Out of the shipping container in Basra came a succession of strange noises. Thud. Thud. Thud. It had been converted into makeshift quarters for a British Army officer after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. To be more serviceable, if not homely, the container’s steel walls had been plastered on the inside.
Nobody had heard this thudding through the night of shelling, when rocket-propelled grenades and screaming mortars tore into buildings and vehicles. It had been one of those intensely humid nights beside the Shatt al-Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, when the moment you walk outside an air-conditioned room, a skein of sweat covers your skin. In the morning, in any event, the officer was absent from his desk at headquarters.
When his colleagues and the Military Police went to see why the officer was not on duty, and heard this thudding coming from the container, they found it locked on the inside. They had to break the steel door.
Inside, the officer was wide awake. He was not wearing the khaki helmet that was mandatory for officers when they were out of bed, in case of sudden attack by a Shi’ite militia. He was wearing a pair of underpants. On his head. Nothing else.
The thudding, they soon established, was intended to drown out the explosions. The officer had succumbed to post-traumatic stress disorder. To cope with a war remote from home, and reason, he had sought solace in the pastime of his childhood. Naked except for his improvised helmet, he was hitting a ball against the inside wall of the container with his cricket bat.FN1
I came from Sheffield. ‘Somebody had to,’ as Bill Bryson said of his birthplace, Des Moines. But in terms of watching cricket I was very lucky to be born less than a mile from Bramall Lane. It was the best ground in the world according to some cricketers, and not only those from Yorkshire.
Jack Fingleton, who opened the batting at Bramall Lane for the Australians in 1938 and became an eminent journalist, declared it had ‘the keenest cricketing crowd in England’. Jeff Stollmeyer of Trinidad, who captained West Indies, observed: ‘There is more atmosphere at Bramall Lane than at any other cricket ground on which I have played, except Lord’s. It was an atmosphere vastly different to Lord’s, tense and full of the spirit of combat, accentuated as it was by the squat chimneys looming black outside the ground.’ When the West Indians of 1950, including Stollmeyer, narrowly won their match against Yorkshire, the crowd of 30,000 threw their seat cushions on to the field in disgust. The ground had drawn crowds of double that size for England football internationals and for an FA Cup final replay, when everybody stood.
Bramall Lane’s colours were primary bright. As Stollmeyer saw, the Lane itself was as black as the soot from steel factories and foundries that rained on the city. ‘Stoke up the boilers, lads!’ was reputed to be the cry when word went round that Yorkshire were bowling, to hamper the batsmen’s vision.
St Mary’s church, at the head of the Lane, was coal-black from the tip of its spire down to the smashed windows. Whenever my mother and I walked to a match, we never went inside the church. That awe which every child is said to need could be found at Bramall Lane.
As we passed St Mary’s, and the terraces of two-up two-downs, with corner shops advertising Craven “A” and Tizer, the blue lettering of Yorkshire became clearer on the posters on the blackened stone walls of the ground – the red of their opponents in smaller lettering below. Clutching my two shillings and sixpence, I might have run ahead to the turnstiles. Yorkshire staged four first-class matches a season at Bramall Lane, often three in the Championship and one against the touring team.
After pushing through the turnstiles, I rush up the steps to the top of the terraces and down the other side to get below the roof-line of the stand.
The crash barriers, after the football season, are freshly painted red.
The sightscreens are bright white, like few things in Sheffield before the Clean Air Act.
The field is luscious green, especially where the cricket outfield overlaps the football pitch.
‘Scoring card, get the official card!’ shout men in coats that once might have been white as they stride up and down the terraces – not that I ever see a rival selling unofficial cards. ‘Cards at sixpence each!’ They record the ascendancy of a county that has never been equalled. In the 1960s, not only were Yorkshire county champions for seven years; they also beat the Australians by an innings, the Indians by an innings and the New Zealanders by an innings, all at Bramall Lane, and the West Indians by 111 runs at Middlesbrough.FN2 Australian tourists called their match against Yorkshire ‘the sixth Test’. During the 1960s, so I believed, Yorkshire at home were the strongest cricket team in the world.
