The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  Alan Watts, in his latest book, This Is It, asks us to laugh with him at that stern and quite idiotic imperative so often read and heard in America – You Must Relax. Here are hundreds of thousands of nice conscientious people, already staggering under a load of musts, who are now faced with yet another and perhaps final Must. Clenching their teeth and straining every nerve, they have to relax. I have spent weekends with such people, all wearing special casual-living clothes and doing fun things, relaxing so hard that it must have been a pleasure to get back to work again. And all this of course is the opposite to wearing life like a loose garment. It is as if a Garfield Sobers arrived on the cricket field wearing a strait-jacket.

  Never be afraid – I am advising the young now; their elders are hopeless – of any accusations and taunts of being half-baked and woolly-minded. These come from the kind of people who would tell a Sobers to pull himself together, to keep his chin up and his chest out. They have minds that can never be loose and easy. They are stiff-necked in all their opinions and conclusions. They carry their intelligence rigidly, never allowing it to amble and lope, so that it is strained and tired before it has been asked to do anything in particular. And England – and I mean England because I can’t speak for Scotland, Wales, Ulster – is crammed with such people.

  This may seem a surprising statement. But then, so far as we have any idea of ourselves at all, we have the wrong idea. We are deceived by superficial appearances and what we read in the papers, which are always looking for the picturesque and the grotesque and so offer us tiny minorities as typical examples. Because we are shown young men with long hair in fancy dress, because we think the housepainters took it easy and the chaps mending the road appear to be idle, we conjure up a disturbing vision of an England full of layabouts, a country going nowhere except to the dogs. It is as if, while the actual weather gets wetter and worse, we are mentally and spiritually ambling into some tropical land of mañana, all taking longer and longer siestas under imaginary palm trees. But most of this is nonsensical. We are in a mess not because we are too slack but because we are too stiff.

  It might be better if we were all going to the dogs, because then at least we would be all going somewhere together. Our trouble is that we aren’t going anywhere together. We are no longer a nation at all. We consist of a number of mentally stiff-necked sections, all chin up and chest out. Between these rigid camps there are committees but no real communications. Nationally we are at the opposite extreme to a Sobers on the field, loose, easy, instant and powerful. We are like people standing to attention or doing a goose step, all in the various uniforms of our class or sectional interests. It is no use our politicians exhorting the nation, with a final reference to the ‘spirit of Dunkirk’; the nation isn’t there, only so many listeners and viewers, so many sectional interests and prejudices.

  We can imagine what would have happened to a famous declaration if it had been received in the spirit of today. We shall fight on beaches would have been denounced at once by the Association of Boarding-House Keepers and Deckchair Hiring. On landing grounds – a sharp protest and a threat to strike by the Union of Airline Ground Staff employees. In fields – a deputation to the Prime Minister by representatives of the Farmers’ Union. In streets – agreed by every borough council to be irresponsible and unwarrantable. And on hills – bringing about, for the first time, joint action by the Landowners’ Association and the National Council of Hikers.

  But this won’t do, I shall be told, because after all we aren’t at war now or in any danger. But we seem to be in considerable danger, even if it isn’t of a spectacular sort. Something rather nasty happens to people who insist on living – and living well – on borrowed money. If they don’t go bankrupt outside, they go bankrupt inside, where the spirit dwells. We have all met – and afterwards avoided – people trying to live as the English have been trying to live for some time now, people who expect the largest possible result from the smallest possible effort, who say they are boldly facing the future while clinging to every remaining vestige of the past, who want everybody to be united except themselves and condemn all prejudices except those they cherish themselves, who are hopelessly committed to self-deception.

  Has this taken us too far from Garfield Sobers? I don’t think so. Instead of holding ourselves loose and easy, rippling along, in our thinking, we still insist upon the stiff neck, the chin up, the chest out. We arrive on the field of our national interests like sergeant majors on parade. What we thought the day before yesterday, perhaps thirty years ago, is good enough for today. We turn again to economics when we should be thinking in terms of psychology. We listen to economists whose understanding of ordinary English human nature is almost nil. The recent sterling crisis offered a wonderful opportunity to ask the English (who love drama and are easily bored by routine) to be heroic and self-sacrificing, making a huge common effort, which the English enjoy because it breaks down the class barriers, the shyness and social suspicion, and they feel they can talk to one another without having been introduced. What we like is a national crisis as big and all-embracing as the weather.

