CMJ

by Christopher Martin Jenkins

  Across the road outside our house, there was a village green, separated from the pub, the Holly and Laurel, by an increasingly busy road, and from the church by half a mile. There, on Saturday afternoons, my father batted and bowled with the sallow-skinned Stan Pierce, who ran the garage at Mid-Holmwood, Phil Hoad, the fair-haired left-hander who delivered the coal with his father Bill, puffing Les Harris with the Bobby Charlton hair, who bowled off the wrong foot, and Syd Knight, who, with his long run-up and high, stately action, seemed to run in all afternoon from the end behind which stretched miles of bracken-covered common.

  In my case at least that pleasure of a thousand fathers, watching a son carrying on the tradition, worked the other way too. I was deeply proud when, more a Pietersen than a Bell, my father launched a heave towards the cowpats beyond the boundary. Even more so, a year or two later, when he did it in the Father’s Match at my prep school in Eastbourne, using only a cut down bat after he had got to twenty. When the magic fifty had been reached, he was allowed a tiny miniature. In other words it was time to get out but his big hitting was legendary in these games and my brothers and I enjoyed the reflected glory.

  If I became a better cricketer than my father, imagine the pleasure when the next generation repeated the process, certainly in the case of Robin, of whom more anon. (James, like me, probably lacked the conviction and concentration to make the fullest use of his ability.) My sons used to bowl to each other for hours on end with a hard rubber ball on a tennis court that, because of the reliability of its bounce, did more for their batting than the net I had amateurishly rigged on the flattest piece of lawn I could find at our family home at Rudgwick in West Sussex. The netting was inclined to fall down in high winds and the pitch, an artificial surface first laid one Easter holiday with the help of Peter Drury, who used to advertise his Notts Non-Turf Pitches in The Cricketer, was not entirely reliable.

  That it is better to learn on good pitches than bad ones will always be true but these days the helmets worn by all the young must take away to some extent that fear of being hit hard by a cricket ball that often holds back the talent in a player. Moreover, uneven bounce can train the eyes and sharpen reflexes: both Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar, two of the greatest of India’s batsmen, attribute their adaptability and quickness of eye to playing on uncovered, unpredictable public pitches in Mumbai.

  The greater the pity, then, that neither ever had to face a really good finger-spinner on a drying pitch in England. When they decided to cover all the pitches for first-class games in England to keep them dry (in 1981) they may have saved a good many matches from being abandoned after rain but they also took away part of the game’s priceless variety and one of its greatest challenges: batting against a spinner on a drying pitch.

  Pitches themselves are an endlessly fascinating element of cricket. The nature of the surface on which it is played determines the course of every game. To give an extreme example, South Africa would simply not have had a chance of chasing 435 to win a fifty-over match, as they famously did against Australia at The Wanderers in Johannesburg in 2006, if they had been playing on the same pitch as the one at Gloucester on which the home county bowled out Northamptonshire for twelve in 1907. I don’t care how badly Northamptonshire batted or how well Herschelle Gibbs hit the ball!

  On the other hand the attitude of players is no less interesting. Sometimes they can rise above inimical, even apparently impossible, conditions. There are plenty of examples, of which Ian Botham’s counter-attack at Headingley in 1981 is one of the most famous, but one has only to look at how batsmen and bowlers meet the vastly differing challenges of Test and Twenty20 cricket to appreciate how enormous a part the mind plays in an intensely physical game.

  Records and figures are another part of the game’s allure. In my case, however, beguilement lay in the sheer joy of hitting and bowling balls. It happened, I think, because of that paternal encouragement, even before I started to watch great cricketers on television in 1953 and became captivated that year by a tussle for the Ashes that fired the imagination, just as future pilots drew their passion from jets scorching overhead or from reading the gripping yarns of W.E. Johns.

  Soon I was either playing by myself with a hard little rubber ball from Woolworths, throwing it at a wall and defending or attacking it with a stump from close quarters, or conducting Tests in the garden with one or both of my brothers. I kept the scores and, for good measure, commentated as I went along, little knowing that thereby I was preparing the ground for a means of making a living. Indoors in the winter ping pong balls had to suffice. The bat was a toy rifle, supposedly made for a cowboy shooting at Indians.

  To me, unusually I believe, acting the part of real cricketers of the time became insufficient for the imagination and I invented wholly fictional English, Australian, Indian and West Indies teams who would play out their own Test matches in summer holidays in the garden. Only recently I found the first chapter of a handwritten unfinished story (novel?) written at some point in my schooldays, which begins with the well-known (fictional) England all-rounder Robin Crale opening a letter from the chairman of the England selectors, one Geoffrey Smailes (all too often misspelt), asking him to take over the captaincy of England. Ah the romance of it all!

  My younger brother and I would stage games involving these imaginary players through the day, recording the scores against the names of such as Albert de Beewee, the fearsome West Indies fast bowler, who was so strangely reminiscent of Wes Hall. The ‘Albert’ was correctly pronounced as by a Frenchman because he hailed from Martinique before moving to Barbados. He opened the bowling with Peardrax Marsh, a subtle swing bowler from Trinidad. These men grew in the imagination from real players I had read about, or seen on television.

