Defining Moments

A distant recollection of a formative childhood event, aged 7

One fine spring or summer’s day

There are only three of us, but we’ve set up our cricket stumps, and we’re fully loaded with bats and a brand new Slazenger tennis ball. The field is ours. Smooth expanse of perfect luscious freshly cut green and a full-length stretch of ‘wicket’ that’s primed and trimmed [in a finer grass of a lighter colour], fit for a game of county cricket or a test-match like the ones they play on t.v.. I can’t vouchsafe for the other two but I feel important, and I’m looking forward to a good game. It’s not that we haven’t played here before – we have many times, numerous weekends in fact, but the grass was always rougher and on the overgrown side, like the neighbouring fields around, and it would always be a bit of a tussle to find the ball if you had a really decent hit. And the strip of wicket now seems silkier, like a ribbon, which should make for some interesting spins, and possibilities for some proper fast bowling, Yorkers and the like - much kinder for the batsman too as you can develop a real feel for the way the ball will bounce. Maybe I could even try for a quarter-century this time. Giving Jim the thumbs up with my raised bat I take a deep sniff and salaciously tune my nostrils into that freshly cut flavour of springy-summer air. It’s about late morning or just past midday. And I’m looking into a quarter sun peering through a single lonely, billowing, cloud that’s just hanging there in some kind of suspended animation, and now gently floating across my solitary gaze of blue horizon sky.

Now suddenly I feel the warm radiance of floating sunbeam satisfaction, as the tennis ball rings with the hollow of the sweet spot of my Slazenger bat, its vibrations and the ball itself both whizzing high and loud over the top of the mesh wire fence at the border of the field. I hear cries of David (our fielder), at the nettles, squeamish but still making a play for the ball, scrambling as it sweeps round into that creeper filled paddock next door. No doubt it’ll soon be a great tussle for us too if it manages to get even half-buried - in those Van Gogh tussocks of knee length blade. Luckily that doesn’t happen. And I genuinely feel for him when I do it again. This time the ball goes straight to mid-off, ripe as a fruit for the catch, it‘s so low it clears the fence only by a hair. His fault of course for fielding badly. But pangs of guilt all the same, and perhaps I should think again before hitting it so hard next time. Coming back he is quite the head down, serene and almost poignant – weathering his sensitivity as best he could. But as I look up it’s still ocean-blue, pure and the single cloud is gone. Waves of lasered heat are beaming down into the middle of my forehead and nape of neck. As I crane just a little I can see the swift graces of a pair of floating wings - of buzzard, glibly and soundlessly circling at height just above our wicket, a kind of portent to anoint our frivolity. This field is ours, and we are here by divine decree. It’s ours by rights, and I can feel that sensual bliss titillating inside me. It’s that thought of a long full drawn-out summer to come, with this field a fixture that won’t move, our newly christened stomping ground, our own special discovery. We are the only ones to have found that narrow gape in the wire fence, to have cleaved it out and pulled it over so you really wouldn’t have known.

It’s the following Saturday I think, around the same time of late morning to midday, and we’ve just finished prepping the wicket - matting out the grass near where the ball bounces, setting up the stumps into the holes that are larger, filling those holes with turf we’ve pulled from the field, when a crow descends on the pole on the pavement behind us. It kind of fascinates me as it is huge and black as crude oil, and it just comes and sits there with a kind of unassuming resolve, listless, intent, as we continue to prep for the first over – our game is its new found inspiration, possibly it’s matinee performance for the afternoon. Minutes later he is joined by a couple of mates, who are equally as jet as black could be, and the three in a line set a right fine silhouette what with that pole and the backdrop of pure cobalt sky, set against a full-ball glare of yellowing sun - like something out of bloody Sesame Street or Hitchcock. I do even contemplate offering them a plate of David’s Quavers, they’re so poised with their postures and attentive. Meanwhile there’s also something else - around the middle of the second over I think - as David throws a salubrious and full circumnavigation of a wide with his (admittedly early stages) right arm offside leg spin – that I fancy I see gleaming or glittering at silly mid-off. It’s bizarre, and it’s sweeping across those far-off fields like a distant haze, shape-shifting like a force field or perhaps it’s a mini-swarm of bees. It’s shimmering in that distant facade like a kaleidoscope could. Now it’s snaking the border of our more vincinal purlieus. And it’s getting closer, and suddenly it starts to make straight for us. And it’s now that I start feeling some kind of a visceral sensation, and it’s that moment I realise. If I could have kicked myself harder I would have. Now I’m also becoming faint and queasy, and then I could almost be sick. Now I’m lurching out to David to ‘oi D! Hold off for a minute, will you!’ and can you effing check on that thing what’s going on ‘over there’ will you!

