had my moments, though they were pitifully few. My seven for nine at school was my zenith, although seventy-seven not out (against poor bowling and fielding in Nigeria) is another cherished memory.
Our home in Brixton was less than a mile from The Oval, home of Surrey. The great Surrey team of the fifties that won the County Championship for seven successive years was equipped for all conditions. They bowled Lock and Laker if the wicket took spin, Bedser if the ball would swing, and Loader if the wicket was quick. May, and later Barrington and Stewart, scored the runs, with Fletcher, Clark and Constable in support. Their fielding was superb. Lock was like a cheetah sighting prey in the leg trap, and Surridge took amazing catches with his telescopic arms – I used to believe he was the only man alive who could scratch his ankles while standing upright. It was a wonderful team of all the talents, and I never expect to see its equal.
I almost lived at The Oval during the school holidays. Armed with sandwiches and a soft drink I sat on the popular side in perfect contentment. If the weather was fine and the crowd large (as it often was) I would sit on the grass just outside the boundary rope, a delight long since forbidden by nannyish safety regulations. I suppose I was spoilt by the wonderful cricket I saw then, but those early days provided imperishable memories. The mind does play tricks, of course, but what I recall is that Surrey always seemed to win, and that in the early evening The Oval was always bathed in sunshine and shadow.
I was enraptured by the literature of cricket, which has a treasure trove no other game can match. For me Neville Cardus, C.L.R. James and E.W. Swanton stand before all other writers on the game. Cardus was the poet of cricket; his prose had a romance to it that swept the mundane aside. The first piece by Cardus I ever read was a pen-portrait of Denis Compton, in which he wrote of the infamous knee: ‘the gods treated him churlishly. They crippled him almost beyond repair.’ I never saw Compton again without that thought coming to mind.
I did suspect that Cardus stretched the truth a little as he fleshed out his affectionate portraits. Were cricketers really such characters, or was their charm enhanced in the poetic eye of a besotted beholder? Even if it was, it didn’t diminish my enjoyment. Cardus, again on Compton, illustrated the point. He once asked two boys why they were not watching the cricket. ‘Because there are no more Denis Comptons,’ he reports them as saying. It is a marvellous tribute to the unique charm of Compton’s batting, but would a small boy really have said that? I doubt it, but when I read it I loved it. And it may have been true.
C.L.R. James’s masterpiece Beyond a Boundary sets out better than anyone before or since how cricket affects character and illustrates the better virtues; it undermined all my prejudices that such a lyrical love of the game should flow from the pen of a committed Marxist
Jim Swanton is the doyen of modern writers although, for reporting the game, he would give the palm to his good friend John Woodcock. Both men have seen much of the greatest cricket played in the last three-quarters of a century. Jonathan Aitken, a great admirer of Swanton, once gave me a set of all the Swanton books I did not already possess, and they are a prized part of my collection.
I have often sat watching cricket with Jim Swanton, and it is an education. His memory is phenomenal: he once said to me of Donald Bradman’s 234 at Lords in 1930, which the Don thought was his greatest innings, ‘He hit the first two balls he received for four; they went …’ Jim stretched out his arm to point ‘towards that advertisement hoarding over there.’
I have found that other old cricketers and cricket watchers have the facility for total recall as well. Alf Gover, the old Surrey and England fast bowler, brought to life a tour of India in the 1930s under the captaincy of Lord Tennyson. Alf was running up to bowl the first ball of the match when a vengeful curry from the night before began to make its presence known. Sensing disaster, he did not deliver the ball when he reached the wicket but, to general astonishment, sprinted past the stumps and straight off the pitch into the pavilion. A few minutes later, as he sat wretchedly in the washroom, Lord Tennyson knocked on the door. ‘Alf,’ he enquired, ‘can we have the ball back please?’
It is difficult to capture the special fascination of cricket. It is unique. It has grace and charm and athleticism. It is unpredictable. It can change the mood of a spectator from lazy contentment to excitement within moments. A game can last up to five days, but the outcome may be uncertain until the end; changing weather conditions can up-end the state of a game. Above all, with occasional lapses, cricket is played with a generosity of spirit that is as refreshing as it is unfashionable. It is, I think, a very English game, that still encapsulates old values.
From the very start, cricket bred characters that the literature of the game has kept alive. Cricket lovers can talk for hours about the virtues of players they never saw, and the greatness of matches long ago. If I ever get to the Elysian Fields I intend to watch Trumper, and Grace, and Ranji, and so many others.
Cricketers are often very modest about their achievements, never realising the admiration they provoke among cricket lovers who do not have their skills. A few years ago, when Harold Larwood, the great old English fast bowler, was awarded his MBE, which was too little for all he did, and too late by several decades, I phoned him up in Australia, where he had lived for many years, to congratulate him. His granddaughter answered the phone but within moments the old man, now blind and frail, was speaking to me. I congratulated him and he thanked me for the award. And then he began to talk not of his exploits, but of his hero, Jack Hobbs, and innings he had played on sticky, treacherous wickets. Harold’s memory was of seventy years earlier, but was as vivid to him as any contemporary event. This was no vainglory, just admiration of another man’s great skill.
Nor is this bashfulness unique to Harold Larwood. I remember being with some former England and Australian international players discussing Bradman’s last Test innings when, to general astonishment, he was bowled for nought second ball by Eric Hollies. Only later when I looked up the match in Wisden, the cricket lover’s bible, did I recall that Arthur Morris, who had taken part in that conversation, scored 196 in that innings. Arthur had not mentioned it.
I would have loved to have been good enough to play cricket at the top level, but the basic skills were never there. I would have improved with practice, but never enough. It often seems to me that top-class sportsmen live their lives upside down. They are at their most famous when young, and end their playing careers at an age when most people in other professions are just beginning to reach positions of influence. Their reward though can be the bliss of fame and fortune and youth together, and the joy of doing something they love supremely well. It is an unbeatable combination, which is why few cricketers I have met ever regret their playing days, even if, for some, life must seem mundane ever after.
Politics is almost a mirror-image of cricket, in that fame and fortune often come with age, and it always surprises me that so few sportsmen carry their fame into public service. Chris Chataway did became a Conservative Minister, Sebastian Coe was a Member of Parliament while I was prime minister, and Colin Cowdrey serves in the House of Lords, but they are comparative rarities.
At school, I found that little was memorable in the classroom. If you worked hard at Rutlish you were encouraged. If you did not, you were ignored, unless you were disruptive; so I retreated to the shadows and stayed there, inconspicuous. Only once was there a price to be paid for not working. At about the age of thirteen or fourteen an opportunity arose for me to sit an entrance examination for Charterhouse. I was keen, but my school was not – only their top academic pupils would sit; they wanted no failures. Nor were my parents happy with the idea: what was wrong with Rutlish? And probably – though they never said so – they were worried about the extra cost a place at a leading public school would entail. I understood this, and the opportunity drifted away.
The years passed forgettably, and I have only sketchy recollections of them. GCE ‘O’ levels in 1959 approached without drama. My parents’ struggle to hide their bad health and poor finances absorbed all their
