Squeezing the Orange
Squeezing the Orange
Henry Blofeld
The quintessentially English cricket commentator, writer, oenophile, bon viveur, collector and national treasure, fondly known as “Blowers”, tells his riveting life story.Born in Norfolk and educated at Eton and Cambridge, Henry Calthorpe Blofeld OBE, nicknamed “Blowers” by the late Brian Johnston, is best known as a cricket commentator for Test Match Special on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra. His distinctively rich, cut glass voice and his vividly eccentric observations of life on and off the pitch, have made him a household name, not only in Britain but around the world, wherever cricket is played. Blowers has been close the the heart of the game for over fifty years and his career has taken him to the far corners of the earth. This autobiography, stuffed to the gunwhales with delicious anecdotes, brings his astonishingly colourful story bang up to date.
About the Book (#ulink_341f8aa1-13da-53bc-aba6-8292b904ad80)
Nicknamed “Blowers” by the late Brian Johnston, Henry Calthorpe Blofeld is one of the best known and best loved sports’ journalists of all time. With his trademark bow-tie, his unmistakeably fruity tones and his delightfully idiosyncratic observations, both on and off the cricket field, Blowers has become a national institution.
He joined the legendary Test Match Special team in 1972. During his career as a journalist and a commentator, he has travelled extensively to the many parts of the world where cricket is played.
Although beset by illness (including major heart surgery in 1999), Henry Blofeld’s philosophy on life is a simple one: live every day as though it were your last and squeeze every last drop out of every waking moment. Even now, at the age of seventy-four, he continues to play by his own rules.
In Squeezing the Orange Blowers looks back affectionately on his childhood and his colourful career with all the wit and good humour which is the hallmark of this remarkable and quintessential Englishman.
About the Author (#ulink_c7991e84-3e1f-51ad-ba4c-8637a113ce75)
A consummate showman, raconteur, collector, gourmet and connoisseur of fine wines, Henry Blofeld was born in Norfolk and educated at Eton and Cambridge. He is the author of several books including The Packer Affair, My Dear Old Thing: Talking Cricket and A Thirst for Life. For the past few years he has been touring all over the UK with his one-man show, An Evening with Blowers, as well as many other public speaking engagements. He was awarded an OBE in 2003.
HENRY BLOFELD
Squeezing the Orange
Copyright (#ulink_36a73dac-1897-59dd-917c-d3400b9a77dd)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by Blue Door 2013
Copyright © Henry Blofeld 2013
Cover photograph © Colin Thomas 2013
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Henry Blofeld asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007506392
Ebook Edition © September 2013 ISBN: 9780007506415
Version: 2015-12-17
For Valeria, whose love, interest, humour and enthusiasm has made all the difference.
CONTENTS
Cover (#ube5675dd-8e08-5e1f-8ef6-528e8fe415fe)
About the Book (#ue795cef7-33f8-5e7e-bbfc-b799eec641c8)
About the Author (#ub52a7ce4-d9cb-5528-aeec-ed6b32924eb3)
Title Page (#ud4b9929d-7a58-5c5f-af80-70561fb7778b)
Copyright (#u5b5dd2d0-b98a-5c35-871e-56f2cbd56172)
Dedication (#u4c97cb22-3b6e-5ff0-a402-c3554093bf8b)
Preface (#u52a7e243-c284-5e0f-9a88-819a12f2f364)
1. Grizel and Shelling Peas (#ucc538b7e-4a59-59be-8e48-146df8ab7f56)
2. A Wodehousian Education (#u6bff724a-b6b8-5386-9bc9-47e9b0167313)
3. The French Women’s Institute (#uca490897-b889-5c2f-bb7e-8c51917968ff)
4. Queen Charlotte and a Milk Train (#ua7109f0d-f282-57b5-8d5a-436ad4e03ca5)
5. Mad Dogs and Honeymoons (#u1f8f5242-555a-525e-a2c4-ad1e580360ad)
6. Slum Dogs and Maharajahs (#litres_trial_promo)
7. A Lie at the Blue Mountain End (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Mugabe at the Pavilion End (#litres_trial_promo)
9. A Modest Dinner at Alresford (#litres_trial_promo)
10. The Traffic Cop in Faisalabad (#litres_trial_promo)
11. A Heavenly Rejection (#litres_trial_promo)
12. The Man in the Stocking Mask (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Norfolk at the Albert Hall (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Middle-Aged Junkies in Kandahar (#litres_trial_promo)
15. White Vans and Chewing Gum (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Photographic Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract from Thanks, Johnners – Jonathan Agnew (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_036bd1d4-c54e-5952-8fe6-41d503a6756f)
I find the older I get the more time I spend thinking back to my early life which I suppose turned me into the person I have become. I have found also that by looking back on this period at the age of seventy-three, I am able to look at it from a much more relaxed perspective than when I last wrote about it fifteen years ago.
The nasty bits don’t hurt or matter as much as they did and the best bits seem to have become even more fun. There is no point in trying to blame anyone but yourself. It is much better to throw your head back and have a thoroughly good laugh. As a result, maybe, I find my first thirty-odd years much more interesting than the rest of it, when effectively the die has been cast.
My early upbringing, strange by today’s standards; my traditional education which, after a homesick start, I enjoyed hugely; a nasty accident; Cambridge; the City and then my two extraordinarily lucky starts in both journalism and broadcasting have all left their mark. I have, therefore, written at some length about my early life and tried to bring alive some of the more remarkable characters who had an influence on me as I started out.
I have spent a life unashamedly in pursuit of fun and this book is meant to be a reflection of that. I know I have been horribly self-indulgent and hedonistic and altogether pretty selfish, but I hope also that I have communicated a fair measure of enjoyment and pleasure and it is this with which I am trying to deal now.
After describing how it all began, I decided not to go on in this vein in case it developed into a boring chronology of cricket tours and matches. I have talked about our commentary box and its inhabitants and one or two important occurrences along the way, but without, I hope, failing to see the funny side of it all.
If I have developed a philosophy, it is ridiculously simple. I regard every day as an orange, from which I try and squeeze every last drop of juice before moving on to tomorrow’s. This book is an attempt to bring a glass or two of that delicious juice back to life and hence the title.
Henry Blofeld
London, 2013
ONE (#ulink_d6d57a3f-0132-57fc-8fce-500d33526316)
Grizel and Shelling Peas (#ulink_d6d57a3f-0132-57fc-8fce-500d33526316)
According to my mother – who had drawn the short straw at the font when she was christened Grizel – my birth was less eventful than my conception. Grizel did not muck around: she was always earthy and to the point. When my wife and I were first married, she encouraged us to waste no time in starting a family, as she felt that delay might have a discouraging effect on procreation. ‘I was lucky,’ she told me, ‘because I bred at the shake of a pair of pants’ – adding, with emphasis, ‘Which was just as well, as it was all I ever got.’ That, I hope, was not entirely fair on Tom, my father, who may not have been one of Casanova’s strongest competitors, but I am sure he had his moments. In any case, this particular pair of pants must have shaken with vigour, no doubt as part of the Christmas festivities, in 1938, as late in the evening of the following 23 September I made a swift and noisy entrance into this world. Tom will have been sitting in the drawing room dealing with a whisky and soda and The Times crossword puzzle while Dr Bennett conducted the events upstairs. I dare say this was not too arduous a production for him, for on another occasion Grizel said, ‘I found that having babies was as easy as shelling peas. I can never understand what all the fuss is about.’ So that was that.
Tom and Grizel were fiercely Edwardian in their beliefs about bringing up children, and the three of us – Anthea was ten years older than me, and John seven – had a tougher time of it than children have now. Of course we were all born with whacking great silver spoons in our mouths, but I don’t know how you can choose your parents. You’ve got to get along with what you’ve got. I’m sure Anthea and John had a stricter start to life than I did. In the thirties nannies and nurserymaids abounded, and Tom and Grizel will have been even more remote figures for the other two than they were for me. I probably had an easier time of it because during the war Nanny had to go back home to Heacham in west Norfolk to look after her sick mother. As a result, Grizel, with the help of any temporary nurserymaid she could lay her hands on, had to roll up her sleeves and do much of the dirty work herself, so she and I had a closer relationship than she did with Anthea and John. I am sure the love between parents and children was just as strong then as it is now, but in those days it was not the upfront jamboree that it has become. In fact, when you look back at it all those years ago, it seems harsh and at times almost cruel. My friends were brought up in much the same way – that was just the way things were done. I should think my parents’ generation felt that life was easy for us compared to the way they themselves had been brought up in the years immediately after Queen Victoria had died. It is all part of the ever-going evolutionary process which has brought us now to the age of the free-range child. So what seemed perfectly normal to us at the time may seem shocking from today’s considerably more relaxed perspective.
While Tom and Grizel were sticklers for keeping us on the straight and narrow, they were, in their own way, loving parents who did their best to make sure that we had as happy a childhood as possible, within the constraints of the time. They were always there for us, to help and give support, although if the fault was mine, as it usually was, they did not hesitate to say so, and seldom minced their words. For years they remained a staunch last resort, and like all offspring I went running back when in need of help, usually in the form of cash, although with only modest success, as Tom and Grizel were never that flush, and guarded their pieces of eight with a solemn rectitude.
I remember when I had reached the pocket-money stage going along to my father’s dressing room to collect my weekly dose. Sometimes I arrived a little ahead of schedule and caught him in his pants, socks and attendant sock suspenders, which was an awe-inspiring sight. It was like looking at a pole-vaulter as things went wrong. There was great excitement one morning when I found I had graduated from a twelve-sided threepenny bit (a penny of which had to go into the church collection) to a silver sixpence. The handover of the coin or coins was carried out with a formality which almost suggested that the Bank of England was involved. Tom kept his loose change in the top drawer of a tiny chest with three little drawers which perched alongside his elderly pair of ivory-backed hairbrushes, which had a strong smell of lemon from the hair oil he got from his barber. As my father made a coot look as if it was in urgent need of a haircut, this all seemed a rather pointless exercise.
While he solemnly located the appropriate piece of small change in this magical drawer, I stood by the door. I don’t think it would have occurred to Tom that he was a frightening figure to a small boy. This had something to do with his height – he stood six feet six inches tall in his stocking feet – as well as his monocle and the sock suspenders, which so fascinated me. His lighter side was harder to find than Grizel’s, and his was naturally a more formal manner. The staff, in the house and on the Home Farm, treated him with a watchful respect. When crossed or let down he could be extremely angry, and would have made common cause with some of those grumpy Old Testament prophets.
Tom regarded the ancien régime as the only possible way forward, while Grizel, if left to herself, would have been happy to allow her more extravagant natural instincts to come to the surface. While Grizel laughed in a bubbling, jolly sort of way, Tom’s merriment seemed to rumble up with more control from the bottom of his throat, and the source of his humour was often harder to fathom than his wife’s. Grizel had a strong sense of loyalty to her husband, and she was always more than aware of her position as Tom’s wife, and played the role pretty well. She was a snob, but I remember it as a snobbery as of right, rather than as a contrivance. Looking back on my parents and my childhood now, it comes to me like a black-and-white, but seldom silent, movie, and from this distance I find it highly entertaining.
The Blofelds have always been a restless lot. At some long-ago point, now lost in the mists of time, they moved from north Germany to Finland, and then shot across the North Sea with the Vikings before finally being grounded on the north Norfolk coast somewhere near what is today called Overstrand, then pushing a few miles inland and setting up shop in a small village called Sustead. Three or four hundred years whizzed by before they up-anchored again, moving twenty-odd miles south-east to Hoveton, which at that time was owned by some people called Doughty. Having a shrewd eye for the main chance, a Blofeld married a Miss Doughty, who was to become the sole surviving member of that distinguished family. Hoveton therefore soon became the Blofeld stronghold, and has remained so ever since.
Discipline – good manners, politeness, the pleases and thank yous of life – was all-important in my childhood. I can’t remember how young I was when I was first soundly ticked off for not leaping to my feet when my mother came into the room, but young enough. Dirty hands, undone buttons, sloppy speech or pronunciation, and the use of certain words were all jumped upon. Throwing sweet papers or any other rubbish out of the car window was also not popular. Goodness knows what my parents would have made of mobile telephones, and their frequent and disturbing use. Table manners were rigidly enforced. No one sat down before Grizel was in place, and you were not allowed to start eating until everyone had been served. If toast crumbs were left on a pat of butter, there was hell to pay, your napkin had to be neatly folded before you left the dining room, and you ate what was put in front of you and left a clean plate.
The nursery was presided over by Nanny Framingham, who was nothing less than a saint. Cheerful, enthusiastic and always smiling, she put up with all sorts of skulduggery. On one occasion I all but frightened her to death. My father’s guns and cartridges were kept in the schoolroom, which was next to his office. I always took a lively interest in the gun cupboard, although it was forbidden territory, and when no one was around I used to go and have a good look round. I loved the smell of the 3-in-One oil which was used to clean the guns. There was also something irresistible about the cartridges. I would steal one or two of them, take them back to the nursery and cut them up to see how they were made. One afternoon Nanny came into the room unexpectedly while I was engaged in this harmless pastime, and the sight of the gunpowder and loose shot lying all over the table terrified her – she saw us all going up in an enormous explosion, and was quick to run off and enlist help. Within a matter of minutes Tom burst into the nursery, looking and sounding a good deal worse than the wrath of God. My cartridge-cutting activities came to an immediate halt, and I was probably sent up to my bedroom for an indefinite period, possibly with a clip over the ear or a smack on the bottom as well. Corporal punishment was always on the menu.
The schoolroom lived up to its name, for it was there, along with my first cousin, Simon Cator, and Jane Holden, an unofficial sister and lifelong friend who lived nearby at Neatishead, that we were given the rudiments of an education by the small, bespectacled, virtuous, austere and humourless Mrs Hales. I often wonder, looking back, what she and Mr Hales – who I’m not sure I ever met – got up to in their spare time. Not a great deal, I should think. They lived at Sea Palling, and she turned up each morning rather earlier than was strictly necessary in her elderly Austin Seven, which, in spite of often making disagreeable and unlikely noises, kept going for many years. On the occasions when we got the better of Mrs Hales and were rather noisily mobbing her up, the door from the schoolroom into my father’s office would burst open, Tom’s thunderous face would appear, and order would be instantly restored. Our lessons were fun, and we learned to read and write and do some basic arithmetic. Mrs Hales must have done a good job, because when I went away to boarding school I found I was able to hold my own.
Tom was an imposing figure. In addition to his height, he had a small moustache which was more a smattering of foliage on his upper lip than anything else. He said he grew it to avoid having to shave his upper lip, which, as he used a cut-throat razor for most of his life, may have been a tricky operation. He had a huge nose, which he blew and sneezed through with considerable venom while applying a large and colourful silk handkerchief to the enormous protuberance. His monocle hung from a thread around his neck, and dangled down in front of his tie. This was impressive, unless, as a small boy, I was summoned to his office for my school report to be discussed. I would tread apprehensively down the long corridor, past the cellar and the game larder, and through the schoolroom for this ghastly meeting. It never had a happy outcome, because away from the games field I was an out-and-out slacker. Tom, sitting behind his desk while I perched apprehensively on the leather bum-warmer around the fireplace, would read out all the hideous lies those wretched schoolmasters had written about me. Not only that, he would believe every single word of them. Both he and Grizel invariably took the side of my persecutors, something it seems parents seldom do today. Having read out the details of whichever crime it was that I was supposed to have committed, there would be a nasty tweak of the muscles around his right eye. The monocle would fall down his shirt front, indicating that it was my turn to go in to bat. I was then invariably bowled by a ball I should have left alone.
When I had reached the age when I was more or less house-trained, I was allowed to join my parents in the drawing room for an hour or so before going to bed. Nanny would open the drawing-room door in the hall to let me in, and Grizel would always greet me with the words, ‘Hello, ducky.’ I loved these visits, for Grizel usually had something fun or interesting for me to do. She taught me card games, starting with a simple two-handed game called cooncan. I graduated from that to hearts, which needed four people, and piquet, which I played with Tom. Grizel also taught me the patiences she would play while Tom was reading and I loved the one called ‘trousers’. We played Ludo and Cluedo, and occasionally Monopoly. Tom would make up the numbers for these, too, but I don’t think Monopoly was really his sort of thing. When he had bought the Old Kent Road he was never quite sure what to do with it.
When I was a touch older, Tom would read aloud to me, and I have always been eternally grateful for this. I think he started me off with Kipling’s Just So Stories – I adored ‘The Elephant’s Child’. I know I have never laughed at any story more than Mr Jorrocks’s adventures in R.S. Surtees’ Handley Cross. Tom was brilliant at all the different accents: his imitation of huntsman James Pigg’s Scottish vowels was special. Then there were John Buchan’s Richard Hannay books, The Thirty-Nine Steps and so on, and Dornford Yates’s stories about Jonathan Mansell and the others discovering treasure in castles in Austria. I was introduced to Bulldog Drummond, Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy Sayers’ detective Lord Peter Wimsey who became a great hero of mine. Tom adored P.G. Wodehouse, and wanted to read me some of the Jeeves books, but Grizel couldn’t stand them, and they stayed on the shelves. We all have awful secrets which we hope will never slip out. One of mine is that I had a mother who didn’t like Wodehouse or Gilbert and Sullivan. This still surprises me, because I would have thought Grizel would have enjoyed the fantasy world of Wodehouse. Tom’s reading would finish in time for the weather and the six o’clock news. After the news headlines, Tom would invariably tell Grizel to turn off the wireless. He dismissed the rest of the news as ‘gossip’. Then it was drinks time for them and bedtime for me.
I am sure Tom never played cricket, judging from his one performance in the fathers’ match when I was at Sunningdale. But he enjoyed the game, and each summer he and two of his friends, Reggie Cubitt (who was his cousin) and Christo Birkbeck, would go up to London for the three days of the Gentlemen v. Players match at Lord’s. They stayed at Boodle’s, and I dare say it was as close as any of them ever came to letting their hair down, which probably meant no more than having a second glass of vintage port after dinner. It is unlikely that they would have paid a visit to the Bag o’Nails after that. Reggie and Christo were a sort of social barometer for Tom and Grizel. If, in the years I still lived at home, I was intending to embark upon some rather flashy adventure, Grizel would caution me by saying, ‘What would Reggie and Christo think?’
Just before the end of the war there were some German prisoners-of-war working on the farm at Hoveton. It was said that if Germany had played cricket it might never have gone to war, so it was ironic that these PoWs were put to work turning a part of the old parkland up by the little round wood at Hill Piece into a wonderfully picturesque cricket ground. The village team, Hoveton and Wroxham, played there, and for several years later on I organised a two-day game in September between the Eton Ramblers and the Free Foresters, which was highly competitive and great fun. It was a lovely ground in a wonderful setting, but sadly it has disappeared for a part of it has now been planted over with trees.
Tom could be great value. He had a wonderful turn of phrase. He and Grizel would go to bed every night at around ten o’clock. Sitting in the drawing room at the Home Farm, or later in the hall at Hoveton House, he would shut his book, half stretch, and say, ‘Well, I think it’s time for a bit of a lie-down before breakfast.’ Another splendid offering would come when a visitor was over-keen to make a favourable impression. When asked what he thought about whoever it was when he had gone, Tom would say, ‘Awfully nice. I do just wish he wouldn’t fart above his arsehole quite so much.’
There was one incident when I was young for which I never forgave Tom. I always ate with Nanny in the nursery, but I was allowed to have lunch in the dining room with my parents on the last full day of the school holidays – I was sent to boarding school at Sunningdale when I was seven and a half. And not only that: I was allowed to choose the pudding. One year Grizel came by a stock of tinned black cherries, and whenever I tasted them I didn’t think I would ever get much closer to heaven. Goodness knows where she found them. Anyway, on this occasion I said I would like some black cherries as the pud, and to my surprise my wish was granted. We sat down to lunch at one o’clock – mealtimes were immutable, and if you were late it was considered to be a major crime. Tom carved the cold beef. They had cold roast beef six days a week, or so it seemed, and to ring the changes, hot roast beef on Sundays. A woman called Joan, who ferried these things around in the dining room, put my plate in front of me, and when everyone had been served, we tucked in. Our empty plates were collected, and then it was time for the cherries.
They were brought in by Joan on a large brown tray, and put down on the sideboard. As well as the big glass bowl brimful of cherries, there was another full of junket, that ghastly milk jelly which I detested with a passion. Tom got up to serve us, and in addition to a pretty useful pile of cherries, I was given two big spoonfuls of junket. We were brought up to ‘eat level’, which meant that junket and cherries had to be eaten together. But on this occasion I threw caution to the winds and, feigning great enthusiasm, got stuck into the junket, which I finished in record time. My undisturbed pile of cherries was now gleaming up at me from my plate. The next five minutes looked promising. But Tom had been watching.
‘Joan,’ he said, for she was still lurking by the sideboard, ‘Master Henry’ – I was always Master Henry as far as the staff were concerned – ‘clearly does not like his cherries. Will you please remove them.’ Which is what she did, and I have only just stopped crying. Life could be bloody unfair, or so it seemed. But I had broken the rules.
In the fifties Tom bought an old Rolls-Royce from a chap who lived in the neighbouring village of Coltishall. It was a bespoke model, and was thought to be one of the last Rolls made with a red ‘RR’ on the front of the bonnet – the change to black was made in 1933, for aesthetic reasons. It was a huge, pale-grey car with a soft roof which never came off, as far as I know. There was a window between the back and the front seats which could be wound up by those in the back so the chauffeur couldn’t do any eavesdropping. As Tom always drove it himself this window remained down and was not to be touched. I thought it was the sexiest car ever, because it had no fewer than three horns. One was a gentle toot for warning an old woman against crossing the road; the next was a bit stronger, in case she had already started; and the third was a klaxon which yelled at her just as she was disappearing under the wheels. ‘Bloody fool,’ Tom would mutter after he had pressed it.
My father used the Rolls as his main car for at least ten years, and it always caused my school chums great amusement when he drove it down to Eton. He was the Chairman of the Country Gentleman’s Association, and the number plate was CG 1000, so he was known by my friends as ‘Country Gent One Thousand’. As it was such a big car he sometimes had difficulty negotiating the smaller streets in London, but it was such an imperious-looking machine that almost everyone got out of the way. If not, there was much hooting, which occasionally got to the klaxon stage. Although parking in those days was a great deal easier than it is now, it still presented problems in the busy parts of London. But Tom, whose appearance was nothing if not distinguished, had the answer to that. He would drive slowly down, say, Bond Street, and when he saw two coppers walking along the pavement – as one did in those far-distant days – he would stop the car, get out and shut the door, saying to the nearest one, ‘Officer, look after my car for me. I shall only be about ten minutes,’ and walk off. When he returned they would indeed be looking after his car. I always wondered who they thought he was.
In many ways Grizel was the antithesis to Tom. She was short, although there was a fair bit of her in the horizontal sense, and she packed a pretty good punch. She went around like a battleship under full steam, with a siren to match. A woman of the most forthright and damning opinions, with a fund of common sense, she did not tolerate what she described as nonsense in any shape or form, and was quick to spot anything remotely bogus. In turn, you had to accept her as she was. She was very bright, and had a marvellous sense of humour. She was a reasonably devout Christian, and church – where Tom read the lessons, and was joint patron of the living together with the Bishop of Norwich – was an essential part of Sundays. As a child, I always felt the time spent in church could have been more usefully employed. Grizel, sensing my objections, would say to me, ‘You’ve had a lovely week. Now you can spend an hour saying thank you.’ She was fond of God, but dealt with him entirely on her own terms. When they eventually met I should think a good deal of finger-wagging of the ‘now, look here’ sort will have gone on.
In 1956 we moved up the drive from the Home Farm to Hoveton House. There was a dinner party soon afterwards, and one of my parents’ friends who came along was what people today would refer to as a born-again Christian. In those days he was known as a God-botherer. He loved to get stuck into his neighbour’s ribs and start banging on about God. While she was all for the general idea of converting people, Grizel felt there was a time and place for everything, and that a dinner party was not remotely a conversional occasion, so she sat him next to her to avoid the danger. But after dinner, as was the custom, the ladies left the room to powder their noses or whatever, leaving the chaps to drink their port before they all joined forces later on in the drawing room. When this moment arrived, our God-botherer found himself sitting on a sofa on the other side of the fireplace from Grizel. After a few minutes she noticed that he was giving his neighbour, a good-looking girl, a fearful going over about the Almighty. She coughed and generally registered short-range disapproval. The God-botherer, realising that he had got it wrong, stopped in mid-sentence and, leaning forward towards Grizel with his elbows on his knees, asked in a surprised voice, ‘But surely, Grizel, you believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ?’ Grizel narrowed her eyes, leaned back a fraction and delivered a stinging rebuke: ‘Never in the drawing room after dinner.’ Which was game, set and match.
Every summer for the last five years of their lives together, before my father put his cue in the rack in 1986, my parents would go for a holiday on a barge on the French canals. It was a fearfully upmarket barge, without a punt pole in sight. At six o’clock each evening they had a glass of champagne on deck, then went up to their cabin to change for dinner, which meant a dinner jacket for Tom and a long skirt for Grizel, before re-emerging to have another glass of champagne. There were always a number of Americans on board who helped make up the numbers. Grizel was suspicious of Americans. She felt that they bounced rather too much. One evening the two of them went up to change for dinner, came down suitably attired and tackled their second glasses of champagne. They had hardly begun when from stage right, a short, middle-aged American in ‘perfectly ghastly rubber shoes’ came bouncing across the deck to Grizel with his arms outstretched, saying in a loud voice, ‘Hi, my name’s Jim. What’s yours?’ This was too much for Grizel who took a step back, mentally at any rate, drew herself up to her full five feet six and a half inches and said in a menacingly firm voice, ‘That, I am afraid, is a private matter, but you may call me Mrs Blofeld.’ I think Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia might well have come up with both those answers.
