HEARTS OF WILLOW
David Lovibond on the passions and lunacies
of village cricket — which is now part of the 'forbidden language' of England
IT is evening in the village. The last tractor has rattled down the lane, the rooks are screeching and wheeling above their tall trees. Behind the coal-black hill the sun sets in ocherous splendour, the green is a field of gold, and old men nodding at the gate fall silent and see again the whispering shades of fond-remembered batsmen and demon bowlers of long ago.
Village cricket is part of the idea of England. There is a church tower of remote architecture, blurred by age, an antique family mansion is glimpsed through trees, a crowd of thatched cottages leans in ancient conspiracy with a rustic inn, and at the heart of it all those immemorial white flannelled players fill the summer air with their sweet sounds.
This year more than 500 village teams competed for the Wadsworth's 6X National Village Championship, the final of which was held at Lord's on Sunday. A spokesman from the Cricketer magazine, organisers of the competition, insisted that only genuine village sides took part: 'The population had to he less than 3,000, and fields must surround the settlement. Villages weren't allowed to field outsiders or paid players.' It would, though, be rare to find a contemporary English village without a significant leavening of 'outsiders'. Some, indeed, would cite the cricket club as the chief reason for wanting to live there in the first place, and bring a passionate commitment to the village game and to all the traditions and continuities it embodies.
Elsewhere, cricket can appear merely a sport; an otiose matter of competition for money. The County Championship seems little more than a joyless round of 'If it's Monday, it must be Morpeth' fixtures, and artificial encounters between rootless jobsworths who may he opponents one season and team-mates the next. At the national level, commentators are careful to refer to the 'England' side rather than the 'English' side, in tacit acknowledgement, perhaps, that few of the players take their identity from the nation they represent or have anything other than a professional allegiance to it. It cannot be an accident that England was thrashed in the Ashes series by an Australian team whose every act spoke of a fierce and unapologetic pride in their country.
But if the village game is the repository of the true spirit of cricket, it usually avoids any unseemly preoccupation with cricketing skills. In my part of rural Wiltshire — part handsomely served, potationally speaking, by Wadsworth's brewery — the emphasis is on 'friendly' matches. If it were otherwise then the Sunday Afternoon Player (SAP), of which I am the archetype, would never get a game.
This is not to say that SAPs don't take their cricket seriously. One of our occasional openers, for example, is a brilliantly successful businessman who organises fundraisers for the club, plays in immaculate whites and carries the latest Slazenger V1200 Pro. He also has the temperament of a racehorse but the batting ability of a donkey, and when perfectly legitimately dismissed second or third ball will lose all sense of reason, berating the blameless umpire and flinging his 1250 bat into the pavilion from a distance of 20 yards. Then there is our skipper, a veritable Captain Mainwaring of tacticians, who places his field with the exactitude of Napoleon considering his troop dispositions before Austerlitz, and is oblivious to the inability of his bowlers to influence where the ball actually ends up.
I have always felt that I fitted into the team rather well. After more than 30 years my highest score remains the 12 I took off a kindly pub attack in the summer of '87. As a bowler my brief, violently stuttering run-up was often taken for an East European folk dance of astounding complexity but which, however diverting the fielders seemed to find it, not infrequently rendered the batsman confused or convulsed and unable to defend his wicket from my cunningly disguised deliveries. In recent years a stiffening of joints and creeping myopia have obliged me to join the other crocks in what we charmingly call 'the close field'. Last season one of us was lifted out by air ambulance, having been hit on the head while deep in conversation on the respective merits of John Deere trailers. It is in the company of such warriors that my reputation as Iron Legs Lovibond' was earned: quite regularly, batsmen would crash a pulled or hooked ball into my shins and, unthinkable as it was to show the least reaction to the excruciating pain, I took the glory for the saved four rather than admit I simply had not seen the ball.
We are fortunate in the village to have so many locals involved in the club. Typically, without the money and energy that newcomers represent, cricket in village England would have gone the way of the horse plough and the Harvest Home. It may be true that many of the am.visres in permanent or weekend flight from the cities are drawn to the country by a romantic conservatism that depends on an archaic vision of rural England: the squire is still in his hall, old Hodge lives in happy thrall to a benev
olent paternalism, and the parson wears cricket boots under his cassock. To such people, and certainly for me. membership of the village cricket team, like attendance at evensong or keeping a pewter mug at the inn, is a personal affirmation that a distinctive. unequivocally English way of life lingers on in an unchanging countryside.
But attending to the pieties of village cricket is not entirely a hopeless longing for a lost England. 'Cricket is a central part of village life; without it the heart has gone from the English countryside,' says Tony Burton, deputy director of the Council for the Protection of Rural England. 'We play on all sorts of impossible pitches, with people missing eyes and limbs. Blind umpires too. sometimes. Matches are fiercely fought, but we all end up in the pub together afterwards. Cricket makes us understand what is important about village life.'
At a time when so much that was familiar has disappeared under concrete or the prairie-master's plough, and when even the concept of Englishness has been erased from our multicultural cities, England has become memorialised in her villages. Playing cricket, keeping faith with English country life, are part of the forbidden language of nation; and when we walk out on to the village field we are not merely in pursuit of a memorable day's sport, but are also continuing in the fellowship of our ancestors.
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