  I could imitate real players too, however. The way in which Tom Graveney touched his long peaked cap, slightly rounded like his shoulders, a moment before he settled again into his stance; and, I liked to think, the flowing elegance of his blade as it caressed the ball into gaps. The pumping run-up of Lindwall and the distinctive, loose-limbed delivery of Brian Statham were, in my mind’s eye at least, no less at my command. They fired the mind but no one, alas, ever instilled into me the thought that actually playing the game for a living might be a possibility, with the accompanying ambition to achieve it by sweating to get fitter and stronger, then working equally hard on technique. These days every coach in every professional sport constantly emphasises these essentials.

  My future career was perhaps more accurately foreshadowed by my first book, ‘written’ in a scrapbook that I still possess, sometime in my teenage years. It was entitled, with shameless plagiarism, ‘Cricket, Lovely Cricket’ and boasted a foreword by no less a star than Brigitte Bardot. That photos of the gorgeous French actress took precedence on the cover over anything reflecting cricket perhaps reflected my priorities at the time. The foreword was brief: Mes amis, je pense que cette livre est superbe; non, merveilleux. J’adore le Cricket et j’adore cette livre. Bonne chance!

  Of course I practised as hard as anyone as a schoolboy, out of sheer amateurish enthusiasm. For years my sights were never set further, however, than on playing for my school at Lord’s. The decision to try for a place at Cambridge came late – after A levels had been taken, in fact. The wise and respected John Dancy, who had taken over from Tommy Garnett as Master of Marlborough, suggested in my final report that I should have a go, but my eyes had never been firmly set on a Blue, as I believe they would need to have been for me to get one. Once there and on the fringe of the University team it seemed a very nice idea, naturally, but defining and visualising ambition as early as possible is halfway towards achieving it. Equally significant was the fact that I did not join a cricket club until I left school. In those days there were no club or county XIs from the age of ten to seventeen as there are now.

  It is just as well that I fell short of playing the game professionally, although I was paid what then seemed generous expenses to play for Sur
rey Club and Ground in the season after I had left school. Several years later, in 1971, when I was already embarked on another career, I made a fifty against the county’s second XI that impressed Arthur McIntyre, the coach. He invited me to play for the second XI when I could but by then I was married and working flat out for the BBC, so it was necessary to take days of precious holiday to play. I played in a three-day Championship match against Warwickshire at The Oval but a match against Kent in the parallel one-day competition was rained off and to have changed horses at that stage would have been a mistake.

  I did at least have one happy day at Guildford that season when I managed to reach the final of a single-wicket tournament for the whole Surrey playing staff at Guildford, beating the England batsman Graham Roope amongst others. Single-wicket, in which each man did all the batting and bowling with nine fielders and a wicket-keeper, was, of course, briefly a popular spectacle in 18th-century England when two great players would challenge each other, or a promoter would pit renowned players such as Alfred Mynn and Thomas Marsden, the respective champions of Kent and Yorkshire, against one another. At Guildford on this occasion, the stars were on a hiding to nothing. Geoff Arnold was beaten by my fellow Marlburian, the Guildford captain Charles Woodhouse, and John Edrich also fell at an early hurdle, his bowling being as weak as his batting was strong.

  McIntyre, always a man of few words, saw the exercise as a test of character for his established players and looked mildly amused that the closely-fought final was played between an amateur and the rising second XI batsman Roy Lewis, who, if I remember the details correctly, passed my total of about thirty with a ball or two of his permitted four overs still in hand, much to the relief of Surrey players who were strongly supporting one of their own professionals. Lewis was a fine player but never quite established himself when his chances came in the Championship side. Instead he was prolific in club cricket, one of countless thousands who have proved that the key to enjoying cricket, sport, even life itself is to find a level at which you can excel; or, at least, one where you may feel that you are swimming in your depth.

  I was a stronger player all-round now than I had been as a student. Still, I cannot claim that it was much better than a long-hop that dismissed Alvin Kallicharran in that match against Warwickshire at The Oval. He pulled it to mid-wicket, surprised, I like to think, by the deadly extra bounce. The same Kallicharran had run me out with a brilliant throw from the distant extra-cover boundary in the first innings as I foolishly attempted a third run, but at least I made sure that Surrey did not lose the three-day game, on a typically true Oval pitch, by batting out time for eighteen not out in the second innings. McIntyre probably disapproved of the stroke with which I hit a Peter Lewington off-break into the empty seats at mid-wicket, although it pleased me. I was an amateur, after all.

  It was too late now to change career and my talent was almost certainly insufficient, not to mention my temperament too lacking in patience and confidence for a game that requires both and plays such havoc with hopes and emotions. I might have ended up hating cricket, as have some who embraced it as a profession in high expectation, almost like marriage, but ended disillusioned. Instead I remain fascinated by its subtle evolution and infinitely unpredictable charm.

  It is certainly easier to talk and write about cricket than to play the game professionally, especially in hot and heathen lands afar, but that is not to say that I would not have jumped at the chance of doing so if it had come early enough.

