Those who run cricket are trying to establish our very English of sports in baseball-mad America. In time we will know how successful this has been - after all, our rounders became baseball and soccer is establishing itself well there.
My connection with a sport that is so divergent, that a cricket match can take a few hours or five days depending upon what aspect of it has been chosen as a contest, is inbred.
My physical participation took place as a player mainly in my school days.
My father, who played cricket for his county, Berkshire, was obsessed with the sport. So, as children we exercised fingers and wrists, hardening our hands, and batting and bowling in the nets at our house in Silchester on the Berkshire/Hampshire borders.
When we played Australia at a Test Match in their faraway country, an aerial was strung from the top of a nearby tree to connect with our PYE radio, which needed a wet battery (like a car battery) and a huge and heavy dry battery. Inside the wooden case of the wireless were glowing valves looking like today’s light bulbs.
My sister captained her school team, my brother Nigel played (but I think he was keener on golf), and I won most of our school cricketing competitions of catching and fielding where the prizes won were of cricket equipment. So that was very handy when money was abnormally short during the time of the great depression.
My father died from a form of anemia when he took Madame Currie’s cure-all of radium in 1938.
Then war was declared and I left school to become a refugee in America.
Just who organised it and just how I was known in Connecticut as a refugee I do not know, but I was asked to play in an exhibition match on Empire Day 1941 between English refugees and an American team from the Boston area at Trinity College, Hertford, Connecticut (I was 16 years old).
I don’t know if I scored runs or took wickets, and the event would surely be lost in time had it not been recorded by two press photographers standing at silly point and short leg on this rather unique occasion. The profits from the match ($130) went to British War Relief.
I happened to be batting at the bowler’s end when the photographs were taken and my copy of one of them with basic details, remains in my photograph album as a rather special occasion in my early life. (We beat the Bostonians.)
The reproduction of that photograph has been sent to the archive at Lord’s and probably sits in a file marked “Cricket played during the Second World War”.
It might surface again one day as a wartime example of eleven young men supporting their homeland when abroad, before becoming old enough to return to fight and probably to die for it.
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