Squeezing the Orange

When I returned to Common Lane House in September 1955, Geoffrey Nickson had retired to North Wales, and Martin (‘Bush’) Forrest (MNF) had become my housemaster. It would be fair to say that we never got on. He was a charming man, but such a different type of schoolmaster to GWN that those of us who graduated from one to the other had some difficulty in getting used to the change. MNF, a large and rather heavy man, built for the scrum, was nothing if not worthy, but, at first at any rate, he lacked the quick-witted humour GWN had brought to even the trickiest of situations. I suspect MNF felt that I was the creation of his predecessor, and that as I was, at the age of fifteen, already in the Eleven, I could do with being taken down a peg or two. I found him suet pudding in comparison to the soufflé-like texture of GWN.

There is one story about Bush which illustrates my point. In the following summer half we played Marlborough at Marlborough, and won by seven or eight wickets. When we returned by bus long after lock-up, the only way into the house was through the front door. No sooner was I inside than Bush asked me how we had got on. I told him we had won, and what the scores were. He then asked me how many I had made. When I said, ‘Sixty-something not out,’ he looked at me for a moment in that stodgy way of his and said in a slightly mournful tone, ‘Oh dear,’ which was what he tended to say on almost every occasion. It hardly felt like a vote of confidence, and our relationship seldom progressed beyond a state of armed neutrality. It must have been my fault, because all of those who spent their full five years with Bush adored him. He clearly became an outstanding housemaster, and a great friend to his charges.

The 1956 cricket season at Eton was a joy. I teamed up as an opening batsman with David Barber (known as ‘Daff’), and together we formed the most amusing, successful and noisiest of opening partnerships. It was unceasing ululation as we negotiated quick singles, and seldom, initially at any rate, were we of the same opinion. We played one match against Home Park, a side largely comprised of Eton beaks. One of them was a housemaster called Nigel Wykes, a most remarkable man, who had won a cricket Blue at Cambridge, was a brilliant painter of birds and flowers, and had Agatha Christie’s grandson, Matthew Pritchard, a future captain of Eton, in his house. He was known as ‘Tiger’ Wykes, and he fancied himself as a cover point, where he was uncommonly quick with the fiercest of throws. In the course of our opening partnership, Daff pushed one ball gently into the covers and yelled, ‘Come five!’ We got them easily as Wykes swooped in and threw like a laser back to the stumps, where the middle-aged wicketkeeper was nowhere to be seen and four overthrows was the result. That year we played Winchester at Eton and came up against the fifteen-year-old Nawab of Pataudi, also called ‘Tiger’, who even at that age was in a class of his own. Like his father, he went on to captain India. He didn’t make many runs that day, but the way in which he got them told the story. As luck would have it, I caught him behind in the first innings and stumped him in the second. Sadly, that year’s Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s was ruined by rain.

I had the luck, though, to be chosen to keep wicket for the Southern Schools against The Rest for two days at Lord’s in early August. I managed to do well enough to secure the same job for the two-day game later that week, also at Lord’s, against the Combined Services, which was a terrific thrill. The Combined Services were run by two redoubtable titans of the armed forces: Squadron Leader A.C. Shirreff, the captain – Napoleon himself would have envied his ever-pragmatic leadership – and his number two, Lieutenant Commander M.L.Y. Ainsworth, who had reddish hair, a forward defensive stroke with the longest no-nonsense stride I have ever seen, and a voice that would have done credit to any quarterdeck. They had under them a bunch of young men doing their National Service, most of whom had already played a fair amount of county cricket, including Mel Ryan, who had used the new ball for Yorkshire; Raman Subba Row (Surrey and then Northamptonshire), who went on to bat left-handed for England; and Stuart Leary, a South African who played cricket for Kent and football for Charlton Athletic. Then there was Geoff Millman, who kept wicket for Nottinghamshire and on a few occasions for England; Phil Sharpe of Yorkshire and England, who caught swallows in the slips; and a few others.

