Charles Snow - Time of Hope

Myself, I went regularly to the ‘county’ whenever I could beg sixpence, but my father had not been to a cricket match in his life. And he said also that he would meet me outside the ground at half past eleven. He was going to leave Myrtle Road early. That was also astonishing. Even for a singing practice, even to get back to an evening with a travel book, he had never left the factory before his fixed time. On Saturdays he always reached home at half past one.

‘We’ll have the whole day at the match, shall we?’ he said. ‘We’ll get our money’s worth, shall we?’

His voice was flat, he could not even begin to clown.

Next morning, however, he was more himself. He liked going to new places; he never minded being innocent, not knowing his way about. ‘Fancy!’ he said, as he paid for us both and we pushed through the turnstiles. ‘So that’s where they play, is it?’ But he was looking at the practice nets. He was quite unembarrassed as I led him to seats on the popular side, just by the edge of the sight-screen.

Soon I had no time to attend to my father. I was immersed, tense with the breathtaking freshness of the first minutes of play. The wickets gleamed in the sun, the bail flashed, the batsmen played cautious strokes; I swallowed with excitement at each ball. I was a passionate partisan. Leicestershire were playing Sussex. For years I thought I remembered each detail of that day; I should have said that my father and I had watched the first balls of the Leicestershire innings. But my memory happened to have tricked me. Long afterwards I looked up the score. The match had begun on the Thursday, and Sussex had made over two hundred, and got two of our wickets for a few that night. Friday was washed out by rain, and we actually saw (despite my false remembrance) Leicestershire continue their innings.

All my heart was set on their getting a big score. And I was passionately partisan among the Leicestershire side itself. I had to find a hero. I had not so much choice as I should have had, if I had been luckier in my county; and I did not glow with many dashing vicarious triumphs. My hero was C J B Wood. Even I, in disloyal moments, admitted that he was not so spectacular as Jessop or Tyldesley. But, I told myself, he was much sounder. In actual fact, my hero did not often let me down. On the occasions when he failed completely, I wanted to cry.

That morning he cost me a gasp of fright. He kept playing — I think it must have been Relf — with an awkward-looking, clumsy, stumbling shot that usually patted the ball safely to mid-off. But once, as he did so, the ball found the edge of the bat and flew knee-high between first and second slip. It was four all the way. People round me clapped and said fatuously: ‘Pretty shot.’ I was contemptuous of them and concerned for my hero, who was thoughtfully slapping the pitch with the back of his bat.

After a quarter of an hour I could relax a little. My father was watching with mild blue-eyed interest. Seeing that I was not leaning forward with such desperate concentration, he began asking questions.

‘Lewis,’ he said, ‘do they have to be very strong to play this game?’

‘Some batsmen’, I said confidently, having read a lot of misleading books, ‘score all their runs by wristwork.’ I demonstrated the principle of the leg-glance.

‘Just turn their wrists, do they?’ said my father. He studied the players in the field. ‘But they seem to be pretty big chaps, most of these? Do they have to be big chaps?’

‘Quaife is ever such a little man. Quaife of Warwickshire.’

‘How little is he? Is he shorter than me?’

‘Oh yes.’

I was not sure of the facts, but I knew that somehow the answer would please my father. He received it with obvious satisfaction.

He pursued his chain of thought.

‘How old do they go on playing?’

‘Very old,’ I said.

‘Older than me?’

My father was forty-five. I assured him that W G Grace went on playing till he was fifty-eight. My father smiled reflectively.

‘How old can they be when they play for the first time? Who is the oldest man to play here for the first time?’

For all my Wisden, it was beyond me to tell him the record age of a first appearance in first-class cricket. I could only give my father general encouragement.

He was given to romantic daydreams, and that morning he was indulging one of them. He was dreaming that all of a sudden he had become miraculously skilled at cricket; he was brought into the middle, everyone acclaimed him, he won instantaneous fame. It would not have done for the dream to be absolutely fantastic. It had to take him as he was, forty-five years old and five feet four in height. He would not imagine himself taken back to youth and transformed into a man strong, tall and glorious. No, he accepted himself in the flesh, He grinned at himself — and then dreamed about all that could happen.

For the same reason he read all the travel books he could lay his hands on. He went down the road to the library and came home with a new book about the headwaters of the Amazon. In his imagination he was still middle-aged, still uncomfortably short in the leg, but he was also paddling up the rainforests where no white man had ever been.

I used, both at that age and when I was a little older, to pretend to myself that he read these books for the sake of knowledge. I liked to pretend that he was very learned about the tropics. But I knew it was not true. It hurt me, it hurt me with bitter twisted indignation, to hear Aunt Milly accuse him of being ineffectual, or my mother of being superstitious and a snob. It roused me to blind, savage, tearful love. It was a long time before I could harden myself to hear such things from her. Yet I could think them to myself and not be hurt at all.

My father treated me to gingerbeer and a pork pie in the lunch interval, and later we had some tea. Otherwise there was nothing to occupy him, after his romantic speculations had died down. He sat there patiently, peering at the game, not understanding it, not seeing the ball. I was not to know that he had a duty to perform.

After the last over the crowd round us drifted over the ground.

‘Let’s wait until they’ve gone,’ said my father.

So we sat on the emptying ground. The pavilion windows glinted in the evening sun, and the scoreboard threw a shadow halfway to the wicket.

‘Lena thinks there’s something I ought to tell you,’ said my father.

I stared at him.

‘I didn’t want to tell you before. I was afraid it might spoil your day.’

He looked at me, and added: ‘You see, Lewis, it isn’t very good news.’

‘Oh!’ I cried.

My father pushed up his spectacles.

‘Things aren’t going very well at Myrtle Road. That’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘I can’t say things are going as we should like.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Milly says that it’s my fault,’ said my father uncomplainingly. ‘But I don’t know about that.’

He began to talk about ‘bigger people turning out a cheaper line’. Then he saw that he was puzzling me. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid we may be done for. I may have to file my petition.’

The phrase sounded ominous, deadly ominous, to me, but I did not understand.

‘That means’, said my father, ‘that I’m afraid we shan’t have much money to spare. I don’t like to think that I can’t find you a sovereign now and then, Lewis. I should like to give you a few sovereigns when you get a bit older.’

For a time, that explanation took the edge off my fears. But my father sat there without speaking again. The seats round us were all empty, we were alone on that side of the ground; scraps of paper blew along the grass. My father pulled his bowler hat down over his ears. At last he said, unwillingly: ‘I suppose we’ve got to go home sometime.’