Brian Close is Yorkshire’s captain and man-manager, and perhaps the bravest man who ever faced fast bowling or stood unhelmeted at short-leg. Raymond Illingworth, soon to become England’s foxiest captain, is in charge of tactics. (Not for another 40 years, until the Ashes series of 2005, did I see such error-free cricket from an English team again.)
Fred Trueman opens the bowling with a perfect side-on action; Jimmy Binks keeps wicket as a butler takes care of the silver; Phil Sharpe conjures at first slip; Ken Taylor is swift or Geoffrey Boycott safe in the covers; John Hampshire bends at short-leg to scoop up catches with a blacksmith’s forearms. Bramall Lane’s pitches are ideal for three-day cricket: damp and seaming on the first morning, excellent for batting on the second day, spinning on the third afternoon.
The only fly in the ointment is the yeasty smell from Ward’s brewery beside St Mary’s if the wind blows in the wrong direction. Nothing else detracts from the raw drama on this green ground in the heart of an industrial city.
After tea, a waterfall flows down the terraces when the gates are opened and spectators are allowed in for free, mixing with the thousands intent on the action. The Grinders’ Stand, its back to the Lane, is renowned as the most knowledgeable stand in cricket. Not that we dare to sit on those wooden benches: my mother and I sit on the terraces on the opposite side, on cushions hired for twopence, without throwing them.
On these summer afternoons when Yorkshire move towards another Championship, generators hum in the factories outside the ground. The only time I am nearly so happy is when my mother takes me to pick bilberries on the moors above Sheffield and we have a picnic beside a stream. But Bramall Lane is where I am most alive. This hum is the hum of my universe.
The closest I can come to an average day of county cricket, to see why people in England now watch the sport, is a Championship match between Gloucestershire and Glamorgan at Bristol.
Nevil Road is like a number of county cricket grounds left over from the Victorian era. Only a few thousand permanent seats; a small area for net practice, as spare land has long since been sold to keep the club solvent; little space for parking in the ground or the surrounding streets on the rare days when a crowd attends. The truth is that the ground is there because the weight of the past is too heavy for it to be moved.
On this sunny morning in early September, the schools have yet to go back, so one might have expected to see a cluster of boys, watching the game or playing with bat and tennis ball: entry to Nevil Road is £15 for adults, £5 for under-16s. But in the grim grey-stoned building which used to be the Muller Orphanage, housing two thousand inmates, the ghost of the beadle must be on the prowl. The handful of autograph-hunters at the foot of the steel steps leading up to the dressing rooms, who had their books signed before the start of play, are middle-aged or old, not young truants. No security officials are needed to stop intruders; the only bouncer is on the pitch. Championship cricket is self-policing, like most communities in Britain before the social weave unravelled.
Were this professional sport in the United States, spectators would be bombarded with brochures, burgers, memorabilia and promotion deals. Nevil Road’s biggest advertisement is a poster fading on the side of the press box: ‘bristol’s big cricket night out: Gloucestershire Gladiators v Somerset’. Inside are two journalists; in the radio commentary box a reporter from BBC Wales.
English cricket can outstrip American sport, however, when it comes to memorabilia. A marquee, erected for the summer, sells new and second-hand books; and cricket has produced more books and pamphlets in English, about 20,000, than any other sport in any language. Those who drift into the marquee seem more interested in the past than the current match, especially in biographies of Gloucestershire heroes whose names are perpetuated by the main buildings: the Grace Suite, the Jessop Pavilion, the Hammond Suite. The first a Victorian hero, the second Edwardian, while the most recent dates from between the two World Wars.
