CMJ

by Christopher Martin Jenkins

  Generally speaking, nothing much gets past the television cameras. Their coverage has become marvellously sophisticated, usually but not by any means exclusively for the game’s good. Even with large electronic screens to show instant replays of wickets and boundaries, spectators on the ground do not get the intimate service available to them on their screens at home but, in England at least, the effect of televising the increasing number of Tests and internationals has actually inflated the size of crowds. Perhaps they go to escape the commentators.

  The warts and all coverage has, superficially at least, brought everyone closer to the middle. The players are paid enormously more than they used to be if they reach the top but it is at the cost of having their every gesture caught in close-up and every aspect of their game analysed. Modern counterparts of the distant heroes of the pre-war age have become familiar faces, as liable to public ridicule as they are to adulation.

  The game has always reflected changes in other aspects of life and always will. From a media perspective I regret only the fact that it is no longer easy to get to know cricketers well, even on a tour when one is travelling round a country with them. There is less time for friendly games of golf or for informal socialising because of crowded itineraries. Conversations with players are sometimes confined to those orchestrated by the travelling team press officer, who would massage the news, if he could, as effectively as Alastair Campbell once controlled information from Downing Street.

  Happily, a little independence is still possible in the way that one interprets cricket, either as commentator or writer. Since I started cricket has become more a business, less a game. The Twenty20 version and the advent of multi-million pound franchises in India threaten the long-established patterns of the international game but chronicling it all remains for the lucky few an extremely agreeable way to make a living.

  24

  SUSSEX AND ENGLAND

  Nick keeps his ancient tractor in a barn on the edge of the fields that abut the Victorian cottage where my wife and I live in West Sussex. In July he comes along with Valerie to collect any hay left on our own little field after the rabbits have finished munching. The tractor saves them time but otherwise they are, like Sussex’s cricketers, continuing a tradition that goes back centuries. Hay time and harvest; hard work and, given health, food and shelter, happiness.

  We have been in the parish since 1978, more than thirty years, in three different dwellings, but in that time I have left the country for at least a part of almost every winter in pursuance of cricket, hopping from one continent to another with, it sometimes seems, barely a moment to catch breath. Nick’s life has been a bit more static: he once went to the Isle of Wight for a holiday; but he soon got homesick. His father, he remembers, had the same problem once when he went to Kent. Neither of them really saw much point in leaving their own county.

  These days Sussex is part of the busy South East where fields like those on which Nick and his farming father grew up are always in danger of being developed to create a few more homes for ‘executives’. But there is an ancient pull every bit as magnetic as the modern one and I feel it every time I drive down our lane: if I go right I am heading for London, for the excitements of a magnificent city but also the noise and the traffic and the endless miles of brick, glass and concrete. If I turn left my spirit always lifts, for that way leads to the Downs and the sea.

  There are far more beautiful stretches of coastline around Britain than the chalky strip between Kent and Hampshire and there are hills and mountains altogether more rugged and awesome than the South Downs (which should, of course, be the ‘Ups’) but for all the sad connotations of Beachy Head I defy any stable soul not to be stirred by the sudden glimpse of vivid blue from the bare and rounded top of the Downs. No sight is more likely to bring to mind those rousing lines from Richard II: ‘this precious stone set in the silver sea . . . this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’

  Anyone who has read Bill Bryson’s brilliant Notes From a Small Island will be unlikely to forget its marvellously funny beginning in which he recalls the mean and tyrannical landlady who confounded his expectations of England when first he landed in Dover. Compare my experience on the day before a Test match in Nottingham, just after retiring from the main cricket job on The Times.

  I had chosen to drive north late the evening before the game and, not uncharacteristically, I could not find the bed and breakfast that I had booked, on the recommendation of a local pub which had been unable to provide a room. Down a telephone line a kindly voice, in an accent unmistakably from the Nottinghamshire/Lincolnshire area, guided me to the right place, like an air traffic controller. The route on this rapidly darkening summer’s evening took me off the A52 down a series of tiny lanes, close to Belvoir Castle (pronounced Beaver, naturally) and eventually to a cosy little house beside a narrow road beyond a humpback bridge over a canal that cannot have more than a dozen vehicles crossing it daily.

  A tawny owl hooted as the moon started to appear above sheep-nibbled fields. I was greeted like the prodigal son by strangers to whom I would be paying £50 a night for a bed in a room so well equipped and so comfortable that it would put any hotel to shame, however many stars it might boast. Did I want coffee, tea, hot chocolate, Horlicks or perhaps a whisky? Or just a comforting bath?

  In the morning I awoke to the fluted tune of a blackbird, rising above a varied chorus: thrush, chaffinch, robin, great tit and others I am too inexpert to discern. The little garden was full of flowers. There was no sound of cars or planes or trains. The room had a shelf full of books, all of which I would have liked to read. The decoration was immaculate, the pictures tasteful and interesting, the bathroom full of smart shampoos and soaps. The fridge had a jug of fresh milk and bottled water, although the ice-cold water from the tap was, a notice said, drinking water. There was a variety of teas and coffees and a tin of biscuits.