I have found that the older I become, the more I look back to my origins and see it all in a different perspective even from fifteen years ago. If I seem a little too critical of my parents, it is with my tongue firmly in my cheek. I feel now, more than ever, that the most surprising thing is that these things happened at all. Hoveton was terrific fun, and it would not have been so enjoyable if Tom and Grizel had been other than they were. Their strong personalities were stamped all over the place. And not only that: although they were never particularly flush with cash, they gave all three of us a wonderful education. Anthea went on to become a doctor, and John, who inherited Tom’s wonderful speaking voice, became a distinguished High Court judge. Meanwhile, I scrabbled around in the press and the broadcasting boxes of the cricketing world. Then when old age was taking hold I began to tread the boards, in the hope of making a few people laugh in any theatre brave enough to take me on, although I fear I may have bored many of them to tears.
We now live in an age when much that I never even dreamt about when I was young has come about. The world of Tom and Grizel has been relegated to the stuff of fairy stories, yet at the time it was as natural as night following day. There was no other game in town for those on either side of the green baize door, and we all got on with it. As a child I had a great relationship with everyone who worked for my parents, both in the house and on the farm, except for Mrs Porcher, our cook. She was a small woman with a shrill voice, and although she was no doubt a dab hand at the kitchen stove, as far as I was concerned she never seemed to blur any issue with goodwill. She didn’t exactly take on my parents, but there was sometimes a curtness to her manner that did not always bring out the best in Grizel. I remember Mrs Porcher going into the drawing room after breakfast, notepad in hand, ready for Grizel to order the food for lunch and dinner that day. Mrs Porcher always had the sense to realise that if she entered into a battle of wills with Grizel there could only be one outcome, while Grizel knew that it would be an awful bore to have to find another cook. As a result, there existed a continuous state of armed neutrality between them. When Mrs Porcher eventually returned permanently into the no doubt grateful arms of Mr Porcher, cooks came and went at a fair pace, until the redoubtable Mrs Alexander took over.
My early years must have shaped the initial hard core of me, which I hope has been smoothed down a bit by the subsequent journey through the mainly self-imposed rough seas of life. In many ways, of course, memory is selective, but there is no doubt that the family estate at Hoveton was an enchanting place in which to have been brought up. Over a great many years it had grown smaller as those in charge of it had seen fit to sell off pieces of land – mostly, I expect, to raise a bit of lolly. But the nucleus that still remained when I was young was heaven for a small boy. Two of the Norfolk Broads, Hoveton Great Broad and Hoveton Little Broad, were within its boundaries, and there were many acres of exciting marshland, with dykes and dams and all manner of birdlife, from ducks and geese to bitterns, swans, hawks and masses of smaller varieties. Grizel was passionate about the local flora and fauna, and would teach me the names of butterflies, birds, insects, trees and wildflowers. Sadly I have forgotten most of them, which would have made her very cross. Sometimes she would find a swallowtail butterfly chrysalis in the reeds on the marshes. This would be brought home and put in a cage in the drawing room, and some time later the most beautifully coloured butterfly you could imagine would emerge. Before it could damage those magical wings by fluttering against the sides of the cage, it would be released into the marshes to fend for itself. Sadly, over the years swallowtails became increasingly scarce and by now have probably completely disappeared : I should think the last one to be reared at home was sometime in the fifties.
For a time Grizel collected Siamese cats, which lived in a long wooden hut in the farmyard at the Home Farm. She won many prizes with them. The silver spoons with which we stirred our coffee after lunch all had the letters ‘SCC’ (Siamese Cat Club) emblazoned on their handles. She also went through a Japanese bantam stage, during which, intermingled with a fluffy collection of white Silkies, they trawled all over the farmyard, not always to Tom’s delight.
Another phase of her life was devoted to Dutch rabbits. These again won prizes, and were kept in the shed that had once been the home of the Siamese cats. There was also an impressive herd of pedigree Shorthorns, which, amid great excitement, won all sorts of prizes over the years at the Royal Show. Grizel was closely involved with the breeding of the cattle, and would go down to the dairy farm almost every day. With the head cowman in tow she would have a look at whatever animals she was particularly interested in, and cast an eye over any new calves. If need be, she was more than happy to roll up her sleeves and help with a difficult birth. When I was very young she would talk for ages to Birch, who was the head cowman, and later to his successor, Pressley, whom I found more fun. I remember Grizel and Pressley constantly hatching plots to convince Tom of the necessity of buying a new bull, or a couple of heifers, or whatever. The dairy was always a fruitful playground for me. I loved watching the cows being milked, and then the milk being separated from the cream. There was one occasion when I eluded Grizel and Pressley and walked into one of the cow sheds when a heifer was in the act of being served by a bull. After I had been dragged out Pressley was embarrassed, but Grizel, who took these things in her stride, said to me, ‘You’ll find out more about that one day, darling, but not just yet.’ This left me deeply curious, but I knew better than to question her. She had drawn a line under the subject for the time being.
Grizel, with her familiar stride, which was more a purposeful walk than a strut, was forever busying herself around the house, the garden and the farmyard. She made the life of the gardener, Walter Savage, confusing and difficult as she issued instructions over her shoulder while he struggled along in her wake. Savage, as we called him, was thin, about medium height, with a white moustache, a good First War record, and a huge and frightening wife who put the fear of God into poor old Savage. They lived in one half of the charming Dutch gabled cottage at the bottom of the Hoveton House garden. When I was a bit older, Savage would drive me and some friends in my mother’s car to the Norwich speedway track, where the home team were pretty high in the national pecking order. Ove Fundin, a five-time world champion from somewhere in Scandinavia, was a name I shall never forget; nor that thrilling smell of petrol fumes and burning rubber as the riders strove to steer their brakeless bikes around corners. On other occasions Savage ferried several of us to the Yarmouth Fun Fair, where the bumper cars, the ghost train and the fish and chips were all irresistible.
When I was a child the farm, which had been whittled down over the years to about 1,300 acres, had become principally a fruit farm. There were an awful lot of people employed to tend to its needs. When I was old enough I used to help the wives of the farmworkers pick the fruit. There was the excitement of being paid sixpence by Herbert Haines for a basket of Victoria plums and a punnet of raspberries. This was a useful supplement to my pocket money. Herbert, short and indomitably cheerful, wearing a perilously placed felt hat, loved his cricket and presided over the fruit picking.
The farm manager, the slightly austere, bespectacled and white-haired Mr Grainger, tootled about the place in his rather severe-looking car. I was extremely careful of him, for I knew that anything I got up to would go straight back to Tom. Mr Grainger had a small office in the Home Farm yard which I avoided like the plague. In fact I think it was a mutual avoidance. As far as I was concerned, Mr Grainger, who lived in a small house down the drive, was always hard work, and if he had a lighter side, I never found it. My father’s office was presided over by the ebullient, bouncing and eternally jolly, but not inconsiderable, figure of Miss Easter, a local lady from Salhouse who was a close ally of Nanny’s. I loved it when she paid us a visit in the nursery. ‘Miss Easter’ was a tongue-twister for the young, and she was known affectionately by all of us, including Grizel, as ‘Seasser’, although Tom never bent from ‘Miss Easter’. I suppose she must have had a Christian name, but I can’t remember it. Sadly for us, she left Hoveton when approaching middle age, and became Mrs Charles Blaxall. He was a yeoman farmer, and they lived somewhere between Hoveton and Yarmouth. I used to go with Nanny to visit her in her new role as a farmer’s wife. She remained the greatest fun, always provided goodies and was one of the real characters of my early life. I can hear her cheerful, echoing laughter even now.
Freddie Hunn, a small man with the friendliest of smiles, was in charge of the cattle feed, which was ground up and mixed in the barn across the yard from my father’s office. I loved to go and help Freddie. There was a huge mixer, which was almost the height of the building. All the ingredients were thrown in at the top, mixed, and then poured into sacks at the bottom. The barn had a delicious, musty smell. Freddie’s other role was to look after the cricket ground at the other end of the farmyard, through the big green gate and up the long grassy slope to Hill Piece. After his day in the barn had finished he would go up to the ground and get to work with the roller or mower or whatever else was needed. The day before a match between Hoveton and Wroxham and one of the neighbouring villages, out would come the whitener, and the creases would be marked. I found it all fascinating, and Nanny could hardly get me back to the house in time for a bath on Friday evenings.
Freddie was a great Surrey supporter, while I was passionate about Middlesex and Compton and Edrich. But Freddie always thought he had trumped my ace when he turned, as he inevitably did, to Jack Hobbs. Freddie’s wife, the large, smiling Hilda Hunn, supervised the delicious cricket teas, and sometimes allowed me a second small cake in an exciting, coloured paper cup.
One of my favourite farmworkers was Lennie Hubbard, whom we all, including my father, called by his Christian name. I never discovered why or how such distinctions were made: why most of the workers on the farm were known by their surnames, while Freddie, Lennie and one or two others went by their Christian names. Lennie was tall, and had been born in the Alms Houses in Lower Street, the rather upmarket name for the lane that ran past these cottages down to the marshes. Once, a great many years earlier, that lane had been part of the main road from Norwich to Yarmouth, which had originally gone past the front of Hoveton House. During the Second World War Lennie had been taken prisoner by the Germans, but had managed to escape – perhaps it was his gallantry that had caused his Christian name to be used. Tom always enjoyed talking to Lennie, and regarded him as one of his best and most faithful employees. There was an irony in that, as Lennie told me much later, long after Tom had died, he and one or two others, for all their outward godliness, had been diehard poachers. He told me, with a broad smile, of an occasion when one day my father had suddenly appeared around the corner of a hedge and spoken to him for ten minutes. Under his greatcoat Lennie was hiding his four-ten shotgun and a recently killed cock pheasant. I dare say he never came closer to losing both his job and his Christian-name status.
Shooting was another highlight of my early life. I fired my first shot when I was nine, missing a sitting rabbit by some distance. I am afraid I was the bloodthirstiest of small boys, and I have loved the excitement and drama of shooting for as long as I can remember.
Tom used to arrange six or seven days’ shooting a year with never more than seven guns. They would kill between one and two hundred pheasants and partridges in a day. As a small boy I found these days hugely exciting. Then there was the early-morning duck flighting on the Great Broad. This was always a terrific adventure, getting up in the dark and eating bread and honey and drinking Horlicks in the kitchen before setting off by car for the Great Broad boathouse soon after five o’clock in the morning. There was also the evening flighting on the marshes, when each of us stood in a small butt made of dried reeds. This was also thrilling, and of course by the time we got home night had set in.
Carter was the first gamekeeper I remember. He was a small, rather gnarled man with a lovely Norfolk voice. Apart from looking after the game and trying to keep the vermin in check, his other job each morning was to brush and press the clothes my father had worn the day before. He did this on a folding wooden table on the verandah by the back door. When he had done this, if I asked politely and he was in an obliging mood, he would come out to the croquet lawn and bowl at me for a few minutes. I had to tread carefully with Carter. I think he was the first person ever to bowl overarm to me with a proper cricket ball. Sometimes I hit him into the neighbouring stinging nettles, which ended play for the day, for his charity did not extend to doing the fielding off his own bowling. Carter was the village umpire during the summer. I’m not sure about his grasp of the laws of the game, but you didn’t question his decisions – you merely moaned about them afterwards. When Carter retired he was succeeded by Watker, a brilliant clay-pigeon shot and, to me, a Biggles-like figure; and then by Godfrey, the nicest of them all. I would spend a huge amount of time with the keepers during the holidays. Once or twice I looked after Godfrey’s vermin traps when he had his holiday. Sadly, neither Watker nor Godfrey had a clue how to bowl, but Nanny, who was up for most things, would bowl to me on the croquet lawn. Her underarm offerings often ended up in the nettles, and being the trouper she was, she would dive in after them, and usually got nastily stung.
It was a fantastic world in which to be brought up. Looking back on it, it was quite right that I should have been taught how to use it and respect it. I can almost feel myself forgiving Tom for those cherries. In a way it was sad when my full-time enjoyment of Hoveton came to an end. But when I was seven and a half I was sent away to boarding school at Sunningdale, almost 150 miles away, which may now seem almost like wanton cruelty, but was par for the course in those days. When I was young, all I wanted to do was to grow older, and going away to school seemed a satisfactory step in the right direction.
TWO (#ulink_3d8793ee-5e31-5732-a037-04071e80d6a2)
A Wodehousian Education (#ulink_3d8793ee-5e31-5732-a037-04071e80d6a2)
I was not unduly alarmed at the prospect of being sent away to school. John had been to Sunningdale, and had survived, although of course as he was seven years older than me, we were never at school together. Grizel had been calling me ‘Blofeld’ for some while before I went, for she wanted to make sure that I would be used to being called by my surname when I got to the school. For some reason I was not made to call Tom ‘sir’, which was how I would have to address the masters. Ordering the school uniform and all the other clothes I would need had gone on for weeks, and Nanny had sewn smart red name-tapes onto all the shirts, pants and stockings, revealing to anyone who chose to look – but principally, I suspect, the laundry – that they belonged to H.C. Blofeld. I won’t say I jumped happily into the back of my father’s dark-green Armstrong Siddeley in early May 1947, but I was nothing like as homesick as I was to become over the next couple of years when going back to school at the end of the holidays. I think Nanny was the person who minded it all the most, and she was probably the closest to tears amid the frantic waving as we tootled off.
The journey went on for nearly five hours before we turned left into the school drive, with rhododendrons on either side. We went up a short hill to what then appeared to me to be a huge gravelled area in front of the house, where half a dozen cars were parked. It all seemed uncomfortably large, and I think I began to quiver. I was greeted with formal handshakes by Mr and Mrs Fox, the headmaster and his wife. Mr Fox’s black hair gleamed with oil, which made him smell of mildly austere flowers. He was wearing a rather severe three-piece suit, with fiercely polished black shoes, and gave me an exceedingly creased half-smile. By now I was beginning to think I had been sold an ungovernably fast one by Tom and Grizel when they had told me what a smashing place Sunningdale would be.
Tom was being pleasantly avuncular in the background while Grizel, with considerable gusto, was shooing me around the Foxes’ drawing room to shake hands with everyone in sight. Having been through it all with John, she knew the leaders of the pack well enough, and briskly brushed aside an under-matron and a junior master. False bonhomie was very much the order of the day. I think we were all given a cup of tea and, who knows, a cucumber sandwich. Mrs Fox, wearing glasses and with a good deal of grey hair, did not exactly clutch me to her bosom. Her efforts to be kind did nothing to steady my nerves.
Most of the staff were present, including Matron, Miss Cryer, who had been at the school for many years and had once met Nanny when John was there. Nanny had generally given her the OK, and she made friendly noises at this somewhat stilted gathering as she bustled around with tea and whatever while Grizel told me to be careful not to spill crumbs on the carpet. Mr Burrows, Mr Fox’s second-in-command, was there, tall, stiffly formal, with a greyish moustache and a smile which resembled one of Carter’s gin traps in repose. We were eventually to become quite good friends, but I would never have guessed it at our first meeting. Mr Tupholme, ‘Tuppy’ to one and all, was grinning cheerfully away and doing his best to bring a touch of jollity to the proceedings. Tuppy was an all-round good egg. Mr Sheepshanks, quite a bit younger, was also cheerful in a black-moustached, ‘What-fun-it-will-all-be-oh-my-goodness-me’ sort of way, and Miss Paterson put in a tight-lipped appearance just to make sure things did not get too jolly. Conversation, if it can be called that, hardly flowed. There were two or three other new boys there with their parents. I have forgotten their names although I think one was Laycock, but I well remember being introduced to one by Mrs Fox, who said in a formal voice, ‘This is Blofeld.’ I was grateful for Grizel’s tuition.
Being the start of the summer term, there was not the influx of new boys that arrived in late September at the start of the school year. We were taken by Mrs Fox and Matron to see the lower dormitory. I was shown the bed in which I was going to sleep, and I think an under-matron may have flitted by. Grizel came with us, and kept telling me how much I would enjoy it once I got used to it. I wished I had shared her confidence. There must have been eight or ten beds, a wash stand and a bowl for each of us in a row at the foot of the beds, a po cupboard underneath, and a basket under the bed for the clothes I would take off before jumping into my pyjamas. The longer this introduction to my new quarters went on, the more I felt my enthusiasm draining. Then it was back along the passages, the walls of which were covered with school groups from prehistoric times. One new boy was shown a photograph and told, ‘There’s your father.’ I hope it gave them both encouragement. It was not long after that that Tom and Grizel decided the time had come for them to leave. Tom certainly never specialised in emotional farewells, and Grizel did her best, giving me the briefest of pecks on the cheek, although she will have been alarmed by the thought that I might burst into tears. Then I watched, helpless, as they strode across the gravel to the car, got in, started the engine and disappeared from view. I was well and truly on my own, and I didn’t like the look of it. I managed not to blub which would have been letting the side down.
I was the youngest boy in the school, and, funnily enough, found this to be a good deal more of a liability than I had expected. It seemed to bring in its wake a disdainful hostility rather than the sympathy I had hoped for. The lower dormitory passed off without too much worry, but I had problems a term or two later for as soon as I was promoted to the upper dormitory, I got on the wrong end of some nasty bullying. There was a monitor in each dormitory who slept in a bed by the door. He didn’t come up until about two hours after the rest of us, which left scope for bullying. Next door to him was a little horror who I don’t think I’ve seen since the day he left Sunningdale, although he probably went on to Eton – most of the boys did, but I don’t remember him there. He forced me to do a number of things which went severely against the grain.
The worst was when I was made to go to the stairwell with my tortoiseshell-backed hairbrush, which had a piece of sticking plaster on it proclaiming ‘Blofeld’ in bold ink. Then, as the girl who carried the cocoa and the cups to the library for the older boys before they went to bed walked underneath, I was instructed to drop the hairbrush so that it landed on the tray, or better still, hit her on the head. Mercifully, I didn’t get it right – if I had, it might have finished her off – and the brush fell with a sickening thud on the floor beside her. She was a good girl, because she didn’t drop the tray or swerve or even scream, but carried steadfastly on. However, retribution was swift. I was in appalling trouble, and came head-to-head for the first time with Mr Burrows, who lived in a part study, part bedroom and part torture chamber in which there was a visible array of canes sticking out of a tall basket which he was never reluctant to use. And when he did, he put a good deal more vim into it than Mr Fox. For some strange reason, Mr Burrows did not tell me to bend over on this occasion. I have no idea what I said to him about the incident, but I didn’t sneak, for that would have meant that my life in the upper dormitory and everywhere else would have been hell. Sneaking was the worst of crimes.
I am not sure why I got away with this early misdemeanour so lightly. It may have been that the powers-that-were had a fair idea of why the hairbrush incident had happened. Mr Burrows had an armour-plated exterior, but a streak of kindness underneath, even if, for the most part, he disguised it well. Anyway, if I was still able to recognise the chap who forced me to drop the hairbrush, I would even now be sorely tempted to step across the street and have a word with him. His name was Baring, and he was almost certainly one of the banking lot. I remember thinking all those years later what a splendid chap the wretched Nick Leeson must have been, and how miserably he was treated. He had no greater supporter than me. I mean, to be sent to a Singaporean gaol for performing such a notable public service …
I couldn’t have enjoyed Sunningdale too much at the start of my five years there, because I was terribly homesick, and at the end of the holidays I had to be hauled off back to school. I howled outrageously in the car most of the way. But not everything was bad. I dipped my toes into the waters of cricket for the first time in my first term, and fell for it just like that. There were other good things too. The sausages we had for breakfast once a week – Wednesdays I think – were delicious, although the daily dose of porridge which preceded them was more awful than anything I have ever eaten in my life. We were made to finish it, then or at lunch, and I have never eaten porridge since. Even the unspeakable mincemeat we were given for lunch on Fridays, which gloried in the splendid name of ‘Friday Muck’, was a couple of lengths better than the porridge and I have struck up a more meaningful relationship with the present-day equivalent of Friday Muck. The name was invented by my contemporary at the school Nicholas Howard-Stepney from the family which owned Horlicks. He was also responsible for Wednesday lunch’s ‘Pharaoh’s Bricks’, a cake pudding cut in Eastern European-like rectangular blocks with the merest soupçon of jam on the top, and ‘Thames Mud’, a terrifyingly solid chocolate blancmange which seemed both to wobble and frown at you. I suppose post-war food rationing hardly helped Mrs Fox when it came to creating the menu.
The cast at Sunningdale was nothing if not Wodehousian. Mr Fox, who went by the Christian names of George Dacre (PGW had a housemaster called Dacre in Tales of St Austin’s), had signed up in 1906. Maybe there was something of the Reverend Aubrey Upjohn (Bertie Wooster’s private-school headmaster) in Mr Fox, and I have no doubt that they would have hit it off like a couple of sailors on shore leave. By the time I met Mr Fox his face was inordinately lined, craggy and ancient, and would have made the Gutenberg Bible look to its laurels. To us, Mr Fox seemed older than God, and spoke in a slow, sepulchral tone that did nothing to make me think I was about to make a lifelong friend. He frightened me out of my socks, and beat me in the fourth-form classroom at the top of the stairs on the left whenever I kicked over the traces. A stern lecture would be followed by six relatively mild strokes, after which I would be told to leave. As many of the other boys as possible would have been standing outside the door to count the number of strokes. Six was the usual complement, but for something truly hideous, the count may have reached eight, making the recipient a sore-bottomed hero, but even to receive six did your street cred no harm. Mr Fox was known to us as ‘Foe’, and come to think of it, it was not a bad nickname, for I don’t think I ever felt entirely convinced that he was on my side. He was five foot seven or eight, and his strong head of black hair was combed back and much adorned with Mr Thomas’s finest unction. Mr Thomas was the school haircutter, and he came down from his HQ in Bury Street SW1 twice a term with two or three of his cohorts to cut our hair. Several masters had their hair cut too, including Foe, who was on Christian-name terms with the rotund, avuncular, noisy and highly genial Mr Thomas, who laughed a good deal as he snapped the scissors like the well-seasoned performer he was. I don’t know why, but it went slightly against the grain that Mr Fox was on first-name terms with his barber. When the two of them laughed there was always something slightly conspiratorial in the air, as if they were planning a visit to a particularly shady club.
Mr Fox took the fourth form, and never encouraged jocularity, although there were times when I am sure he felt he was being the star of the party. But he always made teaching seem a solemn business, and was seldom fun and never funny. He had written a well-known green-covered history date book, which was not so much compulsive as compelled reading. It was all there, from Hengist and Horsa and Ethelred the Unready to the present day. Mr Fox was as proud of his date book as if he had made up the dates himself and given the history of this country both order and meaning. He did have another side to him – to keep themselves sane, a good many schoolmasters must lead double lives. The day the term finished at Sunningdale, the sofa in the Foxes’ drawing room was pushed back, and out came the bridge tables, swiftly followed by the packs of cards and scoresheets, and then by those of his neighbours who participated. The stakes were said to be high; I imagine Foe was probably a gambler, but in a guarded rather than a reckless manner. I should think he was a pretty good player who seldom settled for three no trumps when a slam was in the air.
He was a great racing man too, and a number of important trainers sent their boys to Sunningdale. Cecil Boyd-Rochfort’s twin stepsons, David and Henry Cecil, were naughty and great fun. Of course Henry went on to become a remarkable trainer in his own right, picking up a knighthood and Frankel along the way before dying horribly of cancer. Peter Cazalet, the Queen Mother’s trainer, sent both his sons to Sunningdale. Edward, the elder, became a High Court judge, and as his mother, Leonora, had been PGW’s stepdaughter, controls all things Wodehouse today with charm, skill and high good humour. Noel Cannon’s son was also at the school. Royal Ascot week caused a good deal of activity on the private side, as Mr Fox’s quarters were known. Lots of chaps were seen wandering about the place in morning coats and silk toppers, and ladies in extravagant hats were plentiful. I don’t think a hat, however extravagant, would have made a significant difference to Mrs Fox, who may once have been a great beauty, but if she had been, by the time I met her she was playing from memory.
I don’t know if Foe’s gambling inclinations explored other avenues. I doubt that he was a casino man, unlike R.J.O. Meyer, the famous headmaster of Millfield, who when the day’s duties were over would drive all the way from Somerset to a gaming club in Mayfair with a goodly portion of that term’s school fees in his trouser pocket. Rumour has it that when he plonked it all on red, black almost invariably turned up. On the somewhat daunting return journey in the middle of the night I dare say he would have found it difficult to stick to the speed limit.
To us boys there was no visible lighter side to dear old Foe, who said grace before lunch with a basso profundo solemnity and sang in chapel in a toneless voice somewhere around the baritone mark. He never made much of the high notes. His sermons always seemed to contain some less than compelling strictures; Mr Burrows was not a giggle a minute in the pulpit either and he made it all too plain what the devil had in store for us if we didn’t look sharp. They both made you feel they were arm in arm with the wrath of God. Tuppy took the services in chapel, and wore a surplice as a jovial sort of holy disguise. Miss Paterson (‘Patey’), who sang with a rigorous and tuneless vigour, sat two rows behind the Foxes, who were immediately behind us new boys. Mr Ling, whom we have not yet come across, and who more closely resembled a Chinese god than any Chinese god I have ever seen, did his best in the row in between. The more jolly Mrs Ling clocked in only on Sundays. They sang dutifully, while Mr Sheepshanks, ‘Sheepy’ to us all, played the organ and sang enthusiastically at the same time. Psalms were always harder work than the hymns, and I was glad when we had got the Magnificat and the Te Deum out of the way as well.
Mrs Fox went by the name of Nancy, which didn’t really fit the bill – although Lucretia would have been a bit too severe. I can’t remember Mr Fox ever looking dreamily at her and murmuring, ‘Nancy.’ Maybe he only did this in extremis. Anyway, she remorselessly called him ‘Foxy’, and they begat two sons, both Sunningdalians. By the time I came across George Dacre and Nancy, I suspect they were well past moments of high passion, and neither of them appeared particularly flighty. Mrs Fox looked a little bit like my idea of B. Wooster’s Aunt Agatha, with more than a touch of Lady Constance Keeble, Lord Emsworth’s bloody-minded sister, thrown in. She gave out boiled sweets by the stairwell outside the dining room after lunch on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays with gratuitous suspicion. Eight on Sundays, six on Thursdays, and a chocolate or Mars bar on Tuesdays. They were counted with great exactitude. If, on a recount, she discovered one sweet too many, it was a capital offence and you were lucky if she only took two away.
