Squeezing the Orange

I didn’t have a car of my own, or indeed a driving licence for much of my first year, but I found myself getting lifts up to London from various chums for deb dances, although I was not certain how or why the invitations kept turning up. I fell in love with just about every girl I met at these dances, but sadly I was no competition for the swaggering chaps who were three or four years older than me and had just come out of some famous regiment or other. I did get one or two of the crumbs that fell from the rich men’s tables, but that was about it. Generally speaking, of course, one’s expectations from sorties such as these at that time, even from the crumbs, were not anything like as high as they would have been a few years later, when the joys of what was to become a hugely permissive society were chucked into the mix.

As the summer of 1958 approached, I felt both excited and anxious. Cricket was very much on my mind, but so was the memory of that short one from Edward Scott. I went to Fenner’s early in April for net practice with the main candidates for a place in the university side that year, which included a formidable body of old Blues. The magisterial figure of Ted Dexter, the captain, towered over everything. He was tall and good-looking, but an aloof figure to those of us who were not his special friends. Watching him bat in the nets was extraordinary, and I needed no more than that to tell me I was entering a completely new cricketing world. There was Ossie Wheatley, tall and blond and a wonderful fast-medium seam bowler who went on to Warwickshire and Glamorgan; Michael James, always approachable and friendly and a fine striker of the ball, who in 1956 had scored a hundred as a freshman against the touring Australians; and Ian Pieris from Colombo, who bowled at a sharp and mean medium pace and was more than useful in the lower middle order, if a man of few words, to newcomers at any rate. He was to become an influential figure in the development of Sri Lankan cricket, and was always extremely hospitable whenever cricket took me there. Another old Blue was Ian McLachlan from Adelaide, the oldest son of a huge landowning family in South Australia, who in later years would take care of this visiting Pom with a nonchalant and generous ease. The most genial of men, and an opening batsman who like Dexter was at Jesus College, he was once twelfth man for Australia, but never made it beyond that. In the 1990s he would be a member of Malcolm Fraser’s Australian government, and he is still very much the patriarch of Adelaide and South Australia. Then came the also-rans, of whom I was one.

The two pros who came up to Cambridge to coach that year were the redoubtable Tom Graveney, ever elegant and charming, just like his batting, who made me feel very much at ease, and ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, the leg-spinner from Derbyshire who went on one England tour to the subcontinent, but never played a Test match. He was a small man, with a vermillion face which was not only the product of many days spent in the sun, and the ready humour I have always associated with wrist-spinners. Like Tom he was a good coach, and there were many happy hours spent just across neighbouring Parker’s Piece in the bar of the Prince Regent, where the two of them were billeted.

Perhaps the most important figure of all at Fenner’s was the groundsman-cum-coach-cum-general-bottle-washer who quite simply ran the place, the incomparable and ever-helpful Cyril Coote. He was a man of many parts, and to describe him as the groundsman, as many did, missed the point by miles. At first, the most noticeable thing about him was his pronounced limp, for he had been born with one leg significantly shorter than the other. No one could have made lighter of such a handicap as his limping stride took him all over the place, brimming with enthusiasm and encouragement. He turned himself into a considerable batsman, and opened the batting for Cambridgeshire for many years in the Minor County Championship, although my friends from the Norfolk side of that vintage remembered him more for his adhesiveness than his fluent strokeplay. No one I have ever met understood the mechanics of batting better than Cyril, and it was remarkable how clever he was at correcting faults in the nets. He was almost invariably right in his assessment of the characters of the players he coached, to whom he varied his approach accordingly. Half an hour in the nets with Cyril was worth a week with many others. He also had the reputation of being one of the best shots in Cambridgeshire, and any bird that had the luck to get past him once knew better than to try again. In addition to all this, he was a wonderful groundsman, and produced the superb batting pitches which in the fifties were the hallmark of Fenner’s. He was cheerful, extremely determined and uncompromisingly robust in all his opinions. There were no grey areas with Cyril.

