CRICKET

 CRICKET  (some bits also described in A147)

I treat cricket as a kind of birthright. And yet being enumerate it is a sport that at times I am barely able to understand. It is so much to do with calculations, tactics, history and statistics. Yet I love it, and I am not very interested in who wins or looses but who bats or bowls with skill.

My upbringing as a child was steeped in sports - especially cricket at which my father played for his county, Berkshire.

We practiced a lot, hardening our hands regularly with methylated spirit. So excelled with bat and ball at school.

My sister, June, was captain of her school X1, brother Nigel did well, and I made off with most of the prizes for fielding, throwing, and catching - the prizes being cricket equipment, so reducing the drain on my family’s finances (it was the time of the recession).

My father listened to Test Match cricket when played abroad via a PYE radio with its glowing valves, wet (car) battery, heavy dry battery and aerial leading from the house to the top of a nearby tree.

My father died. The war started, and I became a refugee in the USA, playing once only in a match of refugees against Boston Gentlemen at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. It was in aid of British War Relief. We took $130.

After becoming a pilot and contracting TB, I thereafter never had the time or occasion to play cricket again. But I do watch part of the Test Matches at Lord’s Cricket Ground. 

Four incidences at Lord’s stand out in my memory. 

The first was when, as raw volunteers when old enough to join the RAF in the middle of the war, we were about to be greeted by an officer at Lord’s. As we waited expectantly in a corrugated iron roofed, open spectator stand (were the Warner Stand is now positioned), the occasion for us all was of expectation and solemnity. Then one of our number blew up a condom and let it sail out over the hallowed turf. The tensions and expectations were both suddenly turned into a more lighthearted occasion. 

The second recollection was when Margreet and I were stuck in a human traffic jam behind the Grand Stand, when a member of the public passed by us shouting: “Sick bowl, mind yer backs”. The human traffic jam parted, we kept close behind him, and the three of us sailed through as the crowd stood aside. 

The third time was when Margreet and my sister had reserved seats in the Grand Stand. My sister had mentioned that she had been given brownies by her son’s girlfriend. They watched the cricket and ate the brownies - laced unbeknown to them with cannabis. Margreet (Dutch) for the first time understood cricket, and my sister, June, felt so unwell that she repaired to the St John’s ambulance station nearby and was given a cup of tea. For some time after, my sister refused to answer her doorbell for fear that it was the Police calling to arrest her. 

The last memory still continues and was even to my financial benefit.

This came about as I was in a queue to enter Lord’s Ground and had got on well with one of my neighbours. “I like the cut of your jib”, he explained as we were about to pass through the Grace Gates. “Why don’t you buy some shares in my company?” This offer was made in his rather loud voice, so I had a feeling at the time that he was hoping others would hear and take advantage of his proffered advice to help his company prosper. 

I do not have anything to do with shares, leaving that skill to others who can add - or subtract.

However, I said that as far as I was aware it was essential to know when to sell. I asked him and he gave me a figure.

Several years later the shares reached the selling price that he had given me. 

And I sold. 

Margreet and I went on holiday to Sicily on the strength of it. We naturally wrote to him, from Taormina, to thank for our break.

Our benefactor has, since our original meeting, become not only a great friend but also a collector of my art. 

Cricket - lovely cricket.  

(A154)

BLACKOUT

 

Margreet was reading about a Red Arrows pilot who wore anti-gravity blackout compression kit as part of his job as lead pilot.

Training in America during the war we had no such kit, even though our two-seat Harvards were the British and American advanced training aircraft, enabling us on graduation to convert directly to flying Spitfires and Hurricanes.

She read out from the article about blackouts and I told her that I had experienced such during my flying from an airfield in Oklahoma.

It so happened that a famous fighter pilot was being rested from operations in Europe and sent to the USA to rest, speak publicly and to the likes of us.

He felt like flying a Harvard and that as I was one of the better student pilots,  I was chosen to fly with him.

So up we went with me in control. Then he said that he would take over when we were high enough and in an airspace safe for aerobatics.

He then proceeded to fly our aircraft in the manner of fighting German Me109s in combat.

During several of his pretty extreme manoeuvres I blacked out, being aware of most of my faculties but quite unable to see, as blood that should have been feeding my brain fled toward my flying boots under the force of added gravity.

So had the war in Europe not come to an end I would probably have flown bomber aircraft rather than fighters. 

 

WIND SPEED AND DIRECTION

 

Ever since childhood I have been mad on aeroplanes and flying in them. I even still have an early 1930s book I bought on how to fly an aeroplane, written by W.E. Johns (who wrote the Biggles books).  It is called The Pictorial Flying Course.

The principles of flight since then have hardly changed. The aerodynamics still encompass lift, weight, thrust and drag.

In those far off days aeroplanes were biplanes and airports were grass fields (like London’s main airport, Croydon Aerodrome). 

To enable an aeroplane to fly then as now, it needs a wing (or wings) with the curved shape of an aerofoil section to provide lift. And despite immensely powerful jet engines they still use nature’s wind speed for taking off and landing (as do birds).

