lunch and dine in College, where the standard fare still had a marked post-war flavour to it and it was much cheaper. For a number of my King’s contemporaries a non-academic, Old Etonian, Pitt Club member was not quite the flavour of the month either.
Anyway, life progressed, and Christopher Morris gave me a list of lectures I should attend. I started off by going with bated breath to Mill Lane to listen to John Saltmarsh’s opening discourse about Medieval European economic history. Saltmarsh himself looked discouragingly medieval. There was a good deal of facial hair in one place and another, a voice with a strong underlay of chalky, ecclesiastical tones, and if he had a sense of humour, it went way over my head. His mind was brimful of every aspect of the medieval condition, but sparkling stuff it was not. For about ten minutes I took feverish, indecipherable notes, but I was soon wondering what on earth I was doing there, being lectured to on a subject about which I knew nothing and cared even less. I saw a pretty bleak future for me with Medieval European history. I was too young, too naïve and too unsure of myself to be seriously rebellious, so I sat through a fair number of these sessions. I listened as attentively as I could to the offerings of a good many other lecturers too, who as far as I was concerned were also dreadful bores. It was not all bad though, for there was one don at King’s called Hibbert, with an agreeably unsolemn way of putting things across, who made American history come off the shelf at you. But that was about it.
I didn’t have a car of my own, or indeed a driving licence for much of my first year, but I found myself getting lifts up to London from various chums for deb dances, although I was not certain how or why the invitations kept turning up. I fell in love with just about every girl I met at these dances, but sadly I was no competition for the swaggering chaps who were three or four years older than me and had just come out of some famous regiment or other. I did get one or two of the crumbs that fell from the rich men’s tables, but that was about it. Generally speaking, of course, one’s expectations from sorties such as these at that time, even from the crumbs, were not anything like as high as they would have been a few years later, when the joys of what was to become a hugely permissive society were chucked into the mix.
As the summer of 1958 approached, I felt both excited and anxious. Cricket was very much on my mind, but so was the memory of that short one from Edward Scott. I went to Fenner’s early in April for net practice with the main candidates for a place in the university side that year, which included a formidable body of old Blues. The magisterial figure of Ted Dexter, the captain, towered over everything. He was tall and good-looking, but an aloof figure to those of us who were not his special friends. Watching him bat in the nets was extraordinary, and I needed no more than that to tell me I was entering a completely new cricketing world. There was Ossie Wheatley, tall and blond and a wonderful fast-medium seam bowler who went on to Warwickshire and Glamorgan; Michael James, always approachable and friendly and a fine striker of the ball, who in 1956 had scored a hundred as a freshman against the touring Australians; and Ian Pieris from Colombo, who bowled at a sharp and mean medium pace and was more than useful in the lower middle order, if a man of few words, to newcomers at any rate. He was to become an influential figure in the development of Sri Lankan cricket, and was always extremely hospitable whenever cricket took me there. Another old Blue was Ian McLachlan from Adelaide, the oldest son of a huge landowning family in South Australia, who in later years would take care of this visiting Pom with a nonchalant and generous ease. The most genial of men, and an opening batsman who like Dexter was at Jesus College, he was once twelfth man for Australia, but never made it beyond that. In the 1990s he would be a member of Malcolm Fraser’s Australian government, and he is still very much the patriarch of Adelaide and South Australia. Then came the also-rans, of whom I was one.
The two pros who came up to Cambridge to coach that year were the redoubtable Tom Graveney, ever elegant and charming, just like his batting, who made me feel very much at ease, and ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, the leg-spinner from Derbyshire who went on one England tour to the subcontinent, but never played a Test match. He was a small man, with a vermillion face which was not only the product of many days spent in the sun, and the ready humour I have always associated with wrist-spinners. Like Tom he was a good coach, and there were many happy hours spent just across neighbouring Parker’s Piece in the bar of the Prince Regent, where the two of them were billeted.
Perhaps the most important figure of all at Fenner’s was the groundsman-cum-coach-cum-general-bottle-washer who quite simply ran the place, the incomparable and ever-helpful Cyril Coote. He was a man of many parts, and to describe him as the groundsman, as many did, missed the point by miles. At first, the most noticeable thing about him was his pronounced limp, for he had been born with one leg significantly shorter than the other. No one could have made lighter of such a handicap as his limping stride took him all over the place, brimming with enthusiasm and encouragement. He turned himself into a considerable batsman, and opened the batting for Cambridgeshire for many years in the Minor County Championship, although my friends from the Norfolk side of that vintage remembered him more for his adhesiveness than his fluent strokeplay. No one I have ever met understood the mechanics of batting better than Cyril, and it was remarkable how clever he was at correcting faults in the nets. He was almost invariably right in his assessment of the characters of the players he coached, to whom he varied his approach accordingly. Half an hour in the nets with Cyril was worth a week with many others. He also had the reputation of being one of the best shots in Cambridgeshire, and any bird that had the luck to get past him once knew better than to try again. In addition to all this, he was a wonderful groundsman, and produced the superb batting pitches which in the fifties were the hallmark of Fenner’s. He was cheerful, extremely determined and uncompromisingly robust in all his opinions. There were no grey areas with Cyril.
I played a few matches for the university in my first year, without getting into the side. The delightful and charming Chris Howland filled the wicketkeeping spot. He was undoubtedly better than I was after that stupid accident, but I still have the feeling that if I had missed that wretched bus, it might have been the other way round. My reactions were a mess, and my keeping suffered more than my batting. It was only for one brief spell, on a tour of Barbados with Jim Swanton’s Arabs in 1967, that my wicketkeeping ever fully came back to me, but it was too late, for I had by then become a cricket watcher and writer, and had little time to play. I suppose all through my life I have suffered occasional pangs of what might have been, if only … But there was no future in that line of thought, and I was always anxious to get on with the present, even if that did sometimes mean flying by the seat of my pants.
My first-class career had an unusual start. May 1958 was an important month for me, what with exams, the cricket and keeping a watchful eye on the social scene in London, with deb dances and all that. My particular love at that time – and gosh, she was beautiful – had asked me as her partner to the tour de force of the London season, Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball. This was an invitation it was impossible to refuse, although as it happened I was well out of my depth by then, not that I knew it, and it wouldn’t have made the least difference whether I had gone or not. As luck would have it, two days before the party, the team for the university’s forthcoming game against Kent went up in the window of Ryder & Amies the outfitters on King’s Parade. The match began the day after Queen Charlotte’s, and of course sod’s law decreed that my name should have been down on the team sheet. Showing all the optimism – or maybe the insecurity and bloody stupidity – of youth, I attempted to fulfil both functions, which remains one of the craziest decisions that even I have ever made.
I caught the train up to London, and changed into a white tie and tails at my brother John’s mews cottage. But as soon as I turned up at the appropriate house and met the rest of the party, which was full of dashing cavalry officers and a fair sprinkling from the Brigade of Guards, I realised that any hopes I might have had in the direction of the beautiful deb had disappeared weeks ago. Anyway, off we all went to the Grosvenor House in Park Lane, where we danced a good deal of the night away. Eventually I bade farewell to all concerned and legged it to Liverpool Street station to catch the milk train back to Cambridge before taking on the might of Kent that same morning. As luck would have it, the first person I ran into on the platform was Ian McLachlan, who was being rested for the Kent game and