We batted first, and at an uncomfortably early stage in the proceedings found that we had subsided to 72 for 6, at which point I strode to the crease. Before long Messrs Subba Row and Leary were serving up a succession of most amiable leg-breaks, and when we were all out for 221, I had somehow managed to reach 104 not out. It was quite a moment, at the age of sixteen, to walk back to the Lord’s Pavilion, clapped by the fielding side and with the assorted company of about six MCC members in front of the Pavilion standing to me as I came in. It all seemed like a dream, especially when I was told that only Peter May and Colin Cowdrey had scored hundreds for the Schools in this game. To make things even more perfect, if that were possible, Don Bradman saw my innings from the Committee Room, and sent his congratulations up to the dressing room. When we got back to Norfolk, I remember Grizel being particularly keen that I should not let it all go to my head. ‘You’re no better than anyone else, just a great deal luckier’, was how it went. I played my first game for Norfolk the next day, against Nottinghamshire Second Eleven, and made 79 in the second innings.

After that, a few people thought I was going to be rather good, but they had failed to take into account my navigational ability – or lack of it. The following 7 June (1957), in my last half at Eton, when I was captain of the Eleven, I was on my way to nets on Agar’s Plough after Boys’ Dinner when I managed to bicycle quite forcefully into the side of a bus which was going happily along the Datchet Lane, as it was then called, between Upper Club and Agar’s. I can’t remember anything about it, but Edward Scott, who ended up supervising and controlling the worldwide fortunes of John Swire’s with considerable skill, was just behind me. Rumour has it that I was talking to him over my shoulder as I sped across the Finch Hatton Bridge and into the bus.

The bus was apparently full of French Women’s Institute ladies on their way to look around Eton, which I suppose gave the event a touch of romance, but I lay like a broken jam roll in the gutter until the ambulance arrived and carted me off to the King Edward VII Hospital in Windsor. No doubt a good deal of zut alors-ing went on in the Datchet Lane. One mildly amusing by-product of this story is that I still come across Old Etonians who were around at the time, all of whom were the first or second on the scene and several of whom called the ambulance. It must have been quite a party.

FOUR

Queen Charlotte and a Milk Train

After an accident like that, what next? Well, the immediate future was none too happy. As I lay in my hospital bed, prayers were said for me in both College and Lower Chapels at Eton. The power of prayer may never have been better illustrated for somehow I continued to breathe. Or maybe it was just that the Almighty couldn’t face me yet. Tom and Grizel, after coming down to Eton for the Fourth of June celebrations, had high-tailed it to France and were somewhere in the Loire, but no one knew quite where. Various SOS’s were sent out on the wireless urging them to return as quickly as possible. Grizel told me some time later that on that very day they were in Chartres, and after lunch they went to the cathedral. As I have already said, Grizel was a down-to-earth, on-my-own-terms, not-to-be-shaken member of the Church of England, and was ever mindful that a brace of Blofelds had long ago, or so rumour had it, been barbecued by Queen Mary. Inside the cathedral she did something she had never done before, lighting a candle in one of the side chapels and plonking it down with all the others. It was getting on for half past two, just about the exact moment at which I bicycled into the bus. This was just too much of a coincidence. Unaccountable things like this do happen. What goes on in the subconscious? Who controls these things? Was Grizel’s God ticking her off, through me, for lighting a candle in a Roman Catholic church? Or maybe He was telling her that she had the chance to save my life. Is that too far-fetched? Whatever the truth is, there can be no logical explanation for what happened.

Of course they came back to Eton as fast as they could, hoping against hope that they would find me alive when they got there. My brother John also rushed down, and nobly stayed for a night or two in my room at MNF’s. It must have been beastly for everyone – except, that is, for me, who was blissfully unaware of anything. There cannot be anything much more boring than endlessly going to look at a body which is still breathing but resolutely refuses to come back into this world and take an interest in life. For a time I was on the danger list, which in retrospect makes it sound quite exciting, although it was not at the time for those around my bed, who soon included my sister Anthea. But there was nothing any of them could do, other than wait. Eventually, after what must have seemed an age, I stirred, and in time came to.