Mr Burrows was number two in the batting order after Mr Fox, and he didn’t come across well. To a small boy he was alarming, and anyone could be forgiven for thinking at first that he was an all-round shit. I don’t think he liked or felt comfortable with the smallest boys, and there was always a suspicion that he may have been a repressed homosexual. As far as Wodehouse was concerned, most of the time Burrows would have made Roderick Spode, alias Lord Sidcup, alias Oswald Mosley, seem a decent sort of cove. He was slim, reasonably tall and slightly bent. I think he probably had a sense of humour, but he was careful whom he showed it to. When I first came across him he was very much the Dickensian schoolmaster, but if, for whatever reason, you came into prolonged contact with him – as I did when I kept goal for the school and went on to become an unlikely captain of soccer – he was much easier. I then found a friendlier, more amenable side to him. Perhaps he was rather shy at heart, and it was only when he felt comfortable with certain boys that his outer shell fell away. I never knew what his football qualifications were, but obviously he knew a bit about the game. Whenever we played against other schools he would be mildly unforgiving at half time as we surrounded him in a group, each sucking a quarter of a raw lemon in the hope that it might turn us into Stanley Matthews. Burrows was a serious supporter of Newcastle United, and if you mentioned Jackie Milburn there was an outside chance that he might smile, and he would certainly look more favourably upon you. George Beaumont, a good friend of mine who was a member of the Allendale family, came from Northumberland, and was also passionate about Newcastle and Milburn, which meant that he and Mr Burrows became friends. He was a fine outside right, who ran fast and controlled the ball well. George was sadly killed in an aeroplane crash in New Zealand soon after leaving Eton.
Mr Burrows lived in a room, full of heavy dark-brown furniture, between the upper dormitory and the upper cubicles, from where he administered justice and discipline. He was a recognised and fully-paid-up beater, and a cane in his hands was much more a weapon of war than in Mr Fox’s. His initials were JB – for John Berry, perhaps – and his nickname was ‘Budgie’. I never remember any of his teaching colleagues slapping him on the back and calling him John, or Berry for that matter. When I joined the third form, over which he presided, I found him frighteningly unforgiving. If you were clever and were at the top of the form and gained his respect, he was a bit better. If it had not been for the soccer I would have got it in the neck.
I wonder if Mr Burrows was ever truly happy. But before we leave him, I should mention that when some of us had reached a certain age, he would allow us into his room by the upper dormitory at a quarter to seven in the evening to listen to Dick Barton, Special Agent. Agog, we followed the machinations of Barton, Snowy, Jock and the others as though our lives depended upon the breathtaking drama. Dick Barton was definitely not Mr Burrows’ cup of tea, and he never stayed to listen. Later in life I wondered if Mr Burrows ever found an obliging woman. I doubt it. But then, did he ever want one? I imagine every private school in those days had its Mr Burrows.
Miss Paterson, or Patey, who came onto the books in 1940, was not quite polished enough to have been a contender for the Lady Constance Keeble spot, but she, like Mrs Fox, would have been a definite runner for aunt-like status. I think she and Aunt Agatha would have got along pretty well, although she had about her more than a hint of Rosa Klebb, who made James Bond’s life pretty uncomfortable in From Russia, with Love. The debate about her Christian name continues. ‘Emmeline’ has its supporters, but ‘Eileen’ is probably just the favourite. They both fitted. She was spectacularly uncompromising, and did not tolerate nonsense in any way whatever. If she had a sense of humour, she wasn’t letting on. She had the unfortunate habit of shaping her ‘R’s with a loop, as they appear on Harrods vans. This particularly distressed Nicholas Howard-Stepney who spoke contemptuously of ‘Patey Rs’. Patey had a feminine enough shape, but with a keep-your-distance sort of face – and never to my knowledge did she have a single suitor. I think she would have discouraged passion in any form, and might not have been very good at it. She wore sensible shoes and even more sensible stockings, and spoke like a regimental sergeant-major. I can’t imagine her in a warm, let alone a passionate embrace, although people who give that impression can sometimes come up against the wind. Patey was also, rather surprisingly, my first cricketing mentor. She was in charge of the third-form game, and was forever marshalling the troops. The game was played on a small piece of roughish ground somewhere between the raspberry cages and the railway line, which may give it a romantic connotation it does not deserve.
Miss Paterson must have been in her upper thirties, and there was a fair amount of her. She wobbled a good deal, both fore and aft. She loved to take part in the cricket, or at any rate she felt it was her duty to do so. I don’t ever remember her batting, but she always opened the bowling. The pitch was only about fifteen yards long, if that, and while there were two sets of stumps, there were no bails. We had puny little bats, but there were no pads or gloves, and boxes were not even a gleam in anyone’s eye. Patey ran in off about five paces, and bowled underarm with a certain nippiness. If she hit you on the shin, it made you yelp a bit, and she would launch herself into an extravagant, almost Shane Warne-like appeal. This was a little strange, because there was no umpire. That didn’t worry her in the least, because she immediately metamorphosed herself into the umpire and gave you out. You certainly did not question her decision. She wasn’t the worst bowler, and I can tell you that her swingers went both ways all right.
They were the first swingers I ever took a serious interest in. She had another interesting physical attribute: her front teeth were unstoppable. If you ran round a corner in a passage in the school and she was there, you would put your hands up in front of your face to protect yourself from the upper lot. I remember thinking some years later that if there was such an event at the Olympic Games as eating corn on the cob through a Venetian blind, Miss Paterson would have been on top of the rostrum accepting the gold medal and shaking up the champagne with the best of them.
As far as the runners and riders were concerned at Sunningdale, those were most of the bookies’ favourites. But there was also a pretty good list just behind the leaders. Charlie Sheepshanks, ‘Sheepy’, who had clocked in from the Brigade of Guards soon after hostilities had been concluded in 1945 with a scar on his face which was evidence of close contact with the enemy, was a congenial, Bertie Wooster-like figure. His brother had been killed in the Spanish Civil War, and at Sunningdale Sheepy lived with his mother in a house in the grounds. He played the organ in chapel, or the tin tabernacle, as we knew it, and did so with a certain brio. Good-looking, black-moustached with a ready smile, a bit of a leg-spinner and greatly liked by us all, he shared Mr Fox’s schoolroom where he presided over maths, genially, unpretentiously, amusingly and with indefatigable cheerfulness. He was the dearest of men, and went on to marry Mary Nickson, who was the daughter of my first housemaster at Eton. He also ran the cricket at Sunningdale, taking over from a Mr Kemp, who left soon after I arrived.
After Sheepy retired from educational activities, he and Mary moved to his family home in the village of Arthington in Wharfedale, where they would entertain the Test Match Special team to dinner in splendid style during the Headingley Test match. The banter between the Bishop of Ripon and Jim Swanton will not easily be forgotten. Jim regarded the bishop as an extremely close cohort of the Almighty, and tried to speak to him with a humble sanctity, while the bishop, who was only a suffragan, would leave religion at home for the evening. Sheepy was a passionate gardener and fisherman, and a great friend of Brian Johnston – they were both infectious laughers – with whom he fought innumerable battles on the tennis court. He was also a wizard on the Eton fives court. While at Sunningdale – of which he became headmaster for a time after Fox had retired – he joined forces with J.M. Peterson, an Eton housemaster whose sons were at Sunningdale, and together they won the old boys’ Eton fives competition, the Kinnaird Cup, for year after year. For me, Charlie Sheepshanks was a real-life mixture of Biggles, Bulldog Drummond and Bertie Wooster.
Then there was Mr Tupholme, who came from Bournemouth or thereabouts, and was a long-standing taker of the fifth form. He was an excellent schoolmaster who made everything fun for the boys, while the more solemn members of the staff across the landing would have made the prophet Job seem a bit of a laugh. We listened to Tuppy because he had the knack of making everything fun, but interesting and important at the same time. He was in charge of rugger in the Lent term, bowled a bit in the nets during the summer, and presided genially over the swimming pool. Everyone loved him. Medium-height, plump, eternally cheerful, eyebrows that curled like Denis Healey’s, he was never fierce, never shouted, and bought us Dinky Toys to order on his frequent visits to Windsor. As a boy, one always felt that Tuppy was up for anything, and we loved him. PGW would have turned him into Lord Ickenham. Another of Tuppy’s sidelines was the model railway, which he organised in the Army Hut, a rather Spartan, military-looking building at the far end of the school where the school concert was held. In my first concert, which Tom and Grizel dutifully, and I suspect reluctantly, attended, I had to sing one verse of ‘Cock Robin’. I doubt there has ever been a more tuneless rendering of any song since mankind first put its larynx on the stage.
I have briefly mentioned Mr Ling, who was the Venerable Bede of Sunningdale, and an awesome figure. Like Mr Fox and Mr Burrows, he had joined up with the school before the First War. He was a classical scholar, and was the principal reason why Sunningdale won so many scholarships, mainly for Eton, where most of its pupils ended up. Mr Ling was a genius as a schoolmaster. He took the sixth-form classics, and taught Greek and Latin with astonishing skill and amazing results. His most famous top scholar was Quintin Hogg, who went on to become Lord Hailsham and the Lord Chancellor, and who paid Mr Ling a most generous tribute in his autobiography, The Door Wherein I Went. When I first came across Mr Ling I thought he was even older than Methuselah. He was gruff, quietly and classically humorous, and his gleaming and absolute baldness positively oozed Greek and Latin verse and always looked as if he was made of jade. He was wisdom personified, and wore his rimless glasses in a way that suggested they were an essential adjunct to classical scholarship. He was also a passionate man of Suffolk. This gave us both a certain East Anglian affinity – I did not have the smallest affinity with the classics – even if he regarded Norfolk as the lesser of two equals. Lord Emsworth might have had dinner with him by mistake at the Senior Conservative Club in St James’s.
Mr Ling always came hurriedly into the classroom as if he had just bumped into Socrates on the stairs and, with time running short, had had quickly to put him right about a couple of things. Having virtually lost the use of his right hand by kind permission of the Kaiser in the First War, he wrote on the blackboard and elsewhere with his left hand, and in doing so was magnificently illegible. You needed to have been on the payroll at Bletchley Park to have had the slightest chance of interpreting his offerings. He did not suffer fools gladly, and as I remember he found it jolly nearly incomprehensible that anyone could be as stupid and as unreceptive to the classics as I was. He had a good sense of humour, a pleasant chuckle, and bowled gentle slow left-arm in the nets when it came to the summer term. I don’t think he ever looked much like getting anyone out, but that did not prevent him from having firm views on the forward defensive stroke.
Just occasionally I was asked to tea with Mr and Mrs Ling at their house in nearby Charters Road. Mrs Ling, who was kind in a charming, elderly way, provided more than acceptable strawberry jam and a tolerable scone or two and always loved to pull her husband’s leg. Mr Ling, because of his injured hand, was not as accurate with the teapot as he had been in his heyday, and Mrs Ling was more than prepared to give him a bit of stick for this. He would laugh at his failing, and was always more fun outside the classroom than in it. He was a remarkable man, a brilliant teacher and a friend in a slightly distant, but loyal way, even if academically you were batting well down the order.
Bob (R.G.T.) Spear was young, tall and fair-haired, and taught goodness knows what for a time. He had an electrifying affair with the under-matron, Kitty Dean, whom he married. I once caught her sitting on his knee in the tiny masters’ room between Mr Fox’s and Mr Ling’s schoolrooms, which was as near as one came in those days to hard porn. The marriage did not last, and he eked out his days as a rather penniless handicapper at Newmarket, where he died. I once or twice came across him in the Tavern at Lord’s during a Test match. A long time before, he had bowled fast for Eton: Bingo Little, perhaps, although he never met his Rosie M. Banks.
There was the altogether more garrulous and clubbable Eustace Crawley, son of the immortal golfing correspondent Leonard Crawley, who wrote for the Daily Telegraph for many years. Leonard had also been a master at Sunningdale in the twenties, and in 1925 he was picked to tour the West Indies with the MCC. He was always greatly encouraged with his golf by Mr Fox, who was captain of Sunningdale Golf Club in 1940. This was the reason why in the winter whenever it was shut we were allowed to play French and English on the course.
Eustace must have taught something, but in those days he seemed to be Gussie Fink-Nottle to his eyebrows, and was immense fun without appearing to be devastatingly effective. This was a completely false impression, for he not only won a golf Blue at Cambridge for three years, but ended up as managing director of Jacksons of Piccadilly – Gussie F would have had no answer to that. I remember lots of floppy dark hair and a most engaging chuckle.
There was also the ever genial, tall and robust Mr Squarey, who was poached from neighbouring Lambrook. He was fun, with grey hair and glasses, and was up for everything when it came to games. He also bowled a bit in the nets, without devastating effect, but he was full of good honest cricketing theory, and always gave terrific encouragement. He was a friend.
Finally there was Matron Cryer, a veritable, and adorable, Florence Nightingale who never failed to make you feel better, and could even persuade you that the weekly dose of cod-liver oil tasted pretty good. I personally went for syrup of figs, which was a legitimate alternative and tasted much nicer. Her deputy, who later reigned for years as her successor as matron, was the indomitable Pauline, who was to become every bit as much an intrinsic part of Sunningdale as Mr Fox or any of the others. I suspect she enjoyed a bit of mischief too, and she and Roberta Wickham would have hit it off. Pauline was a great character, and before I left Sunningdale she gave me a photograph of the England side to tour Australia in 1928–29.
I may have missed one or two, but what fun it was. I lived in this milieu for five years, climbing my way up the pole under the auspices of the above-mentioned dramatis personae. I played in the cricket first eleven for four years – having moved fairly rapidly from being a leg-spinner to a wicketkeeper, and I think I could always bat a bit – and in the soccer team for two. I also played fives for the school, against Ludgrove, and we invariably lost. The only real blot was my consistent slacking on the academic side of things.
My years in the Sunningdale first eleven were fantastic fun. The star of the side was Edward Lane Fox and we not only played together in the first eleven for four years at Sunningdale, we also both played for Eton for three years. He was a wonderful all-round cricketer with the discipline I always lacked. Edward also won his colours at soccer and rugger, an impressive triple Blue. He was a remarkable games player, a cricketer who went on to play for Oxfordshire and for the Minor Counties against at least two touring sides and then became an estate agent, running his own eponymous firm with a brilliance few could have matched. He also hits a pretty mean golf ball. It would be hard to imagine a kinder, more charming and less pretentious man. He has never changed in character or in looks, and well into his seventies he is still easily identifiable as the chap sitting in the captain’s seat in the 1952 Sunningdale cricket eleven photograph. Edward was a wonderful orthodox left-arm spinner who bowled with great accuracy and turned the ball sharply away from the right-hander. The representatives of Earlywood, Scaitcliffe, St George’s, Lambrook, Heatherdown and a few other schools could make little of it. As a result, stumped Blofeld bowled Lane Fox was an oft-repeated dismissal.
Edward was also an excellent and solid left-hand batsman. The one school we had difficulty with was Ludgrove, who collectively played left-arm spin more than adequately. I think I am right in saying that the last time Sunningdale beat Ludgrove home and away in the same season was in 1952, which was Edward’s and my last year. Sunningdale may have started a trifle gloomily for me, but success on the playing fields turned it into huge fun, and rapidly put an end to all that silly homesickness.
I was given my first-eleven colours for cricket when the team photograph was about to be taken at the end of the 1950 summer term, my second year in the side. Later that afternoon I was ferried off by Mrs Fox to St George’s hospital in Windsor to have my tonsils removed. I remember Matron packing my new dark-blue cap, and when Mrs Fox unpacked my case at the hospital she thrust this cap under my pillow. When you got your colours this was the accepted modus operandi. The nursing sister was more than mildly surprised, but Mrs Fox pretty well told her to mind her own business. I never felt closer to her than I did at that moment, and I was able, with considerable pleasure, to try on the cap during the night. I had to wait until the chap with whom I shared a room, who probably wouldn’t have understood, was asleep.
What an adventure Sunningdale was and a splendid way to start learning about the highs and lows of life. In the schoolroom I was never remotely a candidate for a scholarship to anywhere except Borstal, but I suppose I did just about enough work to get by, and when I came to take Common Entrance to Eton, I achieved a humble middle fourth, which was lower than was hoped, but probably higher than was feared. I was never any good at exams. That rather apprehensive five-hour journey in my father’s old green Armstrong Siddeley at the start of May five years before had been well worth it. In the end Grizel had got it right, as she usually did.
THREE (#ulink_7e07a20e-f9cc-5676-9e31-61f1781e2870)
The French Women’s Institute (#ulink_7e07a20e-f9cc-5676-9e31-61f1781e2870)
Cricket had me in its grip before I had been at Sunningdale for a year. The following June, in 1948, I found myself at Lord’s with Tom and Grizel sitting on the grass in front of Q Stand eating strawberries they had brought up from Hoveton and watching the third day of the second Test against Australia. I became one of what is now a sadly diminishing band of people to have seen the great Don Bradman bat. He made 89 in Australia’s second innings before being caught at shoulder-height by Bill Edrich at first slip off Alec Bedser. I can still see the catch in my mind’s eye. As he departed, dwarfed by that wonderful and irresistible baggy green Australian cap, I was sad that he hadn’t got a hundred, but everyone else seemed rather pleased. I distinctly remember him facing Yorkshire’s Alec Coxon, a fast bowler playing in his only Test match. A number of times Coxon pitched the ball a little short, and Bradman would swivel and pull him to the straightish midwicket boundary, where we were sitting on the grass. Once I was able to touch the ball – what a moment that was.
It was not only at school that I revelled in cricket. In the Easter holidays I went to indoor coaching classes in Norwich taken by the two professionals who played for Norfolk : C.S.R. Boswell, a leg-spinner and late-middle-order batsman known to one and all as ‘Bozzie’, and Fred Pierpoint, a fastish bowler. Then, in the summer holidays, Grizel would heroically drive me to all parts of Norfolk, however inaccessible, for boys’ cricket matches in which I became a fierce competitor. We would set off in the morning in Grizel’s beetle Renault, with a picnic basket on the back seat. Grizel was nothing if not a determined driver. Whenever she changed gear it was as if she was teaching the gearstick a lesson, and she generally treated the car as if it was a recalcitrant schoolboy. Some of the lay-bys in which we stopped for lunch became familiar haunts over the years. A hard-boiled egg, ham sandwiches and an apple were the usual menu, and it never helped things along if I dropped small bits of eggshell on the floor.
The cricket usually began at about two o’clock, and I remember many of the mums being, if anything, rather more competitive than the players. There were certain key players in the teams I played for: Jeremy Greenwood bowled very fast, Michael Broke’s off-breaks took a long time to reach the batsman, Jeremy Thompson – whose father Wilfred had bowled terrifyingly fast for Norfolk and had captained the county – was another star, while Timmy Denny did his best. Henry and Dominic Harrod, sons of the famous economist Roy Harrod, had their moments, and the many Scotts all played their part, especially Edward, who bowled fast – we later played cricket together at Eton. He was a cousin of the Norfolk Scotts, although he lived in Gloucestershire, and was to become one of my greatest friends. The two Clifton Browns also contributed, and their mother scored like a demon in a felt hat.
The Norfolk Scotts lived at North Runcton, near King’s Lynn. Father Archie, as tall and thin as a lamp post, was the first Old Etonian bookmaker, and his delightful and cuddly wife Ruth was a huge favourite with all of us, forever laughing and always a fount of fun. She was also great friends with the Australian cricketers of Don Bradman’s generation and before. A particular ally was the famous leg-spinner Arthur Mailey, a great character and the most delightful of men. He had been a wonderful bowler, as well as being a brilliant cartoonist. For some reason he took a great interest in my future as a cricketer, and one of my proudest possessions is a booklet he wrote in 1956 called Cricket Humour, with some amusing stories illustrated with his own drawings. The front cover is a lovely cartoon of Mailey himself trying to bribe the umpire with a fiver. On the first page he wrote: ‘My best wishes for a successful cricket life. Saw you play at Runcton about 3 years ago and am very pleased about your progress. Arthur Mailey ’56.’ Later in life I put together a small collection of his original cartoons, and they are a great joy.
In between those holiday matches I would go to Lakenham cricket ground, with its handsome thatched pavilion, where Norfolk played their home games. Now I would be ticked off for spilling my picnic eggshells on the grass in one of the little wigwam-like tents which lined one side of the ground. One of them had a sign hanging on the outside which proclaimed that it belonged to T.R.C. Blofeld. Inside was a small table and some rickety deckchairs. Those days at Lakenham gave me an early glimpse of what I think I supposed heaven was all about. Norfolk never won very much, but my goodness me, it was exciting.
I always brought along my own puny bat and a ball, and sometimes I was able to persuade someone to bowl at me on the grass behind the parked cars at the back of the tents. Among them was the vermillion-faced Mr Tarr, who was the Governor of Norwich Prison and, I hope, a better governor than he was a bowler. Every so often, as I was sitting in a deckchair watching the cricket, a four would be hit in my direction and I would stop it and throw it back to the fielder. Not quite the same as fielding to Bradman, I know, but you took what came. Just occasionally there was the thrill of a six being hit towards our tent, forcing everyone to take cover in a mildly cowardly panic. My early heroes from these occasions were an eclectic bunch, including the afore-mentioned Wilfred Thompson; David Carter, military-medium; and Cedric Thistleton-Smith, who was always out unluckily – all three of whom came from west Norfolk and were thriving farmers. Lawrie Barrett, short and dark-haired, a tiger in the covers, thrilled us all a couple of times a year as a middle-order batsman and succeeded Thompson as captain. H.E. Theobald was a large man who, like his Christian name (it turned out to be Harold), remained a bit of a mystery. He was not in the first flush of youth, and nor was his batting. Then there was good old, eternally cheerful, round-faced Bozzie; we loved his spritely cunning with the ball and his enthusiastic twirl of the bat when his turn came late in the innings. He had a kind word and a smile for everyone.
Village cricket also played a big part in my life. The heroes for Hoveton and Wroxham did battle on the ground set up by those German prisoners-of-war. I had some fierce battles with Nanny, who refused to let me go and watch them when they were at work. I was determined to wear the German policeman’s helmet I had been given by some returning warrior. She felt it would not have created the right impression, and unusually for her, had a word about it with Grizel – who of course agreed wholeheartedly. So my one intended thrust for the Allies was nipped in the bud.
Hoveton was captained by the ever-thoughtful opening batsman Neville Yallop, whose black hair was swept back with the help of Brylcreem. There was Fred Roy, of the huge eponymous village store, who opened the batting with Neville and bowled slow, non-turning off-breaks; Arthur Tink, whose military-medium was full of unsuspected guile – as I dare say was his gypsy-like wife, Mona, who looked incredibly beautiful and never said anything. The vibrantly moustached, ample-figured Colonel Ingram-Johnson kept wicket and batted in an Incogniti cap. He had Indian Army and Rawalpindi coming out of every aperture. Colin Parker, a local boy who bowled at a nippy medium pace, had an attractive, befreckled red-haired sister and a father who umpired in partnership, I am sure, with the ubiquitous gamekeeping Carter. Bob Cork, a small man who I think was a blacksmith, ran around with terrific enthusiasm, but not a great deal of effect. When I was about thirteen and had been allowed to join in a fielding practice, I tried to take a high catch and the ball dislocated my right thumb. Bob was quickly to the rescue, and agonisingly yanked the wretched joint back into place.
I lived for cricket, in boys’ matches, on our ground at home, and at Lakenham, and spent many of my waking hours in the summer holidays at one or other of the three. Added to which, and to Nanny’s mild disapproval, I took my bat to bed with me. That, of course, was in the days when bats smelled redolently of linseed oil. I am not sure I have ever found a better smell to go to sleep with.
In the winter holidays the gamekeepers and shooting took over from cricket, and I have to confess I also took my gun to bed with me. I spent as much time as I could with Carter, Watker or Godfrey learning about trapping vermin, feeding pheasants and partridges, and looking for their nests in the Easter holidays. If a nest was in an especially vulnerable position we would pick up the eggs, which would then be hatched by a broody hen, and the chicks brought up in pens until they were ready to be put back into the wild. Carrion crows, sparrowhawks, jays, magpies, stoats, rabbits and rats all had to be eliminated where possible, and kept in proportion if not. I learned many of the tricks of the trade. What fun it was, and I was unable to put down a book my father gave me called Peter Penniless, which was about the adventures of a country boy who scraped a living by poaching and selling the fruits of his labours. Poaching was something that went on a good deal, and as I was later to learn, was perpetrated not only by the unscrupulous from neighbouring villages and Norwich, but by some, like Lennie Hubbard, as we have seen, who worked, above all suspicion, on the farm. Sometimes the ungodly would be caught and brought to justice, but more often than not they got away with it. It was all part of the excitement of growing up among the Norfolk Broads. There were poachers on the Broads too, who tried to shoot duck and to catch fish and eels. Johnson was the head marshman, and another heroic figure. One of his sons was in the RAF in the war, and once came back on leave bringing with him the first banana I had ever seen, let alone tasted. It was black and well on the way to being rotten, and tasted filthy – not that I was about to admit it.
It was from this background that I once again jumped into the back of my father’s car, which had moved up a peg or two from the Armstrong Siddeley that had first taken me to Sunningdale. It was in the old 1932 Rolls that we made the journey from Hoveton to Eton on 23 September 1952 – which was not exactly the way I wanted to spend my thirteenth birthday. It was another anxious trip. I had long looked forward to going to Eton, but now that the day had arrived, I was more than a touch nervous. Twelve hundred boys, tailcoats, strange white bow ties which had to be tied with the help of a paperclip, my own room, a house of forty boys, a completely new set of rules and regulations to learn. I would have a much greater degree of freedom than I had experienced at Sunningdale, where obviously the young boys had to be kept under close and watchful guidance. Eton was a huge step nearer to the big wide world, and was both frightening and exciting because of it. ‘There will be plenty of other new boys,’ Grizel had said to me in a voice which suggested that that put the argument to bed once and for all.