So, since those Biggles days, pilots have needed to know the wind direction enabling them to take off into the air quickly (into wind) and land slowly and safely (also into wind). So then, as now, a weathervane of some sort is needed.

In those olden grass field days, before landing, a pilot in the air needed to know the wind direction. So someone on the ground looked at a weathervane and rotated a large letter T and pointed the cross-piece toward the breeze. Then the pilot could look down and land into wind. Radio communication now covers the visual side of things, but a weathervane is still needed.

I once had a job as a prop-swinger, starting up the engines of Tigermoth biplanes for trainee pilots.  A weathervane or T indicator mounted just above ground level told us the wind direction for takeoffs and, from the air the T for the pilots to land. With cross winds we might have to run along beside the biplane holding on to the wing-tip to prevent the aircraft from tipping over.

There was no weather forecasting in those wartime days, so to prevent the disaster of  pupils killing themselves, an experienced pilot would refer to a weathervane and fly upwind for a period of time to ensure that good, cloud-free weather would arrive. He would then fly back over the field and stick his arm out into the strong slipstream with his thumb up. Then off would go the students until each could fly solo. (I went through it all later when learning to fly.)

Having bought a house on a hill north of Andover, in Hampshire, and when writing, running a house, garden and children, I decided to design (for myself) some weathervanes using different designs and methods of rotation. 

It was not the first time for me, since soon after the war I designed and helped to built a studio house, and decided to top it off with a weathervane in the shape of a rose (a family flower.) Made of copper, lead and iron rod, it turned out to be too large for the house and was discarded. (Years later it was recovered from a hedge and exists now as a wall decoration in someone’s house.)

My new experimental weathervanes were mainly based on sheet copper, copper tube and reinforcing rod, the most successful being a rather nasty-looking cottage garden or seaside type of a four bladed propeller with a simple vane. It not only worked splendidly but also indicated wind speed, and did both right in my garden for all to see on a fruit cage corner post. 

However, the most interesting and fun one was made from a swivelling plastic drainpipe with a vane at one end and at the other a large plastic funnel, stuck in with glue. It was to attract animal and bird life to the garden and food. To do this an ultrasonic dog whistle was fixed to the funnel’s spout end. Thus, always turning into wind, the air would be scooped in through the funnel’s wide opening to blow the whistle.

The idea was fun but was impossible to discover if it ever worked, as our ears are not tuned into the frequency of noise that wild creatures are able to hear.

But it was successful for one creature - a spider, who strung its web over the funnel’s opening to catch its prey from the incoming wind. But it also made its home in the funnel’s tube, blokking it. This object had succeeded in indicating wind direction and gave a spider an excellent home with its meals blown into its web on the wind. So, in one way, it may have been successful and not in another. 

My weathervanes were as nothing compared with one used by the Admiralty in Whitehall, London. It is a roof weathervane with a spindle stretching downward to the grand ceiling of a room with an internal weathervane on the ceiling directly beneath it. Here, Admirals could see if favourable winds would aid our navy to set sail and beat up the French, Dutch and Spanish Gallions.

I did much the same in my dockland home and added to the ceiling a painted map of the Thames to make wind direction more clearly related to the landscape.

There was, with mine, the added pleasure of attaching Christmas decorations to the internal pointer, swinging silver balls around as the wind outside eddied and changed direction.

Weathervanes are sometimes necessary and their design often imaginative and usually fun. 

A WATERBIRD

I had been invited to stay at a grand country house by a friend high up in the art world and in the City. 

The occasion was a shoot, were the important and rich would set out in the morning after breakfast with their guns, loaders, dogs and wives.

The whole occasion appeared to be rather haphazard, but, in fact, was highly organised.

Breakfast in the “big house” was probably a little more elaborate than was usual. There was kedgeree, bacon, eggs, sausages, cold pheasant and partridge. Porridge, was there, too, for those who might like it, served with local cream.

My place in this jamboree of nature and slaughter was quite clear. I was a beater among locals, yokels and farm workers, but not quite, as I had orders to walk behind the beaters who rattled sticks on trees to make pheasants fly. I was to shoot any birds that cleverly flew away from and not over the invited “guns” but back over me (lucky birds).

We were a merry crowd us beaters from all layers of society and in great spirits.

We were to be traditionally correct by keeping our lines straight, under the orders of the head keeper.

The banter, tapping of trees and bushes with sticks, and voices urgeing birds to fly was all amid the delicious smell of winter woodland, of dead leaves and wet earth. It was just lovely.

The weather was cold and dry, as hoped for, and our dress was appropriate, being Wellingtons, heavy socks, jeans, sweaters, warm coats, and many outrageous hats that gave character to their wearers.

Our host was ahead in his large Range Rover and having trouble getting out of the muddy mire to firmer ground on the far side.

We beaters were perched on straw bales in a wagon towed by a tractor, behind the Range Rover.

We watched as our host’s car wallowed in the mud.

       Then someone noticed that below us and to the side was a wire cage, and inside this cage was a bird - a lovely and exotic-looking dark bird with slightly curved reddish beak and large feet, one that I had never seen before. It was a water rail, now caught in a trap, set for the voracious mink that, during that time, and probably now, was killing off much of England’s natural furred and feathered wildlife. 

