CMJ

by Christopher Martin Jenkins

  Most parents are proud of their offspring but we have certainly been lucky with ours. I have naturally revelled quietly in my sons’ sporting achievements and had hours of enjoyment encouraging them to bowl, throw and hit balls when they were young. They both had a natural eye but I like to think that I at least imparted first principles, such as the importance of bowling a length and trying to hit a moving ball in the direction from which it has come – as opposed, usually, to mid-wicket.

  It is probably our property owning democracy and the evolved system of independent schools that accounts for the lingering of a class structure in Britain but there is undoubtedly some virtue in the fact that so many aspire both to the best education and to owning their own home, not to mention keeping it in good repair if they reach their goal.

  We have moved four times in forty years, the first three very successfully. After three years at Albury, surrounded by lovely walks and within an easy walk also of church, pub, garage, baker and post office, we went a little further north to an even greater gem of a village, East Clandon. It remains to this day one of the very few unspoilt Surrey villages and although it has now lost its post office it still has the other essentials, church and pub. Our half of an Elizabethan cottage, known as ‘Old Harry’s’, had a bigger garden and sufficient oak beams to start a Tudor warship.

  As soon as I decided that I would risk leaving the security of the BBC staff and that I would therefore no longer have to make the regular return journey to London, we moved further south in 1978 into Sussex. We have been in the county ever since. Little Swains, our first home there, tucked away at Tismans Common in the sprawling old parish of Rudgwick, was another old cottage, this time big enough to accommodate our third child and still to have a spare room for the visitors whom Judy always encouraged. For more than twenty-five years she insisted on being the host to various relatives at Christmas, starting her preparations weeks before the gathering of the clan and working ceaselessly to make everything perfect.

  Naldrett House, our family home from 1983 to 2005, was ideal for a big family gathering, whether at Christmas or on the glorious summer’s day on which we celebrated my parents’ golden wedding. Built in 1790 for one of the Naldrett family who had been registered at Rudgwick since the Domesday Book, the house was surrounded by fields and had at one stage had direct access to the river Arun. There was a large pond (the estate agents called it a lake), a tennis court, a fairly ancient swimming pool that we could never afford to heat but that caught the sun all day, and plenty of fine trees including what the agents referred to in their particulars as a ‘laburnum walk’.

  The rooms were large rather than plentiful – five bedrooms and a large study for my work seemed ideal – and the Georgian frontage at the end of a short drive flanked by lime trees made it all look, especially when I had just mown the lawn, statelier than it actually was. But we were very happy there and the day that we acquired Naldrett House in the first place was one of the most exciting in my life.

  The original farm was being sold off in lots when we walked past with our first dog, Sandy, one Sunday afternoon and gawped at a property that seemed well out of our range. It had even been advertised in Country Life for heaven’s sake! I used my cricketing connection with Nat West Bank to discover the maximum amount that they would lend me against a salary that by then was coming in from a hectic mixture of writing and broadcasting adornments to my main job as editor of The Cricketer.

  It was one of those gambles in life which felt right if we could pull it off. I had to make a sealed bid without a guide price and we went as high as we realistically could. After the phone-call to tell us that we had got the house, I drove into the village to tell Judy quietly while she was helping to run one of the stalls at an early Christmas sale for Save the Children. It really felt like divine providence.

  We moved in just before Christmas and never regretted it although, apart from acquiring two of the original farm fields, during our twenty-two years at Naldrett House we could seldom afford to spend much on the house itself. But for a time I was able to spend a more stable home life.

  Between 1974 and 1980 I had been away for long periods four times, to the West Indies, India and twice to Australia, so it was time for a rest from winter tours. On my way to Blackpool by train to make a speech one day while England were playing overseas, I recorded some lines to convince myself that I was in the right place:

  Lovely winter country pastures,

  Sheep and puddles in cropped green fields,

  Crows heavy on straggling thorn trees

  Lanes a-glisten under watery blue.

