Squeezing the Orange

On Sundays, Mrs M’Tutor, Janet Nickson, who was the perfect complement to GWN, would read to the lower boys in her husband’s study, and we had to suffer such improving literature as Lorna Doone in her slightly schoolmistressy voice. When we became upper boys, GWN himself read to us in pupil room. We listened spellbound to, among others, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and J.K. Stanford’s The Twelfth, about Colonel the Honourable George Hysteron-Proteron’s exploits on a grouse moor on 12 August, the opening day of the season. GWN himself was no mean shot, and a considerable fisherman.

One of the first exams a new boy had to go through at Eton was a ‘Colour Test’. There were goodness knows how many different caps, or colours, as they were known, given exclusively for prowess in sporting pursuits ranging from cricket to rowing to the field game, the wall game, fives, racquets, squash, beagling, athletics, gymnastics, tennis, soccer, rugby and many others besides. About three weeks into my first half new boys gathered in the library – in non-Eton talk, the house prefects’ room – where they were asked many searching questions. A profusion of different-coloured caps were produced, and we had to identify them. We had to show that we knew the masters by their initials, that we understood the geography of the place and other Etonian lore, not least the idiosyncratic language which was peculiar to the school. The geography was extremely important, as once the Colour Test had been passed, we lower boys began our fagging career. If you were told by a member of the library to take a fag note (a written message) to a boy in, say, DJGC or FJRC, it was as well to know where you had to go. When a member of the library needed a fag, he would make a ‘boy call’, his yell of ‘B-o-o-o-o-oy’ going on for twenty seconds or so. The last lower boy to arrive got the job. Having taken middle fourth in my Common Entrance, it was my lot to be a fag for five halves.

I enjoyed my five years at Eton as much as any period of my life. As I had discovered at Sunningdale, having the luck to be reasonably successful at games was a great help. Good schoolboy games players become little tin gods, a status which provides a certain insulation against the petty struggles of school life. Of course, this doesn’t happen at once. I spent my first half trying to unravel the mysteries of the field game, an Eton-devised mixture of rugger and soccer played with a round ball. There is a sort of mini scrum, known as the ‘bully’, and much long and skilful kicking up and down the field by the three backs, one behind the other called ‘short’, ‘long’ and ‘goals’. I played at ‘outside corner’, on the edge of the bully, a sort of wing forward. I was never any good at the game, and didn’t enjoy it much. The umpire only blew for infringements if the players appealed. ‘Cornering’, which meant passing, and ‘sneaking’, being offside, were the two most common offences, although the most enjoyable, for obvious reasons, was ‘furking in the bully’, which was lightly, delicately and tellingly adapted on almost every occasion. This was for what was known in less esoteric circumstances as back-heeling, as would happen in a rugger scrum. The wall game was another complicated and esoteric Eton institution. Like many Oppidans (non-Collegers), I never played it, and I still have no clue about the rules. It is best known for the annual mudbath that takes place between the Tugs (Collegers) and the Oppidans on St Andrew’s Day alongside a high and extremely old brick wall in College Field, by the road to Slough.

I had a terrific time in my first half, being ‘up to’ Mr Tait for classics. He was known as ‘Gad’ Tait, for the obvious reason that his initials were GAD. Most of the beaks’ (masters’) nicknames were pretty unoriginal. Dear old Gad Tait was a very tall man who when he rode a bicycle wobbled so perilously and entertainingly that it was like a balancing act in a circus. He had a genius for making the learning of Latin seem interesting, entertaining and good fun, when it was palpably none of those things. By then, of course, we were well past the ‘Caesar conquered Gaul’ stage, which had seen Miss Paterson rise to fevered levels of ferocity in the second form at Sunningdale. At Eton we were very much free-range pupils, by comparison to what we had been at our preparatory schools. Now a good deal of our work had to be done in our spare time.

Once a week we had to construe a piece of Latin prose written by some Godawful Roman no-hoper such as Livy or Cicero. At early school, which began at 7.30 a.m. after a hasty cup of tea in the Boys’ Entrance, Gad Tait, who called everyone ‘Old You’, would charmingly put us through our paces about whatever piece of Latin he had chosen. With equal charm he would exact retribution upon those who not done an adequate job. Also once a week, we had to learn a ‘saying lesson’, which involved him dictating a piece of verse which we wrote down in a flimsy blue notebook – I still have mine. It says much for Gad Tait that even today I remember most of his saying lessons. The principal one was Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, which we learned in three successive weeks. Others included part of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and Cory’s ‘Heraclitus’.

