for a third year I would not be allowed to play cricket until after the exams, which didn’t seem much of a bargain to me. I turned it down, and had a sorrowful letter from John Raven, the college’s dark, angular, friendly, bespectacled head tutor, saying that perhaps it was time I moved on to the next stage in life – without attempting to specify what that might be.
By then, however, I had had one piece of great good luck. Cambridge was not as good a side in 1959 as it had been the year before, and I just managed to squeak in as one of the last two choices. I was probably the worst opening batsman to play for either Cambridge or Oxford since at least the Boer, and probably the Crimean, War. It was the most exciting experience though, and in a funny way the best education I could possibly have got when you consider what I was going to be doing for most of the rest of my life.
My two greatest memories of the cricket came when the home season at Fenner’s had ended. We went on tour, and late in June we arrived at Trent Bridge to play Nottinghamshire in a Saturday–Monday–Tuesday game; there was no play on Sunday in those days. Nottinghamshire were captained by Reg Simpson, who had opened the batting many times for England, and was a fine player of fast bowling. In order to try to drum up some interest in a game which was otherwise pretty small beer, Reg had got hold of Keith Miller, the great Australian all-rounder, to come and play as a guest star. He had retired three years earlier, and was now writing about the game for the Daily Express. He would prove to be one of the greatest men I ever met in the world of cricket, and we remained good friends until he died.
This must have been Keith’s last or last-but-one first-class match. We batted first, and he opened the bowling, slipping in some quickish, almost humorous, leg-breaks in the first over. I faced a couple of them. He then made a hundred in Nottinghamshire’s first innings, thanks partly to the fact that I dropped him off a skier at deep midwicket when he was on 65. There was nothing remotely solemn about his approach or his strokeplay. He hit the ball murderously hard, and talked happily away to everyone throughout his innings. More than forty years later I came across a completed scorecard from this game, and when I asked Keith to sign it, he scrawled across it without any prompting, ‘Well dropped, Henry.’
But the best part of Keith’s foray to Nottinghamshire happened off the field. He brought with him a former Miss Victoria called Beverley Prowse, and until I set eyes on her I had not realised that God made them that good. She sat in the ladies’ stand at straight deep midwicket for three days, and put us all off our stroke(s). Of course, she was the reason I dropped that skier. On the first evening Keith was a few not out at the close of play, and therefore had to be at the crease, booted and spurred, at half past eleven on the Monday morning. About twenty minutes before the start of play, Reg Simpson came into our dressing room, which was below the home dressing room, and asked if we had seen Keith. We had not. A couple of minutes later there was a crash against the door, which burst open, revealing a somewhat breathless Keith. ‘Come on, boys,’ he said. ‘I can’t get all the way up there. Lend me some kit.’ We did our best to fit him out, and I had the luck to help him off with his shirt. His back made a deep impression on me, and I could only deduce that Miss Prowse had long and powerful fingernails. I’d never seen such a sight. It was all part of life’s rich learning curve. It didn’t affect Keith in the least, and he went on to make that splendid hundred. Years later I asked him if he had remembered to slip a packet of emery boards into Miss Prowse’s Christmas stocking that year. He smiled, and looked mildly sheepish.
Ten days later we played MCC at Lord’s, in the game before the University Match. Denis Compton, who had retired from serious cricket year or two earlier, turned out for MCC in what must have been just about his last first-class match. In their first innings he made a quite brilliant 71. Despite his having had a kneecap removed in 1956, his footwork was remarkable, his improvisation astonishing. He is the only batsman I have ever seen who appeared to be able to hit every ball to any part of the ground he wished. His bat really was a magic wand.
I was so lucky to play against two such Adonises as Miller and Compton. Every girl in England and Australia was in love with one of them, and many with both. If it had not been for their joint efforts, I have no doubt that Brylcreem would have gone out of business. By then, of course, I knew that I would not be returning to Cambridge for my third year. But what memories I had to take ‘on to the next stage in life’. Tom and Grizel didn’t have the faintest idea what they were going to do with me, so they enlisted the help of Uncle Mark.
Grizel and her younger brother Mark were the joint products of my maternal grandparents, Kit and Jill Turner. My grandfather was a smallish man whom, if you were sensible, you treated with the greatest care. He had white hair when I knew him, and he spoke in a rasping voice, as if he was firing machine-gun bullets at all and sundry. He was easily irritated, and I remember him having no obvious love for children beyond what passed for duty. Before the war he had worked in the House of Commons where he became Deputy Clerk. He was, by all accounts, a difficult man to work with and did not make friends easily. This is probably why he never got the top job. He was also for time Clerk of the Pells at the Exchequer. Jill, who was close to Grizel, was a dear, but died of leukaemia while I was at Sunningdale. Mrs Fox told me the news, and made me sit down there and then and write letters to Grizel and to my grandfather, whose grief was prolonged, dreadful, and perhaps a trifle stage-managed. Kit loved Switzerland, and every day he received a copy of a Swiss newspaper written in German, a language he spoke fluently. He gave everyone in the family a crumpled pound note in a brown envelope for Christmas, although I think I probably started off with a ten-bob note which I am sure was just as crumpled. He even gave Uncle Mark, who had made a lot of money in the City, a pound note along with everyone else.
After Jill had died I never much enjoyed the visits to ‘Greenhedges’ in Sheringham’s Augusta Road, which was about as ghastly as it sounds. We would go over for lunch, and the food was some way from being haute cuisine. Mrs Fenn, the diminutive, bespectacled, straggly-haired, middle-aged cook, was an eccentric character. She spoke with a deep voice in the broadest of Norfolk accents, and had only a rudimentary knowledge of cooking, although she did make excellent marmalade. When I was very young I would have lunch in the kitchen with Nanny and Mrs Fenn. Afterwards I would be taken off to swim in the North Sea, which I loathed because it was always appallingly cold. I would put on my swimming trunks in the family bathing hut, which stank of stale seaweed and salt water. To get to the beach I had to walk down a huge bank of painful pebbles in my bare feet, which made the prospect of shuffling slowly out into the sea, getting colder as each step took me an inch or two deeper, seem even more appalling, but I was shamed into it. Sheringham put me off swimming for life, just as Sunningdale made sure that I never again ate porridge. The only time I enjoyed it at all was when, with the help of Nanny, who holding up her skirt was an inveterate paddler, I was allowed to catch shrimps. Pushing the shrimping net along in the sand where the water was about eighteen inches deep, I always netted a few, which were taken triumphantly back to Hoveton and boiled for tea. The North Sea also produced a good haul of cockles and winkles. Winkles were great fun, mainly because I used one of Nanny’s hatpins to winkle them out of those curious twisted shells. They were delicious, as long as you didn’t get a mouthful of sand at the same time.
My grandparents would always come over to Hoveton for lunch on Christmas Day, in their austere black saloon car with Kit at the helm. They arrived soon after we had got back from church, and we waited with bated breath for those crumpled one-pound notes. Kit, who just managed to reach his nineties, drove almost until the end with steady 35mph purpose. About twice a year he went to stay in Huntingdonshire with Aunt Saffron, my grandmother’s much younger sister, who was a great ally of Grizel’s. The old boy drove himself there and back. Once, well into the 1950s, he was asked why he always drove in the middle of the road. He dismissed the silly question with a brusque ‘In order to avoid the nails from the tramps’ boots.’ You could see where Grizel got some of it from.
During the Second War Uncle Mark had been one of the