Jim of course, the third in our mighty triumvirate, shoots straight to the mesh wire like a thunderbolt. As does David.

It’s around now that I also remember hearing the decibels of my own heart beat, and my ear-drums spin, synchronised to the pounding of the beat as it all begins to brace with gathering speed. Vaguely I can make out Jim and David’s shrieks as they both stand at the border of the cross-hatch, turgid, rigid; and then they start semaphoring savagely. Their tortured gesticulations only add further to a general descent into hysteria, co-spiralling into a hive of frenzy. Our clamours are barely audible, almost half strangled, stifled sounds that are now also deadening under their own crossfire – ground with the shrieks searing into the plasma of ear drum. Now suddenly we’re reeling back, scarpering off the field and the wicket, tearing out stumps, tumbling through the verdure in bewilderment, and a raw, untamed ferocity. Now we’re staggering forwards, then we’re arching under, then we’re crawling back on our shins in a desperate fighting scramble, sliding through that gape of wire fence at the kerbside end that backs onto the main road, where there are also some cars passing. After a further scrape with nettles in the rose bushes behind we finally manage to secure a hiding place behind some brambles and a thorn bush, catching breath, panting vigorously. Now we’re crouching again, and after some moments have passed, we stare out in quiet and open stupefaction, at our somehow fortune in having narrowly escaped - and from the endless torture and shame that would no doubt have been pursued with parents and school.

That mirage, it was a group of school kids – all boys about our age – running towards that field in an orchestrated squad-type formation, sending forth some kind of rallying cry or chant accompanied by a bugle, or so it seemed. Once they had been let in to the field from the other side, they took their ground on the pitch and the wicket like clockwork, all padded, gloved and booted, fine pieces on a chessboard aligned for a queenside attack. Yes, they’re gleaming in their great silver crested, deep navy school sweaters and grey flannel shorts.

And yes, they’ve usurped our field, quite effortlessly, with impunity – while we, simply the railroaded. Looking up, I can just about make out an angrier, ever diminishing buzzard, as it vanishes from view in gradually expanding circles. The crows are long gone, nowhere to be seen. And then there’s our Jim, having been nudged back into the thorns and we’re all forced to close in tighter. ‘Ouchh’, he breaks into a whimper, and it’s audible. I have to contain him. ‘Shushhh’, I purse finger to lip, pointing straight ahead. Still faced forwards I start backing into his chest, all but slowly, prodding his arm with the broad of my elbow. ‘Jim, it’s now or never my friend, try and hold it in there will you, OK? Do you Comprenday?’

My inveigled reproof may have prevailed for a second as he straightens up, but as I start to arch round it’s a new grievance and now some wierd held-in facial contortions and I think he’s about to blow. So I elbow him in the groin, gently ramming it all the way home. ‘That’s one from all of us, for the record.’ Maybe it worked.

That spectacle, it was still there, glaring at us squarely in the face. These other boys had show us how it’s done; and we, open mouthed, agape. It wasn’t just the glitz in their uniforms, it was the sheer extravagance of it all, the discipline, the act, their simple and un-assumed, God-given rights over this field. A field that had until that moment been so heart-renderingly ours for the whole summer. And they weren’t even a day older than me. It was all burning inside, the torture of their proud silver garters glistening in the sun, their puffed out white cricket pads and gloves, and their great fat red cricket ball – one of those proper hardened ones with the yellow stitching. Not to mention their stumps – proud and statuesque, like Greek columns with bails that didn’t actually blow off in the wind.

There’s also a tallish master type at one end of the wicket conducting the game. He looks quite grave, and discerning. One of the overs he walks straight up in our direction, and we’re thinking we’ve really had it. None of us breathes an ounce, not even Jimmy. Pin drop silence behind the bushes. And then he paces back. I can never forget that single strand of his hair circling his forehead, spiralling the circumference round and round into the baldy patch at the top, and his bushed eyebrows with lateral protruding tails, circus ringmaster like or Dennis Healey style. But above all for the first time I am conscious of a new and disconcerting feeling. It’s in their uniforms, their order, their self-command. And the fact that they could take that field whenever they like – it’s simply theirs for the taking.

I had always been warned about ‘envy’ as one of the Cardinal sins in the R.E. lessons at school, but had also wondered why anyone should ever feel that way about anything – until now.