After a journey of about four hours, not particularly helped by Grizel trying to jolly me along in between spirited bouts of backseat driving, we all trooped in through the front door of Common Lane House and shook hands with M’Tutor and Mrs M’Tutor, as they were known in the Eton vernacular, Geoffrey and Janet Nickson. Geoffrey Nickson was bald and quite small, with a beaming smile, a warm handshake, twinkling eyes and a chuckling laugh, all of which made that first frightening step so much easier than it had been at Sunningdale. He could have taught Mr Fox a thing or two, but then I was five years older, and better able to cope.
As I sat on the ottoman in my own room at Eton, with its lift-up bed hidden behind curtains, my own friendly shooting prints on the wall – I still have them today in my bedroom – and a few family photographs, I was acutely conscious that I was now on my own, in a much more grown-up society. It was a help to know that my brother John had been through it before me, in the same house, and had survived. All the new boys were in the same boat, but at that moment it was a personal, not a communal thing. When we arrived we were all tremulous little islands in a rough sea. I had had many lessons at home on how to put on a stiff collar, how to use collar studs and how to tie that alarming white bow tie – alarming until you had done it once, after which it was simple, as many apparently difficult things turn out to be. There was an official form of ‘cheating’, in that the white strip of the tie had a hole in the middle, through which you put the collar stud between the two ends of the stiff collar. One end of the tie was then held sideways across the collar, while the other was tucked over the top by your Adam’s apple, and then thrust down inside the shirt, where it was held in position by the paperclip. This was the ‘cheating’ bit. The two ends were then pushed under each side of the collar – simple really – then it was nervously down to breakfast, my first outing in my tailcoat. I had well and truly begun my first half at Eton.
We new boys sat at a small table in the corner at one end of the boys’ dining room, which had the somewhat mixed benefit of being presided over by ‘My Dame’ (M’Dame), who was a sort of high-falutin’ house matron. She was called Miss Pearson, and while I must say I never found her particularly loveable, it was a less aggressive sort of unloveableness than Miss Paterson’s. I suppose M’Dame had to be bossy, but she made rather a business of it. When I came down, extremely frightened, to that first breakfast I found myself being stared at by those who were not new boys in a ‘Look what the cat’s brought in’ sort of way.
I was lucky with my housemaster, M’Tutor. Geoffrey Nickson had all the qualities of a perfect schoolmaster. He was kind; he was thoughtful; he was never in a hurry; he never panicked; he never shouted; he was unfailingly interested in everything you did; he suggested, firmly at times, rather than ordered; he had a splendid sense of humour; and he punished firmly and without relish or enjoyment. At Eton, like all masters, he was known by his initials, ‘GWN’. The ‘W’ stood for Wigley, which was harmless enough, but gave rise to a certain amount of childish amusement. GWN was a classical scholar. He was not an Etonian himself, but you would never have guessed it. I arrived at Eton near the end of his fifteen-year spell as a housemaster, which finished at the end of the summer half in 1955. I don’t think it would have been possible not to love GWN. He was always immensely approachable – a schoolmaster, and yet very much not a schoolmaster. He had a wonderfully ready, infectious and enthusiastic smile. He was always fun, whether you were a member of the library, the elite five at the top of the house, who sat at his end of the long dining-room table, or a lower boy, as we all were for at least three halves, whom he took for pupil room, known colloquially as ‘P-hole’, at the end of formal lessons each morning in the mildly improvised classroom outside his study. He was equally enthusiastic whether bowling his leg-tweakers in the nets or watching members of his house in whatever sporting contest they were competing in against other houses. A perfect illustration of GWN’s skill as a schoolmaster came when he caught four of my friends playing bridge – cards were strictly illegal. He made them all write a Georgic which entailed copying out more than five hundred lines of Latin verse. He then asked them down to his study every Sunday afternoon to teach them to become better bridge players.
On Sundays, Mrs M’Tutor, Janet Nickson, who was the perfect complement to GWN, would read to the lower boys in her husband’s study, and we had to suffer such improving literature as Lorna Doone in her slightly schoolmistressy voice. When we became upper boys, GWN himself read to us in pupil room. We listened spellbound to, among others, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and J.K. Stanford’s The Twelfth, about Colonel the Honourable George Hysteron-Proteron’s exploits on a grouse moor on 12 August, the opening day of the season. GWN himself was no mean shot, and a considerable fisherman.
One of the first exams a new boy had to go through at Eton was a ‘Colour Test’. There were goodness knows how many different caps, or colours, as they were known, given exclusively for prowess in sporting pursuits ranging from cricket to rowing to the field game, the wall game, fives, racquets, squash, beagling, athletics, gymnastics, tennis, soccer, rugby and many others besides. About three weeks into my first half new boys gathered in the library – in non-Eton talk, the house prefects’ room – where they were asked many searching questions. A profusion of different-coloured caps were produced, and we had to identify them. We had to show that we knew the masters by their initials, that we understood the geography of the place and other Etonian lore, not least the idiosyncratic language which was peculiar to the school. The geography was extremely important, as once the Colour Test had been passed, we lower boys began our fagging career. If you were told by a member of the library to take a fag note (a written message) to a boy in, say, DJGC or FJRC, it was as well to know where you had to go. When a member of the library needed a fag, he would make a ‘boy call’, his yell of ‘B-o-o-o-o-oy’ going on for twenty seconds or so. The last lower boy to arrive got the job. Having taken middle fourth in my Common Entrance, it was my lot to be a fag for five halves.
I enjoyed my five years at Eton as much as any period of my life. As I had discovered at Sunningdale, having the luck to be reasonably successful at games was a great help. Good schoolboy games players become little tin gods, a status which provides a certain insulation against the petty struggles of school life. Of course, this doesn’t happen at once. I spent my first half trying to unravel the mysteries of the field game, an Eton-devised mixture of rugger and soccer played with a round ball. There is a sort of mini scrum, known as the ‘bully’, and much long and skilful kicking up and down the field by the three backs, one behind the other called ‘short’, ‘long’ and ‘goals’. I played at ‘outside corner’, on the edge of the bully, a sort of wing forward. I was never any good at the game, and didn’t enjoy it much. The umpire only blew for infringements if the players appealed. ‘Cornering’, which meant passing, and ‘sneaking’, being offside, were the two most common offences, although the most enjoyable, for obvious reasons, was ‘furking in the bully’, which was lightly, delicately and tellingly adapted on almost every occasion. This was for what was known in less esoteric circumstances as back-heeling, as would happen in a rugger scrum. The wall game was another complicated and esoteric Eton institution. Like many Oppidans (non-Collegers), I never played it, and I still have no clue about the rules. It is best known for the annual mudbath that takes place between the Tugs (Collegers) and the Oppidans on St Andrew’s Day alongside a high and extremely old brick wall in College Field, by the road to Slough.
I had a terrific time in my first half, being ‘up to’ Mr Tait for classics. He was known as ‘Gad’ Tait, for the obvious reason that his initials were GAD. Most of the beaks’ (masters’) nicknames were pretty unoriginal. Dear old Gad Tait was a very tall man who when he rode a bicycle wobbled so perilously and entertainingly that it was like a balancing act in a circus. He had a genius for making the learning of Latin seem interesting, entertaining and good fun, when it was palpably none of those things. By then, of course, we were well past the ‘Caesar conquered Gaul’ stage, which had seen Miss Paterson rise to fevered levels of ferocity in the second form at Sunningdale. At Eton we were very much free-range pupils, by comparison to what we had been at our preparatory schools. Now a good deal of our work had to be done in our spare time.
Once a week we had to construe a piece of Latin prose written by some Godawful Roman no-hoper such as Livy or Cicero. At early school, which began at 7.30 a.m. after a hasty cup of tea in the Boys’ Entrance, Gad Tait, who called everyone ‘Old You’, would charmingly put us through our paces about whatever piece of Latin he had chosen. With equal charm he would exact retribution upon those who not done an adequate job. Also once a week, we had to learn a ‘saying lesson’, which involved him dictating a piece of verse which we wrote down in a flimsy blue notebook – I still have mine. It says much for Gad Tait that even today I remember most of his saying lessons. The principal one was Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, which we learned in three successive weeks. Others included part of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and Cory’s ‘Heraclitus’.
There were about thirty of us in his ‘div’ (division), and we had to recite whatever piece of verse we had been given to learn in groups of ten. Gad Tait watched closely but effortlessly, and although ten people were speaking at once, he could tell exactly who had not learned the words properly, and distributed penalties accordingly. When, just occasionally, I had written a particularly successful piece of Latin verse or whatever, he would give me a ‘show-up’. This meant that he wrote nice things at the top of my work, which I would then take to pupil room, where GWN would gratefully and happily endorse it with his initials. These were useful brownie points. Whenever Gad Tait gave anyone in M’Tutor’s a show-up, GWN, who was a more than useful cartoonist, would almost inevitably draw a picture of an old ewe on the paper. When it was handed back the next day, Gad Tait always had a chuckle at this. I can’t remember any of the other beaks I was ‘up to’ in my first half, which is a measure of Gad Tait’s skill as a schoolmaster.
Soccer and fives were the two games which occupied me in my second half, the Lent half, and then it was the summer, and cricket, which I had been longing for. I spent my first two cricketing halves in Lower Sixpenny, which was for the under fifteen-year-olds, and immediately made my greatest cricketing friend at Eton. Claude Taylor (CHT) had won a cricket Blue at Oxford, for whom he had made almost the slowest-ever hundred in the University Match, and had gone on to play for Leicestershire. He was the dearest and gentlest of men, and a wonderful coach who loved the beauty of the game more than anything. Grey-haired by the time I knew him, he had the knack of being able to explain cricket, which is not an easy game, in the most uncomplicated manner. He understood the mechanics of batting so well that he was able to dissect a stroke into a series of simple movements that when put together cohesively made not only a hugely effective stroke, in attack or defence, but a thing of beauty. He loved, above all, the beauty of the game. He taught Latin, although I never had the luck to be up to him. He also played and taught the oboe, and married the sister of Ian Peebles, a delightful Scotsman who bowled leg-breaks for Oxford, Middlesex and England. Peebles was a considerable force in a City of London wine merchants, and wrote charmingly, knowledgeably and extremely amusingly about cricket for the Sunday Times. Before the war Peebles had shared a flat in the Temple with Henry Longhurst and Jim Swanton, whom he relentlessly called ‘James’. It was a most distinguished gathering.
We began my first summer half with new-boy nets, and it was then that I caught CHT’s eye for the first time. I immediately found myself playing in ‘Select A’, the top game in Lower Sixpenny, of which he was the master-in-charge. I had a fierce competitor for the position of wicketkeeper called Julian Curtis, a wonderful all-round games player who probably lost out to me because I just had the edge in the batting stakes. In that first year, 1953, the Keeper (captain) of Lower Sixpenny was Simon Douglas Pennant, with whom I went on to play for the school and later for Cambridge, who bowled left-arm over-the-wicket at fast-medium. Edward Lane Fox was also in the side, but now that we were playing against opponents that were better-versed in the art of playing left-arm spin, ‘stumped Blofeld bowled Lane Fox’ became a less frequent entry in the scorebook. It was a memorable first summer half.
My cricketing activities went on much to the detriment of my work, and I must admit that, as at Sunningdale, my greatest ambition in the learning department was simply to get by. This attitude never received Tom’s blessing when my school reports, which were always of the ‘must try harder’ variety, were up for discussion. But as far as I was concerned, it was only cricket that mattered. If it was not Lower Sixpenny matches against other schools, it was Select A games, nets or fielding practice, and I am afraid I was the most intense competitor. The school professional at the time was Jack O’Connor, the dearest of men, who batted a time or two for England in the thirties, and played for many years for Essex. He ran the Bat Shop, just at the start of the High Street, next door to Rowland’s, one of the two ‘sock’ shops, where we guzzled crab buns and banana splits. Jack sold sporting goods, and whenever any of us went in he would give us a smiling and enthusiastic welcome. He was to become a great friend and cricketing confidant. Buying batting gloves, wicketkeeping inners or whatever from his modest emporium always involved a jolly ten-minute gossip. Once or twice CHT brought him to the Lower Sixpenny nets to watch some of us batting. Jack always gave generous, smiling encouragement. Once when I was batting he turned his arm over; so began a lifetime of misery and mystification for me as far as leg-spin and googly bowling are concerned. I still have nightmares of an umpire signalling four byes.
The winter halves were, for me, little more than an inconveniently large gap between cricket seasons. There was nothing so gloomy as going back to school towards the end of September, when the weather was gorgeous but all, or most, of the cricket grounds were strung about with goalposts. What made it even more depressing was that my return was often just a couple of days or so before my birthday. Various wrapped presents were always tucked away in the bottom of my suitcase, but opening them alone in my room between breakfast and going to chapel was a cold-blooded exercise if ever there was one. They did, however, usually contain a couple of cricket books, which helped.
In the Lent half I tried my best to impress those who mattered with my ability on the fives court and between the goalposts on the soccer pitch, but I never quite made it on either count. Soccer was run by a wonderfully bucolic former Cambridge cricket Blue called Tolly Burnett (ACB), a relation of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, who added greatly to the gaiety of nations in just about everything he did. He was large, if not portly, marvellously unpunctual, rode a bicycle as if he was, with much pomp and circumstance, leading a procession of one, or perhaps rehearsing for a part in Dad’s Army, and walked with an avuncular swagger. I am not sure what Captain Mainwaring would have made of Tolly. He drove an exciting sports car, and took biology with considerable gusto, especially when it came to the more pertinent points of reproduction, in a div room just around the corner from Lower Chapel. If you stopped him in the street to ask a question, he would clatter to an uncertain halt and invariably say in somewhat breathless tones, ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy. Just a bit pushed,’ then off he’d go with a bit of a puff. What fun he was, and how we loved him. I am not sure the authorities at the school entirely agreed with us, for although he was, I believe, down to become a housemaster, the position never materialised.
Tolly captained Glamorgan during the summer holidays in 1958. The Glamorgan committee felt, as they did from time to time, that Wilf Wooller, the patriarchal figure of Welsh cricket, was too old and should be replaced. In their infinite wisdom they brought in Tolly for a trial as captain for the last eight games of the season. His highest score was 17, and the dressing room came as close to mutiny as it gets. In September he was back teaching biology at Eton, and Wooller was still the official Glamorgan captain. By the time Tolly’s moment of possible glory came, his girth would have prevented much mobility in the field, his batting was well past its prime, and his ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy’ might not have been exactly what the doctor ordered in a Glamorgan dressing room which was pure-bred Wales to its eyebrows. His charmingly irrelevant ‘Up boys and at ’em’ enthusiasm must have fallen on deaf ears. Tolly was more Falstaff than Flewellyn.
Back at Eton, before that little episode, he sadly, but entirely correctly, preferred Carrick-Buchanan’s agility between the goalposts to my own. I did however achieve the splendid job of Keeper (captain) of the second eleven. Tolly was also the cricket master in charge of Lower Club, and sadly I never had first-hand experience of the way in which he coped with that. It would not have been boring.
Keeper of the soccer second eleven, or ‘Team B’, as we proudly called ourselves, was not a particularly distinguished post, but it led to my first sortie into the world of journalism, which turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. We had a considerable fixture list, which included a game against Bradfield College’s second eleven at Bradfield. The Eton College Chronicle felt compelled to carry an account of even such insignificant encounters as this, and for some reason I was chosen to write the report. We were taken by bus to Bradfield, where we joined a mass of boys for a lunch which it would have been tempting to let go past the off-stump. Then we changed into our soccer stuff, climbed a steepish hill and found a well-used and pretty muddy football pitch. I enjoyed writing my account of the day’s events, and it duly appeared in the columns of the Chronicle. Unfortunately, it elicited a hostile response from Bradfield, who made a complaint which promptly came to the ears of Robert Birley, Eton’s large and formidable-looking, but in fact kind, rather shy and immensely able, headmaster. He was to us a remote, Genghis-Khan-like figure who hovered somewhat ominously in the background. Birley was known, unfairly in my view, as ‘Red Robert’. This merely meant that he had realised somewhat earlier than most of the school’s supporters the urgent need for change if a school like Eton was to survive. Many reactionary hands were thrown up in horror.
Anyway, one morning I found myself ‘on the Bill’, which meant that I was summoned to the headmaster’s schoolroom at midday. When I arrived, more than a trifle worried, I was told in no uncertain terms that what I had written about Team B’s midwinter visit to Bradfield was extremely offensive, and that I must without delay write a number of letters of apology. Apart from a general dressing down, I don’t think any other penalty was exacted. I still have a copy of this most undistinguished entry into the world I was to inhabit for just about the rest of my life. I have to admit that in the circumstances it may have been a little strong in places, although it is positively mild when judged by today’s standards.
The Michaelmas half in 1954 will always remain firmly in my mind, and for cricketing reasons too. England were touring Australia in the hope of hanging on to the Ashes they had won in a nerve-racking game at The Oval the previous year. There were one or two exciting newcomers in the England party, especially a fast bowler called Frank Tyson and a twenty-one-year-old called Colin Cowdrey, who was still up at Oxford. I found the whole series quite irresistible, and would tune in to the commentary from Australia under my bedclothes from about five o’clock in the morning. This was always a bit of a lottery, as the snap, crackle and pop of the atmospherics made listening a difficult business. Sometimes the line would go down altogether, and the commentary would be replaced by music from the studio in London. Those delicious Australian voices of the commentators, Johnny Moyes, Alan McGilvray and Vic Richardson, added hugely to the excitement, and John Arlott was there to add a touch of Hampshire-sounding Englishness.
First came the intense gloom at the end of November, when Len Hutton put Australia in to bat in the first Test in Brisbane, and England lost by an innings and 154 runs. Every afternoon I would rush to the corner of Keates Lane and the High Street, where the old man who sold the Evening Standard took up his post. I would thrust a few coppers at him, grab the paper, and turn feverishly to the back page. I had devoured what was for me the peerless, if at that time depressing, prose of Bruce Harris well before I got back to the Boys’ Entrance. The second Test in Sydney began in mid-December. The anxiety was enormous, and it seemed as if the end had come when Australia led by 74 on the first innings. But all was not lost, because Peter May then made a remarkable hundred, leaving Australia with 223 to win. They failed by 38 runs with Tyson taking six wickets, bowling faster than anyone can ever have bowled before. The game had a marvellous ending, with a stupendous diving leg-side catch behind the wicket by Godfrey Evans. Phew! I lived every ball. We won the third Test, in Melbourne, but I had to wait until early in the Lent half for England to make sure of the Ashes by winning the fourth Test in Adelaide. After that, to general relief at Eton, normal service was resumed.
Another diversion that winter was being prepared for my confirmation in December. At times the process was up against pretty tough competition from events in Australia, but GWN, who prepared us for the Bishop of Lincoln, was able neatly to combine events in Australia with those in Heaven. After that heavy defeat in Brisbane I was not at all sure about the Almighty, but GWN’s gentle manner and instructive way of putting things across gave meaning and relevance to the whole business of Christianity. Up until then I had felt that religion did nothing more than get in the way of things, what with endlessly having to tool off to chapel and listen to those interminable sermons. My family and one or two of my surviving godparents foregathered in College Chapel on a Saturday late in the Michaelmas half, and the Bishop of Lincoln laid his hands on our heads and turned a group of us into fully paid-up Christians. Then there was the excitement of going to my first Holy Communion the next morning, and the dreadful worry of whether or not I had got my hands the right way round when it came to the critical moment. GWN’s hard work of getting us into mid-season form for the Bishop of Lincoln was underlined and taken a stage further in the Lenten Lectures the following half, given by a notable cleric, George Reindorp, who was soon to become the Bishop of Guildford. By then England were playing slightly more frivolous cricket in New Zealand with the Ashes safely beneath their belt, and the Almighty and I were back on terms. Reindorp came across as the most delightful of men and just the right sort of Christian as he explained the issues surrounding Lent in such an unfussy way that even I thought I could understand them. Anyway, it all helped fill the gap between cricket seasons.
I had been Keeper of Lower Sixpenny in my second summer half, and went on to become Keeper of Upper Sixpenny in 1955. Upper Sixpenny, for fifteen-year-olds, was being run for the first time by a likeable new beak called Ray Parry (RHP), an immense enthusiast who during the war had played as a batsman for Glamorgan. It was one of life’s strange ironies that when, in my early seventies, I went through the divorce courts, my wife’s solicitor was none other than RHP’s son Richard. He was hellbent on delivering an innings defeat, but I think I just about saved the follow-on, if not much else.
RHP and I made great preparations for what we were sure would be a sensational season for Upper Sixpenny. But as luck would have it, David Macindoe, who ran the Eleven, and Clem Gibson, the captain of the Eleven, who actually made the decision, or at least put it into writing, summoned me to play for Upper Club, the top game in the school, from which the Eleven and the Twenty-Two (the Second Eleven) were chosen. Macindoe was another of the mildly eccentric schoolmasters Eton had a habit of producing. He had a gruff but friendly manner, a reassuring chuckle and an ever-cheerful pipe, and had opened the bowling off the wrong foot for Oxford for four years on either side of the war.
Things went well, and I donned the wicketkeeping gloves for the Eleven. I never returned to play a single game for Upper Sixpenny; nor did my old friend Edward Lane Fox, who had received a similar call to arms. At the age of fifteen it felt as near to unbelievable as it gets, especially when, early in June, I received a letter from Clem Gibson, which I still have, asking me if I would like to play against Harrow at Lord’s early in July. It was not an invitation I was likely to refuse. Can you imagine? There I was, a complete cricket nut who ate, slept and drank the game, being asked to play for two days against the Old Enemy at the Holy of Holies.
Of course, I had known by then that there was a distinct possibility the invitation would come my way, for things had been going quite well behind the stumps. But there it was in black and white. No one was more pleased than dear old Claude Taylor, with whom I had kept in close contact after leaving his clutches in Lower Sixpenny. In Upper Club nets, CHT still came to help me, standing halfway down the net and throwing an endless stream of balls at me. The stroke he taught me better than any other was the on-drive, which he considered the most beautiful in the game. When I got it right he would purr with delight. He and David Macindoe had together written a splendid book called Cricket Dialogue, about the need to maintain the traditional etiquette and standards of the game. It may be dated, but it is still well worth reading.
I shall never forget my first Eton v. Harrow match. The anticipation had been intense, and I was given a lift from Eton to Lord’s, along with Edward Lane Fox and Gus Wolfe-Murray, by Richard Burrows, a considerable middle-order batsman and a wonderful all-round games player. His father, the General, sent his Rolls-Royce – what else? – and chauffeur, and the four of us piled inside and were driven not only to Lord’s, but imperiously through the Grace Gates. What a way to enter the most hallowed cricketing portals in the world for the first time as a player. No matter what those in the know talked about in College Chapel, I felt that Heaven couldn’t be any better than this. I can still clearly remember the frisson of prickly excitement as we stopped to have our credentials checked. Yes, they even checked up on Rolls-Royces. Even today, every time I go in through the Grace Gates – and goodness knows how many times I have done so – I still get that same feeling. I remember carrying my puny little canvas cricket bag through the back door of the Pavilion, up the stairs and along the passage to the home dressing room, the one from which Middlesex, MCC and England ply their wares. After being given a cup of tea by the dressing-room attendant, we changed into our flannels. There were several formal-looking dark-brown leather couches around the walls and as I sat down on one to tie up my bootlaces it suddenly occurred to me that not a fortnight before, England had been playing the second Test against South Africa at Lord’s. In that same dressing room, sitting more or less where I was and doing precisely the same thing, would have been Denis Compton, Peter May, Ken Barrington, Tom Graveney, Godfrey Evans, Fred Trueman and the others.
We won the contest, and were generous to let Harrow get to within 34 runs of us. As far as I was concerned, the only blemish came on the second morning. We had begun our second innings on the first evening, and needed quick runs to give us time to bowl them out again. We made a good start, but then after about an hour, wickets began to fall, and there was mild panic in the dressing room. I was batting at number eight, and no sooner had I got my pads on than there came shouts of ‘You’re in, you’re in!’ I grabbed my bat and gloves and fled down the stairs, through the Long Room, down the steps and out through the gates. I strode to the Nursery End, took guard and prepared to face Rex Neame, who bowled testing off-breaks, which he was to do later on a few occasions for Kent in between his productive efforts at the Shepherd Neame Brewery. I came two paces down the pitch to my first ball, had a swing in the vague direction of the Tavern, and my off-stump went all over the place. I retreated on the interminably long return journey to the Pavilion amid applause and yells the like of which I had never heard. In the circumstances I felt I could hardly raise my bat or take off my cap, and somewhat perplexed, I continued on my way. No one much wanted to talk to me in the dressing room, so I took off my pads and things, put on my blazer and went to join Tom and Grizel in Q Stand, next to the Pavilion. When I arrived, Tom looked severely at me and said, ‘You were a bloody fool to let him get a hat-trick.’ Until then, I had had no idea it was a hat-trick – the first ever to be taken by a Harrovian in the Eton and Harrow match. Tom Pugh, who was playing that day, always says that when the hat-trick came up for discussion later, I said, ‘If I’d known it was a hat-trick I would have tried harder.’ You never know what to believe.
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 (#ulink_1de697a8-fb22-5145-bd82-d9f43fdcd88e)
Queen Charlotte and a Milk Train (#ulink_1de697a8-fb22-5145-bd82-d9f43fdcd88e)
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.
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 (#ulink_7cd2d3f9-7451-5a86-88cb-e7b75bb583c9)
Mad Dogs and Honeymoons (#ulink_7cd2d3f9-7451-5a86-88cb-e7b75bb583c9)
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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Henry Blofeld
The quintessentially English cricket commentator, writer, oenophile, bon viveur, collector and national treasure, fondly known as “Blowers”, tells his riveting life story.Born in Norfolk and educated at Eton and Cambridge, Henry Calthorpe Blofeld OBE, nicknamed “Blowers” by the late Brian Johnston, is best known as a cricket commentator for Test Match Special on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra. His distinctively rich, cut glass voice and his vividly eccentric observations of life on and off the pitch, have made him a household name, not only in Britain but around the world, wherever cricket is played. Blowers has been close the the heart of the game for over fifty years and his career has taken him to the far corners of the earth. This autobiography, stuffed to the gunwhales with delicious anecdotes, brings his astonishingly colourful story bang up to date.
