round when it came to the critical moment. GWN’s hard work of getting us into mid-season form for the Bishop of Lincoln was underlined and taken a stage further in the Lenten Lectures the following half, given by a notable cleric, George Reindorp, who was soon to become the Bishop of Guildford. By then England were playing slightly more frivolous cricket in New Zealand with the Ashes safely beneath their belt, and the Almighty and I were back on terms. Reindorp came across as the most delightful of men and just the right sort of Christian as he explained the issues surrounding Lent in such an unfussy way that even I thought I could understand them. Anyway, it all helped fill the gap between cricket seasons.
I had been Keeper of Lower Sixpenny in my second summer half, and went on to become Keeper of Upper Sixpenny in 1955. Upper Sixpenny, for fifteen-year-olds, was being run for the first time by a likeable new beak called Ray Parry (RHP), an immense enthusiast who during the war had played as a batsman for Glamorgan. It was one of life’s strange ironies that when, in my early seventies, I went through the divorce courts, my wife’s solicitor was none other than RHP’s son Richard. He was hellbent on delivering an innings defeat, but I think I just about saved the follow-on, if not much else.
RHP and I made great preparations for what we were sure would be a sensational season for Upper Sixpenny. But as luck would have it, David Macindoe, who ran the Eleven, and Clem Gibson, the captain of the Eleven, who actually made the decision, or at least put it into writing, summoned me to play for Upper Club, the top game in the school, from which the Eleven and the Twenty-Two (the Second Eleven) were chosen. Macindoe was another of the mildly eccentric schoolmasters Eton had a habit of producing. He had a gruff but friendly manner, a reassuring chuckle and an ever-cheerful pipe, and had opened the bowling off the wrong foot for Oxford for four years on either side of the war.
Things went well, and I donned the wicketkeeping gloves for the Eleven. I never returned to play a single game for Upper Sixpenny; nor did my old friend Edward Lane Fox, who had received a similar call to arms. At the age of fifteen it felt as near to unbelievable as it gets, especially when, early in June, I received a letter from Clem Gibson, which I still have, asking me if I would like to play against Harrow at Lord’s early in July. It was not an invitation I was likely to refuse. Can you imagine? There I was, a complete cricket nut who ate, slept and drank the game, being asked to play for two days against the Old Enemy at the Holy of Holies.
Of course, I had known by then that there was a distinct possibility the invitation would come my way, for things had been going quite well behind the stumps. But there it was in black and white. No one was more pleased than dear old Claude Taylor, with whom I had kept in close contact after leaving his clutches in Lower Sixpenny. In Upper Club nets, CHT still came to help me, standing halfway down the net and throwing an endless stream