The largest scattering of spectators, in a crowd of about three hundred, sits atop the Hammond Suite on terraced rows of benches, while underneath lunch is prepared. The days when every county was linked by an umbilical cord to the community it represented, and when a hard core of several thousands – often football supporters out of season – would turn up for knockout ties, or a Lord’s cup final, are gone.
Some spectators sit in pairs, others three or four to a bench. Everybody seems to feel free to speak to those around him. A conversation continues while the ball is bowled; laughter ripples. The talk is of how Gloucestershire’s campaign for promotion from the second division had faltered at the Cheltenham Festival, as it has done for the last decade; or not of cricket at all but of City, or Rovers, or the government. Never does this morning murmur escalate into loudness.
On the field, the dominant colours are the cricketers’ white – this is the old-fashioned Championship, not Twenty20 – and the green of the turf. Beyond the boundary, beige and fawn predominate: not so much the colours of autumn, Nevil Road being short of trees and hedges, as of spectators’ clothing. The majority of spectators – barely a handful of women – wear light-coloured shirts and maybe a light brown jacket. Those feeling young at heart might wear an England replica shirt.
Another group characteristic is the absence of audible interest in money. Conversations are not about stocks and shares, equities and annuities. This may be related to the fact that the overall sums do not add up: the action on the field is subsidised by the broadcasting deal for covering England’s international matches. Gloucestershire’s gate receipts, membership fees and other sources of income make up around one-quarter of the county’s revenue.
One colour arrests the eye: a dozen or more streaks of electric blue dotted around the pavilion. Today, 1 September, happens to be the 35th anniversary of a characteristically English institution. Alan Gibson, a former president of the Oxford Union, used his talents to best effect when writing about county cricket for The Times. He aggrandised journeymen into lovable personalities: above all, Colin Dredge of Somerset as ‘the demon of Frome’, and Jack Davey of Gloucestershire, originally from Devon. Whether Dredge could be ranked among Somerset’s all-time top 100 cricketers, or Davey among Gloucestershire’s, would prompt a prolonged debate on the roof of the Hammond Suite. What mattered, though, was that Gibson welcomed his readers into a warm world of West Country characters.
In a book for sale in the marquee, Growing Up With Cricket, Gibson had written of Davey:
Jack has only one Christian name. One day his captain, Tony Brown, felt that this was a little unfair on him, as everybody else had two initials. So they popped in an extra J. This was repeated on scorecards up and down the country for some time. Speculation grew, encouraged I fear by a mischievous journalist, as to what the extra J stood for. Jolly Jack? Jocose Jack? Jovial Jack? Jubilee Jack? Jocund Jack? Jesting Jack? Jabbering Jack? Jaunty Jack? Jumping Jack? Hence the query on the tie of his fan club.
About two dozen members have turned up for the lunch to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the JJ? Club. Arthur Anderson, the genial chairman and a retired accountant, explains that he had bought an electric-blue suit in 1971 and had chosen the tie to match it. Our eponymous hero, Jack Davey, has turned 66 and remains jolly, jovial, even jaunty. He is glad to be alive after dying twice, from heart and renal failure, when he was 50. The cardiac specialist subsequently told Jack that he normally stopped trying to restart a heart after 24 attempts with the ‘jump leads’ but, as Jack was a non-smoker, he was planning to give him a couple of extra shocks – just as he came back to life at the 23rd attempt. Jack was still unconscious for two weeks, and when he looked in the mirror after losing three stone did not recognise himself.
Over the wine of ‘luncheon’, anecdotes are told, or rather retold. Jack recalls the most famous game in Gloucestershire’s history: their Gillette Cup semi-final at Old Trafford in 1971, in front of a 30,000 crowd and probably the largest television audience ever to see a county game. So important was a county semi-final, and so thrilling the climax in Manchester’s twilight, that the BBC delayed the start of the Nine O’Clock News. ‘And our appearance fee for that game from the BBC was five pounds fifty!’ said Jack, without any trace of bitterness or envy of today’s players. He admits himself: ‘I wouldn’t get through the warm-ups now.’