About the Book (#ulink_341f8aa1-13da-53bc-aba6-8292b904ad80)
Nicknamed “Blowers” by the late Brian Johnston, Henry Calthorpe Blofeld is one of the best known and best loved sports’ journalists of all time. With his trademark bow-tie, his unmistakeably fruity tones and his delightfully idiosyncratic observations, both on and off the cricket field, Blowers has become a national institution.
He joined the legendary Test Match Special team in 1972. During his career as a journalist and a commentator, he has travelled extensively to the many parts of the world where cricket is played.
Although beset by illness (including major heart surgery in 1999), Henry Blofeld’s philosophy on life is a simple one: live every day as though it were your last and squeeze every last drop out of every waking moment. Even now, at the age of seventy-four, he continues to play by his own rules.
In Squeezing the Orange Blowers looks back affectionately on his childhood and his colourful career with all the wit and good humour which is the hallmark of this remarkable and quintessential Englishman.
About the Author (#ulink_c7991e84-3e1f-51ad-ba4c-8637a113ce75)
A consummate showman, raconteur, collector, gourmet and connoisseur of fine wines, Henry Blofeld was born in Norfolk and educated at Eton and Cambridge. He is the author of several books including The Packer Affair, My Dear Old Thing: Talking Cricket and A Thirst for Life. For the past few years he has been touring all over the UK with his one-man show, An Evening with Blowers, as well as many other public speaking engagements. He was awarded an OBE in 2003.
HENRY BLOFELD
Squeezing the Orange
Copyright (#ulink_36a73dac-1897-59dd-917c-d3400b9a77dd)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Blue Door 2013
Copyright © Henry Blofeld 2013
Cover photograph © Colin Thomas 2013
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Henry Blofeld asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007506392
Ebook Edition © September 2013 ISBN: 9780007506415
Version: 2015-12-17
For Valeria, whose love, interest, humour and enthusiasm has made all the difference.
CONTENTS
Cover (#ube5675dd-8e08-5e1f-8ef6-528e8fe415fe)
About the Book (#ue795cef7-33f8-5e7e-bbfc-b799eec641c8)
About the Author (#ub52a7ce4-d9cb-5528-aeec-ed6b32924eb3)
Title Page (#ud4b9929d-7a58-5c5f-af80-70561fb7778b)
Copyright (#u5b5dd2d0-b98a-5c35-871e-56f2cbd56172)
Dedication (#u4c97cb22-3b6e-5ff0-a402-c3554093bf8b)
Preface (#u52a7e243-c284-5e0f-9a88-819a12f2f364)
1. Grizel and Shelling Peas (#ucc538b7e-4a59-59be-8e48-146df8ab7f56)
2. A Wodehousian Education (#u6bff724a-b6b8-5386-9bc9-47e9b0167313)
3. The French Women’s Institute (#uca490897-b889-5c2f-bb7e-8c51917968ff)
4. Queen Charlotte and a Milk Train (#ua7109f0d-f282-57b5-8d5a-436ad4e03ca5)
5. Mad Dogs and Honeymoons (#u1f8f5242-555a-525e-a2c4-ad1e580360ad)
6. Slum Dogs and Maharajahs (#litres_trial_promo)
7. A Lie at the Blue Mountain End (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Mugabe at the Pavilion End (#litres_trial_promo)
9. A Modest Dinner at Alresford (#litres_trial_promo)
10. The Traffic Cop in Faisalabad (#litres_trial_promo)
11. A Heavenly Rejection (#litres_trial_promo)
12. The Man in the Stocking Mask (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Norfolk at the Albert Hall (#litres_trial_promo)
14. Middle-Aged Junkies in Kandahar (#litres_trial_promo)
15. White Vans and Chewing Gum (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Photographic Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract from Thanks, Johnners – Jonathan Agnew (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_036bd1d4-c54e-5952-8fe6-41d503a6756f)
I find the older I get the more time I spend thinking back to my early life which I suppose turned me into the person I have become. I have found also that by looking back on this period at the age of seventy-three, I am able to look at it from a much more relaxed perspective than when I last wrote about it fifteen years ago.
The nasty bits don’t hurt or matter as much as they did and the best bits seem to have become even more fun. There is no point in trying to blame anyone but yourself. It is much better to throw your head back and have a thoroughly good laugh. As a result, maybe, I find my first thirty-odd years much more interesting than the rest of it, when effectively the die has been cast.
My early upbringing, strange by today’s standards; my traditional education which, after a homesick start, I enjoyed hugely; a nasty accident; Cambridge; the City and then my two extraordinarily lucky starts in both journalism and broadcasting have all left their mark. I have, therefore, written at some length about my early life and tried to bring alive some of the more remarkable characters who had an influence on me as I started out.
I have spent a life unashamedly in pursuit of fun and this book is meant to be a reflection of that. I know I have been horribly self-indulgent and hedonistic and altogether pretty selfish, but I hope also that I have communicated a fair measure of enjoyment and pleasure and it is this with which I am trying to deal now.
After describing how it all began, I decided not to go on in this vein in case it developed into a boring chronology of cricket tours and matches. I have talked about our commentary box and its inhabitants and one or two important occurrences along the way, but without, I hope, failing to see the funny side of it all.
If I have developed a philosophy, it is ridiculously simple. I regard every day as an orange, from which I try and squeeze every last drop of juice before moving on to tomorrow’s. This book is an attempt to bring a glass or two of that delicious juice back to life and hence the title.
Henry Blofeld
London, 2013
ONE (#ulink_d6d57a3f-0132-57fc-8fce-500d33526316)
Grizel and Shelling Peas (#ulink_d6d57a3f-0132-57fc-8fce-500d33526316)
According to my mother – who had drawn the short straw at the font when she was christened Grizel – my birth was less eventful than my conception. Grizel did not muck around: she was always earthy and to the point. When my wife and I were first married, she encouraged us to waste no time in starting a family, as she felt that delay might have a discouraging effect on procreation. ‘I was lucky,’ she told me, ‘because I bred at the shake of a pair of pants’ – adding, with emphasis, ‘Which was just as well, as it was all I ever got.’ That, I hope, was not entirely fair on Tom, my father, who may not have been one of Casanova’s strongest competitors, but I am sure he had his moments. In any case, this particular pair of pants must have shaken with vigour, no doubt as part of the Christmas festivities, in 1938, as late in the evening of the following 23 September I made a swift and noisy entrance into this world. Tom will have been sitting in the drawing room dealing with a whisky and soda and The Times crossword puzzle while Dr Bennett conducted the events upstairs. I dare say this was not too arduous a production for him, for on another occasion Grizel said, ‘I found that having babies was as easy as shelling peas. I can never understand what all the fuss is about.’ So that was that.
Tom and Grizel were fiercely Edwardian in their beliefs about bringing up children, and the three of us – Anthea was ten years older than me, and John seven – had a tougher time of it than children have now. Of course we were all born with whacking great silver spoons in our mouths, but I don’t know how you can choose your parents. You’ve got to get along with what you’ve got. I’m sure Anthea and John had a stricter start to life than I did. In the thirties nannies and nurserymaids abounded, and Tom and Grizel will have been even more remote figures for the other two than they were for me. I probably had an easier time of it because during the war Nanny had to go back home to Heacham in west Norfolk to look after her sick mother. As a result, Grizel, with the help of any temporary nurserymaid she could lay her hands on, had to roll up her sleeves and do much of the dirty work herself, so she and I had a closer relationship than she did with Anthea and John. I am sure the love between parents and children was just as strong then as it is now, but in those days it was not the upfront jamboree that it has become. In fact, when you look back at it all those years ago, it seems harsh and at times almost cruel. My friends were brought up in much the same way – that was just the way things were done. I should think my parents’ generation felt that life was easy for us compared to the way they themselves had been brought up in the years immediately after Queen Victoria had died. It is all part of the ever-going evolutionary process which has brought us now to the age of the free-range child. So what seemed perfectly normal to us at the time may seem shocking from today’s considerably more relaxed perspective.
While Tom and Grizel were sticklers for keeping us on the straight and narrow, they were, in their own way, loving parents who did their best to make sure that we had as happy a childhood as possible, within the constraints of the time. They were always there for us, to help and give support, although if the fault was mine, as it usually was, they did not hesitate to say so, and seldom minced their words. For years they remained a staunch last resort, and like all offspring I went running back when in need of help, usually in the form of cash, although with only modest success, as Tom and Grizel were never that flush, and guarded their pieces of eight with a solemn rectitude.
I remember when I had reached the pocket-money stage going along to my father’s dressing room to collect my weekly dose. Sometimes I arrived a little ahead of schedule and caught him in his pants, socks and attendant sock suspenders, which was an awe-inspiring sight. It was like looking at a pole-vaulter as things went wrong. There was great excitement one morning when I found I had graduated from a twelve-sided threepenny bit (a penny of which had to go into the church collection) to a silver sixpence. The handover of the coin or coins was carried out with a formality which almost suggested that the Bank of England was involved. Tom kept his loose change in the top drawer of a tiny chest with three little drawers which perched alongside his elderly pair of ivory-backed hairbrushes, which had a strong smell of lemon from the hair oil he got from his barber. As my father made a coot look as if it was in urgent need of a haircut, this all seemed a rather pointless exercise.
While he solemnly located the appropriate piece of small change in this magical drawer, I stood by the door. I don’t think it would have occurred to Tom that he was a frightening figure to a small boy. This had something to do with his height – he stood six feet six inches tall in his stocking feet – as well as his monocle and the sock suspenders, which so fascinated me. His lighter side was harder to find than Grizel’s, and his was naturally a more formal manner. The staff, in the house and on the Home Farm, treated him with a watchful respect. When crossed or let down he could be extremely angry, and would have made common cause with some of those grumpy Old Testament prophets.
Tom regarded the ancien régime as the only possible way forward, while Grizel, if left to herself, would have been happy to allow her more extravagant natural instincts to come to the surface. While Grizel laughed in a bubbling, jolly sort of way, Tom’s merriment seemed to rumble up with more control from the bottom of his throat, and the source of his humour was often harder to fathom than his wife’s. Grizel had a strong sense of loyalty to her husband, and she was always more than aware of her position as Tom’s wife, and played the role pretty well. She was a snob, but I remember it as a snobbery as of right, rather than as a contrivance. Looking back on my parents and my childhood now, it comes to me like a black-and-white, but seldom silent, movie, and from this distance I find it highly entertaining.
The Blofelds have always been a restless lot. At some long-ago point, now lost in the mists of time, they moved from north Germany to Finland, and then shot across the North Sea with the Vikings before finally being grounded on the north Norfolk coast somewhere near what is today called Overstrand, then pushing a few miles inland and setting up shop in a small village called Sustead. Three or four hundred years whizzed by before they up-anchored again, moving twenty-odd miles south-east to Hoveton, which at that time was owned by some people called Doughty. Having a shrewd eye for the main chance, a Blofeld married a Miss Doughty, who was to become the sole surviving member of that distinguished family. Hoveton therefore soon became the Blofeld stronghold, and has remained so ever since.
Discipline – good manners, politeness, the pleases and thank yous of life – was all-important in my childhood. I can’t remember how young I was when I was first soundly ticked off for not leaping to my feet when my mother came into the room, but young enough. Dirty hands, undone buttons, sloppy speech or pronunciation, and the use of certain words were all jumped upon. Throwing sweet papers or any other rubbish out of the car window was also not popular. Goodness knows what my parents would have made of mobile telephones, and their frequent and disturbing use. Table manners were rigidly enforced. No one sat down before Grizel was in place, and you were not allowed to start eating until everyone had been served. If toast crumbs were left on a pat of butter, there was hell to pay, your napkin had to be neatly folded before you left the dining room, and you ate what was put in front of you and left a clean plate.
The nursery was presided over by Nanny Framingham, who was nothing less than a saint. Cheerful, enthusiastic and always smiling, she put up with all sorts of skulduggery. On one occasion I all but frightened her to death. My father’s guns and cartridges were kept in the schoolroom, which was next to his office. I always took a lively interest in the gun cupboard, although it was forbidden territory, and when no one was around I used to go and have a good look round. I loved the smell of the 3-in-One oil which was used to clean the guns. There was also something irresistible about the cartridges. I would steal one or two of them, take them back to the nursery and cut them up to see how they were made. One afternoon Nanny came into the room unexpectedly while I was engaged in this harmless pastime, and the sight of the gunpowder and loose shot lying all over the table terrified her – she saw us all going up in an enormous explosion, and was quick to run off and enlist help. Within a matter of minutes Tom burst into the nursery, looking and sounding a good deal worse than the wrath of God. My cartridge-cutting activities came to an immediate halt, and I was probably sent up to my bedroom for an indefinite period, possibly with a clip over the ear or a smack on the bottom as well. Corporal punishment was always on the menu.
The schoolroom lived up to its name, for it was there, along with my first cousin, Simon Cator, and Jane Holden, an unofficial sister and lifelong friend who lived nearby at Neatishead, that we were given the rudiments of an education by the small, bespectacled, virtuous, austere and humourless Mrs Hales. I often wonder, looking back, what she and Mr Hales – who I’m not sure I ever met – got up to in their spare time. Not a great deal, I should think. They lived at Sea Palling, and she turned up each morning rather earlier than was strictly necessary in her elderly Austin Seven, which, in spite of often making disagreeable and unlikely noises, kept going for many years. On the occasions when we got the better of Mrs Hales and were rather noisily mobbing her up, the door from the schoolroom into my father’s office would burst open, Tom’s thunderous face would appear, and order would be instantly restored. Our lessons were fun, and we learned to read and write and do some basic arithmetic. Mrs Hales must have done a good job, because when I went away to boarding school I found I was able to hold my own.
Tom was an imposing figure. In addition to his height, he had a small moustache which was more a smattering of foliage on his upper lip than anything else. He said he grew it to avoid having to shave his upper lip, which, as he used a cut-throat razor for most of his life, may have been a tricky operation. He had a huge nose, which he blew and sneezed through with considerable venom while applying a large and colourful silk handkerchief to the enormous protuberance. His monocle hung from a thread around his neck, and dangled down in front of his tie. This was impressive, unless, as a small boy, I was summoned to his office for my school report to be discussed. I would tread apprehensively down the long corridor, past the cellar and the game larder, and through the schoolroom for this ghastly meeting. It never had a happy outcome, because away from the games field I was an out-and-out slacker. Tom, sitting behind his desk while I perched apprehensively on the leather bum-warmer around the fireplace, would read out all the hideous lies those wretched schoolmasters had written about me. Not only that, he would believe every single word of them. Both he and Grizel invariably took the side of my persecutors, something it seems parents seldom do today. Having read out the details of whichever crime it was that I was supposed to have committed, there would be a nasty tweak of the muscles around his right eye. The monocle would fall down his shirt front, indicating that it was my turn to go in to bat. I was then invariably bowled by a ball I should have left alone.
When I had reached the age when I was more or less house-trained, I was allowed to join my parents in the drawing room for an hour or so before going to bed. Nanny would open the drawing-room door in the hall to let me in, and Grizel would always greet me with the words, ‘Hello, ducky.’ I loved these visits, for Grizel usually had something fun or interesting for me to do. She taught me card games, starting with a simple two-handed game called cooncan. I graduated from that to hearts, which needed four people, and piquet, which I played with Tom. Grizel also taught me the patiences she would play while Tom was reading and I loved the one called ‘trousers’. We played Ludo and Cluedo, and occasionally Monopoly. Tom would make up the numbers for these, too, but I don’t think Monopoly was really his sort of thing. When he had bought the Old Kent Road he was never quite sure what to do with it.
When I was a touch older, Tom would read aloud to me, and I have always been eternally grateful for this. I think he started me off with Kipling’s Just So Stories – I adored ‘The Elephant’s Child’. I know I have never laughed at any story more than Mr Jorrocks’s adventures in R.S. Surtees’ Handley Cross. Tom was brilliant at all the different accents: his imitation of huntsman James Pigg’s Scottish vowels was special. Then there were John Buchan’s Richard Hannay books, The Thirty-Nine Steps and so on, and Dornford Yates’s stories about Jonathan Mansell and the others discovering treasure in castles in Austria. I was introduced to Bulldog Drummond, Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy Sayers’ detective Lord Peter Wimsey who became a great hero of mine. Tom adored P.G. Wodehouse, and wanted to read me some of the Jeeves books, but Grizel couldn’t stand them, and they stayed on the shelves. We all have awful secrets which we hope will never slip out. One of mine is that I had a mother who didn’t like Wodehouse or Gilbert and Sullivan. This still surprises me, because I would have thought Grizel would have enjoyed the fantasy world of Wodehouse. Tom’s reading would finish in time for the weather and the six o’clock news. After the news headlines, Tom would invariably tell Grizel to turn off the wireless. He dismissed the rest of the news as ‘gossip’. Then it was drinks time for them and bedtime for me.
I am sure Tom never played cricket, judging from his one performance in the fathers’ match when I was at Sunningdale. But he enjoyed the game, and each summer he and two of his friends, Reggie Cubitt (who was his cousin) and Christo Birkbeck, would go up to London for the three days of the Gentlemen v. Players match at Lord’s. They stayed at Boodle’s, and I dare say it was as close as any of them ever came to letting their hair down, which probably meant no more than having a second glass of vintage port after dinner. It is unlikely that they would have paid a visit to the Bag o’Nails after that. Reggie and Christo were a sort of social barometer for Tom and Grizel. If, in the years I still lived at home, I was intending to embark upon some rather flashy adventure, Grizel would caution me by saying, ‘What would Reggie and Christo think?’
Just before the end of the war there were some German prisoners-of-war working on the farm at Hoveton. It was said that if Germany had played cricket it might never have gone to war, so it was ironic that these PoWs were put to work turning a part of the old parkland up by the little round wood at Hill Piece into a wonderfully picturesque cricket ground. The village team, Hoveton and Wroxham, played there, and for several years later on I organised a two-day game in September between the Eton Ramblers and the Free Foresters, which was highly competitive and great fun. It was a lovely ground in a wonderful setting, but sadly it has disappeared for a part of it has now been planted over with trees.
Tom could be great value. He had a wonderful turn of phrase. He and Grizel would go to bed every night at around ten o’clock. Sitting in the drawing room at the Home Farm, or later in the hall at Hoveton House, he would shut his book, half stretch, and say, ‘Well, I think it’s time for a bit of a lie-down before breakfast.’ Another splendid offering would come when a visitor was over-keen to make a favourable impression. When asked what he thought about whoever it was when he had gone, Tom would say, ‘Awfully nice. I do just wish he wouldn’t fart above his arsehole quite so much.’
There was one incident when I was young for which I never forgave Tom. I always ate with Nanny in the nursery, but I was allowed to have lunch in the dining room with my parents on the last full day of the school holidays – I was sent to boarding school at Sunningdale when I was seven and a half. And not only that: I was allowed to choose the pudding. One year Grizel came by a stock of tinned black cherries, and whenever I tasted them I didn’t think I would ever get much closer to heaven. Goodness knows where she found them. Anyway, on this occasion I said I would like some black cherries as the pud, and to my surprise my wish was granted. We sat down to lunch at one o’clock – mealtimes were immutable, and if you were late it was considered to be a major crime. Tom carved the cold beef. They had cold roast beef six days a week, or so it seemed, and to ring the changes, hot roast beef on Sundays. A woman called Joan, who ferried these things around in the dining room, put my plate in front of me, and when everyone had been served, we tucked in. Our empty plates were collected, and then it was time for the cherries.
They were brought in by Joan on a large brown tray, and put down on the sideboard. As well as the big glass bowl brimful of cherries, there was another full of junket, that ghastly milk jelly which I detested with a passion. Tom got up to serve us, and in addition to a pretty useful pile of cherries, I was given two big spoonfuls of junket. We were brought up to ‘eat level’, which meant that junket and cherries had to be eaten together. But on this occasion I threw caution to the winds and, feigning great enthusiasm, got stuck into the junket, which I finished in record time. My undisturbed pile of cherries was now gleaming up at me from my plate. The next five minutes looked promising. But Tom had been watching.
‘Joan,’ he said, for she was still lurking by the sideboard, ‘Master Henry’ – I was always Master Henry as far as the staff were concerned – ‘clearly does not like his cherries. Will you please remove them.’ Which is what she did, and I have only just stopped crying. Life could be bloody unfair, or so it seemed. But I had broken the rules.
In the fifties Tom bought an old Rolls-Royce from a chap who lived in the neighbouring village of Coltishall. It was a bespoke model, and was thought to be one of the last Rolls made with a red ‘RR’ on the front of the bonnet – the change to black was made in 1933, for aesthetic reasons. It was a huge, pale-grey car with a soft roof which never came off, as far as I know. There was a window between the back and the front seats which could be wound up by those in the back so the chauffeur couldn’t do any eavesdropping. As Tom always drove it himself this window remained down and was not to be touched. I thought it was the sexiest car ever, because it had no fewer than three horns. One was a gentle toot for warning an old woman against crossing the road; the next was a bit stronger, in case she had already started; and the third was a klaxon which yelled at her just as she was disappearing under the wheels. ‘Bloody fool,’ Tom would mutter after he had pressed it.
My father used the Rolls as his main car for at least ten years, and it always caused my school chums great amusement when he drove it down to Eton. He was the Chairman of the Country Gentleman’s Association, and the number plate was CG 1000, so he was known by my friends as ‘Country Gent One Thousand’. As it was such a big car he sometimes had difficulty negotiating the smaller streets in London, but it was such an imperious-looking machine that almost everyone got out of the way. If not, there was much hooting, which occasionally got to the klaxon stage. Although parking in those days was a great deal easier than it is now, it still presented problems in the busy parts of London. But Tom, whose appearance was nothing if not distinguished, had the answer to that. He would drive slowly down, say, Bond Street, and when he saw two coppers walking along the pavement – as one did in those far-distant days – he would stop the car, get out and shut the door, saying to the nearest one, ‘Officer, look after my car for me. I shall only be about ten minutes,’ and walk off. When he returned they would indeed be looking after his car. I always wondered who they thought he was.
In many ways Grizel was the antithesis to Tom. She was short, although there was a fair bit of her in the horizontal sense, and she packed a pretty good punch. She went around like a battleship under full steam, with a siren to match. A woman of the most forthright and damning opinions, with a fund of common sense, she did not tolerate what she described as nonsense in any shape or form, and was quick to spot anything remotely bogus. In turn, you had to accept her as she was. She was very bright, and had a marvellous sense of humour. She was a reasonably devout Christian, and church – where Tom read the lessons, and was joint patron of the living together with the Bishop of Norwich – was an essential part of Sundays. As a child, I always felt the time spent in church could have been more usefully employed. Grizel, sensing my objections, would say to me, ‘You’ve had a lovely week. Now you can spend an hour saying thank you.’ She was fond of God, but dealt with him entirely on her own terms. When they eventually met I should think a good deal of finger-wagging of the ‘now, look here’ sort will have gone on.
In 1956 we moved up the drive from the Home Farm to Hoveton House. There was a dinner party soon afterwards, and one of my parents’ friends who came along was what people today would refer to as a born-again Christian. In those days he was known as a God-botherer. He loved to get stuck into his neighbour’s ribs and start banging on about God. While she was all for the general idea of converting people, Grizel felt there was a time and place for everything, and that a dinner party was not remotely a conversional occasion, so she sat him next to her to avoid the danger. But after dinner, as was the custom, the ladies left the room to powder their noses or whatever, leaving the chaps to drink their port before they all joined forces later on in the drawing room. When this moment arrived, our God-botherer found himself sitting on a sofa on the other side of the fireplace from Grizel. After a few minutes she noticed that he was giving his neighbour, a good-looking girl, a fearful going over about the Almighty. She coughed and generally registered short-range disapproval. The God-botherer, realising that he had got it wrong, stopped in mid-sentence and, leaning forward towards Grizel with his elbows on his knees, asked in a surprised voice, ‘But surely, Grizel, you believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ?’ Grizel narrowed her eyes, leaned back a fraction and delivered a stinging rebuke: ‘Never in the drawing room after dinner.’ Which was game, set and match.
Every summer for the last five years of their lives together, before my father put his cue in the rack in 1986, my parents would go for a holiday on a barge on the French canals. It was a fearfully upmarket barge, without a punt pole in sight. At six o’clock each evening they had a glass of champagne on deck, then went up to their cabin to change for dinner, which meant a dinner jacket for Tom and a long skirt for Grizel, before re-emerging to have another glass of champagne. There were always a number of Americans on board who helped make up the numbers. Grizel was suspicious of Americans. She felt that they bounced rather too much. One evening the two of them went up to change for dinner, came down suitably attired and tackled their second glasses of champagne. They had hardly begun when from stage right, a short, middle-aged American in ‘perfectly ghastly rubber shoes’ came bouncing across the deck to Grizel with his arms outstretched, saying in a loud voice, ‘Hi, my name’s Jim. What’s yours?’ This was too much for Grizel who took a step back, mentally at any rate, drew herself up to her full five feet six and a half inches and said in a menacingly firm voice, ‘That, I am afraid, is a private matter, but you may call me Mrs Blofeld.’ I think Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia might well have come up with both those answers.
I have found that the older I become, the more I look back to my origins and see it all in a different perspective even from fifteen years ago. If I seem a little too critical of my parents, it is with my tongue firmly in my cheek. I feel now, more than ever, that the most surprising thing is that these things happened at all. Hoveton was terrific fun, and it would not have been so enjoyable if Tom and Grizel had been other than they were. Their strong personalities were stamped all over the place. And not only that: although they were never particularly flush with cash, they gave all three of us a wonderful education. Anthea went on to become a doctor, and John, who inherited Tom’s wonderful speaking voice, became a distinguished High Court judge. Meanwhile, I scrabbled around in the press and the broadcasting boxes of the cricketing world. Then when old age was taking hold I began to tread the boards, in the hope of making a few people laugh in any theatre brave enough to take me on, although I fear I may have bored many of them to tears.
