REPORT 29    JULY 2005

A hooped cap and an elegant deflectionary style of batting . . .

Where did flaming June go? One minute it was the glorious first and now, suddenly, July is upon us, Wimbledon is over, Fowey is teeming with emmets and Australia and abroad seem a lifetime away.
In fact, I see from the diary, that the month started almost sedately in Adelaide, with lunches and farewells downtown and in McLaren Vale at the absolutely fabulous D’Arry’s winery as well as the equally magic Star of Greece restaurant overlooking the sparkling sea. Oz winters incidentally seem to be hotter and sunnier than English summers but I guess we all know that.

We had two nights at the Tanglin Club in Singapore where, coincidentally younger son Tristram and partner Beth were spending a few days on their year-long round-the-world trip. We took them off for lunch at Raffles which was wonderfully decadent and the following day we all did a long walk along the beach before some delicious Indonesian seafood and long cool drinks at the courtyard bar at Raffles. A very jolly interlude.

Back home life seems to have been dominated by cricket although there was a wedding (Grace Browning at glorious Lanteglos church), a visit to North Wales (cousin David at Bryn Eithin near Colwyn Bay), the AGM of the Royal Society of Literature, a fascinating day with Princess Margaret’s former secretary Lord Napier, a Beaulieu Garden Party given by Lord Montagu and much else besides. 

The best cricket in a way was at Boconnoc one Monday. Several months earlier Cleeves Palmer of the Palmers’ brewery in Bridport said he’d like to bring his cricket team on a tour of Cornwall and could I help. I suggested some ideas, persuaded Michael Williams to do a Crusaders’ match and agreed to get up a ‘Major Rodney’s XI’ to play Palmers at Boconnoc,the Fortescues’ lovely ground in their deer park near Lostwithiel. Cometh the hour, of course, practically everyone who had murmured agreement about playing had become otherwise engaged or injured or dead or whatever. Even Bishop Bill of Truro had prior engagements. Anyway, somehow, thanks to Doctor Leach the headmaster of Fowey Community College, Elizabeth Fortescue and sundry locals such as Richard, the butcher, Peter the bookseller, James, the hotel manager and perhaps above all Peter, the German sous-chef, we mustered a full team. Elizabeth had even laid on a brilliant captain – a senior third generation Eton Rambler called Bill, complete with immaculate flannels, a hooped cap and an elegant deflectionary style of batting. I umpired having pulled a hamstring or something when I last played a couple of years ago and could barely walk for a fortnight.

We lost by a mile though I didn’t think it mattered too much. Bill, in his charming way, was determined that everyone should have a bowl which meant that having reduced them to sixty or so for six we let them off the hook and they got to almost two hundred, whacking around people like the German chef (who had a distinctly dodgy action!) . Then they had one bowler who was just a yard or so too quick for any of our lot. But never mind. It was a beautiful day; the tea was spectacular; the deer came to watch and it was the sort of occasion that A.G.Macdonnell described in “England their England” and which some “experts” such as an irritating Sunday Telegraph reviewer called Fort seem to think don’t exist any longer – and shouldn’t even if they did.
Other cricketing occasions were rather more professional. I went with son Alexander and Graham Coster my Denis Compton editor from Aurum to a 20-20 Middlesex v Surrey game at Lord’s preceded by a Groucho lunch with my old friend, Prince Philip’s archivist, who has just been made a dame! (There’s posh!). I walked to St. John’s Wood from the Groucho and almost got lost in the massive expanse of Regents Park. I enjoyed the game- 400 odd runs including a spectacular one-handed catch off Owais Shah who hit the ball into the top tier of the tavern where we were sitting. Supper at the excellent Frontline Club with Alexander, Kirsten and her Mum.

A few days later I was a guest at a Cricket Society/ECB lunch in the Tally Ho club next to Edgbaston cricket ground in Birmingham. An entertaing occasion in aid of a new sort of instant cricket apparatus for Primary Schools. All good but I can’t help feeling that the only answer to the perceived apathy in schools is to encourage games teachers. Anyway it was well attended and I met all sorts of people who were keen to know more especially about Denis Compton.

The England Australia game was curtailed by violent electric storms. Very dramatic. It was the first time I’d sat in a stand with the Barmy Army. Pretty rum. They actually seemed perfectly nice and obviously had a good rapport with the players. Every time they shouted out “Give us a wave, Straussy!”, Strauss obliged though he didn’t moon when they followed up with “Show us your arse Straussy”. On the other hand – and I suppose it’s being a Senior Railcard holder - I find the constant chanting of ‘Barmy Army! Barmy Army!” a bit irritating and it blots out the Tannoy announcements which is a bore. I also, in a no doubt blimpy way, find it hard to come to terms with apparently normal youngish blokes dressing up in frocks and wigs for a day at the cricket. Oh God, call me old-fashioned. I think my take on it all was summed up by my new friend Ian Jackson the Cricket Society’s PR person who lives in Newcastle. Ian said he and a friend were off to the cricket wearing MCC gear – ties, straw hats and so on when they passed two men dressed as Women Police Constables. Ian and friend made no comment but the two “WPCs” corpsed and cried out, pointing at the guys in rhubarb and custard something along the lines of “Is that sad, or is that sad?!”

I rehearsed some of these thoughts on Sunday at the White Hart in St. Teath where the Cornish Crusaders were celebrating the anniversary of the first cricket played in Cornwall in 1781. The usual convivial, old-fashioned occasion. I spoke between Bob Hicks, the ex-Conservative MP and Canon Ken, the former Rector of Bodmin. It was fun. Brilliant pasties and an excellent rhyming cricketing grace from the female vicar who is about to be translated to a multi-parish living on Bodmin Moor.

I suppose all this cricket stuff makes me seem like a stuffy old blazer but I don’t feel like that. I just enjoy it and I like the mix of ancient and modern, traditional and contemporary, change and permanence. Other people have always criticised me for sitting on the fence, facing both ways and generally having feet in at least two separate camps. I care less and less. I like seeing different points of view, doing all sorts of different things and not conforming.

My collaborator, David Taylor, has just put the finishing touches to around 40,000 words of a potential blockbuster; I crack on with Princess Margaret, stutter on with the third Tudor Cornwall; and the revised Denis Compton – lunch with Christine Compton and Trevor Bailey on Friday; the Palmers Brewery history; number three in the Tudor Cornwall Crime Series; a meting to discuss ‘Books for Africa’ and much else besides. 

On Thursday we’re early to London beginning with the Sherborne Old Boys’ media lunch at the Groucho and culminating in another ODI between England and Australia at Lord’s. Outside the sun is shining; the harbour is full of boats; Wednesday is our sixth wedding anniversary, all’s well I suppose…but I came away from Lord Napier with a huge plastic bag full of Princess Margaret papers which I simply must get through as soon as possible. I feel a bit like the wretched British Lions. I am always playing ‘catch-up’!

Tim Heald

Report Number 29  JULY 2005                                                                               Return to Homepage