  ‘Missing Australia, are you then?

  All that lovely winter sun?’

  Give me messy, squelchy England,

  Grey stone walls and a northern sky.

  A full winter at home, the lot for most of us, has the added virtue of heightening both the anticipation and the eventual pleasures of spring. As for May, the month of months, it has moved me since to further wonder:

  What a pity Eve succumbed;

  On a May morning, perhaps, much like this;

  When trees are bursting with green promise,

  Like sails in the wind, or proud expectant mothers waiting the day;

  When hawthorn and cow parsley abound,

  Daubed with blossom like Jersey cream;

  When you must walk through the shady coolness of a wood

  To escape the glare from the pale blue heights,

  And breathe the earthy richness of the leaf-moulded floor,

  The nectary remnants of the bluebells.

  Perhaps – that word again, if only we knew for sure –

  Heaven will be like this: Eden regained; England in May.

  But I discovered that, if I was honest, I did miss Australia and the other winter haunts a little. More than that, I felt that if I were to remain at the top of my chosen profession I had to start touring again. The game was moving on fast as usual and it was necessary to remain in the thick of it, or lose authority as a commentator and writer. The offer from the BBC to return as cricket correspondent while remaining editor of The Cricketer solved that problem and also made it easier to pay all those bills. Life was a constant juggle, with several balls aloft at any one time, and I could not have managed it without Judy’s calm support.

  13

  BOOKS AND SPEECHES

  My return to The Cricketer in time to prepare for the magazine’s diamond jubilee issue in 1981 meant accepting a much smaller salary and leaving the shelter of Auntie BBC, with the generous pension that would have come my way at sixty if I had been able to stomach the Corporation’s frustrating internal politics and archaic wage structure. There were no Jonathan ‘Woss’ style deals on offer in those days, certainly not to radio cricket commentators.

  Settling to a different style of office life at Redhill, but with school fees already biting in earnest, I supplemented my income by taking on books, regular freelance articles for the Scotsman newspaper and after-dinner speeches all over the country.

  Over the next ten years balancing the need for money with family life was always a challenge but on the whole the two dovetailed fairly well. After a three-year break I was again taken on as BBC cricket correspondent, this time on a contract, so renewed travelling in the winters required careful organisation. It meant also, of course, that life was never dull.

  In the first ten days after my return from Pakistan and India in November 1987, for example, my diary tells me that I arrived home from Delhi on a Wednesday, oversaw press day at The Cricketer on Thursday, spoke at a black-tie dinner at the Plaisterers’ Hall that evening, went to Lucy’s school on Friday, followed by a supper party at home, then to the fortieth birthday party of a friend of Judy’s on the Saturday. The next week included lunch and dinner speeches, my weekly piece for the Scotsman, a school match, a school play and a memorial service for Judy’s favourite uncle. Variety is the spice.

  I usually had a book project on the go during these y
ears but making speeches was less time consuming and, gradually, more lucrative. For years I had spoken at cricket dinners without reward but Brian Johnston told me one day while we were discussing the art of after-dinner speaking, curiously enough at a café in Dubrovnik during a ‘working holiday’ cruise on the P&O ship Canberra, that I was mad not to get an agent. He recommended me to his own man, another irrepressibly cheerful fellow called Tony ‘Dabber’ Davies, and henceforward I joined the list of paid speakers for many of my appearances.

  The Canberra cruise was one of three that Judy and I made when cricket seasons had ended in the early 1980s. I had been approached by P&O to organise a small band of cricketing celebrities to help them to sell Mediterranean cruises at that time of the year by using cricket as one of the themes. Apart from Brian I invited, at different times, Tom Graveney and Chris Cowdrey, both wonderful mixers, Dennis Amiss, Ray Illingworth, Richard Hutton, E.W. Swanton (who pleased some and offended others) and the lovable Colin Milburn, who almost drank the ship dry, moving down to join the crew when he had finished with the passengers!