A collection is made during lunch for a charity, launched in memory of another Devonian cricketer who represented Gloucestershire, although David Shepherd was to become famous as an umpire. This charity funds cricket coaching for youngsters in the West Country. It is hard to think of a gathering of men in suits and ties that could be less materialistic or less intent on self-promotion. Jack, living in Exeter, is content with driving a hire car for three or four days a week ‘to pay the golf club fees’.
Of the club named after him, Jack says: ‘It’s lovely, and it’s great to think it’s still going on after all these years. But it is a bit eccentric.’ When luncheon finishes, just before tea, a large electric-blue banner is unfurled and paraded very slowly around the boundary, again without a security man in sight. While the four or five members show their flag, the public-address system announces that Hampshire have scored 373 for one wicket against Somerset, prompting a few mild laughs at Gloucestershire’s neighbours. Somerset have never won the Championship; Gloucestershire can claim a title or two, in the 1870s, under Grace.
Before the members of the JJ? Club disperse for the winter, they kindly fill out a questionnaire in which I ask several questions, including ‘What do you like most about cricket?’ The majority had played the game in their youth, usually inspired by seeing their father do so. But what three-quarters of them liked most was ‘the friendship’, or ‘camaraderie’, or ‘social life’.
England, fundamentally an Anglo-Saxon country, values privacy more than most societies; and the other side of this coin is loneliness. If you want other people to keep their distance, they are going to do that even when you feel like some company. Surveys say that more than one-third of the UK’s population over 65 is lonely from ‘sometimes’ to ‘always’; one-fifth of those between the ages of 35 and 44 feel lonely a lot of the time.
At any county cricket ground from April to September, however, anybody can go and sit beside a stranger and talk without a formal introduction: about Grace or Hammond, cricket or football, politics or people. Behaviour which would be regarded as weird or antisocial in a public park or cinema or train becomes acceptable in a public house or an English cricket ground. This sport promotes socialisation among those who watch it. It offers friendship in a society which can value privacy too highly.
I was the same. I clung to cricket as an emotional surrogate, before discovering its other pleasures.
On the morning of Thursday, 27 July 1967, I was leaning out of the train window with a transistor radio, trying to listen to the Test match commentary. My mother had driven my father and me to Sheffield station, near Bramall Lane, to put us on the train to Liverpool, from where we were going to take a ferry to the Isle of Man for a week’s holiday.
It was the first day of England’s Test series against Pakistan at Lord’s. Transmission was intermittent as we went over and through the Pennines, and on the ferry. After England had made a large total, Pakistan collapsed at the start of their first innings. On the third day, they began to rally, led by Hanif Mohammad. On the Sunday morning, a rest day in the Test, my father and I were having breakfast at a small hotel in Laxey when he was called to the phone in Reception. My sister Melloney was ringing from home: my mother, while decorating a bedroom, had suffered a brain haemorrhage.
I cannot remember how we returned to the mainland, whether by ferry or plane. My next memory is stopping in a taxi past midnight – it must have been too late for a train back to Sheffield – on the Snake Pass. My father rang from a telephone kiosk and spoke to the Sheffield Royal Infirmary. The latest news was that my mother had suffered a second, far more serious, haemorrhage.
We reached the hospital about dawn. I was not allowed into the intensive care unit. So I never saw my mother again. Melloney took me home, to wait. A kind neighbour came round and found something to keep me occupied: to continue decorating the spare bedroom. While I scraped away at wallpaper, the radio was on, and Hanif was still batting. He batted for more than nine hours, long enough to take my mind away from the impending reality for the odd moment.
Early on the morning of 1 August 1967, my mother died. She had never regained consciousness after the first haemorrhage. The second, I was told, had been so severe she would never have been able to lead a normal life. I do not remember crying much, or feeling angry or bitter, or even talking. I suppose I carried on decorating, and listening to the radio, just infinitely sad.