There were about thirty of us in his ‘div’ (division), and we had to recite whatever piece of verse we had been given to learn in groups of ten. Gad Tait watched closely but effortlessly, and although ten people were speaking at once, he could tell exactly who had not learned the words properly, and distributed penalties accordingly. When, just occasionally, I had written a particularly successful piece of Latin verse or whatever, he would give me a ‘show-up’. This meant that he wrote nice things at the top of my work, which I would then take to pupil room, where GWN would gratefully and happily endorse it with his initials. These were useful brownie points. Whenever Gad Tait gave anyone in M’Tutor’s a show-up, GWN, who was a more than useful cartoonist, would almost inevitably draw a picture of an old ewe on the paper. When it was handed back the next day, Gad Tait always had a chuckle at this. I can’t remember any of the other beaks I was ‘up to’ in my first half, which is a measure of Gad Tait’s skill as a schoolmaster.

Soccer and fives were the two games which occupied me in my second half, the Lent half, and then it was the summer, and cricket, which I had been longing for. I spent my first two cricketing halves in Lower Sixpenny, which was for the under fifteen-year-olds, and immediately made my greatest cricketing friend at Eton. Claude Taylor (CHT) had won a cricket Blue at Oxford, for whom he had made almost the slowest-ever hundred in the University Match, and had gone on to play for Leicestershire. He was the dearest and gentlest of men, and a wonderful coach who loved the beauty of the game more than anything. Grey-haired by the time I knew him, he had the knack of being able to explain cricket, which is not an easy game, in the most uncomplicated manner. He understood the mechanics of batting so well that he was able to dissect a stroke into a series of simple movements that when put together cohesively made not only a hugely effective stroke, in attack or defence, but a thing of beauty. He loved, above all, the beauty of the game. He taught Latin, although I never had the luck to be up to him. He also played and taught the oboe, and married the sister of Ian Peebles, a delightful Scotsman who bowled leg-breaks for Oxford, Middlesex and England. Peebles was a considerable force in a City of London wine merchants, and wrote charmingly, knowledgeably and extremely amusingly about cricket for the Sunday Times. Before the war Peebles had shared a flat in the Temple with Henry Longhurst and Jim Swanton, whom he relentlessly called ‘James’. It was a most distinguished gathering.

We began my first summer half with new-boy nets, and it was then that I caught CHT’s eye for the first time. I immediately found myself playing in ‘Select A’, the top game in Lower Sixpenny, of which he was the master-in-charge. I had a fierce competitor for the position of wicketkeeper called Julian Curtis, a wonderful all-round games player who probably lost out to me because I just had the edge in the batting stakes. In that first year, 1953, the Keeper (captain) of Lower Sixpenny was Simon Douglas Pennant, with whom I went on to play for the school and later for Cambridge, who bowled left-arm over-the-wicket at fast-medium. Edward Lane Fox was also in the side, but now that we were playing against opponents that were better-versed in the art of playing left-arm spin, ‘stumped Blofeld bowled Lane Fox’ became a less frequent entry in the scorebook. It was a memorable first summer half.

My cricketing activities went on much to the detriment of my work, and I must admit that, as at Sunningdale, my greatest ambition in the learning department was simply to get by. This attitude never received Tom’s blessing when my school reports, which were always of the ‘must try harder’ variety, were up for discussion. But as far as I was concerned, it was only cricket that mattered. If it was not Lower Sixpenny matches against other schools, it was Select A games, nets or fielding practice, and I am afraid I was the most intense competitor. The school professional at the time was Jack O’Connor, the dearest of men, who batted a time or two for England in the thirties, and played for many years for Essex. He ran the Bat Shop, just at the start of the High Street, next door to Rowland’s, one of the two ‘sock’ shops, where we guzzled crab buns and banana splits. Jack sold sporting goods, and whenever any of us went in he would give us a smiling and enthusiastic welcome. He was to become a great friend and cricketing confidant. Buying batting gloves, wicketkeeping inners or whatever from his modest emporium always involved a jolly ten-minute gossip. Once or twice CHT brought him to the Lower Sixpenny nets to watch some of us batting. Jack always gave generous, smiling encouragement. Once when I was batting he turned his arm over; so began a lifetime of misery and mystification for me as far as leg-spin and googly bowling are concerned. I still have nightmares of an umpire signalling four byes.