We now live in an age when much that I never even dreamt about when I was young has come about. The world of Tom and Grizel has been relegated to the stuff of fairy stories, yet at the time it was as natural as night following day. There was no other game in town for those on either side of the green baize door, and we all got on with it. As a child I had a great relationship with everyone who worked for my parents, both in the house and on the farm, except for Mrs Porcher, our cook. She was a small woman with a shrill voice, and although she was no doubt a dab hand at the kitchen stove, as far as I was concerned she never seemed to blur any issue with goodwill. She didn’t exactly take on my parents, but there was sometimes a curtness to her manner that did not always bring out the best in Grizel. I remember Mrs Porcher going into the drawing room after breakfast, notepad in hand, ready for Grizel to order the food for lunch and dinner that day. Mrs Porcher always had the sense to realise that if she entered into a battle of wills with Grizel there could only be one outcome, while Grizel knew that it would be an awful bore to have to find another cook. As a result, there existed a continuous state of armed neutrality between them. When Mrs Porcher eventually returned permanently into the no doubt grateful arms of Mr Porcher, cooks came and went at a fair pace, until the redoubtable Mrs Alexander took over.
My early years must have shaped the initial hard core of me, which I hope has been smoothed down a bit by the subsequent journey through the mainly self-imposed rough seas of life. In many ways, of course, memory is selective, but there is no doubt that the family estate at Hoveton was an enchanting place in which to have been brought up. Over a great many years it had grown smaller as those in charge of it had seen fit to sell off pieces of land – mostly, I expect, to raise a bit of lolly. But the nucleus that still remained when I was young was heaven for a small boy. Two of the Norfolk Broads, Hoveton Great Broad and Hoveton Little Broad, were within its boundaries, and there were many acres of exciting marshland, with dykes and dams and all manner of birdlife, from ducks and geese to bitterns, swans, hawks and masses of smaller varieties. Grizel was passionate about the local flora and fauna, and would teach me the names of butterflies, birds, insects, trees and wildflowers. Sadly I have forgotten most of them, which would have made her very cross. Sometimes she would find a swallowtail butterfly chrysalis in the reeds on the marshes. This would be brought home and put in a cage in the drawing room, and some time later the most beautifully coloured butterfly you could imagine would emerge. Before it could damage those magical wings by fluttering against the sides of the cage, it would be released into the marshes to fend for itself. Sadly, over the years swallowtails became increasingly scarce and by now have probably completely disappeared : I should think the last one to be reared at home was sometime in the fifties.
For a time Grizel collected Siamese cats, which lived in a long wooden hut in the farmyard at the Home Farm. She won many prizes with them. The silver spoons with which we stirred our coffee after lunch all had the letters ‘SCC’ (Siamese Cat Club) emblazoned on their handles. She also went through a Japanese bantam stage, during which, intermingled with a fluffy collection of white Silkies, they trawled all over the farmyard, not always to Tom’s delight.
Another phase of her life was devoted to Dutch rabbits. These again won prizes, and were kept in the shed that had once been the home of the Siamese cats. There was also an impressive herd of pedigree Shorthorns, which, amid great excitement, won all sorts of prizes over the years at the Royal Show. Grizel was closely involved with the breeding of the cattle, and would go down to the dairy farm almost every day. With the head cowman in tow she would have a look at whatever animals she was particularly interested in, and cast an eye over any new calves. If need be, she was more than happy to roll up her sleeves and help with a difficult birth. When I was very young she would talk for ages to Birch, who was the head cowman, and later to his successor, Pressley, whom I found more fun. I remember Grizel and Pressley constantly hatching plots to convince Tom of the necessity of buying a new bull, or a couple of heifers, or whatever. The dairy was always a fruitful playground for me. I loved watching the cows being milked, and then the milk being separated from the cream. There was one occasion when I eluded Grizel and Pressley and walked into one of the cow sheds when a heifer was in the act of being served by a bull. After I had been dragged out Pressley was embarrassed, but Grizel, who took these things in her stride, said to me, ‘You’ll find out more about that one day, darling, but not just yet.’ This left me deeply curious, but I knew better than to question her. She had drawn a line under the subject for the time being.
Grizel, with her familiar stride, which was more a purposeful walk than a strut, was forever busying herself around the house, the garden and the farmyard. She made the life of the gardener, Walter Savage, confusing and difficult as she issued instructions over her shoulder while he struggled along in her wake. Savage, as we called him, was thin, about medium height, with a white moustache, a good First War record, and a huge and frightening wife who put the fear of God into poor old Savage. They lived in one half of the charming Dutch gabled cottage at the bottom of the Hoveton House garden. When I was a bit older, Savage would drive me and some friends in my mother’s car to the Norwich speedway track, where the home team were pretty high in the national pecking order. Ove Fundin, a five-time world champion from somewhere in Scandinavia, was a name I shall never forget; nor that thrilling smell of petrol fumes and burning rubber as the riders strove to steer their brakeless bikes around corners. On other occasions Savage ferried several of us to the Yarmouth Fun Fair, where the bumper cars, the ghost train and the fish and chips were all irresistible.
When I was a child the farm, which had been whittled down over the years to about 1,300 acres, had become principally a fruit farm. There were an awful lot of people employed to tend to its needs. When I was old enough I used to help the wives of the farmworkers pick the fruit. There was the excitement of being paid sixpence by Herbert Haines for a basket of Victoria plums and a punnet of raspberries. This was a useful supplement to my pocket money. Herbert, short and indomitably cheerful, wearing a perilously placed felt hat, loved his cricket and presided over the fruit picking.
The farm manager, the slightly austere, bespectacled and white-haired Mr Grainger, tootled about the place in his rather severe-looking car. I was extremely careful of him, for I knew that anything I got up to would go straight back to Tom. Mr Grainger had a small office in the Home Farm yard which I avoided like the plague. In fact I think it was a mutual avoidance. As far as I was concerned, Mr Grainger, who lived in a small house down the drive, was always hard work, and if he had a lighter side, I never found it. My father’s office was presided over by the ebullient, bouncing and eternally jolly, but not inconsiderable, figure of Miss Easter, a local lady from Salhouse who was a close ally of Nanny’s. I loved it when she paid us a visit in the nursery. ‘Miss Easter’ was a tongue-twister for the young, and she was known affectionately by all of us, including Grizel, as ‘Seasser’, although Tom never bent from ‘Miss Easter’. I suppose she must have had a Christian name, but I can’t remember it. Sadly for us, she left Hoveton when approaching middle age, and became Mrs Charles Blaxall. He was a yeoman farmer, and they lived somewhere between Hoveton and Yarmouth. I used to go with Nanny to visit her in her new role as a farmer’s wife. She remained the greatest fun, always provided goodies and was one of the real characters of my early life. I can hear her cheerful, echoing laughter even now.
Freddie Hunn, a small man with the friendliest of smiles, was in charge of the cattle feed, which was ground up and mixed in the barn across the yard from my father’s office. I loved to go and help Freddie. There was a huge mixer, which was almost the height of the building. All the ingredients were thrown in at the top, mixed, and then poured into sacks at the bottom. The barn had a delicious, musty smell. Freddie’s other role was to look after the cricket ground at the other end of the farmyard, through the big green gate and up the long grassy slope to Hill Piece. After his day in the barn had finished he would go up to the ground and get to work with the roller or mower or whatever else was needed. The day before a match between Hoveton and Wroxham and one of the neighbouring villages, out would come the whitener, and the creases would be marked. I found it all fascinating, and Nanny could hardly get me back to the house in time for a bath on Friday evenings.
Freddie was a great Surrey supporter, while I was passionate about Middlesex and Compton and Edrich. But Freddie always thought he had trumped my ace when he turned, as he inevitably did, to Jack Hobbs. Freddie’s wife, the large, smiling Hilda Hunn, supervised the delicious cricket teas, and sometimes allowed me a second small cake in an exciting, coloured paper cup.
One of my favourite farmworkers was Lennie Hubbard, whom we all, including my father, called by his Christian name. I never discovered why or how such distinctions were made: why most of the workers on the farm were known by their surnames, while Freddie, Lennie and one or two others went by their Christian names. Lennie was tall, and had been born in the Alms Houses in Lower Street, the rather upmarket name for the lane that ran past these cottages down to the marshes. Once, a great many years earlier, that lane had been part of the main road from Norwich to Yarmouth, which had originally gone past the front of Hoveton House. During the Second World War Lennie had been taken prisoner by the Germans, but had managed to escape – perhaps it was his gallantry that had caused his Christian name to be used. Tom always enjoyed talking to Lennie, and regarded him as one of his best and most faithful employees. There was an irony in that, as Lennie told me much later, long after Tom had died, he and one or two others, for all their outward godliness, had been diehard poachers. He told me, with a broad smile, of an occasion when one day my father had suddenly appeared around the corner of a hedge and spoken to him for ten minutes. Under his greatcoat Lennie was hiding his four-ten shotgun and a recently killed cock pheasant. I dare say he never came closer to losing both his job and his Christian-name status.
Shooting was another highlight of my early life. I fired my first shot when I was nine, missing a sitting rabbit by some distance. I am afraid I was the bloodthirstiest of small boys, and I have loved the excitement and drama of shooting for as long as I can remember.
Tom used to arrange six or seven days’ shooting a year with never more than seven guns. They would kill between one and two hundred pheasants and partridges in a day. As a small boy I found these days hugely exciting. Then there was the early-morning duck flighting on the Great Broad. This was always a terrific adventure, getting up in the dark and eating bread and honey and drinking Horlicks in the kitchen before setting off by car for the Great Broad boathouse soon after five o’clock in the morning. There was also the evening flighting on the marshes, when each of us stood in a small butt made of dried reeds. This was also thrilling, and of course by the time we got home night had set in.
Carter was the first gamekeeper I remember. He was a small, rather gnarled man with a lovely Norfolk voice. Apart from looking after the game and trying to keep the vermin in check, his other job each morning was to brush and press the clothes my father had worn the day before. He did this on a folding wooden table on the verandah by the back door. When he had done this, if I asked politely and he was in an obliging mood, he would come out to the croquet lawn and bowl at me for a few minutes. I had to tread carefully with Carter. I think he was the first person ever to bowl overarm to me with a proper cricket ball. Sometimes I hit him into the neighbouring stinging nettles, which ended play for the day, for his charity did not extend to doing the fielding off his own bowling. Carter was the village umpire during the summer. I’m not sure about his grasp of the laws of the game, but you didn’t question his decisions – you merely moaned about them afterwards. When Carter retired he was succeeded by Watker, a brilliant clay-pigeon shot and, to me, a Biggles-like figure; and then by Godfrey, the nicest of them all. I would spend a huge amount of time with the keepers during the holidays. Once or twice I looked after Godfrey’s vermin traps when he had his holiday. Sadly, neither Watker nor Godfrey had a clue how to bowl, but Nanny, who was up for most things, would bowl to me on the croquet lawn. Her underarm offerings often ended up in the nettles, and being the trouper she was, she would dive in after them, and usually got nastily stung.
It was a fantastic world in which to be brought up. Looking back on it, it was quite right that I should have been taught how to use it and respect it. I can almost feel myself forgiving Tom for those cherries. In a way it was sad when my full-time enjoyment of Hoveton came to an end. But when I was seven and a half I was sent away to boarding school at Sunningdale, almost 150 miles away, which may now seem almost like wanton cruelty, but was par for the course in those days. When I was young, all I wanted to do was to grow older, and going away to school seemed a satisfactory step in the right direction.
TWO (#ulink_3d8793ee-5e31-5732-a037-04071e80d6a2)
A Wodehousian Education (#ulink_3d8793ee-5e31-5732-a037-04071e80d6a2)
I was not unduly alarmed at the prospect of being sent away to school. John had been to Sunningdale, and had survived, although of course as he was seven years older than me, we were never at school together. Grizel had been calling me ‘Blofeld’ for some while before I went, for she wanted to make sure that I would be used to being called by my surname when I got to the school. For some reason I was not made to call Tom ‘sir’, which was how I would have to address the masters. Ordering the school uniform and all the other clothes I would need had gone on for weeks, and Nanny had sewn smart red name-tapes onto all the shirts, pants and stockings, revealing to anyone who chose to look – but principally, I suspect, the laundry – that they belonged to H.C. Blofeld. I won’t say I jumped happily into the back of my father’s dark-green Armstrong Siddeley in early May 1947, but I was nothing like as homesick as I was to become over the next couple of years when going back to school at the end of the holidays. I think Nanny was the person who minded it all the most, and she was probably the closest to tears amid the frantic waving as we tootled off.
The journey went on for nearly five hours before we turned left into the school drive, with rhododendrons on either side. We went up a short hill to what then appeared to me to be a huge gravelled area in front of the house, where half a dozen cars were parked. It all seemed uncomfortably large, and I think I began to quiver. I was greeted with formal handshakes by Mr and Mrs Fox, the headmaster and his wife. Mr Fox’s black hair gleamed with oil, which made him smell of mildly austere flowers. He was wearing a rather severe three-piece suit, with fiercely polished black shoes, and gave me an exceedingly creased half-smile. By now I was beginning to think I had been sold an ungovernably fast one by Tom and Grizel when they had told me what a smashing place Sunningdale would be.
Tom was being pleasantly avuncular in the background while Grizel, with considerable gusto, was shooing me around the Foxes’ drawing room to shake hands with everyone in sight. Having been through it all with John, she knew the leaders of the pack well enough, and briskly brushed aside an under-matron and a junior master. False bonhomie was very much the order of the day. I think we were all given a cup of tea and, who knows, a cucumber sandwich. Mrs Fox, wearing glasses and with a good deal of grey hair, did not exactly clutch me to her bosom. Her efforts to be kind did nothing to steady my nerves.
Most of the staff were present, including Matron, Miss Cryer, who had been at the school for many years and had once met Nanny when John was there. Nanny had generally given her the OK, and she made friendly noises at this somewhat stilted gathering as she bustled around with tea and whatever while Grizel told me to be careful not to spill crumbs on the carpet. Mr Burrows, Mr Fox’s second-in-command, was there, tall, stiffly formal, with a greyish moustache and a smile which resembled one of Carter’s gin traps in repose. We were eventually to become quite good friends, but I would never have guessed it at our first meeting. Mr Tupholme, ‘Tuppy’ to one and all, was grinning cheerfully away and doing his best to bring a touch of jollity to the proceedings. Tuppy was an all-round good egg. Mr Sheepshanks, quite a bit younger, was also cheerful in a black-moustached, ‘What-fun-it-will-all-be-oh-my-goodness-me’ sort of way, and Miss Paterson put in a tight-lipped appearance just to make sure things did not get too jolly. Conversation, if it can be called that, hardly flowed. There were two or three other new boys there with their parents. I have forgotten their names although I think one was Laycock, but I well remember being introduced to one by Mrs Fox, who said in a formal voice, ‘This is Blofeld.’ I was grateful for Grizel’s tuition.
Being the start of the summer term, there was not the influx of new boys that arrived in late September at the start of the school year. We were taken by Mrs Fox and Matron to see the lower dormitory. I was shown the bed in which I was going to sleep, and I think an under-matron may have flitted by. Grizel came with us, and kept telling me how much I would enjoy it once I got used to it. I wished I had shared her confidence. There must have been eight or ten beds, a wash stand and a bowl for each of us in a row at the foot of the beds, a po cupboard underneath, and a basket under the bed for the clothes I would take off before jumping into my pyjamas. The longer this introduction to my new quarters went on, the more I felt my enthusiasm draining. Then it was back along the passages, the walls of which were covered with school groups from prehistoric times. One new boy was shown a photograph and told, ‘There’s your father.’ I hope it gave them both encouragement. It was not long after that that Tom and Grizel decided the time had come for them to leave. Tom certainly never specialised in emotional farewells, and Grizel did her best, giving me the briefest of pecks on the cheek, although she will have been alarmed by the thought that I might burst into tears. Then I watched, helpless, as they strode across the gravel to the car, got in, started the engine and disappeared from view. I was well and truly on my own, and I didn’t like the look of it. I managed not to blub which would have been letting the side down.
I was the youngest boy in the school, and, funnily enough, found this to be a good deal more of a liability than I had expected. It seemed to bring in its wake a disdainful hostility rather than the sympathy I had hoped for. The lower dormitory passed off without too much worry, but I had problems a term or two later for as soon as I was promoted to the upper dormitory, I got on the wrong end of some nasty bullying. There was a monitor in each dormitory who slept in a bed by the door. He didn’t come up until about two hours after the rest of us, which left scope for bullying. Next door to him was a little horror who I don’t think I’ve seen since the day he left Sunningdale, although he probably went on to Eton – most of the boys did, but I don’t remember him there. He forced me to do a number of things which went severely against the grain.
The worst was when I was made to go to the stairwell with my tortoiseshell-backed hairbrush, which had a piece of sticking plaster on it proclaiming ‘Blofeld’ in bold ink. Then, as the girl who carried the cocoa and the cups to the library for the older boys before they went to bed walked underneath, I was instructed to drop the hairbrush so that it landed on the tray, or better still, hit her on the head. Mercifully, I didn’t get it right – if I had, it might have finished her off – and the brush fell with a sickening thud on the floor beside her. She was a good girl, because she didn’t drop the tray or swerve or even scream, but carried steadfastly on. However, retribution was swift. I was in appalling trouble, and came head-to-head for the first time with Mr Burrows, who lived in a part study, part bedroom and part torture chamber in which there was a visible array of canes sticking out of a tall basket which he was never reluctant to use. And when he did, he put a good deal more vim into it than Mr Fox. For some strange reason, Mr Burrows did not tell me to bend over on this occasion. I have no idea what I said to him about the incident, but I didn’t sneak, for that would have meant that my life in the upper dormitory and everywhere else would have been hell. Sneaking was the worst of crimes.
I am not sure why I got away with this early misdemeanour so lightly. It may have been that the powers-that-were had a fair idea of why the hairbrush incident had happened. Mr Burrows had an armour-plated exterior, but a streak of kindness underneath, even if, for the most part, he disguised it well. Anyway, if I was still able to recognise the chap who forced me to drop the hairbrush, I would even now be sorely tempted to step across the street and have a word with him. His name was Baring, and he was almost certainly one of the banking lot. I remember thinking all those years later what a splendid chap the wretched Nick Leeson must have been, and how miserably he was treated. He had no greater supporter than me. I mean, to be sent to a Singaporean gaol for performing such a notable public service …
I couldn’t have enjoyed Sunningdale too much at the start of my five years there, because I was terribly homesick, and at the end of the holidays I had to be hauled off back to school. I howled outrageously in the car most of the way. But not everything was bad. I dipped my toes into the waters of cricket for the first time in my first term, and fell for it just like that. There were other good things too. The sausages we had for breakfast once a week – Wednesdays I think – were delicious, although the daily dose of porridge which preceded them was more awful than anything I have ever eaten in my life. We were made to finish it, then or at lunch, and I have never eaten porridge since. Even the unspeakable mincemeat we were given for lunch on Fridays, which gloried in the splendid name of ‘Friday Muck’, was a couple of lengths better than the porridge and I have struck up a more meaningful relationship with the present-day equivalent of Friday Muck. The name was invented by my contemporary at the school Nicholas Howard-Stepney from the family which owned Horlicks. He was also responsible for Wednesday lunch’s ‘Pharaoh’s Bricks’, a cake pudding cut in Eastern European-like rectangular blocks with the merest soupçon of jam on the top, and ‘Thames Mud’, a terrifyingly solid chocolate blancmange which seemed both to wobble and frown at you. I suppose post-war food rationing hardly helped Mrs Fox when it came to creating the menu.
The cast at Sunningdale was nothing if not Wodehousian. Mr Fox, who went by the Christian names of George Dacre (PGW had a housemaster called Dacre in Tales of St Austin’s), had signed up in 1906. Maybe there was something of the Reverend Aubrey Upjohn (Bertie Wooster’s private-school headmaster) in Mr Fox, and I have no doubt that they would have hit it off like a couple of sailors on shore leave. By the time I met Mr Fox his face was inordinately lined, craggy and ancient, and would have made the Gutenberg Bible look to its laurels. To us, Mr Fox seemed older than God, and spoke in a slow, sepulchral tone that did nothing to make me think I was about to make a lifelong friend. He frightened me out of my socks, and beat me in the fourth-form classroom at the top of the stairs on the left whenever I kicked over the traces. A stern lecture would be followed by six relatively mild strokes, after which I would be told to leave. As many of the other boys as possible would have been standing outside the door to count the number of strokes. Six was the usual complement, but for something truly hideous, the count may have reached eight, making the recipient a sore-bottomed hero, but even to receive six did your street cred no harm. Mr Fox was known to us as ‘Foe’, and come to think of it, it was not a bad nickname, for I don’t think I ever felt entirely convinced that he was on my side. He was five foot seven or eight, and his strong head of black hair was combed back and much adorned with Mr Thomas’s finest unction. Mr Thomas was the school haircutter, and he came down from his HQ in Bury Street SW1 twice a term with two or three of his cohorts to cut our hair. Several masters had their hair cut too, including Foe, who was on Christian-name terms with the rotund, avuncular, noisy and highly genial Mr Thomas, who laughed a good deal as he snapped the scissors like the well-seasoned performer he was. I don’t know why, but it went slightly against the grain that Mr Fox was on first-name terms with his barber. When the two of them laughed there was always something slightly conspiratorial in the air, as if they were planning a visit to a particularly shady club.
Mr Fox took the fourth form, and never encouraged jocularity, although there were times when I am sure he felt he was being the star of the party. But he always made teaching seem a solemn business, and was seldom fun and never funny. He had written a well-known green-covered history date book, which was not so much compulsive as compelled reading. It was all there, from Hengist and Horsa and Ethelred the Unready to the present day. Mr Fox was as proud of his date book as if he had made up the dates himself and given the history of this country both order and meaning. He did have another side to him – to keep themselves sane, a good many schoolmasters must lead double lives. The day the term finished at Sunningdale, the sofa in the Foxes’ drawing room was pushed back, and out came the bridge tables, swiftly followed by the packs of cards and scoresheets, and then by those of his neighbours who participated. The stakes were said to be high; I imagine Foe was probably a gambler, but in a guarded rather than a reckless manner. I should think he was a pretty good player who seldom settled for three no trumps when a slam was in the air.
He was a great racing man too, and a number of important trainers sent their boys to Sunningdale. Cecil Boyd-Rochfort’s twin stepsons, David and Henry Cecil, were naughty and great fun. Of course Henry went on to become a remarkable trainer in his own right, picking up a knighthood and Frankel along the way before dying horribly of cancer. Peter Cazalet, the Queen Mother’s trainer, sent both his sons to Sunningdale. Edward, the elder, became a High Court judge, and as his mother, Leonora, had been PGW’s stepdaughter, controls all things Wodehouse today with charm, skill and high good humour. Noel Cannon’s son was also at the school. Royal Ascot week caused a good deal of activity on the private side, as Mr Fox’s quarters were known. Lots of chaps were seen wandering about the place in morning coats and silk toppers, and ladies in extravagant hats were plentiful. I don’t think a hat, however extravagant, would have made a significant difference to Mrs Fox, who may once have been a great beauty, but if she had been, by the time I met her she was playing from memory.
I don’t know if Foe’s gambling inclinations explored other avenues. I doubt that he was a casino man, unlike R.J.O. Meyer, the famous headmaster of Millfield, who when the day’s duties were over would drive all the way from Somerset to a gaming club in Mayfair with a goodly portion of that term’s school fees in his trouser pocket. Rumour has it that when he plonked it all on red, black almost invariably turned up. On the somewhat daunting return journey in the middle of the night I dare say he would have found it difficult to stick to the speed limit.
To us boys there was no visible lighter side to dear old Foe, who said grace before lunch with a basso profundo solemnity and sang in chapel in a toneless voice somewhere around the baritone mark. He never made much of the high notes. His sermons always seemed to contain some less than compelling strictures; Mr Burrows was not a giggle a minute in the pulpit either and he made it all too plain what the devil had in store for us if we didn’t look sharp. They both made you feel they were arm in arm with the wrath of God. Tuppy took the services in chapel, and wore a surplice as a jovial sort of holy disguise. Miss Paterson (‘Patey’), who sang with a rigorous and tuneless vigour, sat two rows behind the Foxes, who were immediately behind us new boys. Mr Ling, whom we have not yet come across, and who more closely resembled a Chinese god than any Chinese god I have ever seen, did his best in the row in between. The more jolly Mrs Ling clocked in only on Sundays. They sang dutifully, while Mr Sheepshanks, ‘Sheepy’ to us all, played the organ and sang enthusiastically at the same time. Psalms were always harder work than the hymns, and I was glad when we had got the Magnificat and the Te Deum out of the way as well.
Mrs Fox went by the name of Nancy, which didn’t really fit the bill – although Lucretia would have been a bit too severe. I can’t remember Mr Fox ever looking dreamily at her and murmuring, ‘Nancy.’ Maybe he only did this in extremis. Anyway, she remorselessly called him ‘Foxy’, and they begat two sons, both Sunningdalians. By the time I came across George Dacre and Nancy, I suspect they were well past moments of high passion, and neither of them appeared particularly flighty. Mrs Fox looked a little bit like my idea of B. Wooster’s Aunt Agatha, with more than a touch of Lady Constance Keeble, Lord Emsworth’s bloody-minded sister, thrown in. She gave out boiled sweets by the stairwell outside the dining room after lunch on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays with gratuitous suspicion. Eight on Sundays, six on Thursdays, and a chocolate or Mars bar on Tuesdays. They were counted with great exactitude. If, on a recount, she discovered one sweet too many, it was a capital offence and you were lucky if she only took two away.