I played a few matches for the university in my first year, without getting into the side. The delightful and charming Chris Howland filled the wicketkeeping spot. He was undoubtedly better than I was after that stupid accident, but I still have the feeling that if I had missed that wretched bus, it might have been the other way round. My reactions were a mess, and my keeping suffered more than my batting. It was only for one brief spell, on a tour of Barbados with Jim Swanton’s Arabs in 1967, that my wicketkeeping ever fully came back to me, but it was too late, for I had by then become a cricket watcher and writer, and had little time to play. I suppose all through my life I have suffered occasional pangs of what might have been, if only … But there was no future in that line of thought, and I was always anxious to get on with the present, even if that did sometimes mean flying by the seat of my pants.

My first-class career had an unusual start. May 1958 was an important month for me, what with exams, the cricket and keeping a watchful eye on the social scene in London, with deb dances and all that. My particular love at that time – and gosh, she was beautiful – had asked me as her partner to the tour de force of the London season, Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball. This was an invitation it was impossible to refuse, although as it happened I was well out of my depth by then, not that I knew it, and it wouldn’t have made the least difference whether I had gone or not. As luck would have it, two days before the party, the team for the university’s forthcoming game against Kent went up in the window of Ryder & Amies the outfitters on King’s Parade. The match began the day after Queen Charlotte’s, and of course sod’s law decreed that my name should have been down on the team sheet. Showing all the optimism – or maybe the insecurity and bloody stupidity – of youth, I attempted to fulfil both functions, which remains one of the craziest decisions that even I have ever made.

I caught the train up to London, and changed into a white tie and tails at my brother John’s mews cottage. But as soon as I turned up at the appropriate house and met the rest of the party, which was full of dashing cavalry officers and a fair sprinkling from the Brigade of Guards, I realised that any hopes I might have had in the direction of the beautiful deb had disappeared weeks ago. Anyway, off we all went to the Grosvenor House in Park Lane, where we danced a good deal of the night away. Eventually I bade farewell to all concerned and legged it to Liverpool Street station to catch the milk train back to Cambridge before taking on the might of Kent that same morning. As luck would have it, the first person I ran into on the platform was Ian McLachlan, who was being rested for the Kent game and who had also been to Queen Charlotte’s. As he was a good friend of Ted Dexter’s, the news of my nocturnal progress soon got about. Sod’s law again.

I took a taxi back to my lodgings, and after the briefest of lie-downs before a hurried bowl of Corn Flakes, I pedalled my way to Fenner’s in the hope of greater success than I had achieved at Grosvenor House. Dexter and Colin Cowdrey tossed, and we were batting, which was not quite the way I had planned things. Shortly before half past eleven, therefore, I was making my way, horribly nervously, to the crease as one of the openers. I don’t think I took the first ball, but very soon I was down at the business end preparing to face Alan Brown, a tall, blond fast bowler. I managed somehow to survive my first ball. The second was short, and lifted on me. I followed it up in front of my face, and it hit the splice of the bat and dollied up to give forward short leg the easiest catch in the history of cricket. I shuffled miserably off to the pavilion, and as I passed Cowdrey at first slip he said, ‘Bad luck,’ in the kindest of voices. It was no help. In the space of approximately fifteen hours I had played two and lost two. So much for youthful optimism. I would always have lost at Grosvenor House, but who knows, I might have made a better fist of things at Fenner’s. Some time later, I wondered if I might have hooked that ball if it had not been for my bang on the head. I made one in the second innings. What a start.

I opened again in the next game, against Lancashire, and somehow managed to put on 78 with Dexter for the second wicket. I spent my time at the non-striker’s end jumping out of the way of his thunderous straight drives, and at the other end playing and missing or edging the ball just short of the slips. Eventually, having made 41, I missed a low full toss from off-spinner Roy Tattersall which hit the outside of my leg-stump. Lancashire were captained by Cyril Washbrook, and their attack consisted of Brian Statham and Ken Higgs with the new ball, while the spin was provided by Tattersall and the left-armer Malcolm Hilton, who as a beginner in 1948 had famously dismissed Bradman. I faced a few overs from Statham, bowling almost off the wrong foot, and I don’t think he sent down a single ball I could leave alone. His accuracy was of course legendary, and at that time he and Fred Trueman formed one of England’s greatest pairs of opening bowlers.