The winter halves were, for me, little more than an inconveniently large gap between cricket seasons. There was nothing so gloomy as going back to school towards the end of September, when the weather was gorgeous but all, or most, of the cricket grounds were strung about with goalposts. What made it even more depressing was that my return was often just a couple of days or so before my birthday. Various wrapped presents were always tucked away in the bottom of my suitcase, but opening them alone in my room between breakfast and going to chapel was a cold-blooded exercise if ever there was one. They did, however, usually contain a couple of cricket books, which helped.

In the Lent half I tried my best to impress those who mattered with my ability on the fives court and between the goalposts on the soccer pitch, but I never quite made it on either count. Soccer was run by a wonderfully bucolic former Cambridge cricket Blue called Tolly Burnett (ACB), a relation of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, who added greatly to the gaiety of nations in just about everything he did. He was large, if not portly, marvellously unpunctual, rode a bicycle as if he was, with much pomp and circumstance, leading a procession of one, or perhaps rehearsing for a part in Dad’s Army, and walked with an avuncular swagger. I am not sure what Captain Mainwaring would have made of Tolly. He drove an exciting sports car, and took biology with considerable gusto, especially when it came to the more pertinent points of reproduction, in a div room just around the corner from Lower Chapel. If you stopped him in the street to ask a question, he would clatter to an uncertain halt and invariably say in somewhat breathless tones, ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy. Just a bit pushed,’ then off he’d go with a bit of a puff. What fun he was, and how we loved him. I am not sure the authorities at the school entirely agreed with us, for although he was, I believe, down to become a housemaster, the position never materialised.

Tolly captained Glamorgan during the summer holidays in 1958. The Glamorgan committee felt, as they did from time to time, that Wilf Wooller, the patriarchal figure of Welsh cricket, was too old and should be replaced. In their infinite wisdom they brought in Tolly for a trial as captain for the last eight games of the season. His highest score was 17, and the dressing room came as close to mutiny as it gets. In September he was back teaching biology at Eton, and Wooller was still the official Glamorgan captain. By the time Tolly’s moment of possible glory came, his girth would have prevented much mobility in the field, his batting was well past its prime, and his ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy’ might not have been exactly what the doctor ordered in a Glamorgan dressing room which was pure-bred Wales to its eyebrows. His charmingly irrelevant ‘Up boys and at ’em’ enthusiasm must have fallen on deaf ears. Tolly was more Falstaff than Flewellyn.

Back at Eton, before that little episode, he sadly, but entirely correctly, preferred Carrick-Buchanan’s agility between the goalposts to my own. I did however achieve the splendid job of Keeper (captain) of the second eleven. Tolly was also the cricket master in charge of Lower Club, and sadly I never had first-hand experience of the way in which he coped with that. It would not have been boring.

Keeper of the soccer second eleven, or ‘Team B’, as we proudly called ourselves, was not a particularly distinguished post, but it led to my first sortie into the world of journalism, which turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. We had a considerable fixture list, which included a game against Bradfield College’s second eleven at Bradfield. The Eton College Chronicle felt compelled to carry an account of even such insignificant encounters as this, and for some reason I was chosen to write the report. We were taken by bus to Bradfield, where we joined a mass of boys for a lunch which it would have been tempting to let go past the off-stump. Then we changed into our soccer stuff, climbed a steepish hill and found a well-used and pretty muddy football pitch. I enjoyed writing my account of the day’s events, and it duly appeared in the columns of the Chronicle. Unfortunately, it elicited a hostile response from Bradfield, who made a complaint which promptly came to the ears of Robert Birley, Eton’s large and formidable-looking, but in fact kind, rather shy and immensely able, headmaster. He was to us a remote, Genghis-Khan-like figure who hovered somewhat ominously in the background. Birley was known, unfairly in my view, as ‘Red Robert’. This merely meant that he had realised somewhat earlier than most of the school’s supporters the urgent need for change if a school like Eton was to survive. Many reactionary hands were thrown up in horror.

Anyway, one morning I found myself ‘on the Bill’, which meant that I was summoned to the headmaster’s schoolroom at midday. When I arrived, more than a trifle worried, I was told in no uncertain terms that what I had written about Team B’s midwinter visit to Bradfield was extremely offensive, and that I must without delay write a number of letters of apology. Apart from a general dressing down, I don’t think any other penalty was exacted. I still have a copy of this most undistinguished entry into the world I was to inhabit for just about the rest of my life. I have to admit that in the circumstances it may have been a little strong in places, although it is positively mild when judged by today’s standards.