My father sold our house and moved into a hall of residence at Sheffield University. He was a professor of English who used to proclaim: ‘The two greatest men who ever lived – and you cannot say that Jesus was only a man – are Hammond and Shakespeare. Or rather Shakespeare and Hammond, in that order.’ Having lost his mother in childbirth, and been caned frequently at school, he sought refuge in English literature and Cheltenham festivals – not the literary ones but those dominated by Wally Hammond. He was there for the week in 1928 when Hammond made a century in each innings and took ten catches against Surrey; then he scored 80, took 15 wickets and bowled unchanged throughout both innings against Worcestershire.
My father was an archetypally English professor, the most impractical of men, through a combination of accident and design. One day, my mother and I had gone out, maybe to Bramall Lane, leaving his lunch in the oven. When we came home, he had not eaten it: he had been unable to work out how the oven opened.
My father had served in the army in Malta in the Second World War, during the Siege. He would have been dangerous with a gun in his hand, though not to the enemy. From the army, he was seconded to teach English at a school in the medieval hilltop town of Mdina, from where he watched German planes swooping over the Mediterranean from their bases in Italy to bomb the island into submission. We were never close, because he never removed the mask of Victorian fatherhood; but when I took him back to Malta for his 90th birthday, I met several of his former pupils who were overwhelmed by their memories of the animation with which my father had staged their performances of Hamlet and Macbeth amid Mdina’s battlements. He had escaped from the practical world and thrown himself into English literature as the antidote to his childhood.
So my father went into a hall of residence, my sister to university, and the contents of our house were sold. Even our cat had to be given away; a few months later, a letter came from her new home to say she had died of flu. On a similar basis, it was decided I should be sent to boarding school. My father had read that the school which sent the highest proportion of pupils to Oxbridge was Ampleforth College (he might have missed the small print saying that Ampleforth, as a religious foundation, had its own Oxford college to train Catholic priests and swell the numbers). He had longed to go to Oxford himself, but did not have the money and had to train as a solicitor’s clerk.
After boarding for a year or two, I would sometimes lie in bed in the dormitory after the lights had been turned out and count, not sheep, but the number of adults I had spoken to in my life. I had entered Ampleforth in the January term, after everyone else in my year had joined in September and made friends. Excluding people at school, I can remember the total at some counts amounting to fewer than 20.
Sunday evenings were worst. From the cold supper, I would escape early and run to queue for the school’s only public telephone. When my father answered, I pushed Button A and we had a few shillings’ worth of ‘How are you?’ and ‘Oh, I’m all right.’ Neither of us began to say how we felt.
Cricket kept me going – firstly reading about it, then writing about it, before I ever had the chance to play. One day, after going to the dentist’s in York, I found in a second-hand bookshop a complete run of Yorkshire CCC yearbooks from 1898 to 1940. Here was a world I could enter, inhabited by Wilfred Rhodes, Roy Kilner, Herbert Sutcliffe, George Macaulay, Emmott Robinson, Hedley Verity . . . Here was camaraderie, of a vicarious kind.
If I appeared diligent in the school library, it was because it contained several books by Len Hutton and Neville Cardus. By the time I was supposed to be studying for A levels, I felt I knew enough about the Yorkshire cricketers of 1925 – never has a county won more Championship matches in a season without defeat – to try and write a book about them. Only Sutcliffe was still alive, in a nursing home, but I did what research I could – at school, if not at home, which was now in London. My father had remarried hastily; and my stepmother was prone to hit the bottle and wreck her/our house.