When I finally returned to real life I was endlessly asked how much I remembered of it all, both fore and aft as it were. The truthful answer was pretty much nothing, except for one or two unimportant things. One was strange. The day the accident happened, M’Tutor had had a guest to Boys’ Dinner, a Spaniard who had come with a group to look around Eton. He sat next to MNF, and I was on his other side. Even to this day I can remember exactly what he looked like. I don’t think we can have spoken much, but it is amazing how small things can stick in your mind. I do remember that my first concern in the hospital on re-entering this world was the need to get back to school, because ‘I am captaining Eton against Marlborough on Saturday’, a day which had long since gone. The nurses said, ‘There, there, you’ll soon feel better,’ or something like that. Yet it was true that on Saturday, 15 June, Eton had played Marlborough on Agar’s Plough. Memory is a funny thing. Various people came to see me in hospital, but my only desire was to get back on the cricket field as soon as possible.

There was a certain amount of pain, because my skull had been badly broken, and one cheekbone was squashed flat and had to be cranked up again in an operation. Cleverly, I managed to flatten it a second time while I was asleep, and it had to be done once more. I am not sure if everything went according to plan, because I still have very little feeling on the left side of my face. One or two of the nerves must have taken a turn for the worse. My large nose had a bit of a going-over too, and had to be reorganised. I was left with a whacking great scar on top of it, which was skilfully removed later on by a plastic surgeon called Stuart Harrison, who had learned his trade under the famous Archibald McIndoe in his hospital at East Grinstead. Even after that I am not sure I would ever have won a beauty contest, but I don’t think I was visually much more offputting than before the accident. I think my right shoulder had to be rebroken, under anaesthetic of course, although the aftermath was painful. My skull was broken most of the way round, but not all of it, otherwise my ghost would have needed a ghost to write this. Some of it was crushed, and a certain amount of digging around had to go on to remove all the bits and pieces of bone that were floating about the place. I am not sure whether I actually remember any of this, or whether I am just repeating what I have been told. One thing I do know is that I suffered quite badly from brain bruising, which stayed with me for a number of years – there are of course those who say it is still. There were lots of other amusements to keep the doctors busy, but considering all things it wasn’t too bad. I lingered in hospital for a week or two, then once again we journeyed back to Norfolk in the old Rolls, which was still one of the joys of Tom’s life.

When I got back to Hoveton, there was something of the return of the prodigal son about the way in which everyone bustled around me. I didn’t care for all the fuss. I felt all right, and perfectly able to get on with things on my own, without all the mollycoddling. But obviously I was not allowed to do much, and I hated the shackles that were imposed upon me. All I wanted to do was to get back on the cricket field and to look to the future, for there was nothing I could do about my accident. I also had a burning desire to return to Eton for the final week of my last half. I particularly wanted to sing one of the verses of the ‘Vale’, the leaving song at the school concert on the last Saturday of the half. There were four verses, and four of the best-known chaps who were leaving the school, who always included the captain of the Eleven if he was on his way, sang a verse each. I made sure this message was conveyed by Tom to Bush Forrest.

I believe, although I can’t really remember it, that at some stage in those days at home I picked up a cricket bat and someone trundled in and bowled me a ball or two. Maybe Nanny made a late comeback with her right-arm unders, which were less nippy than Miss Paterson’s. But there was one dreadful cricketing moment hereabouts. After my departure Edward Lane Fox took on the captaincy of the Eleven, which was lovely, as it sort of completed the circle after all the years we had played together. The two days of the Eton and Harrow match arrived, when I should have been leading Eton down the steps at Lord’s, one of the very few things resulting from my knock on the head which I regret just a little. I suppose that later, there was a chance that I might have been asked to captain the Public Schools against the Combined Services, when I would have had another crack at captaining a side at Lord’s. Anyway, while Eton were taking on Harrow I was stamping around at Hoveton like a caged tiger. I was desperately keen to find out the score, and I well remember sitting in the hall after lunch on the Friday, the first day of the game, listening to the lunchtime scoreboard, which was a daily five-minute broadcast on the BBC Home Service. At the end of the county scores, the announcer said, ‘And now at Lord’s …’ and gave the score, although I have long since forgotten what it was. I think it was just about the most awful moment of my life, sitting there at Hoveton knowing that I should have been at Lord’s and in the thick of it, and there was nothing I could do about it. I think even Grizel was hard-pressed to entertain me that afternoon.