A week or two later I was out first ball to the examiners, but as this was only a college exam and not part one of the tripos or anything particularly serious, King’s looked benevolently upon me, and I was not shown the door. After that I wiled away the summer working on the first floor of Simpson’s in Piccadilly. There was one moment of excitement, which proved to be a false dawn. The university were on tour, playing various counties before the University Match, and I received an SOS to go to Guildford and keep wicket against Surrey. I was mean-spirited enough to hope that Chris Howland had perhaps broken a finger, but when I clocked in at the Hog’s Back hotel I discovered that he was merely having a game off. So four days later I was asking Simpsons for my job back and it was Daks trousers and cashmere jackets all over again. I never quite got the hang of the measuring tape, but I was not too bad at the chat, which just about got me by.

I played a bit of cricket for Norfolk, without much success, before beginning my second year at Cambridge. Towards the end of the summer term I had arranged to move lodgings to a house at 3 St Clement’s Gardens, which was run by an elderly landlady called Agnes Smith, who must have been the best of her sort in the whole of Cambridge. Her cooked breakfasts were magnificent, her kindness, enthusiasm and humour simply remarkable, and she had a wonderful, chuckling laugh. One of my companions there was Christopher Mallaby, who went on to reach spectacular heights in the diplomatic profession: his last posting was as our man at the amazing embassy in Paris. Another benefit of St Clement’s Gardens, which didn’t altogether please my bank manager, was that it was just around the corner from the Pitt Club.

My second year was much more fun than my first, especially as far as the social whirl was concerned. As a result my overdraft increased inexorably, which irritated Tom, who found it difficult to understand how I could not live within the slender means he allowed me. We had a number of lively conversations on this subject. Academically, little had changed. My distaste for lectures grew worse, and alas, I did not work hard enough to get by. I did a bit better against the examiners, surviving almost a complete over and scoring what was known as ‘a Special’, which meant guilty unless there were extenuating circumstances. King’s made it clear that if I returned for a third year I would not be allowed to play cricket until after the exams, which didn’t seem much of a bargain to me. I turned it down, and had a sorrowful letter from John Raven, the college’s dark, angular, friendly, bespectacled head tutor, saying that perhaps it was time I moved on to the next stage in life – without attempting to specify what that might be.

By then, however, I had had one piece of great good luck. Cambridge was not as good a side in 1959 as it had been the year before, and I just managed to squeak in as one of the last two choices. I was probably the worst opening batsman to play for either Cambridge or Oxford since at least the Boer, and probably the Crimean, War. It was the most exciting experience though, and in a funny way the best education I could possibly have got when you consider what I was going to be doing for most of the rest of my life.

My two greatest memories of the cricket came when the home season at Fenner’s had ended. We went on tour, and late in June we arrived at Trent Bridge to play Nottinghamshire in a Saturday–Monday–Tuesday game; there was no play on Sunday in those days. Nottinghamshire were captained by Reg Simpson, who had opened the batting many times for England, and was a fine player of fast bowling. In order to try to drum up some interest in a game which was otherwise pretty small beer, Reg had got hold of Keith Miller, the great Australian all-rounder, to come and play as a guest star. He had retired three years earlier, and was now writing about the game for the Daily Express. He would prove to be one of the greatest men I ever met in the world of cricket, and we remained good friends until he died.

This must have been Keith’s last or last-but-one first-class match. We batted first, and he opened the bowling, slipping in some quickish, almost humorous, leg-breaks in the first over. I faced a couple of them. He then made a hundred in Nottinghamshire’s first innings, thanks partly to the fact that I dropped him off a skier at deep midwicket when he was on 65. There was nothing remotely solemn about his approach or his strokeplay. He hit the ball murderously hard, and talked happily away to everyone throughout his innings. More than forty years later I came across a completed scorecard from this game, and when I asked Keith to sign it, he scrawled across it without any prompting, ‘Well dropped, Henry.’