  But what have we got? Chin up and chest out, that’s all. Just enough, no doubt, to put the statistics right, but also just enough to make England a still more unheroic and disagreeable country to live in, a good country to get out of. Nothing stiff has been broken or loosened; nobody will go loping and rippling on to the field. And don’t let any Tory take heart from all this. They have always been in the same leaky boat while pretending it was a luxury liner. They are still solidly behind any chest-out ‘world power’ nonsense, any chin-up ‘top table’ drivel, any stiff-necked back-to-the-Thirties deflationary moves, with prosperity and joy at the end of long queues at the labour exchanges.

  So we arrive on the ground, to play the world, still marching as if on parade, not as a nation but in regimented sections, each shouting old slogans and moving to tunes that have bored the hell out of us for years. We might remember, before making our final protest and then deciding to emigrate, how a man from Barbados came on to our Test-match grounds, so eager and yet so easy, apparently without a stubborn bone or stiffened muscle in his body. Yes indeed, we can learn from Garfield Sobers.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  Now come two lovely meditations by literary-minded and cricket-mad Englishmen. Neville Cardus remembers the spirit of cricket in inter-war England, the game and its characters between the bloody conflicts. A. A. Thomson recalls the continuation of cricket in the English winter, in places and climes far removed from his own cold hearth.

  NEVILLE CARDUS

  The Spirit of Summer (1949)

  For twenty years I went to cricket matches north, south, east and west, and I saw the blossom come upon orchards in Gloucestershire, as we journeyed from Manchester to Bristol; and I saw midsummer in full blaze at Canterbury; and I saw midsummer dropping torrents of rain on the same lovely place, the white tents dropsical: ‘Play abandoned for the day.’ I saw the autumn leaves falling at Eastbourne. I have shivered to the bone in the springtime blasts at the Parks at Oxford. In a Manchester Guardian article I congratulated the keenness and devotion of two spectators who at Leicester sat all day, near the sight screen, from eleven until half past six, in spite of an east wind like a knife. Then, as I was finishing my notice, a thought struck me. ‘But’, I added in a final sentence, ‘perhaps they were only dead.’ I have seen English summer days pass like a dream as the cricketers changed places in the field over by over. Sometimes I have seen in vision all the games going on throughout the land at the same minute of high noon; Hobbs, easy and unhurriedly on the way to another hundred under the gasometer at the Oval; Tate and Gilligan at Hove skittling wickets while the tide comes in; Hendren and Hearne batting for ever at Lord’s while the Tavern gets busier and busier; at Southampton, Kennedy bowling for hours for Hampshire – Kennedy never ceased bowling in those days; he could always have produced a clinching alibi if ever circumstantial evidence had convicted him of anything: />
  ‘What were you doing on 17 July at 4.45 in the afternoon?’

  ‘Why, bowling of course.’

  From Old Trafford to Dover, from Hull to Bristol, the fields were active as fast bowlers heaved and thudded and sweated over the earth, and batsmen drove and cut or got their legs in front; and the men in the slips bent down, all four of them together, as though moved by one string. On every afternoon at half past six I saw them, in my mind’s eye, all walking home to the pavilion, with a deeper tan on their faces. And the newspapers came out with the cricket scores and the visitor from Budapest, in London for the first time, experienced a certain bewilderment when he saw an Evening News poster: ‘Collapse of Surrey.’ In these twenty seasons I saw also a change in cricket. It is not fanciful, I think, to say that a national game is influenced by the spirit and atmosphere of the period. In 1920 cricket retained much of the gusto and free personal gesture of the years before the war of 1914–18. Then, as disillusion increased and the nation’s life contracted and the catchword ‘safety first’ became familiar and a sense of insecurity gathered, cricket itself lost confidence and character. My own county of Lancashire provided a striking example of how a mere game can express a transition in the social and industrial scene. When Manchester was wealthy and the mills of Lancashire were busy most days and nights, cricket at Old Trafford was luxuriant with MacLaren, Spooner and Tyldesley squandering runs opulently right and left. It was as soon as the county’s shoe began to pinch and mill after mill closed that Lancashire cricket obtained its reputation for suspicious thriftiness; care and want batted visibly at both ends of the wicket. Not that the players consciously expressed anything; of course they didn’t. But a cricketer, like anybody else, is what his period and environment make of him, and he acts or plays accordingly.