Mr Burrows was number two in the batting order after Mr Fox, and he didn’t come across well. To a small boy he was alarming, and anyone could be forgiven for thinking at first that he was an all-round shit. I don’t think he liked or felt comfortable with the smallest boys, and there was always a suspicion that he may have been a repressed homosexual. As far as Wodehouse was concerned, most of the time Burrows would have made Roderick Spode, alias Lord Sidcup, alias Oswald Mosley, seem a decent sort of cove. He was slim, reasonably tall and slightly bent. I think he probably had a sense of humour, but he was careful whom he showed it to. When I first came across him he was very much the Dickensian schoolmaster, but if, for whatever reason, you came into prolonged contact with him – as I did when I kept goal for the school and went on to become an unlikely captain of soccer – he was much easier. I then found a friendlier, more amenable side to him. Perhaps he was rather shy at heart, and it was only when he felt comfortable with certain boys that his outer shell fell away. I never knew what his football qualifications were, but obviously he knew a bit about the game. Whenever we played against other schools he would be mildly unforgiving at half time as we surrounded him in a group, each sucking a quarter of a raw lemon in the hope that it might turn us into Stanley Matthews. Burrows was a serious supporter of Newcastle United, and if you mentioned Jackie Milburn there was an outside chance that he might smile, and he would certainly look more favourably upon you. George Beaumont, a good friend of mine who was a member of the Allendale family, came from Northumberland, and was also passionate about Newcastle and Milburn, which meant that he and Mr Burrows became friends. He was a fine outside right, who ran fast and controlled the ball well. George was sadly killed in an aeroplane crash in New Zealand soon after leaving Eton.
Mr Burrows lived in a room, full of heavy dark-brown furniture, between the upper dormitory and the upper cubicles, from where he administered justice and discipline. He was a recognised and fully-paid-up beater, and a cane in his hands was much more a weapon of war than in Mr Fox’s. His initials were JB – for John Berry, perhaps – and his nickname was ‘Budgie’. I never remember any of his teaching colleagues slapping him on the back and calling him John, or Berry for that matter. When I joined the third form, over which he presided, I found him frighteningly unforgiving. If you were clever and were at the top of the form and gained his respect, he was a bit better. If it had not been for the soccer I would have got it in the neck.
I wonder if Mr Burrows was ever truly happy. But before we leave him, I should mention that when some of us had reached a certain age, he would allow us into his room by the upper dormitory at a quarter to seven in the evening to listen to Dick Barton, Special Agent. Agog, we followed the machinations of Barton, Snowy, Jock and the others as though our lives depended upon the breathtaking drama. Dick Barton was definitely not Mr Burrows’ cup of tea, and he never stayed to listen. Later in life I wondered if Mr Burrows ever found an obliging woman. I doubt it. But then, did he ever want one? I imagine every private school in those days had its Mr Burrows.
Miss Paterson, or Patey, who came onto the books in 1940, was not quite polished enough to have been a contender for the Lady Constance Keeble spot, but she, like Mrs Fox, would have been a definite runner for aunt-like status. I think she and Aunt Agatha would have got along pretty well, although she had about her more than a hint of Rosa Klebb, who made James Bond’s life pretty uncomfortable in From Russia, with Love. The debate about her Christian name continues. ‘Emmeline’ has its supporters, but ‘Eileen’ is probably just the favourite. They both fitted. She was spectacularly uncompromising, and did not tolerate nonsense in any way whatever. If she had a sense of humour, she wasn’t letting on. She had the unfortunate habit of shaping her ‘R’s with a loop, as they appear on Harrods vans. This particularly distressed Nicholas Howard-Stepney who spoke contemptuously of ‘Patey Rs’. Patey had a feminine enough shape, but with a keep-your-distance sort of face – and never to my knowledge did she have a single suitor. I think she would have discouraged passion in any form, and might not have been very good at it. She wore sensible shoes and even more sensible stockings, and spoke like a regimental sergeant-major. I can’t imagine her in a warm, let alone a passionate embrace, although people who give that impression can sometimes come up against the wind. Patey was also, rather surprisingly, my first cricketing mentor. She was in charge of the third-form game, and was forever marshalling the troops. The game was played on a small piece of roughish ground somewhere between the raspberry cages and the railway line, which may give it a romantic connotation it does not deserve.
Miss Paterson must have been in her upper thirties, and there was a fair amount of her. She wobbled a good deal, both fore and aft. She loved to take part in the cricket, or at any rate she felt it was her duty to do so. I don’t ever remember her batting, but she always opened the bowling. The pitch was only about fifteen yards long, if that, and while there were two sets of stumps, there were no bails. We had puny little bats, but there were no pads or gloves, and boxes were not even a gleam in anyone’s eye. Patey ran in off about five paces, and bowled underarm with a certain nippiness. If she hit you on the shin, it made you yelp a bit, and she would launch herself into an extravagant, almost Shane Warne-like appeal. This was a little strange, because there was no umpire. That didn’t worry her in the least, because she immediately metamorphosed herself into the umpire and gave you out. You certainly did not question her decision. She wasn’t the worst bowler, and I can tell you that her swingers went both ways all right.
They were the first swingers I ever took a serious interest in. She had another interesting physical attribute: her front teeth were unstoppable. If you ran round a corner in a passage in the school and she was there, you would put your hands up in front of your face to protect yourself from the upper lot. I remember thinking some years later that if there was such an event at the Olympic Games as eating corn on the cob through a Venetian blind, Miss Paterson would have been on top of the rostrum accepting the gold medal and shaking up the champagne with the best of them.
As far as the runners and riders were concerned at Sunningdale, those were most of the bookies’ favourites. But there was also a pretty good list just behind the leaders. Charlie Sheepshanks, ‘Sheepy’, who had clocked in from the Brigade of Guards soon after hostilities had been concluded in 1945 with a scar on his face which was evidence of close contact with the enemy, was a congenial, Bertie Wooster-like figure. His brother had been killed in the Spanish Civil War, and at Sunningdale Sheepy lived with his mother in a house in the grounds. He played the organ in chapel, or the tin tabernacle, as we knew it, and did so with a certain brio. Good-looking, black-moustached with a ready smile, a bit of a leg-spinner and greatly liked by us all, he shared Mr Fox’s schoolroom where he presided over maths, genially, unpretentiously, amusingly and with indefatigable cheerfulness. He was the dearest of men, and went on to marry Mary Nickson, who was the daughter of my first housemaster at Eton. He also ran the cricket at Sunningdale, taking over from a Mr Kemp, who left soon after I arrived.
After Sheepy retired from educational activities, he and Mary moved to his family home in the village of Arthington in Wharfedale, where they would entertain the Test Match Special team to dinner in splendid style during the Headingley Test match. The banter between the Bishop of Ripon and Jim Swanton will not easily be forgotten. Jim regarded the bishop as an extremely close cohort of the Almighty, and tried to speak to him with a humble sanctity, while the bishop, who was only a suffragan, would leave religion at home for the evening. Sheepy was a passionate gardener and fisherman, and a great friend of Brian Johnston – they were both infectious laughers – with whom he fought innumerable battles on the tennis court. He was also a wizard on the Eton fives court. While at Sunningdale – of which he became headmaster for a time after Fox had retired – he joined forces with J.M. Peterson, an Eton housemaster whose sons were at Sunningdale, and together they won the old boys’ Eton fives competition, the Kinnaird Cup, for year after year. For me, Charlie Sheepshanks was a real-life mixture of Biggles, Bulldog Drummond and Bertie Wooster.
Then there was Mr Tupholme, who came from Bournemouth or thereabouts, and was a long-standing taker of the fifth form. He was an excellent schoolmaster who made everything fun for the boys, while the more solemn members of the staff across the landing would have made the prophet Job seem a bit of a laugh. We listened to Tuppy because he had the knack of making everything fun, but interesting and important at the same time. He was in charge of rugger in the Lent term, bowled a bit in the nets during the summer, and presided genially over the swimming pool. Everyone loved him. Medium-height, plump, eternally cheerful, eyebrows that curled like Denis Healey’s, he was never fierce, never shouted, and bought us Dinky Toys to order on his frequent visits to Windsor. As a boy, one always felt that Tuppy was up for anything, and we loved him. PGW would have turned him into Lord Ickenham. Another of Tuppy’s sidelines was the model railway, which he organised in the Army Hut, a rather Spartan, military-looking building at the far end of the school where the school concert was held. In my first concert, which Tom and Grizel dutifully, and I suspect reluctantly, attended, I had to sing one verse of ‘Cock Robin’. I doubt there has ever been a more tuneless rendering of any song since mankind first put its larynx on the stage.
I have briefly mentioned Mr Ling, who was the Venerable Bede of Sunningdale, and an awesome figure. Like Mr Fox and Mr Burrows, he had joined up with the school before the First War. He was a classical scholar, and was the principal reason why Sunningdale won so many scholarships, mainly for Eton, where most of its pupils ended up. Mr Ling was a genius as a schoolmaster. He took the sixth-form classics, and taught Greek and Latin with astonishing skill and amazing results. His most famous top scholar was Quintin Hogg, who went on to become Lord Hailsham and the Lord Chancellor, and who paid Mr Ling a most generous tribute in his autobiography, The Door Wherein I Went. When I first came across Mr Ling I thought he was even older than Methuselah. He was gruff, quietly and classically humorous, and his gleaming and absolute baldness positively oozed Greek and Latin verse and always looked as if he was made of jade. He was wisdom personified, and wore his rimless glasses in a way that suggested they were an essential adjunct to classical scholarship. He was also a passionate man of Suffolk. This gave us both a certain East Anglian affinity – I did not have the smallest affinity with the classics – even if he regarded Norfolk as the lesser of two equals. Lord Emsworth might have had dinner with him by mistake at the Senior Conservative Club in St James’s.
Mr Ling always came hurriedly into the classroom as if he had just bumped into Socrates on the stairs and, with time running short, had had quickly to put him right about a couple of things. Having virtually lost the use of his right hand by kind permission of the Kaiser in the First War, he wrote on the blackboard and elsewhere with his left hand, and in doing so was magnificently illegible. You needed to have been on the payroll at Bletchley Park to have had the slightest chance of interpreting his offerings. He did not suffer fools gladly, and as I remember he found it jolly nearly incomprehensible that anyone could be as stupid and as unreceptive to the classics as I was. He had a good sense of humour, a pleasant chuckle, and bowled gentle slow left-arm in the nets when it came to the summer term. I don’t think he ever looked much like getting anyone out, but that did not prevent him from having firm views on the forward defensive stroke.
Just occasionally I was asked to tea with Mr and Mrs Ling at their house in nearby Charters Road. Mrs Ling, who was kind in a charming, elderly way, provided more than acceptable strawberry jam and a tolerable scone or two and always loved to pull her husband’s leg. Mr Ling, because of his injured hand, was not as accurate with the teapot as he had been in his heyday, and Mrs Ling was more than prepared to give him a bit of stick for this. He would laugh at his failing, and was always more fun outside the classroom than in it. He was a remarkable man, a brilliant teacher and a friend in a slightly distant, but loyal way, even if academically you were batting well down the order.
Bob (R.G.T.) Spear was young, tall and fair-haired, and taught goodness knows what for a time. He had an electrifying affair with the under-matron, Kitty Dean, whom he married. I once caught her sitting on his knee in the tiny masters’ room between Mr Fox’s and Mr Ling’s schoolrooms, which was as near as one came in those days to hard porn. The marriage did not last, and he eked out his days as a rather penniless handicapper at Newmarket, where he died. I once or twice came across him in the Tavern at Lord’s during a Test match. A long time before, he had bowled fast for Eton: Bingo Little, perhaps, although he never met his Rosie M. Banks.
There was the altogether more garrulous and clubbable Eustace Crawley, son of the immortal golfing correspondent Leonard Crawley, who wrote for the Daily Telegraph for many years. Leonard had also been a master at Sunningdale in the twenties, and in 1925 he was picked to tour the West Indies with the MCC. He was always greatly encouraged with his golf by Mr Fox, who was captain of Sunningdale Golf Club in 1940. This was the reason why in the winter whenever it was shut we were allowed to play French and English on the course.
Eustace must have taught something, but in those days he seemed to be Gussie Fink-Nottle to his eyebrows, and was immense fun without appearing to be devastatingly effective. This was a completely false impression, for he not only won a golf Blue at Cambridge for three years, but ended up as managing director of Jacksons of Piccadilly – Gussie F would have had no answer to that. I remember lots of floppy dark hair and a most engaging chuckle.
There was also the ever genial, tall and robust Mr Squarey, who was poached from neighbouring Lambrook. He was fun, with grey hair and glasses, and was up for everything when it came to games. He also bowled a bit in the nets, without devastating effect, but he was full of good honest cricketing theory, and always gave terrific encouragement. He was a friend.
Finally there was Matron Cryer, a veritable, and adorable, Florence Nightingale who never failed to make you feel better, and could even persuade you that the weekly dose of cod-liver oil tasted pretty good. I personally went for syrup of figs, which was a legitimate alternative and tasted much nicer. Her deputy, who later reigned for years as her successor as matron, was the indomitable Pauline, who was to become every bit as much an intrinsic part of Sunningdale as Mr Fox or any of the others. I suspect she enjoyed a bit of mischief too, and she and Roberta Wickham would have hit it off. Pauline was a great character, and before I left Sunningdale she gave me a photograph of the England side to tour Australia in 1928–29.
I may have missed one or two, but what fun it was. I lived in this milieu for five years, climbing my way up the pole under the auspices of the above-mentioned dramatis personae. I played in the cricket first eleven for four years – having moved fairly rapidly from being a leg-spinner to a wicketkeeper, and I think I could always bat a bit – and in the soccer team for two. I also played fives for the school, against Ludgrove, and we invariably lost. The only real blot was my consistent slacking on the academic side of things.
My years in the Sunningdale first eleven were fantastic fun. The star of the side was Edward Lane Fox and we not only played together in the first eleven for four years at Sunningdale, we also both played for Eton for three years. He was a wonderful all-round cricketer with the discipline I always lacked. Edward also won his colours at soccer and rugger, an impressive triple Blue. He was a remarkable games player, a cricketer who went on to play for Oxfordshire and for the Minor Counties against at least two touring sides and then became an estate agent, running his own eponymous firm with a brilliance few could have matched. He also hits a pretty mean golf ball. It would be hard to imagine a kinder, more charming and less pretentious man. He has never changed in character or in looks, and well into his seventies he is still easily identifiable as the chap sitting in the captain’s seat in the 1952 Sunningdale cricket eleven photograph. Edward was a wonderful orthodox left-arm spinner who bowled with great accuracy and turned the ball sharply away from the right-hander. The representatives of Earlywood, Scaitcliffe, St George’s, Lambrook, Heatherdown and a few other schools could make little of it. As a result, stumped Blofeld bowled Lane Fox was an oft-repeated dismissal.
Edward was also an excellent and solid left-hand batsman. The one school we had difficulty with was Ludgrove, who collectively played left-arm spin more than adequately. I think I am right in saying that the last time Sunningdale beat Ludgrove home and away in the same season was in 1952, which was Edward’s and my last year. Sunningdale may have started a trifle gloomily for me, but success on the playing fields turned it into huge fun, and rapidly put an end to all that silly homesickness.
I was given my first-eleven colours for cricket when the team photograph was about to be taken at the end of the 1950 summer term, my second year in the side. Later that afternoon I was ferried off by Mrs Fox to St George’s hospital in Windsor to have my tonsils removed. I remember Matron packing my new dark-blue cap, and when Mrs Fox unpacked my case at the hospital she thrust this cap under my pillow. When you got your colours this was the accepted modus operandi. The nursing sister was more than mildly surprised, but Mrs Fox pretty well told her to mind her own business. I never felt closer to her than I did at that moment, and I was able, with considerable pleasure, to try on the cap during the night. I had to wait until the chap with whom I shared a room, who probably wouldn’t have understood, was asleep.
What an adventure Sunningdale was and a splendid way to start learning about the highs and lows of life. In the schoolroom I was never remotely a candidate for a scholarship to anywhere except Borstal, but I suppose I did just about enough work to get by, and when I came to take Common Entrance to Eton, I achieved a humble middle fourth, which was lower than was hoped, but probably higher than was feared. I was never any good at exams. That rather apprehensive five-hour journey in my father’s old green Armstrong Siddeley at the start of May five years before had been well worth it. In the end Grizel had got it right, as she usually did.
THREE (#ulink_7e07a20e-f9cc-5676-9e31-61f1781e2870)
The French Women’s Institute (#ulink_7e07a20e-f9cc-5676-9e31-61f1781e2870)
Cricket had me in its grip before I had been at Sunningdale for a year. The following June, in 1948, I found myself at Lord’s with Tom and Grizel sitting on the grass in front of Q Stand eating strawberries they had brought up from Hoveton and watching the third day of the second Test against Australia. I became one of what is now a sadly diminishing band of people to have seen the great Don Bradman bat. He made 89 in Australia’s second innings before being caught at shoulder-height by Bill Edrich at first slip off Alec Bedser. I can still see the catch in my mind’s eye. As he departed, dwarfed by that wonderful and irresistible baggy green Australian cap, I was sad that he hadn’t got a hundred, but everyone else seemed rather pleased. I distinctly remember him facing Yorkshire’s Alec Coxon, a fast bowler playing in his only Test match. A number of times Coxon pitched the ball a little short, and Bradman would swivel and pull him to the straightish midwicket boundary, where we were sitting on the grass. Once I was able to touch the ball – what a moment that was.
It was not only at school that I revelled in cricket. In the Easter holidays I went to indoor coaching classes in Norwich taken by the two professionals who played for Norfolk : C.S.R. Boswell, a leg-spinner and late-middle-order batsman known to one and all as ‘Bozzie’, and Fred Pierpoint, a fastish bowler. Then, in the summer holidays, Grizel would heroically drive me to all parts of Norfolk, however inaccessible, for boys’ cricket matches in which I became a fierce competitor. We would set off in the morning in Grizel’s beetle Renault, with a picnic basket on the back seat. Grizel was nothing if not a determined driver. Whenever she changed gear it was as if she was teaching the gearstick a lesson, and she generally treated the car as if it was a recalcitrant schoolboy. Some of the lay-bys in which we stopped for lunch became familiar haunts over the years. A hard-boiled egg, ham sandwiches and an apple were the usual menu, and it never helped things along if I dropped small bits of eggshell on the floor.
The cricket usually began at about two o’clock, and I remember many of the mums being, if anything, rather more competitive than the players. There were certain key players in the teams I played for: Jeremy Greenwood bowled very fast, Michael Broke’s off-breaks took a long time to reach the batsman, Jeremy Thompson – whose father Wilfred had bowled terrifyingly fast for Norfolk and had captained the county – was another star, while Timmy Denny did his best. Henry and Dominic Harrod, sons of the famous economist Roy Harrod, had their moments, and the many Scotts all played their part, especially Edward, who bowled fast – we later played cricket together at Eton. He was a cousin of the Norfolk Scotts, although he lived in Gloucestershire, and was to become one of my greatest friends. The two Clifton Browns also contributed, and their mother scored like a demon in a felt hat.
The Norfolk Scotts lived at North Runcton, near King’s Lynn. Father Archie, as tall and thin as a lamp post, was the first Old Etonian bookmaker, and his delightful and cuddly wife Ruth was a huge favourite with all of us, forever laughing and always a fount of fun. She was also great friends with the Australian cricketers of Don Bradman’s generation and before. A particular ally was the famous leg-spinner Arthur Mailey, a great character and the most delightful of men. He had been a wonderful bowler, as well as being a brilliant cartoonist. For some reason he took a great interest in my future as a cricketer, and one of my proudest possessions is a booklet he wrote in 1956 called Cricket Humour, with some amusing stories illustrated with his own drawings. The front cover is a lovely cartoon of Mailey himself trying to bribe the umpire with a fiver. On the first page he wrote: ‘My best wishes for a successful cricket life. Saw you play at Runcton about 3 years ago and am very pleased about your progress. Arthur Mailey ’56.’ Later in life I put together a small collection of his original cartoons, and they are a great joy.
In between those holiday matches I would go to Lakenham cricket ground, with its handsome thatched pavilion, where Norfolk played their home games. Now I would be ticked off for spilling my picnic eggshells on the grass in one of the little wigwam-like tents which lined one side of the ground. One of them had a sign hanging on the outside which proclaimed that it belonged to T.R.C. Blofeld. Inside was a small table and some rickety deckchairs. Those days at Lakenham gave me an early glimpse of what I think I supposed heaven was all about. Norfolk never won very much, but my goodness me, it was exciting.
I always brought along my own puny bat and a ball, and sometimes I was able to persuade someone to bowl at me on the grass behind the parked cars at the back of the tents. Among them was the vermillion-faced Mr Tarr, who was the Governor of Norwich Prison and, I hope, a better governor than he was a bowler. Every so often, as I was sitting in a deckchair watching the cricket, a four would be hit in my direction and I would stop it and throw it back to the fielder. Not quite the same as fielding to Bradman, I know, but you took what came. Just occasionally there was the thrill of a six being hit towards our tent, forcing everyone to take cover in a mildly cowardly panic. My early heroes from these occasions were an eclectic bunch, including the afore-mentioned Wilfred Thompson; David Carter, military-medium; and Cedric Thistleton-Smith, who was always out unluckily – all three of whom came from west Norfolk and were thriving farmers. Lawrie Barrett, short and dark-haired, a tiger in the covers, thrilled us all a couple of times a year as a middle-order batsman and succeeded Thompson as captain. H.E. Theobald was a large man who, like his Christian name (it turned out to be Harold), remained a bit of a mystery. He was not in the first flush of youth, and nor was his batting. Then there was good old, eternally cheerful, round-faced Bozzie; we loved his spritely cunning with the ball and his enthusiastic twirl of the bat when his turn came late in the innings. He had a kind word and a smile for everyone.
Village cricket also played a big part in my life. The heroes for Hoveton and Wroxham did battle on the ground set up by those German prisoners-of-war. I had some fierce battles with Nanny, who refused to let me go and watch them when they were at work. I was determined to wear the German policeman’s helmet I had been given by some returning warrior. She felt it would not have created the right impression, and unusually for her, had a word about it with Grizel – who of course agreed wholeheartedly. So my one intended thrust for the Allies was nipped in the bud.
Hoveton was captained by the ever-thoughtful opening batsman Neville Yallop, whose black hair was swept back with the help of Brylcreem. There was Fred Roy, of the huge eponymous village store, who opened the batting with Neville and bowled slow, non-turning off-breaks; Arthur Tink, whose military-medium was full of unsuspected guile – as I dare say was his gypsy-like wife, Mona, who looked incredibly beautiful and never said anything. The vibrantly moustached, ample-figured Colonel Ingram-Johnson kept wicket and batted in an Incogniti cap. He had Indian Army and Rawalpindi coming out of every aperture. Colin Parker, a local boy who bowled at a nippy medium pace, had an attractive, befreckled red-haired sister and a father who umpired in partnership, I am sure, with the ubiquitous gamekeeping Carter. Bob Cork, a small man who I think was a blacksmith, ran around with terrific enthusiasm, but not a great deal of effect. When I was about thirteen and had been allowed to join in a fielding practice, I tried to take a high catch and the ball dislocated my right thumb. Bob was quickly to the rescue, and agonisingly yanked the wretched joint back into place.
I lived for cricket, in boys’ matches, on our ground at home, and at Lakenham, and spent many of my waking hours in the summer holidays at one or other of the three. Added to which, and to Nanny’s mild disapproval, I took my bat to bed with me. That, of course, was in the days when bats smelled redolently of linseed oil. I am not sure I have ever found a better smell to go to sleep with.
In the winter holidays the gamekeepers and shooting took over from cricket, and I have to confess I also took my gun to bed with me. I spent as much time as I could with Carter, Watker or Godfrey learning about trapping vermin, feeding pheasants and partridges, and looking for their nests in the Easter holidays. If a nest was in an especially vulnerable position we would pick up the eggs, which would then be hatched by a broody hen, and the chicks brought up in pens until they were ready to be put back into the wild. Carrion crows, sparrowhawks, jays, magpies, stoats, rabbits and rats all had to be eliminated where possible, and kept in proportion if not. I learned many of the tricks of the trade. What fun it was, and I was unable to put down a book my father gave me called Peter Penniless, which was about the adventures of a country boy who scraped a living by poaching and selling the fruits of his labours. Poaching was something that went on a good deal, and as I was later to learn, was perpetrated not only by the unscrupulous from neighbouring villages and Norwich, but by some, like Lennie Hubbard, as we have seen, who worked, above all suspicion, on the farm. Sometimes the ungodly would be caught and brought to justice, but more often than not they got away with it. It was all part of the excitement of growing up among the Norfolk Broads. There were poachers on the Broads too, who tried to shoot duck and to catch fish and eels. Johnson was the head marshman, and another heroic figure. One of his sons was in the RAF in the war, and once came back on leave bringing with him the first banana I had ever seen, let alone tasted. It was black and well on the way to being rotten, and tasted filthy – not that I was about to admit it.
It was from this background that I once again jumped into the back of my father’s car, which had moved up a peg or two from the Armstrong Siddeley that had first taken me to Sunningdale. It was in the old 1932 Rolls that we made the journey from Hoveton to Eton on 23 September 1952 – which was not exactly the way I wanted to spend my thirteenth birthday. It was another anxious trip. I had long looked forward to going to Eton, but now that the day had arrived, I was more than a touch nervous. Twelve hundred boys, tailcoats, strange white bow ties which had to be tied with the help of a paperclip, my own room, a house of forty boys, a completely new set of rules and regulations to learn. I would have a much greater degree of freedom than I had experienced at Sunningdale, where obviously the young boys had to be kept under close and watchful guidance. Eton was a huge step nearer to the big wide world, and was both frightening and exciting because of it. ‘There will be plenty of other new boys,’ Grizel had said to me in a voice which suggested that that put the argument to bed once and for all.
After a journey of about four hours, not particularly helped by Grizel trying to jolly me along in between spirited bouts of backseat driving, we all trooped in through the front door of Common Lane House and shook hands with M’Tutor and Mrs M’Tutor, as they were known in the Eton vernacular, Geoffrey and Janet Nickson. Geoffrey Nickson was bald and quite small, with a beaming smile, a warm handshake, twinkling eyes and a chuckling laugh, all of which made that first frightening step so much easier than it had been at Sunningdale. He could have taught Mr Fox a thing or two, but then I was five years older, and better able to cope.