We all wanted to relase that lovely creature, but we were under the head keepers orders. 

At last, when our host reached dry land, he was told of the water rail and was furious that no-one had gone to free it.

The head keeper then arranged for someone to set the bird free, which ran away, flapping its wings and with its big feet hanging down, to live another day in the freedom of its boggy world.  

A140

A WARTIME CRICKET MATCH IN AMERICA

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. 

                                                                    

IN CONTACT WITH THE ENEMY

Being in the RAF and based mostly in England and America during the last war I had not a great deal of contact with live Germans and their war machine.

I will relate them to you later (as I may have done before), but now I will tell you about Fred Scott, my cousin, who was in the Army and very much in live contact with enemy tanks and soldiers.

Fred, well-educated, joined up as an ordinary private soldier. His first job was part of the defence of Shoreham Airfield on our south coast. His fellows were mostly guilty ex-criminals who had been told by the judiciary to become soldiers or go down the mines.

Fred learned from them about the rougher side of life and, in particular, a special skill.

His father was a Brigadier General. When in Fred’s district, the Brigadier ordered Fred’s presence. They were then together and alone - a hig-ranking soldier and an ordinary private soldier.

“Well, my boy, what have you learned in the Army?” 

“How to pick a lock, sir.”

“Well, Fred”, said his father, open the padlock on that gas meter in the corner.” 

Fred opened the lock and a cascade of coins fell to the floor.

“Now put the coins back and lock it up again.”

“Sorry, sir, I can’t do it. I have only learned how to unlock locks.” 

You might well imagine the following consternation caused by this episode of army life. 

Fred was flown into the Normandy battlefield by glider on the second day of the liberation, rose to become a Major, and was aworded the Militairy Cross by Field Marshall Montgomery on the battlefield.

My own first and closest contact with Germans came when, having returned to the UK in 1942 from America when old enough to join the RAF, with a view of becoming a pilot, I was given an RAF number and told to wait in civilian life for a flying vacancy.

The first job I took as an RAF/civilian was being a farm labourer. It was at a time of extreme food shortages and farm produce was vital. 

I was in the middle of a field weeding rows of mangels (cattle feed) when I heard approaching engines in the sky. A German Ju 88 bomber approached so low over my field that I could see the pilot and gunner quite clearly. The gunner could have so easily killed me, but chose not to do so. I suppose the German airmen were too tense, flying so low and trying to find their way to bomb Reading railway station - which they missed, hitting a school and killing many children. 

A dangerous meeting with the enemy came when I was posted to Davidstow Moor, in Cornwall, as a trainee pilot, now with the RAF proper, to experience real operational flying.

We flew Warwick Aircraft in RAF Coastal Command, with a lifeboat designed to fit beneath the fusilage of our rather ponderous twin-engined aeroplane. It was to be dropped by parachute. 

I was taken on sorties over the Bay of Biscay to find baled-out aircrew. With most of those on board looking downward to the sea, my job was to scan the sky for German Condors, four-engined aeroplanes that could easily fly faster than us and outgun us with cannon fire. I did see one in the far distance but communication broke down at that moment so had to point it out to the skipper beside me. As we had no chance of survival in a fight, we dived to just above sea level and headed for home at full speed. (All aircrew were given a fried egg on their return. That was special.)

The next four encounters were the following:

Arriving by train in the western suburbs of London on leave, an air raid was in progress. The train I was aboard was halted and, although advised not to leave the carriages for our safety, many of us climbed out and down to the rails to witness searchlights combing the sky to the sound of anti-aircraft shells, and bombs falling, mainly on the East End of London. I wrote to an American that I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. 

Then came the unmanned, V1 flying buzzbombs (doodlebugs). They were directed haphazardly with London as their target. If the noise of its one ram jet engine stopped before the bomb reached you, you dived for cover. If it continued overhead then all was well and it would fall and explode elsewhere - and one could continue one’s interrupted bath if having one. 

After the buzzbombs came the V2 rocket. I was mending roofs in the East End of London (Plumstead) waiting for a posting to the USA when on top of a roof I heard an explosion and then a swooshing sound. It was one of the first V2 rockets to fall on London and far enough away. The noise of its explosion was followed by the sound of its arrival.

My last possible encounter with the enemy was when posted to RAF Skellingthorpe, near  Lincoln, at an RAF bomber squadron.

A Lancaster bomber had returned from a raid on Germany overnight with one of its engines shot up. Another was substituted and had to be tested before the next night raid took off for Germany. 

The rear gunner, for some reason, was unable to be aboard for this test flight to Scotland and back. So I took his place - with four Browning 303 machine guns to fire at a German aircraft should one cross the North Sea to interrupt our flight.  I was not required to press the firing button, but it was a great experience to have flown in such a famous bomber - even though my only duty was to line up my guns with the landscape beneath and read off the drift and pass on this information to the navigator by intercom.

These were my most exciting wartime experiences. Had I been born one year earlier I doubt very much if I would have been alive to write about such minor wartime episodes.

And I am also grateful to that Ju 88 air gunner for not bothering to kill me when I was hoeing weeds just beneath him.