  The romantic flourish vanished as much from cricket as from the theatre and the arts. I even reacted against the romanticism in my own cricket writing. The lyric gush, the ‘old flashing bat’ and ‘rippling green grass’ metaphors gave way to, or became tinctured with, satire if not with open irony. Hammond no longer inspired me into comparisons between him and the Elgin marbles; I saw something middle-class and respectable about his play, and was vastly amused and relieved when occasionally he fell off his pedestal and struck a ball with the oil hole of his bat, or received a blow from a fast ball on his toe. Bradman was the summing-up of the Efficient Age which succeeded the Golden Age. Here was brilliance safe and sure, streamlined and without impulse. Victor Trumper was the flying bird; Bradman the aeroplane. It was the same in music, by the way: the objective Toscanini was preferred to the subjective Furtwängler. In an England XI of 1938, A. C. MacLaren would have looked as much an anachronism as Irving in a Noël Coward play.

  But the humour of English character kept creeping in, even to Lancashire cricket. And I came to love the dour shrewd ways of these north-country ‘professors’; it was true to life at any rate, and not, like much of the cricket of the south of England, suburban and genteel. The Lancashire and Yorkshire match was every year like a play and pageant exhibiting the genius of the two counties. To watch it rightly you needed the clue; for years I myself had missed the point. There is slow play and slow play at cricket. There are batsmen who cannot score quickly because they can’t, and there are batsmen who can score quickly but won’t. In a representative Lancashire and Yorkshire match of 1924–34, runs were severely discountenanced. No fours before lunch, on principle, was the unannounced policy; and as few as possible after. But fours or no fours, runs or no runs, the games touched greatness because of the north of England character that was exposed in every action, every movement, all day. Imagine the scene: Bramall Lane. Factory chimneys everywhere; a pall of smoke between earth and sun. A crowd mainly silent; hard hats or caps and scarves on all sides. Makepeace is batting to Rhodes; old soldier against old soldier. Makepeace has only one purpose in life at the moment, and that is not to get out. And Rhodes pitches a cautious ball wide of the off stump – pitches it there so that Makepeace cannot safely score off it; Makepeace, mind you, who is not going to put his bat anywhere near a ball if he can help it.