  It was my job to provide some cricketing ‘entertainment’ for the cricket devotees on board, most of them very experienced pensioners. We had talks and question and answer sessions in the evenings and enjoyable games of cricket on deck, designed partly to enable me to select some teams for matches that I had organised in advance of each cruise at some of our ports of call. We had some successful fixtures, especially on Gibraltar where, according to Amiss, Swanton politely refused my invitation to do some umpiring until he heard that the Governer was going to be present.

  We played a match at Malaga in southern Spain, where cricket has taken quite a hold since. At that stage it was a novelty. The majority of the spectators were dripping with gold chains and watches, a fair few of them almost certainly on the run from Scotland Yard, enjoying their good life in an extradition-free area.

  The problem fixture was always at Corfu where I always had letters of confirmation from the Anglo-Corfiot Cricket Society that the local team would honour our agreed fixture at such and such a time on the concrete pitch in the middle of the famous square at the heart of Corfu Town. They never actually produced an XI, put off, it seems, by the famous names I had mentioned in letters, thinking that they were going to be confronted by a formidable old England team rather than a very motley bunch of old men from amongst the passengers. Each year I had to think on my feet at the last moment, not helped one time when ‘Illy’ did a bunk when he sussed that things were not going to go according to plan, choosing to go shopping with his beloved Shirley instead. Usually, however, my celebrity ‘team’ rallied round and we had some amusing games between quickly assembled teams from the ship, cheered on by local spectators. One or two Greeks did play, too, so I was able to witness at first hand how they always pinched a quick single in the first over when one opener would shout a loud ‘Ne’ to the other. All fielders in the area of the pitch would immediately relax, unaware that ‘Ne’ meant ‘Yes’ and that ‘No’ would have been ‘Ochi’.

  Sometimes I adapted for the Canberra passengers the sort of after-dinner speech that I was by now being regularly called in various directions to make. An ability to master regional accents, if not always to impersonate people with the accuracy of a Mike Yarwood or the truly remarkable Rory Bremner helped me to gain a bit of a reputation as someone who could make people laugh, although, inevitably, some evenings went better than others. I soon learned that no two audiences were the same, each occasion requiring subtly different approaches, and that, occasionally, the circumstances were beyond your control.

  Two in South Africa come to mind. Indeed I shall never forget the centenary banquet of the Orange Free State Cricket Union when, incidentally, the dignified parents of the soon to be disgraced Hansie Cronje were amongst an audience of 750 people scattered on tables over the large stage of a theatre in Bloemfontein.

  The organiser of the evening had had the apparently bright idea of lowering me from the ceiling by steel wire, like Peter Pan in a Christmas production, but instead of flying I was standing inside an open-fronted ‘commentary box’ which was lowered as I was introduced and then suspended above the audience. Delivering my speech as the box swayed some ten feet above an auditorium full of tables I must have made an extraordinary, and distracting, sight.

  Moreover, the acoustics were poor. There is nothing worse than a bad microphone for any speaker and, for one of only two occasions in my career, a section of the guests, inebriated no doubt, began to talk loudly amongst themselves as I tried to amuse those who were listening or, more to the point, those who could actually hear me. In vain I borrowed Peter Parfitt’s story of the speaker who asked if people could hear him at the back. ‘Yes’, came the reply, ‘but I’ll gladly swap places with someone who can’t.’

  An attempt by one of the organisers to quieten the offending minority almost resulted in a punch-up. It was a disaster such as I had only experienced previously when my agent arranged for me to talk, mainly about cricket, to a convention of power-boat enthusiasts.

  Later on that evening in Bloemfontein the amusing and attractive Diane Chandler, a north country girl who had made a reputation in Johannesburg, failed even more comprehensively to capture the attention of the unruly element during a double act with the ubiquitous Franklyn Stephenson, the globe-trotting Barbadian cricketer who also played professional golf. This strange and painful experience (because I had been well paid to appear) proved to me that bad acoustics are more often the cause of failed speeches than poor material or delivery.