The Michaelmas half in 1954 will always remain firmly in my mind, and for cricketing reasons too. England were touring Australia in the hope of hanging on to the Ashes they had won in a nerve-racking game at The Oval the previous year. There were one or two exciting newcomers in the England party, especially a fast bowler called Frank Tyson and a twenty-one-year-old called Colin Cowdrey, who was still up at Oxford. I found the whole series quite irresistible, and would tune in to the commentary from Australia under my bedclothes from about five o’clock in the morning. This was always a bit of a lottery, as the snap, crackle and pop of the atmospherics made listening a difficult business. Sometimes the line would go down altogether, and the commentary would be replaced by music from the studio in London. Those delicious Australian voices of the commentators, Johnny Moyes, Alan McGilvray and Vic Richardson, added hugely to the excitement, and John Arlott was there to add a touch of Hampshire-sounding Englishness.

First came the intense gloom at the end of November, when Len Hutton put Australia in to bat in the first Test in Brisbane, and England lost by an innings and 154 runs. Every afternoon I would rush to the corner of Keates Lane and the High Street, where the old man who sold the Evening Standard took up his post. I would thrust a few coppers at him, grab the paper, and turn feverishly to the back page. I had devoured what was for me the peerless, if at that time depressing, prose of Bruce Harris well before I got back to the Boys’ Entrance. The second Test in Sydney began in mid-December. The anxiety was enormous, and it seemed as if the end had come when Australia led by 74 on the first innings. But all was not lost, because Peter May then made a remarkable hundred, leaving Australia with 223 to win. They failed by 38 runs with Tyson taking six wickets, bowling faster than anyone can ever have bowled before. The game had a marvellous ending, with a stupendous diving leg-side catch behind the wicket by Godfrey Evans. Phew! I lived every ball. We won the third Test, in Melbourne, but I had to wait until early in the Lent half for England to make sure of the Ashes by winning the fourth Test in Adelaide. After that, to general relief at Eton, normal service was resumed.

Another diversion that winter was being prepared for my confirmation in December. At times the process was up against pretty tough competition from events in Australia, but GWN, who prepared us for the Bishop of Lincoln, was able neatly to combine events in Australia with those in Heaven. After that heavy defeat in Brisbane I was not at all sure about the Almighty, but GWN’s gentle manner and instructive way of putting things across gave meaning and relevance to the whole business of Christianity. Up until then I had felt that religion did nothing more than get in the way of things, what with endlessly having to tool off to chapel and listen to those interminable sermons. My family and one or two of my surviving godparents foregathered in College Chapel on a Saturday late in the Michaelmas half, and the Bishop of Lincoln laid his hands on our heads and turned a group of us into fully paid-up Christians. Then there was the excitement of going to my first Holy Communion the next morning, and the dreadful worry of whether or not I had got my hands the right way round when it came to the critical moment. GWN’s hard work of getting us into mid-season form for the Bishop of Lincoln was underlined and taken a stage further in the Lenten Lectures the following half, given by a notable cleric, George Reindorp, who was soon to become the Bishop of Guildford. By then England were playing slightly more frivolous cricket in New Zealand with the Ashes safely beneath their belt, and the Almighty and I were back on terms. Reindorp came across as the most delightful of men and just the right sort of Christian as he explained the issues surrounding Lent in such an unfussy way that even I thought I could understand them. Anyway, it all helped fill the gap between cricket seasons.

I had been Keeper of Lower Sixpenny in my second summer half, and went on to become Keeper of Upper Sixpenny in 1955. Upper Sixpenny, for fifteen-year-olds, was being run for the first time by a likeable new beak called Ray Parry (RHP), an immense enthusiast who during the war had played as a batsman for Glamorgan. It was one of life’s strange ironies that when, in my early seventies, I went through the divorce courts, my wife’s solicitor was none other than RHP’s son Richard. He was hellbent on delivering an innings defeat, but I think I just about saved the follow-on, if not much else.

RHP and I made great preparations for what we were sure would be a sensational season for Upper Sixpenny. But as luck would have it, David Macindoe, who ran the Eleven, and Clem Gibson, the captain of the Eleven, who actually made the decision, or at least put it into writing, summoned me to play for Upper Club, the top game in the school, from which the Eleven and the Twenty-Two (the Second Eleven) were chosen. Macindoe was another of the mildly eccentric schoolmasters Eton had a habit of producing. He had a gruff but friendly manner, a reassuring chuckle and an ever-cheerful pipe, and had opened the bowling off the wrong foot for Oxford for four years on either side of the war.

