SPECTATOR SPORT
Absent friends
Frank Keating
licing rain on whetted-knife winds last week were perfect for the ritual first-day drill — two soggy circuits of the ground, to sniff at least the wet, mown grass and linseed oil. Then into the beer-tent with friends to sigh (and swig) sadly over the death of childhood monarchs who have gone since autumn's final over— each one, to me, leaving the crease with still the strong, straight gaze of their youth and their shiny, cigarette-card hairstyles. Norman Yardley, courteous old skip, took himself off forever from the Kirkstall Lane end. Les Ames and Joe Hardstaff unbuckled their pads for the last time. David Evans, umpire-stumper, won't lean his nose, lovingly keen, over the bails again. Nor roly-poly Horace Hazell flick a lick to his left hand, hitch up his bags, and shuffle in, softly sideways, for Somerset. Colin Milburn's flannels were even more mainsail-taut than Horace's. For 011ie, a new generation grieves. He dropped dead after a lunchtime session on the very February day England began to give the West Indies what for. 'Sheer ruddy sur- Prise, mate,' he probably chortled as he went. Dammit, he was younger than me. Although his bonny, beery carousing kept uP pretences, he knew and we knew that a great chunk of him (and us) died 21 springs ago when he lost his eye. What a man. What a loss.
I last laughed with 011ie in that cocktail place near Headingley. So much that his glass eye fell out. Plink, plonk, plink, it bounced on the marble floor and under a bench, and the beloved fat Falstaff — pint steady in one hand — dived after it as if he was still at leg slip for Mushtaq's googly. Days are long in the season. Cricketers need a long drink. Even towards the end, when his asthma was bad, Joe Hardstaff would grin and tell his tales. Once, on MCC's India tour of 1938, Joe and a local maharajah had a drinking contest on the eve of the Madras Test. Glass for glass claret, gin, whisky — till five a.m. when Joe was carried to bed by Arthur Wellard and George Pope. They feared he was dead. Next morning . . . well, I quote Wisden, 1939: `Hardstaff never appeared in any trouble, batting 51/2 hours, he hit 24 fours in his 213.'
One Bank Holiday, Horace Hazell took eight Gloucester wickets in a row. 'All due to a nicely medicinal liquid lunch, m'boy,' he told me many years later. After worry- pot Harold Gimblett's 'dry' Methodist wedding, Horace and Bill Andrews 'bor- rowed' two bottles of sherry from the hotel and set off on a GWR buffet-bar pub-crawl round Watchet and Weston which ended at Temple Meads with Horace having to be prised from the gap between carriage and platform by porters. Horace died at 80, on the eve of April Fools' Day.
Within a week went David Evans, another goodie. I had looked for him in Cardiff in January at the funeral of his friend, Joe Erskine, the boxer. Everyone else was there. Packed with the whole clan, led by Henry Cooper, who always thought Joe the v. best. Front three pews had more ears of cauliflower than an allotment, more scar tissue than can be layered into a box of Kleenex. The Rev apparently peeped through the drapes before the service. `Glory be!' he ordered the altar-boy, `Whatever you do, don't ring the consecra- tion bell!'
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