But the best part of Keith’s foray to Nottinghamshire happened off the field. He brought with him a former Miss Victoria called Beverley Prowse, and until I set eyes on her I had not realised that God made them that good. She sat in the ladies’ stand at straight deep midwicket for three days, and put us all off our stroke(s). Of course, she was the reason I dropped that skier. On the first evening Keith was a few not out at the close of play, and therefore had to be at the crease, booted and spurred, at half past eleven on the Monday morning. About twenty minutes before the start of play, Reg Simpson came into our dressing room, which was below the home dressing room, and asked if we had seen Keith. We had not. A couple of minutes later there was a crash against the door, which burst open, revealing a somewhat breathless Keith. ‘Come on, boys,’ he said. ‘I can’t get all the way up there. Lend me some kit.’ We did our best to fit him out, and I had the luck to help him off with his shirt. His back made a deep impression on me, and I could only deduce that Miss Prowse had long and powerful fingernails. I’d never seen such a sight. It was all part of life’s rich learning curve. It didn’t affect Keith in the least, and he went on to make that splendid hundred. Years later I asked him if he had remembered to slip a packet of emery boards into Miss Prowse’s Christmas stocking that year. He smiled, and looked mildly sheepish.

Ten days later we played MCC at Lord’s, in the game before the University Match. Denis Compton, who had retired from serious cricket year or two earlier, turned out for MCC in what must have been just about his last first-class match. In their first innings he made a quite brilliant 71. Despite his having had a kneecap removed in 1956, his footwork was remarkable, his improvisation astonishing. He is the only batsman I have ever seen who appeared to be able to hit every ball to any part of the ground he wished. His bat really was a magic wand.

I was so lucky to play against two such Adonises as Miller and Compton. Every girl in England and Australia was in love with one of them, and many with both. If it had not been for their joint efforts, I have no doubt that Brylcreem would have gone out of business. By then, of course, I knew that I would not be returning to Cambridge for my third year. But what memories I had to take ‘on to the next stage in life’. Tom and Grizel didn’t have the faintest idea what they were going to do with me, so they enlisted the help of Uncle Mark.

FIVE

Mad Dogs and Honeymoons

Grizel and her younger brother Mark were the joint products of my maternal grandparents, Kit and Jill Turner. My grandfather was a smallish man whom, if you were sensible, you treated with the greatest care. He had white hair when I knew him, and he spoke in a rasping voice, as if he was firing machine-gun bullets at all and sundry. He was easily irritated, and I remember him having no obvious love for children beyond what passed for duty. Before the war he had worked in the House of Commons where he became Deputy Clerk. He was, by all accounts, a difficult man to work with and did not make friends easily. This is probably why he never got the top job. He was also for time Clerk of the Pells at the Exchequer. Jill, who was close to Grizel, was a dear, but died of leukaemia while I was at Sunningdale. Mrs Fox told me the news, and made me sit down there and then and write letters to Grizel and to my grandfather, whose grief was prolonged, dreadful, and perhaps a trifle stage-managed. Kit loved Switzerland, and every day he received a copy of a Swiss newspaper written in German, a language he spoke fluently. He gave everyone in the family a crumpled pound note in a brown envelope for Christmas, although I think I probably started off with a ten-bob note which I am sure was just as crumpled. He even gave Uncle Mark, who had made a lot of money in the City, a pound note along with everyone else.

