BENNY GREEN
As my taxi drew up outside the Grace Gates, I peered through the window and was pleasurably surprised, as always, to see that I was not after all the only man in London feeble-minded enough to attend the annual ritual of the first game of the season at Lord's. For at least ten years now I have sud- denly thought about it at random moments through the winter. Suppose that one day it were to happen; suppose that one day the MCC finds itself playing the customary overture to, the season before an audience of nil? What would follow? Nothing, pro- bably. The committee would grit its teeth and continue to smile.
But there were others besides myself after all, nearly three hundred of them as the um- pires came out. Two men walked in front of me to the pavilion entrance. I overheard one of them say to the other, 'If we hurry we'll be in time to see the first ball of the season', as if the first ball of the season was some rare and exotic sight which once missed, might not be glimpsed again in living memory. In the event 1971 opened with no stroke being offered to a ball sailing away down the leg side. The second ball was patted back to the bowler, the third went down the leg side without a stroke being offered. Ball four was patted back to the bowler. The fifth ball beat the bat and went through to the wicket- keeper, and the sixth went down the leg side without a stroke being offered. The season was under way at last.
It was noticeable that in the Long Room the average age of the onlookers was between eighty and ninety, and that the finest connoisseur among them, Sir Neville Cardus, spent the first ten or fifteen minutes with his back to the cricket laughing with some acquaintances. From behind the glass of the Long Room window the cricket was curiously muted. When occasionally the ball made contact with the bat, it did so noiselessly, so that the players on the grass seemed like ghosts drifting through a dream. After fifteen minutes as many as five runs had been scored, and I began to grow desperate. I had waited seven months for this occasion, and now that it was here, the batsmen were going mad. Five runs in fifteen minutes! What had happened to English reserve and the sense of restraint which has always characterised our great national rituals? I glanced round the Long Room seeking distraction.
There were always the portraits, Sir Pelham Warner looking like an aged schoolboy, Jardine, so flattered by the painter that he did not look remotely like a fanatic- Nothing there. It's odd, but in that Mausoleum of portraiture, there hangs one painting at least which actually seems to have been executed by an artist. The subject is, of all things, the Eton-Harrow match of 1886, and the painter has amazingly instilled a touch of Impressionism into the figures sit- ting on the boundary. H. Chevalier Tayler. whoever he was. Monet in disguise, perhaps?
I left the Long Room and emerged into the outer world once more. While the cricketers played pat-a-cake. I strolled round the perimeter of the ground. A sudden sensa- tion! A bank of tulips, planted against the wall behind the new Tavern, had gone mad. Fifty-nine yellow ones, one purple. Did the Cricket Council know of this? What price now those jeremiads who said that at Lord's they never did anything original? A purple tulip in a bank of yellows. And on the first day of the year. This might yet turn out to be an exciting season.
One of the notice-boards announced that on sale in the ground were such delicate ob- jets d'art as platter mats, pen-and-pencil sets and bookmarkers. Cricket loses thousands of pounds every week, but there is still hope. The commercial instincts have been aroused at last. You can buy platter mats at Lord's.
Cardus had retreated now, into the MCC room, where I could just catch a glimpse of his camel's hair overcoat as he sat staring through the glass. What was he thinking of? Albert Trott hitting a ball over the pavilion, perhaps? George Gunn ambling down the pitch to meet the fast bowlers? Whatever was going through that fastidious mind, I doubted if it had much to do with the Kent batting, which had by now piled up the gar- gantuan score of 34, no doubt causing alarm and despondency in the scorebox and wildcat strikes in the room where they printed the matchcards.
I went up to the top tier of the pavilion. On the right I counted sixty balconies of overhanging flats, and not one human being on any of them getting a free look. No wonder. They would have to pay a man to watch this sort of stuff. By lunch the Kent batsmen, in spite of all their ingenuity had not been able to avoid scoring 56 runs in the two-hour session. In those immortal words of Lupin Pooter, this sort of thing was too fast for me, and so I passed through the Grace Gates into the real world, which was, I have to admit, going about its business as though cricket had never existed.
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