At first, in spite of my determination to go back to Eton for that last week, everyone shook their heads and wondered if it was sensible. I suppose that as I had been so close to snuffing it, this was hardly surprising. But all the various bits and pieces seemed to mend quickly enough, and in the end I got my way. The old Rolls was in business once more. I don’t imagine anyone has ever been more delighted to return to school than I was then. Of course I found that I was Exhibit A, and from the moment I shook Bush Forrest by the hand – I don’t think he said ‘oh dear’ – everyone stared at me, not because I was in any way disfigured, although my nose had seen better days, but in sheer disbelief that I was there at all. That week I behaved exactly as if I was an ordinary member of the school, attending the appropriate divs and joining in everything. I even played in the semi-finals of the house sides’ cricket competition. Forrest’s were playing Tiger Wykes’s on Agar’s Plough.

I can’t remember if I was allowed to open the innings, but I must have batted near the top of the order. There was one perfectly ghastly moment when I was made to realise all too vividly the effect my beastly accident had had on my cricket. NGW’s (Wykes’s) main opening bowler was dear old Edward Scott, who I know felt in a predicament as he ran in to bowl to me. He obviously didn’t want to hurt me, and was reluctant to bowl flat out. Even so, he still seemed quite brisk to me. But I coped well enough defensively, and picked up the odd run here and there. Realising that I was not as bad as he had feared, he then ran in and bowled me a short one. I had always been a good hooker – a dangerous thing to say in the modern world – and I loved to hook anything short. As soon as I saw the ball was dug in, my instinct told me to hook, but I was unable to alert my feet of the need to make the appropriate movements. It was as if they were stuck in concrete, and all I could do was flap in a ridiculous, firm-footed way at the wretched ball, and somehow fend it down. The signal system had gone, and my reflexes were in no sort of condition. I don’t know how many runs I made. It can’t have been that many, although I was cheered off – because of my mere presence rather than any cricketing brilliance. The fact that I could take my place in the side without making a fool of myself did me a lot of good, even if it left me with that one nagging doubt. I didn’t attempt to keep wicket, which seemed too risky.

I sang my verse of the ‘Vale’ at the school concert, and my rendition was a tuneless rival to that verse of ‘Cock Robin’ in my first school concert at Sunningdale. I remember waking up on my last full day at Eton and feeling so sad that this was the last time I would be putting on the stick-up collar and tying the white bow tie – at school at any rate. I had the same feeling when I climbed into that splendid assortment of sponge-bag trousers, coloured waistcoat and floral buttonhole that members of Pop wore, and that made me look like a peacock on a day out. The old Rolls was in business again the next day as I was ferried away to Hoveton with as many of my Eton accoutrements as could be fitted into it. An era had passed, and another one was about to begin. At the time I had no idea of how precariously placed I was to face up to it.

My accident had prevented me from taking the entrance exam to King’s College, Cambridge, where both Tom and my brother John had prospered notably on the academic front. The clout on the head at least saved me from failing that entrance exam, and King’s, in their infinite wisdom, took me blind. It took me two years to teach them the folly of their ways. Tom had always regarded Cambridge as the pinnacle of his education, and when King’s said they would take me in October that year, there was no alternative as far as he was concerned. With the advantage of hindsight, this was one decision he got wrong. He may have felt that if I had refused the invitation, it would not apply to the following year, and I might after all have had to take an exam which I would have failed by a good many lengths. Maybe, too, my outward appearance and the speed with which I had mended physically made him think that all would be well.

I did not suggest that I was not fit to go up immediately; in any case, at that time children by and large did what they were told over something like this, and I longed to get back into the mainstream of life. Nonetheless, the fact was that after 7 June I had been laid out for a long time, and the doctors had warned about brain bruising and its effects. Yet here I was, clocking in at Cambridge in the first week of October. It was hardly the moment for me to start a new life in much more of a man’s world, where I was likely to struggle on several fronts. Also, my one strong point, namely cricket, had been at least partly taken away, although I was certainly not ready to admit this. I am sure that Tom and Grizel must have agonised for ages about what I should do next. Maybe they felt it would be psychologically bad for me not to be allowed to carry on as normal.