After Jill had died I never much enjoyed the visits to ‘Greenhedges’ in Sheringham’s Augusta Road, which was about as ghastly as it sounds. We would go over for lunch, and the food was some way from being haute cuisine. Mrs Fenn, the diminutive, bespectacled, straggly-haired, middle-aged cook, was an eccentric character. She spoke with a deep voice in the broadest of Norfolk accents, and had only a rudimentary knowledge of cooking, although she did make excellent marmalade. When I was very young I would have lunch in the kitchen with Nanny and Mrs Fenn. Afterwards I would be taken off to swim in the North Sea, which I loathed because it was always appallingly cold. I would put on my swimming trunks in the family bathing hut, which stank of stale seaweed and salt water. To get to the beach I had to walk down a huge bank of painful pebbles in my bare feet, which made the prospect of shuffling slowly out into the sea, getting colder as each step took me an inch or two deeper, seem even more appalling, but I was shamed into it. Sheringham put me off swimming for life, just as Sunningdale made sure that I never again ate porridge. The only time I enjoyed it at all was when, with the help of Nanny, who holding up her skirt was an inveterate paddler, I was allowed to catch shrimps. Pushing the shrimping net along in the sand where the water was about eighteen inches deep, I always netted a few, which were taken triumphantly back to Hoveton and boiled for tea. The North Sea also produced a good haul of cockles and winkles. Winkles were great fun, mainly because I used one of Nanny’s hatpins to winkle them out of those curious twisted shells. They were delicious, as long as you didn’t get a mouthful of sand at the same time.

My grandparents would always come over to Hoveton for lunch on Christmas Day, in their austere black saloon car with Kit at the helm. They arrived soon after we had got back from church, and we waited with bated breath for those crumpled one-pound notes. Kit, who just managed to reach his nineties, drove almost until the end with steady 35mph purpose. About twice a year he went to stay in Huntingdonshire with Aunt Saffron, my grandmother’s much younger sister, who was a great ally of Grizel’s. The old boy drove himself there and back. Once, well into the 1950s, he was asked why he always drove in the middle of the road. He dismissed the silly question with a brusque ‘In order to avoid the nails from the tramps’ boots.’ You could see where Grizel got some of it from.

During the Second War Uncle Mark had been one of the more important brains in the Department of Economic Warfare, for which he had been knighted. He was a delightful man, with an open, smiling, enthusiastic face, and I don’t think I ever saw him disgruntled about anything. Both he and Grizel were extremely bright, but their lives followed completely different paths. Grizel had thrown herself into being the country squire’s wife, while Mark had negotiated the City of London with remarkable success. Tom and Grizel were of the old school who felt that making money was intrinsically rather vulgar, and that while City slickers might be tolerated, their habits and customs should be viewed with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Uncle Mark drove a Bentley, which I think Tom and Grizel may have felt was a touch flashy. We always had fun when we came up to London, going to his house in Edwardes Square, and later on to the Grove in Highgate Village. Mark’s wife Peggy was great value too. A continuous smoker, she drank whisky, coughed and laughed raucously, and always entered into the spirit of everything. Like Uncle Mark, she was an inveterate bridge player.

With my spell at Cambridge being cut short, and my future career looking decidedly uncertain, Tom and Grizel turned to Uncle Mark as an act of last resort. Of course, he delivered. I was signed up for three years, starting in late September 1959, as a trainee in the merchant bank Robert Benson Lonsdale, of which he was a director. So began the most boring period of my life. Uncle Mark had done his best, but there was no way I would ever have made the grade as a merchant banker, or have wanted to. For two years I tooled off five days a week to Aldermanbury Square, where the headquarters of RBL were located, before I was shoved off to Fenchurch Street after RBL had merged with Kleinworts in 1961. I can honestly say that I never came within several furlongs of doing anything within those two years that remotely quickened the pulse. I had a room in a flat in Egerton Gardens in Knightsbridge, and the early-morning walk to Knightsbridge Underground station, the change of lines at Holborn and the ten-minute walk to Aldermanbury Square still haunt me. I wore a stiff collar and a three-piece suit, carried a rolled umbrella, and topped it off with a bowler hat. I must have looked the most preposterous of oafs. I suppose that if I had kept my hand out of the till (which I did), and they had found me some backwater where I could do no harm, I might have made lots of money, with a bonus or two thrown in, who knows? But it wasn’t for me. Living like that for five days a week in order to enjoy the other two seemed the wrong way round, and a lousy way to spend my life.

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