February 23rd and the Forty Club of London came to Loburn. They turned out to be the Fifty-five-and-over Club. Their throwing was even more feeble than ours and they didn’t run.
Nevertheless they had one man who could bat. He opened , was fussy about taking guard, and before he faced each ball he fiddled with his gear. He had plenty of gear to fiddle with – a thigh pad that protruded above the waist band of his trousers and butted against his paunch, another thigh pad on the back thigh, an arm guard and a little home made extra pad attached by velcro to his calf. He ambled two singles in the first over and after each of them had to go back and fetch this pad from mid-pitch.
In the second over a ball on leg stump went through the surface of the damp track and rose to hip height. He opened his front hip and punched the ball through midwicket for another single and suddenly I knew exactly who he was. lt wasn’t his face I recognised, nor his elaborate gear – though that ought to have been a clue. This was a man who used to wear toe-separators.
But what I recognised was the way he played the ball. However we age, however we grow slower and less flexible the movements we make are ghosts of the movements that a young man of the same name made twenty, thirty, forty summers ago.
And the form of that punch through mid wicket told me instantly and infallibly that here was Andy Meads. I had played a lot of cricket both with and against Andy in England when I was a teenage lout and he was a star. In the top local league he made a mountain of runs – 147 centuries he told me later, and still counting at the age of 58. But I don’t remember his centuries. I remember bowling him.
I was 16 or so and we were playing at Arundel where Australian teams traditionally open their tours. They used to play the Duke of Norfolk’s XI.
Then the Duke died so they played Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk’s XI instead. lt was much the same.
If you arrive early at Arundel you get to see teams of racehorses coming back to stable from their morning gallops. Huge trees and grassy bands surround the ground and the pavilion has a white wicket gate that I felt important walking through. The pitch at Arundel was made in heaven by angels who like batting. And it was there that I bowled Andy Meads. Back then I bowled leg breaks, but I did Andy Meads with a quicker ball that cut back between his bat and assorted pads and took the off bail. Being of a naturally reserved character, I’d stopped whooping and grinning by the following Wednesday.
Thirty years later and on the other side of the world I reminded Andy Meads of that great day. He said he’d have to take my word for it. What he remembered was a league game in which I had come in in the last over with some eight to win and had dropped the first ball at my feet and run. As short extra cover sprinted in to effect a certain run-out I deftly kicked the ball out of his reach. The whole team appealed for obstructing the field, I protested that it had been an accident, our dwarf umpire – who was also a fanatical collector of pornography gave me not out, and we won.
I’d forgotten all about that.