  The breakfast table was laden with good things: half a dozen different fruits, perfectly presented; four different flavours of local honey; two fresh loaves of bread, white and brown; and a menu offering every imaginable combination of bacon, eggs, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms and the like. Soon my choice was presented, grilled to perfection by a skilled, friendly and unpretentious cook. Sue is also a professional florist, her husband, Norman, a skilled electrician. They are quietly house proud but this is only a sideline to help ends meet.

  They and their environment prove that there is still an England to be proud of for all the things that make me angry, like litter, the obsession with soccer and celebrity, traffic jams and tower blocks, not to mention all the rip-off hotels that are such a contrast to this little English heaven in the Lincolnshire Wolds. I loved that advertisement in which a guest checking out of just such a hotel is asked by the receptionist if he has had anything from the minibar. Has he enjoyed his stay, she asks further, and perhaps the view of the sunset from the swimming pool? ‘Yes’, he replies, like any polite Englishman. ‘That’ll be another £15 then’, she says (or words to that effect).

  A privilege to have travelled so much it may be, but Britain is still for all sorts of reasons – Radio Four would be one – the place to live. Were I starting again I might settle for a quiet life in Rutland but Sussex has not been a bad alternative, over-populated though it is.

  Until the coming of the turnpikes the chalky downlands may have been a very remote part of England, but they were also the scene of relatively sophisticated farming activity for the ancestors of my friend Nick. Close by, in the wooded valleys of the Weald where cricket spread so rapidly in the 18th century, there was much of what passed in England then for ‘industry’. The historian William Camden wrote of Sussex in the 1580s being ‘full of iron mines, all over it, for the casting of which there are furnaces up and down the country, and abundance of wood is yearly spent’.

  It is a varied as well as an ancient shire, therefore, that the cricketers of Sussex represent these days in their fastness at Hove, cheek by jo
wl with Brighton. In the days of Fry and Ranji it was a fashionable resort for swells and commoners alike. Today it is ‘London on Sea’, as full of different nationalities as London – or, for that matter, county cricket.

  There are at least nine different written references to cricket matches in Sussex villages before 1700. Out of the county where village cricket blossomed between the deeply shadowed woods of the Weald and the bare green sweep of the Downs has sprung a tough modern team drawn from many places, none more productive than Pakistan. It is extremely unlikely that Sussex County Cricket Club would have achieved what it did during the Chris Adams era of the late nineties and early 2000s without the happy but fortuitous recruitment of the inspirational Mushtaq Ahmed but there were enough locally produced players still in the team for genuine links with the county’s long history.

  Traditionally this has been the county for families. From Edwin and William Napper in the mid-19th century, to George and Joseph Bean, through the Doggarts, the Gilligans, the Langridges, the Oakes, the Parks, the Wells and the Newells I believe that forty pairs of brothers have played cricket for Sussex. I have probably missed some but they all tell something about the soul of the county. If there is little sentiment in the modern game, wise captains and coaches still tap into this sense of history and community. It is no coincidence that after every victory the current team still gets together for a hearty rendition of ‘Sussex by the Sea’.

  I naturally felt more of an affinity with all this when Robin, our second son, began to make his way as first a junior but then a pivotal member of the Sussex team. They won the County Championship for the first time in 2003 and went on to win every other county trophy during his career from 1996 to 2010.

  25

  R.M-J

  Robin Martin-Jenkins, whose captain, Chris Adams, had said overnight that he now regarded him as a ‘complete cricketer who could still play for England’, claimed Joe Denly and Martin van Jaarsveld leg before with successive balls in his first over, both men playing back to length balls.

  Cricketing fathers are notorious bores and, like flies on a sandwich, often a damned nuisance. That is true whether they know next to nothing about the game or a fair bit. I know I was no exception to that rule, hard as I tried to be dispassionate in my unusual position of sometimes having to write about my son. Twice, I even had to commentate on his performance ‘ball by ball’. It was not easy, but it was a great privilege.

  On the first occasion, in a semi-final against Surrey at Hove, he got Alec Stewart out with the first ball of the match. On the second he was given out caught behind off his pad off Glenn Chapple in the final of the Cheltenham & Gloucester just when he was starting to rescue his team from a dreadful start against Lancashire. It is as well I was not on the air myself at either moment, especially because I knew he had been the recipient of a poor decision at that apparently vital moment at Lord’s. Professionalism would have triumphed no doubt, but at the expense of natural honesty about my feelings. I’m told that I kicked the waste-paper basket very hard at the back of the commentary box.

  If one cannot brag a bit in an autobiography I don’t know when else it can be done so I cannot resist some wallowing in the pleasure that Robin’s efforts gave Judy and me, along, of course, with moments of agonised disappointment. Every parent will recognise the feelings.

  He was a relatively heavy baby and, showing an early inclination to emulate his father, he arrived late. As I recall it required a brisk and purposeful walk by his mother around Winkworth Arboretum near Godalming before the sleeping giant started moving at all. But whenever he showed signs of being a big baby in another sense in the months that followed, it was never a problem to divert Robin’s attention. Just produce a ball and roll it towards him and his natural good humour would be restored. It did not seem long before he was propelling it back to the top of the stumps.