I played a few games for Norfolk in August with little success, which was another thing I should never have done. I had become a less confident chap, and it was probably a bit much to expect me to hold my own in Minor County cricket so soon after my accident, even though I was desperately keen to play.

Although I was alarmed at the prospect of starting out in a new, more grown-up world, I was happy that Cambridge was to be my lot. Plans were laid, and I was allotted rooms in a lodging house in Newnham Terrace, run by a Mr and Mrs Hughes. She was large and tough, bossy and without much humour; he was small, with a faint moustache, and was generally a rather grey character who did precisely what he was told. I had a decent-sized sitting room and a small, pokey bedroom up two flights of gloomy stairs in a house that smelled mildly but permanently of stale cooked cabbage. It was into this far from prepossessing milieu that I was dumped by Tom and Grizel, not in the old Rolls, which had been put on ice, but in a new and sleek dark-green Jaguar which Tom sometimes liked and at other times felt rather ashamed of. His friends in Norfolk mischievously pulled his leg for buying such a fast car.

They decanted me into my rooms with a few pictures, which they helped me hang, and the odd suitcase. Then it was a quick peck on the cheek and they jumped into the Jaguar and drove off to Harwich, where they boarded the ferry to spend a few days in Holland to visit some antique-dealer friends in Amsterdam.

Thus began two years in which I never felt fully at ease, and which I did not enjoy as I should have done. National Service had not quite come to an end, and I had been heading for the Rifle Brigade, but when I had a medical the quacks all threw their hands in the air with horror when they heard the details of that encounter with the bus. Almost every other undergraduate had done National Service, and was two years older than me. I was just eighteen, and at that age two years is a lot. At school you were a trifle subservient to boys two years older than you, and at first I found it hard to realise that in spite of the age gap we were on level terms. Another sea-change was that I was expected to call my tutors and supervisors by their Christian names, which was difficult after ten years in the world of ‘sir’.

I was reading history, the subject I had specialised in at Eton after scraping through eight O-levels. Those, incidentally, were the last exams I ever passed in my life. King’s was an intensely academic college, and I didn’t fit in on that score. My supervisor, Christopher Morris, made some allowances because I played cricket (his son Charles had played against me while he was at Marlborough), but otherwise I was some way from being his favourite pupil. I had heard he took a dimmish view of Old Etonians, but I suspect the main reason was the awfulness of my weekly essays.

I soon found that I loved the social side of life at Cambridge, which, not unhappily, took me away from King’s. I became a member of the Pitt Club, which was founded in the memory of William Pitt the Younger. I would have loved to have eaten lunch and dinner there rather more often, but I was not as well off as some of my friends, and was forced to lunch and dine in College, where the standard fare still had a marked post-war flavour to it and it was much cheaper. For a number of my King’s contemporaries a non-academic, Old Etonian, Pitt Club member was not quite the flavour of the month either.

Anyway, life progressed, and Christopher Morris gave me a list of lectures I should attend. I started off by going with bated breath to Mill Lane to listen to John Saltmarsh’s opening discourse about Medieval European economic history. Saltmarsh himself looked discouragingly medieval. There was a good deal of facial hair in one place and another, a voice with a strong underlay of chalky, ecclesiastical tones, and if he had a sense of humour, it went way over my head. His mind was brimful of every aspect of the medieval condition, but sparkling stuff it was not. For about ten minutes I took feverish, indecipherable notes, but I was soon wondering what on earth I was doing there, being lectured to on a subject about which I knew nothing and cared even less. I saw a pretty bleak future for me with Medieval European history. I was too young, too naïve and too unsure of myself to be seriously rebellious, so I sat through a fair number of these sessions. I listened as attentively as I could to the offerings of a good many other lecturers too, who as far as I was concerned were also dreadful bores. It was not all bad though, for there was one don at King’s called Hibbert, with an agreeably unsolemn way of putting things across, who made American history come off the shelf at you. But that was about it.