A piece of fortune was that Yorkshire’s captain from 1927 to 1929, Sir William Worsley, lived a few miles away at Hovingham Hall. After I had laboriously typed eleven chapters of juvenilia, he penned the kindest of forewords: ‘It was a team of infinite cricket ability and strong character: seven of its members played for England and all the others achieved distinction in the game. Berry has analysed their ability and their personality with devoted attention. I understand he would like to become a writer on cricket and this volume gives clear evidence to me that this may well be a very successful line for him. I do wish him luck.’
By now I was 17 years old, and I still had not played a single game of cricket – not one proper match other than pick-up games. It was partly my fault, for being truthful. On arriving at Ampleforth, when asked by the games master if I had been in the first team at my previous school, I said I had been in the first-team squad, but not in the first XI.
Cricket at Westbourne preparatory school in Sheffield had been dominated by William Ward – not the one who scored 278 for MCC at Lord’s in 1820, but another who may have been almost as good. He would make a century out of a total of 138 or so, and went on to break the record for most runs in a season at Uppingham. The cover drives of Boycott at Bramall Lane and Ward at Westbourne – his front foot pointing towards where I sat beside the boundary – are the first strokes I still recall. When given a chance, I bowled leg-breaks that were very slow but turned a long way, and added a googly; but even after Ward had left, I was not selected for the first XI for their few matches. Instead, I reasoned I would be chosen for the second XI’s match at Bakewell. It was logical: I was in the first-team squad of 14, so the two others and I who were not in the first XI would be chosen for the second team. I set my heart on it. My parents then happened to invite the headmaster to our house, and he asked me if I would be scorer for the second XI. I ran out of the room, into the kitchen, and burned. It was the most embarrassing, disappointing and frustrating moment of my life. It still is.
The drawback to living in Sheffield was that Bramall Lane and the university were the only cricket grounds anywhere near the centre. The city had produced plenty of cricketers in the nineteenth century – George Ulyett, the Ian Botham of his day, grew up in Sheffield, as well as the county’s first captain, Roger Iddison – because they had space in which to play. Thereafter factories and terraced houses expanded down Bramall Lane, leaving no flat land for a boy to play, without going to the leafy suburbs.
For my first two summers at boarding school, aged 14 and 15, I was condemned to cross-country and tennis. Aged 16, I broke my collarbone playing football, so another summer passed without a game. And how do you get selected for a match if you have never played one? Even Don Bradman might have had a problem. ‘How about reviving the Optimists, old chap?’ my housemaster, Fr Edward, said one day. ‘We used to have a school team that played against the local villages. That’s why we were called the Optimists – we didn’t stand much chance of winning.’
So one summer evening, when I was 17, the team I had assembled poured out of a school minibus to play a 20-over game at and against Rievaulx Abbey. The ruins were magnificent, but when we looked for a cricket ground, we found arrangements were almost as medieval: a field of sheep with a roped-off square. After chasing them away, and at the end of the first over of my first cricket match, Rievaulx had scored four runs for the loss of three wickets. Having arranged the fixture and collected the team, I thought I deserved to be captain, and drew on my observations of Brian Close.
Faced with a bunch of schoolboys, however, Rievaulx had reversed their batting order and given their younger lads a chance. As the Reformation cast its shadow, the home side won easily enough. We then persuaded the master-in-charge that, having missed school supper, we needed to stop at a pub in Scawton on the way back. The Hare claimed to be the smallest pub in England, but it was large enough for us to eat ham, egg and chips, and drink to excess and the success of our new cricket team. I had a strange feeling. I realised I was happy for the first time in years.
We played four or five games that summer, and the following, although the rationale for the team’s name was soon manifest, no matter how many of the school’s first XI I persuaded to play. Every village team in Yorkshire contains canny cricketers. Our most one-sided game was at Newburgh Priory, where Oliver Cromwell’s head is reputed to be buried. Our batsmen lost theirs when we chased Newburgh’s 170 off 20 overs. At number ten I was the highest scorer, with 11 not out in a total of 28 for nine. I did not dare bat any higher, and it was only later when I took my driving test that I found I needed glasses. I never had the confidence to bowl a single ball.