  The early characteristics never changed. When he was a day boy at Cranleigh prep school on the Surrey/Sussex border, the only way to get him to do his prep on long summer evenings was to promise a game of cricket when, and only when, the sums had been done, the essay had been written, the dates had been learned or the verbs conjugated.

  As time passed he managed to keep a reasonable balance between the necessary work and the longed-for play, but in those days, whilst playing the stern parent, I felt for him and recalled my own yearning for the playing field as a long academic labour began. It was obvious from an early age that he was an outstanding talent amongst his peers, as all who become first-class players always were and will be. I used to have to bite my tongue as other parents boasted about their talented children, invariably exaggerating their brilliance: ‘Charlie’s a fantastic little cricketer. He’s in the second XI and I’m told he’s bound to be in the firsts next year.’

  There was some satisfaction in replying, with a proper English reserve, that one’s own sons played a bit too; forbearing to mention that they had been in the firsts for ages.

  James, two years in the Radley side, was a gifted batsman and useful bowler who improved technically under Les Lenham’s coaching at Oxford, before turning his chief attention to golf. His younger brother did not, like James, make ninety-six at the age of ten in a school match but by the same age he was already a demon bowler and relatively heavy scorer. The former Sussex cricketer John Spencer, the outstanding coach of Brighton College who used to take Easter classes at Horsham, told me one day with conviction: ‘He could go all the way.’ At about the same time Robin scored two centuries in one day in the Sussex Junior Cricket Festival.

  I treasure, too, the memory of some of the rare occasions when I got the chance to watch him playing as a schoolboy cricketer, knowing from garden cricket that the talent was there. My wife saw much more of him playing in matches than I was able to do, doing all the hard work of ferrying him about in the car for holiday matches for Horsham and Sussex; and, of course, making chocolate cakes for innumerable teas.

  I just did the easy bit, watching when I could, which, unfortunately, was seldom. At one prep school match when he was the captain I arrived when the opposition team were hopelessly placed at something like 30 for eight, RM-J having taken seven of them. I prayed that he would take himself off so that I could see him play an innings of reasonable length. The Lord obliged, as he generally does when you need a boost. To give another bowler a chance, Robin took himself off and the opposing school’s last two wickets duly more than doubled the total. The captain, who in those days opened the batting as well as the bowling, proceeded serenely to a not-out fifty and the game was swiftly won.

  At Radley he made a century in his first match as a junior colt and was immediately promoted to a higher age group by Alan Dowding, the former Oxford captain, who ran his junior sides at Radley with great sympathy and sagacity. In the first match that I saw him play for the first XI Robin took an exceptional catch down by his bootlaces at third-man from a scything cut hit with great power by a batsman later destined to play for Gloucestershire, a moment that possibly turned the game and proved that there was courage and commitment in him as well as the essential hand-to-eye co-ordination.

  He had joined his elder brother in the Radley first team at the start of his second summer term. When Guy Waller, the master-in-charge and future Cranleigh headmaster, asked me if he should regularly play in the XI so young I said that I thought that a year’s wait would do him no harm. I had in mind the fact that in my own school days Mike Griffith, now the highly accomplished chairman of MCC’s cricket committee, seemed to have become an introverted personality for a time, partly because he was promoted to play with (and outshine) older boys when he was young. I was also aware of the strong opinion of the England coach Micky Stewart that English school cricketers do not get pushed hard enough early enough if they show great promise but my other strong reason for persuading Guy to be patient was paternal. This was James’s chance to be a relative star in the first XI. He duly contributed effectively as both a batsman and medium-pacer to a ve
ry successful side.

  A year or two later Robin’s bowling potential became apparent to me when, in a match against Wellington, he unleashed a Harmison-like delivery that flew through to the wicket-keeper at head height. This off a good length on a slow and sleepy pitch. Robin Dyer, the former Surrey batsman, now Wellington’s master-in-charge, immediately recommended that he should play for England Schools and he duly did.

  The only problem in those years was that he bowled too much for all sorts of representative sides. Perhaps as a consequence such whippy pace only appeared occasionally in later years. When it did he was as dangerous as many who were preferred for England teams. In particular I watched with pleasure as he gave that gifted Australian Michael Bevan one of the most torrid examinations of his career when he returned to play against his old county for Leicestershire. In the Telegraph Simon Briggs compared his bowling that day to that of Curtly Ambrose. Such fire was the exception not the rule, unfortunately, but it was some recompense for the times when RM-J had been run out for nought or one, unselfishly trying to give the esteemed Bevan the strike late in a Sunday League innings.

  He can probably blame me for encouraging an ambition to play cricket for a living in the first place, but in truth the seed did not need much planting; indeed, it was never deliberately planted at all. When he was given a mock job interview in his later days at school by an adviser on suitable careers, he replied to the woman who had asked him what he wanted to do that he wished to play cricket. She smiled and said: ‘Yes; but what do you want to do for a living?’