As I sat on the ottoman in my own room at Eton, with its lift-up bed hidden behind curtains, my own friendly shooting prints on the wall – I still have them today in my bedroom – and a few family photographs, I was acutely conscious that I was now on my own, in a much more grown-up society. It was a help to know that my brother John had been through it before me, in the same house, and had survived. All the new boys were in the same boat, but at that moment it was a personal, not a communal thing. When we arrived we were all tremulous little islands in a rough sea. I had had many lessons at home on how to put on a stiff collar, how to use collar studs and how to tie that alarming white bow tie – alarming until you had done it once, after which it was simple, as many apparently difficult things turn out to be. There was an official form of ‘cheating’, in that the white strip of the tie had a hole in the middle, through which you put the collar stud between the two ends of the stiff collar. One end of the tie was then held sideways across the collar, while the other was tucked over the top by your Adam’s apple, and then thrust down inside the shirt, where it was held in position by the paperclip. This was the ‘cheating’ bit. The two ends were then pushed under each side of the collar – simple really – then it was nervously down to breakfast, my first outing in my tailcoat. I had well and truly begun my first half at Eton.
We new boys sat at a small table in the corner at one end of the boys’ dining room, which had the somewhat mixed benefit of being presided over by ‘My Dame’ (M’Dame), who was a sort of high-falutin’ house matron. She was called Miss Pearson, and while I must say I never found her particularly loveable, it was a less aggressive sort of unloveableness than Miss Paterson’s. I suppose M’Dame had to be bossy, but she made rather a business of it. When I came down, extremely frightened, to that first breakfast I found myself being stared at by those who were not new boys in a ‘Look what the cat’s brought in’ sort of way.
I was lucky with my housemaster, M’Tutor. Geoffrey Nickson had all the qualities of a perfect schoolmaster. He was kind; he was thoughtful; he was never in a hurry; he never panicked; he never shouted; he was unfailingly interested in everything you did; he suggested, firmly at times, rather than ordered; he had a splendid sense of humour; and he punished firmly and without relish or enjoyment. At Eton, like all masters, he was known by his initials, ‘GWN’. The ‘W’ stood for Wigley, which was harmless enough, but gave rise to a certain amount of childish amusement. GWN was a classical scholar. He was not an Etonian himself, but you would never have guessed it. I arrived at Eton near the end of his fifteen-year spell as a housemaster, which finished at the end of the summer half in 1955. I don’t think it would have been possible not to love GWN. He was always immensely approachable – a schoolmaster, and yet very much not a schoolmaster. He had a wonderfully ready, infectious and enthusiastic smile. He was always fun, whether you were a member of the library, the elite five at the top of the house, who sat at his end of the long dining-room table, or a lower boy, as we all were for at least three halves, whom he took for pupil room, known colloquially as ‘P-hole’, at the end of formal lessons each morning in the mildly improvised classroom outside his study. He was equally enthusiastic whether bowling his leg-tweakers in the nets or watching members of his house in whatever sporting contest they were competing in against other houses. A perfect illustration of GWN’s skill as a schoolmaster came when he caught four of my friends playing bridge – cards were strictly illegal. He made them all write a Georgic which entailed copying out more than five hundred lines of Latin verse. He then asked them down to his study every Sunday afternoon to teach them to become better bridge players.
On Sundays, Mrs M’Tutor, Janet Nickson, who was the perfect complement to GWN, would read to the lower boys in her husband’s study, and we had to suffer such improving literature as Lorna Doone in her slightly schoolmistressy voice. When we became upper boys, GWN himself read to us in pupil room. We listened spellbound to, among others, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and J.K. Stanford’s The Twelfth, about Colonel the Honourable George Hysteron-Proteron’s exploits on a grouse moor on 12 August, the opening day of the season. GWN himself was no mean shot, and a considerable fisherman.
One of the first exams a new boy had to go through at Eton was a ‘Colour Test’. There were goodness knows how many different caps, or colours, as they were known, given exclusively for prowess in sporting pursuits ranging from cricket to rowing to the field game, the wall game, fives, racquets, squash, beagling, athletics, gymnastics, tennis, soccer, rugby and many others besides. About three weeks into my first half new boys gathered in the library – in non-Eton talk, the house prefects’ room – where they were asked many searching questions. A profusion of different-coloured caps were produced, and we had to identify them. We had to show that we knew the masters by their initials, that we understood the geography of the place and other Etonian lore, not least the idiosyncratic language which was peculiar to the school. The geography was extremely important, as once the Colour Test had been passed, we lower boys began our fagging career. If you were told by a member of the library to take a fag note (a written message) to a boy in, say, DJGC or FJRC, it was as well to know where you had to go. When a member of the library needed a fag, he would make a ‘boy call’, his yell of ‘B-o-o-o-o-oy’ going on for twenty seconds or so. The last lower boy to arrive got the job. Having taken middle fourth in my Common Entrance, it was my lot to be a fag for five halves.
I enjoyed my five years at Eton as much as any period of my life. As I had discovered at Sunningdale, having the luck to be reasonably successful at games was a great help. Good schoolboy games players become little tin gods, a status which provides a certain insulation against the petty struggles of school life. Of course, this doesn’t happen at once. I spent my first half trying to unravel the mysteries of the field game, an Eton-devised mixture of rugger and soccer played with a round ball. There is a sort of mini scrum, known as the ‘bully’, and much long and skilful kicking up and down the field by the three backs, one behind the other called ‘short’, ‘long’ and ‘goals’. I played at ‘outside corner’, on the edge of the bully, a sort of wing forward. I was never any good at the game, and didn’t enjoy it much. The umpire only blew for infringements if the players appealed. ‘Cornering’, which meant passing, and ‘sneaking’, being offside, were the two most common offences, although the most enjoyable, for obvious reasons, was ‘furking in the bully’, which was lightly, delicately and tellingly adapted on almost every occasion. This was for what was known in less esoteric circumstances as back-heeling, as would happen in a rugger scrum. The wall game was another complicated and esoteric Eton institution. Like many Oppidans (non-Collegers), I never played it, and I still have no clue about the rules. It is best known for the annual mudbath that takes place between the Tugs (Collegers) and the Oppidans on St Andrew’s Day alongside a high and extremely old brick wall in College Field, by the road to Slough.
I had a terrific time in my first half, being ‘up to’ Mr Tait for classics. He was known as ‘Gad’ Tait, for the obvious reason that his initials were GAD. Most of the beaks’ (masters’) nicknames were pretty unoriginal. Dear old Gad Tait was a very tall man who when he rode a bicycle wobbled so perilously and entertainingly that it was like a balancing act in a circus. He had a genius for making the learning of Latin seem interesting, entertaining and good fun, when it was palpably none of those things. By then, of course, we were well past the ‘Caesar conquered Gaul’ stage, which had seen Miss Paterson rise to fevered levels of ferocity in the second form at Sunningdale. At Eton we were very much free-range pupils, by comparison to what we had been at our preparatory schools. Now a good deal of our work had to be done in our spare time.
Once a week we had to construe a piece of Latin prose written by some Godawful Roman no-hoper such as Livy or Cicero. At early school, which began at 7.30 a.m. after a hasty cup of tea in the Boys’ Entrance, Gad Tait, who called everyone ‘Old You’, would charmingly put us through our paces about whatever piece of Latin he had chosen. With equal charm he would exact retribution upon those who not done an adequate job. Also once a week, we had to learn a ‘saying lesson’, which involved him dictating a piece of verse which we wrote down in a flimsy blue notebook – I still have mine. It says much for Gad Tait that even today I remember most of his saying lessons. The principal one was Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, which we learned in three successive weeks. Others included part of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and Cory’s ‘Heraclitus’.
There were about thirty of us in his ‘div’ (division), and we had to recite whatever piece of verse we had been given to learn in groups of ten. Gad Tait watched closely but effortlessly, and although ten people were speaking at once, he could tell exactly who had not learned the words properly, and distributed penalties accordingly. When, just occasionally, I had written a particularly successful piece of Latin verse or whatever, he would give me a ‘show-up’. This meant that he wrote nice things at the top of my work, which I would then take to pupil room, where GWN would gratefully and happily endorse it with his initials. These were useful brownie points. Whenever Gad Tait gave anyone in M’Tutor’s a show-up, GWN, who was a more than useful cartoonist, would almost inevitably draw a picture of an old ewe on the paper. When it was handed back the next day, Gad Tait always had a chuckle at this. I can’t remember any of the other beaks I was ‘up to’ in my first half, which is a measure of Gad Tait’s skill as a schoolmaster.
Soccer and fives were the two games which occupied me in my second half, the Lent half, and then it was the summer, and cricket, which I had been longing for. I spent my first two cricketing halves in Lower Sixpenny, which was for the under fifteen-year-olds, and immediately made my greatest cricketing friend at Eton. Claude Taylor (CHT) had won a cricket Blue at Oxford, for whom he had made almost the slowest-ever hundred in the University Match, and had gone on to play for Leicestershire. He was the dearest and gentlest of men, and a wonderful coach who loved the beauty of the game more than anything. Grey-haired by the time I knew him, he had the knack of being able to explain cricket, which is not an easy game, in the most uncomplicated manner. He understood the mechanics of batting so well that he was able to dissect a stroke into a series of simple movements that when put together cohesively made not only a hugely effective stroke, in attack or defence, but a thing of beauty. He loved, above all, the beauty of the game. He taught Latin, although I never had the luck to be up to him. He also played and taught the oboe, and married the sister of Ian Peebles, a delightful Scotsman who bowled leg-breaks for Oxford, Middlesex and England. Peebles was a considerable force in a City of London wine merchants, and wrote charmingly, knowledgeably and extremely amusingly about cricket for the Sunday Times. Before the war Peebles had shared a flat in the Temple with Henry Longhurst and Jim Swanton, whom he relentlessly called ‘James’. It was a most distinguished gathering.
We began my first summer half with new-boy nets, and it was then that I caught CHT’s eye for the first time. I immediately found myself playing in ‘Select A’, the top game in Lower Sixpenny, of which he was the master-in-charge. I had a fierce competitor for the position of wicketkeeper called Julian Curtis, a wonderful all-round games player who probably lost out to me because I just had the edge in the batting stakes. In that first year, 1953, the Keeper (captain) of Lower Sixpenny was Simon Douglas Pennant, with whom I went on to play for the school and later for Cambridge, who bowled left-arm over-the-wicket at fast-medium. Edward Lane Fox was also in the side, but now that we were playing against opponents that were better-versed in the art of playing left-arm spin, ‘stumped Blofeld bowled Lane Fox’ became a less frequent entry in the scorebook. It was a memorable first summer half.
My cricketing activities went on much to the detriment of my work, and I must admit that, as at Sunningdale, my greatest ambition in the learning department was simply to get by. This attitude never received Tom’s blessing when my school reports, which were always of the ‘must try harder’ variety, were up for discussion. But as far as I was concerned, it was only cricket that mattered. If it was not Lower Sixpenny matches against other schools, it was Select A games, nets or fielding practice, and I am afraid I was the most intense competitor. The school professional at the time was Jack O’Connor, the dearest of men, who batted a time or two for England in the thirties, and played for many years for Essex. He ran the Bat Shop, just at the start of the High Street, next door to Rowland’s, one of the two ‘sock’ shops, where we guzzled crab buns and banana splits. Jack sold sporting goods, and whenever any of us went in he would give us a smiling and enthusiastic welcome. He was to become a great friend and cricketing confidant. Buying batting gloves, wicketkeeping inners or whatever from his modest emporium always involved a jolly ten-minute gossip. Once or twice CHT brought him to the Lower Sixpenny nets to watch some of us batting. Jack always gave generous, smiling encouragement. Once when I was batting he turned his arm over; so began a lifetime of misery and mystification for me as far as leg-spin and googly bowling are concerned. I still have nightmares of an umpire signalling four byes.
The winter halves were, for me, little more than an inconveniently large gap between cricket seasons. There was nothing so gloomy as going back to school towards the end of September, when the weather was gorgeous but all, or most, of the cricket grounds were strung about with goalposts. What made it even more depressing was that my return was often just a couple of days or so before my birthday. Various wrapped presents were always tucked away in the bottom of my suitcase, but opening them alone in my room between breakfast and going to chapel was a cold-blooded exercise if ever there was one. They did, however, usually contain a couple of cricket books, which helped.
In the Lent half I tried my best to impress those who mattered with my ability on the fives court and between the goalposts on the soccer pitch, but I never quite made it on either count. Soccer was run by a wonderfully bucolic former Cambridge cricket Blue called Tolly Burnett (ACB), a relation of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, who added greatly to the gaiety of nations in just about everything he did. He was large, if not portly, marvellously unpunctual, rode a bicycle as if he was, with much pomp and circumstance, leading a procession of one, or perhaps rehearsing for a part in Dad’s Army, and walked with an avuncular swagger. I am not sure what Captain Mainwaring would have made of Tolly. He drove an exciting sports car, and took biology with considerable gusto, especially when it came to the more pertinent points of reproduction, in a div room just around the corner from Lower Chapel. If you stopped him in the street to ask a question, he would clatter to an uncertain halt and invariably say in somewhat breathless tones, ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy. Just a bit pushed,’ then off he’d go with a bit of a puff. What fun he was, and how we loved him. I am not sure the authorities at the school entirely agreed with us, for although he was, I believe, down to become a housemaster, the position never materialised.
Tolly captained Glamorgan during the summer holidays in 1958. The Glamorgan committee felt, as they did from time to time, that Wilf Wooller, the patriarchal figure of Welsh cricket, was too old and should be replaced. In their infinite wisdom they brought in Tolly for a trial as captain for the last eight games of the season. His highest score was 17, and the dressing room came as close to mutiny as it gets. In September he was back teaching biology at Eton, and Wooller was still the official Glamorgan captain. By the time Tolly’s moment of possible glory came, his girth would have prevented much mobility in the field, his batting was well past its prime, and his ‘Just a bit pushed, old boy’ might not have been exactly what the doctor ordered in a Glamorgan dressing room which was pure-bred Wales to its eyebrows. His charmingly irrelevant ‘Up boys and at ’em’ enthusiasm must have fallen on deaf ears. Tolly was more Falstaff than Flewellyn.
Back at Eton, before that little episode, he sadly, but entirely correctly, preferred Carrick-Buchanan’s agility between the goalposts to my own. I did however achieve the splendid job of Keeper (captain) of the second eleven. Tolly was also the cricket master in charge of Lower Club, and sadly I never had first-hand experience of the way in which he coped with that. It would not have been boring.
Keeper of the soccer second eleven, or ‘Team B’, as we proudly called ourselves, was not a particularly distinguished post, but it led to my first sortie into the world of journalism, which turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. We had a considerable fixture list, which included a game against Bradfield College’s second eleven at Bradfield. The Eton College Chronicle felt compelled to carry an account of even such insignificant encounters as this, and for some reason I was chosen to write the report. We were taken by bus to Bradfield, where we joined a mass of boys for a lunch which it would have been tempting to let go past the off-stump. Then we changed into our soccer stuff, climbed a steepish hill and found a well-used and pretty muddy football pitch. I enjoyed writing my account of the day’s events, and it duly appeared in the columns of the Chronicle. Unfortunately, it elicited a hostile response from Bradfield, who made a complaint which promptly came to the ears of Robert Birley, Eton’s large and formidable-looking, but in fact kind, rather shy and immensely able, headmaster. He was to us a remote, Genghis-Khan-like figure who hovered somewhat ominously in the background. Birley was known, unfairly in my view, as ‘Red Robert’. This merely meant that he had realised somewhat earlier than most of the school’s supporters the urgent need for change if a school like Eton was to survive. Many reactionary hands were thrown up in horror.
Anyway, one morning I found myself ‘on the Bill’, which meant that I was summoned to the headmaster’s schoolroom at midday. When I arrived, more than a trifle worried, I was told in no uncertain terms that what I had written about Team B’s midwinter visit to Bradfield was extremely offensive, and that I must without delay write a number of letters of apology. Apart from a general dressing down, I don’t think any other penalty was exacted. I still have a copy of this most undistinguished entry into the world I was to inhabit for just about the rest of my life. I have to admit that in the circumstances it may have been a little strong in places, although it is positively mild when judged by today’s standards.
The Michaelmas half in 1954 will always remain firmly in my mind, and for cricketing reasons too. England were touring Australia in the hope of hanging on to the Ashes they had won in a nerve-racking game at The Oval the previous year. There were one or two exciting newcomers in the England party, especially a fast bowler called Frank Tyson and a twenty-one-year-old called Colin Cowdrey, who was still up at Oxford. I found the whole series quite irresistible, and would tune in to the commentary from Australia under my bedclothes from about five o’clock in the morning. This was always a bit of a lottery, as the snap, crackle and pop of the atmospherics made listening a difficult business. Sometimes the line would go down altogether, and the commentary would be replaced by music from the studio in London. Those delicious Australian voices of the commentators, Johnny Moyes, Alan McGilvray and Vic Richardson, added hugely to the excitement, and John Arlott was there to add a touch of Hampshire-sounding Englishness.
First came the intense gloom at the end of November, when Len Hutton put Australia in to bat in the first Test in Brisbane, and England lost by an innings and 154 runs. Every afternoon I would rush to the corner of Keates Lane and the High Street, where the old man who sold the Evening Standard took up his post. I would thrust a few coppers at him, grab the paper, and turn feverishly to the back page. I had devoured what was for me the peerless, if at that time depressing, prose of Bruce Harris well before I got back to the Boys’ Entrance. The second Test in Sydney began in mid-December. The anxiety was enormous, and it seemed as if the end had come when Australia led by 74 on the first innings. But all was not lost, because Peter May then made a remarkable hundred, leaving Australia with 223 to win. They failed by 38 runs with Tyson taking six wickets, bowling faster than anyone can ever have bowled before. The game had a marvellous ending, with a stupendous diving leg-side catch behind the wicket by Godfrey Evans. Phew! I lived every ball. We won the third Test, in Melbourne, but I had to wait until early in the Lent half for England to make sure of the Ashes by winning the fourth Test in Adelaide. After that, to general relief at Eton, normal service was resumed.
Another diversion that winter was being prepared for my confirmation in December. At times the process was up against pretty tough competition from events in Australia, but GWN, who prepared us for the Bishop of Lincoln, was able neatly to combine events in Australia with those in Heaven. After that heavy defeat in Brisbane I was not at all sure about the Almighty, but GWN’s gentle manner and instructive way of putting things across gave meaning and relevance to the whole business of Christianity. Up until then I had felt that religion did nothing more than get in the way of things, what with endlessly having to tool off to chapel and listen to those interminable sermons. My family and one or two of my surviving godparents foregathered in College Chapel on a Saturday late in the Michaelmas half, and the Bishop of Lincoln laid his hands on our heads and turned a group of us into fully paid-up Christians. Then there was the excitement of going to my first Holy Communion the next morning, and the dreadful worry of whether or not I had got my hands the right way round when it came to the critical moment. GWN’s hard work of getting us into mid-season form for the Bishop of Lincoln was underlined and taken a stage further in the Lenten Lectures the following half, given by a notable cleric, George Reindorp, who was soon to become the Bishop of Guildford. By then England were playing slightly more frivolous cricket in New Zealand with the Ashes safely beneath their belt, and the Almighty and I were back on terms. Reindorp came across as the most delightful of men and just the right sort of Christian as he explained the issues surrounding Lent in such an unfussy way that even I thought I could understand them. Anyway, it all helped fill the gap between cricket seasons.
I had been Keeper of Lower Sixpenny in my second summer half, and went on to become Keeper of Upper Sixpenny in 1955. Upper Sixpenny, for fifteen-year-olds, was being run for the first time by a likeable new beak called Ray Parry (RHP), an immense enthusiast who during the war had played as a batsman for Glamorgan. It was one of life’s strange ironies that when, in my early seventies, I went through the divorce courts, my wife’s solicitor was none other than RHP’s son Richard. He was hellbent on delivering an innings defeat, but I think I just about saved the follow-on, if not much else.
RHP and I made great preparations for what we were sure would be a sensational season for Upper Sixpenny. But as luck would have it, David Macindoe, who ran the Eleven, and Clem Gibson, the captain of the Eleven, who actually made the decision, or at least put it into writing, summoned me to play for Upper Club, the top game in the school, from which the Eleven and the Twenty-Two (the Second Eleven) were chosen. Macindoe was another of the mildly eccentric schoolmasters Eton had a habit of producing. He had a gruff but friendly manner, a reassuring chuckle and an ever-cheerful pipe, and had opened the bowling off the wrong foot for Oxford for four years on either side of the war.
Things went well, and I donned the wicketkeeping gloves for the Eleven. I never returned to play a single game for Upper Sixpenny; nor did my old friend Edward Lane Fox, who had received a similar call to arms. At the age of fifteen it felt as near to unbelievable as it gets, especially when, early in June, I received a letter from Clem Gibson, which I still have, asking me if I would like to play against Harrow at Lord’s early in July. It was not an invitation I was likely to refuse. Can you imagine? There I was, a complete cricket nut who ate, slept and drank the game, being asked to play for two days against the Old Enemy at the Holy of Holies.
Of course, I had known by then that there was a distinct possibility the invitation would come my way, for things had been going quite well behind the stumps. But there it was in black and white. No one was more pleased than dear old Claude Taylor, with whom I had kept in close contact after leaving his clutches in Lower Sixpenny. In Upper Club nets, CHT still came to help me, standing halfway down the net and throwing an endless stream of balls at me. The stroke he taught me better than any other was the on-drive, which he considered the most beautiful in the game. When I got it right he would purr with delight. He and David Macindoe had together written a splendid book called Cricket Dialogue, about the need to maintain the traditional etiquette and standards of the game. It may be dated, but it is still well worth reading.
I shall never forget my first Eton v. Harrow match. The anticipation had been intense, and I was given a lift from Eton to Lord’s, along with Edward Lane Fox and Gus Wolfe-Murray, by Richard Burrows, a considerable middle-order batsman and a wonderful all-round games player. His father, the General, sent his Rolls-Royce – what else? – and chauffeur, and the four of us piled inside and were driven not only to Lord’s, but imperiously through the Grace Gates. What a way to enter the most hallowed cricketing portals in the world for the first time as a player. No matter what those in the know talked about in College Chapel, I felt that Heaven couldn’t be any better than this. I can still clearly remember the frisson of prickly excitement as we stopped to have our credentials checked. Yes, they even checked up on Rolls-Royces. Even today, every time I go in through the Grace Gates – and goodness knows how many times I have done so – I still get that same feeling. I remember carrying my puny little canvas cricket bag through the back door of the Pavilion, up the stairs and along the passage to the home dressing room, the one from which Middlesex, MCC and England ply their wares. After being given a cup of tea by the dressing-room attendant, we changed into our flannels. There were several formal-looking dark-brown leather couches around the walls and as I sat down on one to tie up my bootlaces it suddenly occurred to me that not a fortnight before, England had been playing the second Test against South Africa at Lord’s. In that same dressing room, sitting more or less where I was and doing precisely the same thing, would have been Denis Compton, Peter May, Ken Barrington, Tom Graveney, Godfrey Evans, Fred Trueman and the others.
We won the contest, and were generous to let Harrow get to within 34 runs of us. As far as I was concerned, the only blemish came on the second morning. We had begun our second innings on the first evening, and needed quick runs to give us time to bowl them out again. We made a good start, but then after about an hour, wickets began to fall, and there was mild panic in the dressing room. I was batting at number eight, and no sooner had I got my pads on than there came shouts of ‘You’re in, you’re in!’ I grabbed my bat and gloves and fled down the stairs, through the Long Room, down the steps and out through the gates. I strode to the Nursery End, took guard and prepared to face Rex Neame, who bowled testing off-breaks, which he was to do later on a few occasions for Kent in between his productive efforts at the Shepherd Neame Brewery. I came two paces down the pitch to my first ball, had a swing in the vague direction of the Tavern, and my off-stump went all over the place. I retreated on the interminably long return journey to the Pavilion amid applause and yells the like of which I had never heard. In the circumstances I felt I could hardly raise my bat or take off my cap, and somewhat perplexed, I continued on my way. No one much wanted to talk to me in the dressing room, so I took off my pads and things, put on my blazer and went to join Tom and Grizel in Q Stand, next to the Pavilion. When I arrived, Tom looked severely at me and said, ‘You were a bloody fool to let him get a hat-trick.’ Until then, I had had no idea it was a hat-trick – the first ever to be taken by a Harrovian in the Eton and Harrow match. Tom Pugh, who was playing that day, always says that when the hat-trick came up for discussion later, I said, ‘If I’d known it was a hat-trick I would have tried harder.’ You never know what to believe.
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 (#ulink_1de697a8-fb22-5145-bd82-d9f43fdcd88e)
Queen Charlotte and a Milk Train (#ulink_1de697a8-fb22-5145-bd82-d9f43fdcd88e)
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.
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 (#ulink_7cd2d3f9-7451-5a86-88cb-e7b75bb583c9)
Mad Dogs and Honeymoons (#ulink_7cd2d3f9-7451-5a86-88cb-e7b75bb583c9)
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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Henry Blofeld
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Хобби, увлечения
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 18.04.2024
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О книге: The quintessentially English cricket commentator, writer, oenophile, bon viveur, collector and national treasure, fondly known as “Blowers”, tells his riveting life story.Born in Norfolk and educated at Eton and Cambridge, Henry Calthorpe Blofeld OBE, nicknamed “Blowers” by the late Brian Johnston, is best known as a cricket commentator for Test Match Special on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live Sports Extra. His distinctively rich, cut glass voice and his vividly eccentric observations of life on and off the pitch, have made him a household name, not only in Britain but around the world, wherever cricket is played. Blowers has been close the the heart of the game for over fifty years and his career has taken him to the far corners of the earth. This autobiography, stuffed to the gunwhales with delicious anecdotes, brings his astonishingly colourful story bang up to date.