I was 18 years old, therefore, when I bowled my first over in a proper match. Fr Edward chose me for a side he had assembled to play against the Under-16 first XI, whom he coached. I began quite tidily, bowling with a windmill action which a few years later Jack Fingleton, who was umpiring, said was like that of his Australian teammate Bill O’Reilly: he was not obviously joking, bless him. I started to take some wickets. The Under-16s were not bad – one went on to play a few first-class games for Oxford University – but they could not spot a googly. In my first 11 overs of formal cricket, I took six wickets for 24 runs, and led the side off to tea.
Only there was no tea, no interval, no time to savour the elation after waiting so long. ‘You’d better come and have a bowl,’ said the school coach. A first XI trial was in progress so, without a break, I went out and took off my sweater to bowl again. The umpire was Brian Statham. Me, who had never bowled until that afternoon, handing my sweater to Brian Statham, the taker of 242 Test wickets for England. He was known as ‘Gentleman George’, one of nature’s finest, and he neither said nor did anything to increase my discomfort. But it still seemed sacrilege. It would have been more appropriate if I had spread my sweater on the ground for him to walk on.
I ran in and bowled straight away. Out came a googly. I ran in again, intent on a leg-break, and out came a googly. And another. Every ball was turning in to the right-hander. I had no idea what was happening. The pitch was slower, more puddingy, than the one I had just been bowling on further up the hill, but that did not account for this sudden reversal. The batsman could predict which way the ball was going to turn.
In the afternoons following this trial, I went back to the nets and still the same thing happened. Only googlies, no leg-break. Nobody offered a word of advice. It was years before I worked out that, because I had tired after my first spell of 11 overs and all the nervous excitement, I was no longer turning side-on but bowling increasingly chest-on. My wrist had consequently ‘collapsed’ – instead of pointing my palm at the batsman – so only googlies came out.
I was still chosen for Ampleforth’s next second XI game against Durham School Seconds. I took four wickets for eight runs as we dismissed them for 50. Having waited throughout my childhood for a game, I had taken my first ten wickets for 32 runs. But my leg-break had not returned – that took a couple of years – and I was soon dropped, or ‘allowed to concentrate on my A levels’. That was not undeserved, but I was subsequently written out of the school magazine. The master-in-charge awarded my wickets to the bowler at the other end, who had taken four wickets for nine.
In the following year, 1973, Bramall Lane was closed as a cricket ground. It had been discussed in the local newspapers for years. Sheffield United wanted their ground exclusively for football, even though they did not attract the crowds to fill the stand that was going to be built on the fourth side across the cricket square. Yorkshire had declined drastically since 1968: Close, Illingworth, Binks and Trueman gone, with all their knowledge and winning habits, through bad management more than age. Closure, nevertheless, felt like a gratuitous wound.
I went to the last game of cricket at Bramall Lane, the Roses Match against Lancashire, which was ruined by rain. Supporters were invited at the close to dig up the turf and take a piece home. That, for me, would have been desecrating a cemetery; but maybe it was better that the place where my childhood was happiest should be closed. Had I kept returning to Bramall Lane every summer, in pursuit of memories of my mother, I might not have moved on.
’Tis little I repair to the matches of the South’ron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
’Tis little I repair to the matches of the South’ron folk,
Though the red roses crest their caps, I know.
Seldom did the late Victorian poet Francis Thompson revisit Lord’s after the heroes of his youth, Hornby and Barlow, had ceased to play for Lancashire and ‘flicker to and fro, to and fro’: he could not afford to watch his old county, having drifted south to the streets of London, where he wrote his poetry and sold newspapers and became an opium addict. I never went to Bramall Lane again, after my own white roses there had blown.
But at least during my childhood I had watched cricket being played at its best, and had tasted the briefest success as a player. Before the door of the steel container slammed, I had seen the happiness that could lie beyond.