Duncan Hamilton - A Clear Blue Sky - A remarkable memoir about family, loss and the will to overcome

After every innings you replay the chances you missed: the stray delivery on your pads that you should have flicked to the boundary; the half-volley that you curse yourself for mishitting; the short ball you didn’t punish. In 40 minutes, I made only one run. On 95, I failed to score for 14 balls. I had about four chances to regain my authority and my momentum and claim that century. I wasn’t able to take any of them. Finally, out of desperation, I spotted what I thought was the perfect opportunity to on-drive Morkel to the fence. So I went for it. Rather than the romantic sound of willow on leather, I heard the terrible rattle of leather on ash as the bails went for a little dance. I’d played around the delivery.

The ovation I got for an innings-saving score – and then for a 41-ball fifty when batting again – was wonderful music, but not entirely consoling. Nor were the complimentary critiques of each knock. My dad was mentioned. I’d done him proud, they said. I’d evoked his spirit and shown the guts and gusto that, time and again, had hallmarked his own cricket. But we lost the Test, lost the series, lost our number one ranking and Strauss retired as a consequence. Someone once said that the most beautiful rebuke you can ever utter is ‘I told you so’. My performance would have allowed me to use it, but I didn’t. I was too busy kicking myself rotten for not getting the hundred. That was nearly four years ago, which is a lifetime in sport, a profession where most careers constitute not much more than a brief flash of time compared with the life that comes after them.

But Lord’s is only one reason why it would be fitting to get my Test first century now, exacting a kind of revenge against South Africa in the process. On England’s tour here, exactly six years ago, I was a spectator. I sat in an executive box, staring down the line of the stumps. That day I let my eyes roll right across Newlands, one of the great theatres of cricket. It’s the sort of place where you’d gladly play every week purely for the picturesque sight of it. I gathered in every square foot of the ground, which was cast in hot sun and dark shadow. Two South Africans scored centuries in a game that was dramatically drawn in the last over of the last day: Jacques Kallis got one in the first innings; Graeme Smith got another in the second. Watching them in that Test, I quietly resolved – telling no one about it – to come back here and make a century too.

Just one more run …

I can see the executive box where my younger self sat, and I wonder who is sitting in it today. Whoever has the privilege will envy me the plumb position I’ve had during one of the best innings I’ve ever seen. When I came in, we were 223 for five, and Ben Stokes was on 24, just warming up. We ended the first day on 315: him on 74, me on 39. He’s now on double Nelson – 222 – and the two of us, the ginger twins, have taken the score on to 538. Talk about being in the groove. In the past two and a half hours he’s dismantled the South African attack nut and bolt. He’s striking the ball so hard that I wouldn’t be surprised to see it spontaneously combust. The way he’s seeing it, bigger than a party balloon, and the way he’s hitting it, each attacking stroke like a booming detonation, he could probably have reached his first century using one of the stumps. He’s walloped everything everywhere, and none of the bowlers is escaping punishment. No matter how they bowl to him, or where the ball lands, he seems to know what’s coming at him, as if he’s developed a sixth sense. It’s been a prolonged burst of clean, pyrotechnical hitting. The ball is travelling so far that South Africa might be better off posting a couple of fielders on Table Mountain.

Our partnership has been an unselfish one. I’ve known Stokesy for eleven and a half years, ever since we played against one another in an under-15 County Cup match at Sowerby, a ground ringed by tall heavy trees, plain houses and hills topped with a row of unlovely electric pylons. I was 15. He was a fortnight shy of his 14th birthday. Imagine if someone from the future had turned up then, tapped us both on the shoulder and said: ‘One day, lads, the two of you will swap this for Cape Town.’ We’d have dismissed the remark as insane. Stokesy’s dad was also a pro sportsman, a New Zealand rugby league international and then a coach in England. So he knows what it’s like to grow up with a name that gets recognised. He knows, too, that reaching this century for me will be about more than the landmark of the score itself; that the past as much as the present will be entwined within it.

In between overs we come together and touch gloves. Denis Compton, whose day was a few ice ages before my own, would apparently cheerfully ask his most frequent batting partners which club or bar the two of them might frequent later on that night. Or he’d tell them about his gallivanting exploits during the evening before. What Stokesy and I say to one another isn’t remotely as entertaining as that. None of our exchanges will make it into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations either. We offer nothing more than ‘well done, mate’ or ‘keep going’ or ‘you can do it’.

You have this dreamy image of reaching your first Test hundred with one of the showboat strokes – a ravishing drive through extra cover or something smacked along the ground straight past the bowler. But when you’re almost there, right on top of a ton, you’re grateful to get home any old how. Even the faintest of faint edges or something slightly streaky will do – an inside edge past leg stump and the wicketkeeper. Yes, I’d gladly take that.

I haven’t tried to prove I can match Stokesy shot for shot. A year or two ago it would have been different. I would have impetuously tried to keep pace, getting myself caught up in the whirl of things and wanting to demonstrate that I’m no slouch either when it comes to finding the boundary. But I’m a more measured and mature batsman than I used to be; a bit older and a lot wiser than the bloke who got into a tangle and let Morne Morkel get the better of him in 2012.

At lunch I was on 95, which threw up one of those strange coincidences. I know it won’t have gone unnoticed among the South Africans. Morkel in particular will have thought about Lord’s – and he’ll have known that I was thinking about it too. Because of that, I did something I wouldn’t normally do. In the dressing room I didn’t take off my pads or my box or my boots. I wanted, as much as I possibly could, to pretend the break wasn’t happening. In the hubbub I sat largely in silence, left alone as I waited for the clock to tick around and send me back out again. I knew Morkel would be waiting for me; that he’d be thrown the ball again as soon as the afternoon session began. So it proved. He bowled tightly, forcing me to play five of his first six deliveries – all of them dots.

Sometimes you hit a shot that makes you feel it’s going to be your day. It’s something fluid and naturally stylish, taking no effort. You do it not only instinctively but also unconsciously, and you understand immediately afterwards, as you’re still watching the ball sail away from you, that today everything is well-oiled and working solidly. The bat is a physical part of you. This happened to me after I went past fifty. It was an on drive against Morkel. The ball was fullish, not too dissimilar to the one that got me out at Lord’s. I waited for it, got my head over it and then thumped it past him. I felt in charge then, and I still feel in charge now.

Just one more run …

South Africa have taken off Morne Morkel and brought on Stiaan van Zyl, a batsman who can bowl. He’s a bits and pieces medium pacer, called on only occasionally. He’s less experienced in Tests than I am; he’s taken only four wickets in nine appearances before this one. That said, one of his victims was Virat Kohli. And another – in the previous Test at Durban – was me. In the second innings, I was on 79 and eyeing a century the way I am today. But I was running out of partners and went back into my crease to crash the living daylights out of an ordinary delivery. I miscalculated. I didn’t put enough juice into the shot and I holed out at long off, getting a rollicking for it later.