Things went well, and I donned the wicketkeeping gloves for the Eleven. I never returned to play a single game for Upper Sixpenny; nor did my old friend Edward Lane Fox, who had received a similar call to arms. At the age of fifteen it felt as near to unbelievable as it gets, especially when, early in June, I received a letter from Clem Gibson, which I still have, asking me if I would like to play against Harrow at Lord’s early in July. It was not an invitation I was likely to refuse. Can you imagine? There I was, a complete cricket nut who ate, slept and drank the game, being asked to play for two days against the Old Enemy at the Holy of Holies.

Of course, I had known by then that there was a distinct possibility the invitation would come my way, for things had been going quite well behind the stumps. But there it was in black and white. No one was more pleased than dear old Claude Taylor, with whom I had kept in close contact after leaving his clutches in Lower Sixpenny. In Upper Club nets, CHT still came to help me, standing halfway down the net and throwing an endless stream of balls at me. The stroke he taught me better than any other was the on-drive, which he considered the most beautiful in the game. When I got it right he would purr with delight. He and David Macindoe had together written a splendid book called Cricket Dialogue, about the need to maintain the traditional etiquette and standards of the game. It may be dated, but it is still well worth reading.

I shall never forget my first Eton v. Harrow match. The anticipation had been intense, and I was given a lift from Eton to Lord’s, along with Edward Lane Fox and Gus Wolfe-Murray, by Richard Burrows, a considerable middle-order batsman and a wonderful all-round games player. His father, the General, sent his Rolls-Royce – what else? – and chauffeur, and the four of us piled inside and were driven not only to Lord’s, but imperiously through the Grace Gates. What a way to enter the most hallowed cricketing portals in the world for the first time as a player. No matter what those in the know talked about in College Chapel, I felt that Heaven couldn’t be any better than this. I can still clearly remember the frisson of prickly excitement as we stopped to have our credentials checked. Yes, they even checked up on Rolls-Royces. Even today, every time I go in through the Grace Gates – and goodness knows how many times I have done so – I still get that same feeling. I remember carrying my puny little canvas cricket bag through the back door of the Pavilion, up the stairs and along the passage to the home dressing room, the one from which Middlesex, MCC and England ply their wares. After being given a cup of tea by the dressing-room attendant, we changed into our flannels. There were several formal-looking dark-brown leather couches around the walls and as I sat down on one to tie up my bootlaces it suddenly occurred to me that not a fortnight before, England had been playing the second Test against South Africa at Lord’s. In that same dressing room, sitting more or less where I was and doing precisely the same thing, would have been Denis Compton, Peter May, Ken Barrington, Tom Graveney, Godfrey Evans, Fred Trueman and the others.

We won the contest, and were generous to let Harrow get to within 34 runs of us. As far as I was concerned, the only blemish came on the second morning. We had begun our second innings on the first evening, and needed quick runs to give us time to bowl them out again. We made a good start, but then after about an hour, wickets began to fall, and there was mild panic in the dressing room. I was batting at number eight, and no sooner had I got my pads on than there came shouts of ‘You’re in, you’re in!’ I grabbed my bat and gloves and fled down the stairs, through the Long Room, down the steps and out through the gates. I strode to the Nursery End, took guard and prepared to face Rex Neame, who bowled testing off-breaks, which he was to do later on a few occasions for Kent in between his productive efforts at the Shepherd Neame Brewery. I came two paces down the pitch to my first ball, had a swing in the vague direction of the Tavern, and my off-stump went all over the place. I retreated on the interminably long return journey to the Pavilion amid applause and yells the like of which I had never heard. In the circumstances I felt I could hardly raise my bat or take off my cap, and somewhat perplexed, I continued on my way. No one much wanted to talk to me in the dressing room, so I took off my pads and things, put on my blazer and went to join Tom and Grizel in Q Stand, next to the Pavilion. When I arrived, Tom looked severely at me and said, ‘You were a bloody fool to let him get a hat-trick.’ Until then, I had had no idea it was a hat-trick – the first ever to be taken by a Harrovian in the Eton and Harrow match. Tom Pugh, who was playing that day, always says that when the hat-trick came up for discussion later, I said, ‘If I’d known it was a hat-trick I would have tried harder.’ You never know what to believe.