  I have made a few speeches in South Africa over the years, as I have almost wherever I have travelled, usually with a better reaction, although few occasions there seemed to go quite as planned. On another evening I got an immediate laugh from a large gathering of diners celebrating the centenary of the first Test match in Port Elizabeth when I started with the words ‘Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen’. There had been several speeches already and I had finally got to my feet on the stroke of midnight.

  It is the impromptu things that come to mind when an event takes shape that often give the most satisfaction, although there is always an element of risk. That same evening, since there were Australians present in an international audience, I hazarded re-telling a story about the Afrikaans gentleman who had made an inquiry in Sydney about the little black things bobbing about in the water just off Bondi Beach.

  ‘Those little black things?’ replied a local Aussie. ‘Oh they’re just bouys to keep the shark nets in place.’ There was a pause before the visitor replied: ‘Black boys? For ’eaven’s sake, we’d never get away with that in South Africa.’

  A fellow journalist told me that there was a mixed reaction. One can never tell for sure how well any joke will go down. Speaking at the request of a former Cambridge University contemporary who had become an executive in the food business I failed to sense the presence of a strong feminist feeling amongst some of the guests. Not long after I had sat down, aware that things had not gone quite as swimmingly as usual, the microphone was seized by a lady who said in a loud voice, ‘I’d just like to say that I thought that speech was chauvinist, sexist and racist.’

  That was putting it rather strongly but the fact is that most humour is at somebody’s expense and has the capacity to offend. In this case I had started with a jest about the long admitted sexual orientation of a famous and much admired lady tennis player. (It’s a funny world; we can get a man on the moon, but we still can’t get one on Martina Navratilova.) I like to think that she would have laughed. It had certainly gone down rather well elsewhere, but you win some and lose others.

  I had a delicate balance to strike in Kingston in 2004 when asked by Pat Rousseau, president of the Jamaica Cricket Association, to speak at a special anniversary dinner at the Pegasus hotel. This was a great honour and my only disappointment, on the eve of the first Test, was that the England team, having enjoyed their dinner, did not stay to listen to me, leavin
g myself and my fellow journalist, Pat Gibson, as the only English folk in a room full of distinguished Jamaicans and senior cricketing folk from elsewhere in the Caribbean including the great Bajans Sir Everton Weekes and Sir Garfield Sobers.

  I still have the notes of what I said that evening because it happens that I made a remarkable prophesy, largely to soften the blow of expressing to a partisan audience my firm view that England would win the forthcoming series quite easily. Sure enough, the reaction was mixed, but I quickly added: ‘But. Don’t worry; there will be consolation for Brian Lara. He will regain his individual Test batting record by scoring 400 in the fourth Test in Antigua.’ It was uncanny that this is precisely what happened after England had won the first three Tests, Lara having recently lost his record, also set against England in Antigua, when Matt Hayden thrashed 380 against Zimbabwe in Perth. I wished that I had acted on my intuition by putting some money on it. The odds against would have been enormous.

  Other than at University sports dinners my first public speech was made in my early days at The Cricketer in the late 1960s when, like almost anyone who wrote anything professionally about cricket, I was summoned by Jack Sokell, the industrious secretary of the Wombwell Cricket Lovers, to speak to the Society. They used to meet in a pub on the outskirts of Barnsley and they had a charming custom of introducing the visitor by presenting him with a glass mug on which a local artist had engraved a likeness of his face.

  Thinking on my feet as I began speaking after this surprise gift, I said: ‘I think I can say that this is the ugliest mug I have ever seen’. I looked down the ranks of the locals, all of whom seemed to me to be rather ancient men in cloth caps, each clutching his pint, and saw not a flicker of amusement. Fortunately someone eventually got my meaning and the rest of my debut performance was generously received. Like most north country folk they were warm-hearted and, of course, they loved their cricket.