  Maiden overs occurred in profusion. Appeals for leg before wicket were the only signs of waking life for hours. Often I thought that one day during overs, while the field was changing positions, somebody would return the ball from the outfield and accidentally hit a batsman on the pads, and then eleven terrific ‘H’zats!’ would be emitted by sheer force of habit. ‘Aye,’ said Roy Kilner, ‘it’s a rum ’un is t’Yarksheer and Lankysheer match. T’two teams meets in t’dressin’ room on t’Bank Holiday; and then we never speaks agean for three days – except to appeal.’ The ordeal of umpiring in a Lancashire and Yorkshire match during 1924–30 was severe. One day at Leeds, Yorkshire fell upon the Lancashire first innings and three wickets – the best – were annihilated for next to nothing. Two young novices nervously discovered themselves together, holding the fourth Lancashire wicket, while 30,000 Yorkshire folk roared for their blood; and the Yorkshire team crouched under their very noses, a few yards from the block-hole. By some miracle worked on high, the two young novices stayed in. Not only that; they began to hit fours. One drive soared over the ropes. George Macaulay, the Yorkshire medium-paced bowler (a grand fellow off the field, and on it a tiger with the temper of the jungle) glared down the wicket until his eyes were pinpoints of incredulity and frustration. And Emmott Robinson, grey-haired in the service of Yorkshire and whose trousers were always coming down, an old campaigner who would any day have died rather than give ‘owt away’, kept muttering, ‘Hey, dear, dear, dear; what’s t’matter, what’s t’matter?’ The two novices declined to get out; the score mounted – 40 for 3, 50 for 3, 80 for 3, 100 for 3. At that time the Yorkshire captain was not a good cricketer though a very nice man – an ‘amateur’ of course; for even Yorkshire continued to observe the custom that no first-class county team should be captained by a professional; even Yorkshire carried a ‘passenger’ for the sake of traditional social distinctions. But he was only a figurehead; the leadership was a joint dictatorship; Rhodes and Robinson. This day the situation got out of hand; the novices each made a century. One of the umpires told me, after the scalding afternoon’s play was over: ‘Never again; no more ‘‘standin’’’ in Yorkshire and Lancashire matches for me. Why, this afternoon, when them two lads were knockin’ t’stuffin’ out of t’Yorkshire bowlers, the row and racket on t’field were awful. George Macaulay were cussin’ ’is ’ead off, and Emmott were mutterin’ to ’isself, and poor owd captain ’ad been sent out into t’outfield so’s ’e couldn’t ’ear. At last I ’ad to call order; I said ‘‘Now look ’ere, you chaps, how the ’ell do you expect me and me pal ’Arry to umpire in a bloody parrot ’ouse?’’’

  Roy Kilner, Yorkshire to the end of his days and for ever after, once said that umpires were only ‘luxurious superfluities’ in a Lancashire and Yorkshire match. ‘They gets in t’way. What we want in Yarksheer and Lankysheer matches is ‘‘fair do’s’’ – no umpires, and honest cheatin’ all round, in conformity wi’ the law.’

  The joke about Yorkshire cricket is that for Yorkshiremen it is no laughing matter. It is a possession of the clan and must on no account be put down, or interfered with by anybody not born in the county. When Hammond was an unknown young player, I went to look at him at Huddersfield one day when Gloucestershire were playing Yorkshire. I had been told he was more than promising. He came to the wicket and began well. I watched from behind the bowler’s arm, through Zeiss glasses. Suddenly a ball from Emmott Robinson struck him on the pad, high up. Every Yorkshireman on the field of play, and many not on it, roared ‘Howzat!’ Involuntarily I spoke aloud and said, ‘No, not out, not out’; through my glasses I had seen that the ball would have missed the wicket. Then I was conscious I was being watched; you know how you can somehow feel that somebody behind you is looking at you. I turned round and saw a typical Yorkshireman eyeing me from my boots upward to the crown of my head, his hand dee
p and aggressively thrust in his pocket. ‘And what’s the matter with thee?’ he asked.

  No writer of novels could make a picture of Yorkshire life half as full of meaning as the one drawn every year in matches between Lancashire and Yorkshire. Cricket on the dole; Nature herself on the dole. The very grass on the field of play told of the struggle for existence; it eventually achieved a triumphant greenness. ‘Tha can’t be too careful.’ If it happened to be a fine day, well – ‘maybe it’ll last and maybe it won’t’. And, if things are at a pretty pass all round, well – ‘they’ll get worse before they get better’. ‘Ah’m tekking nowt on trust.’ At Sheffield there is a refreshment room situated deep in the earth under a concrete stand. I descended one afternoon for a cup of tea. A plump Yorkshire lass served me and I asked for a spoon. ‘It’s there, Maister,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  She pointed with her bread knife. ‘There,’ she said, ‘tied to t’counter, la-ad.’ So it was; a lead spoon tied to the premises with a piece of string.

  A. A. THOMSON

  Winter Made Glorious (1954)

  Winter in England is a time of raw, foggy days, of running colds and streaming umbrellas, when a man has practically no friends in the world but his goloshes, and when he has nothing more to look forward to at the end of the day but one small whisky, two large aspirins and a lukewarm hot-water bottle. That is England in winter, and never were time and place more entitled to separation on grounds of incompatibility.