  I dare say that every generation feels that cricket is not so enjoyable as it once was but in all its various guises and tempos it remains, for the most part, a joyous, captivating, beautiful game. The great thing is to keep passing on the torch to the next generation. That can give pleasure in itself, as Edmund Blunden expressed so simply but graphically in his little poem ‘Forefathers’:

  On the green they watched their sons

  Playing till too dark to see,

  As their fathers watched them once,

  As my father once watched me;

  While the bat and beetle flew

  On the warm air webbed with dew.

  There have been moments of even greater pleasure away from cricket fields, naturally, notably the first heart-popping sighting of my wife Judy across a crowded Hall in Cambridge in 1966, seeing her give birth to our first child in 1973, and hearing late on the evening of Boxing Day in 2009 that our third grandchild had arrived after some tough years of waiting for her parents. Such blessings put obsessions like mine for cricket into proper perspective.

  The infatuation remains, however. In a way, perhaps, I have never grown up, which is why I have managed to extend into adult life roughly what I was doing as a young schoolboy: watching cricket, playing when I could, writing about matches in old exercise books and amusing my mates by commentating in the dormitory on imaginary games. The luckiest people may be those who can make a living out of childhood fantasies.

  3

  FAMILY MATTERS

  The earliest memory is of a small trauma: a military plane flying low over my pram in Scotland, frighteningly noisy. It cannot, for me, have been any legacy from the war, but there were others, such as my mother cutting up a Mars bar into twelve slim pieces. One slice a day was all that Government rationing and her own frugality would allow a young child. It did not prevent my having poor teeth, as much, I think, from deprivations during my mother’s pregnancy as from too much sugar. A few years later, I startled a dentist in Cheshire, as he was about to use his drill for the second time, with an abominable barrage of the worst language I knew. ‘You biggees man, you weewees man’, I yelled at him.

  I was born in Peterborough in the last year of the war (a fact I frequently mentioned to my growing children when putting tiny portions of uneaten food back into the fridge) to Rosemary and Dennis Martin-Jenkins. My father was still doing his bit for King, country and the Royal Artillery, having joined the Territorial Army some time before Neville Chamberlain gave his sombre broadcast in 1939. He was lucky to avoid any serious conflict overseas until joining the mopping-up operations in Germany in 1945, by which time he had reached the lofty rank of Lieutenant Colonel and received the Territorial Decoration, which, much to the admiration of his sons, he wore on his chest on Remembrance Day as chairman of his local British Legion.

  Daddy was a friendly, highly-strung character with great energy, charm and good looks, despite being on the way to near total baldness by the time that he married in 1937. These days it would have been fashionable. Kind, with his emotions never far below the surface, he was a good father and husband who loved to please people, although he was prone to mood swings from great merriment to what for a time became a life-threatening depression. It was his gregariousness as much as anything that enabled him to rise to the top of what was for many years one of Britain’s biggest private companies, the shipping-based group Ellerman Lines.

  He first worked for them just before the war and rose rapidly afterwards to become first a director, then eventually both chairman and managing director. He was, by the account of several witnesses, fun to work with and an excellent, inclusive chairman. He became president of the UK Chamber of Shipping, chairman of the International Chamber of Shipping and Prime Warden of the Shipwrights.

  In all these roles he was widely popular but for all his success he was curiously insecure, tending both to solipsism and paranoia. There is nothing unusual about that sort of paradox. In my father’s case I think that from time to time he simply felt out of his depth at a period when the British shipping industry was sinking below the waves of subsidised foreign competition. It was, too, a time of rapid technological change in the shipping industry. Staff changes had to be made and even relatively large companies were vulnerable as containers became the new and more efficient means of storing cargo.

  He was devoted to his job but the more demanding it got the more it weighed him down. I learned many years after that he had taken an overdose in 1967, when he was fifty-six. I w
as on the point of taking my final exams at Cambridge and my mother, typically, told me nothing of the crisis to avoid troubling me. Even after his mind had been calmed by pills my memory of him, when for a time I shared his London flat in Hallam Street, was of evenings that he spent tied to a paper-strewn desk, sighing frequently and looking as crushed in spirit as an abandoned dog.

  In those days he relaxed only on the golf course or on holiday. Like me, I fear, a sense of duty meant that he sometimes got less fun out of life than he should have done. It was a joy, occasionally, to see him totally relaxed, not least when roaring with laughter at a comedian such as Tommy Cooper or Norman Wisdom.

  When he finally retired there was a party on board HMS Belfast to ‘celebrate’ his retirement. I fear the word might have been chosen mischievously by the new group managing director, Jim Stewart, with whom he had fallen out. My father missed the company of his working companions but now he was able to spend more time watching the sport he had always loved. A move to Thurlestone in Devon had the attraction of a scenic golf course for him and lovely walks for my mother but they felt too cut off from their family and came back to Cranleigh in Surrey before, when he was nearly eighty-one, prostate cancer ended his life in 1991. Only the previous year the same disease had accounted for his younger brother, Alan.