Hill with my dad (and occasionally my mum) were incredibly well organised and we developed hundreds of rules over the years. As a bat, we used a stick that I’d found in the woods and ripped the bark off, about the size of a baseball bat. I think it was bent in the middle as well. Batting was a tricky business, because the pitch was nowhere near flat, there were stones all over it, so one ball could bounce over your head, then the next could roll along the floor.
Not only that, but we had the biggest set of stumps in the world. Whoever was batting would stand in front of a sapling that must have been three feet wide and six feet high. That was our stumps. So if Dad bowled me a bouncer, there wasn’t much point in me ducking underneath it because I’d be bowled out. And if the ball hit me on the shoulder, I could be lbw. As I said, batting was far from easy.
If you managed to connect with the ball, and sent it flying into the trees for Pepper to fetch, there were some trees that were out and other trees that were six. If you hit the ball over a track behind the bowler, that was six as well. And if you edged the ball, there was a bigger tree behind the sapling that served as a slip cordon. If you nicked it past the tree, you were okay, but if it so much as clipped a leaf, you were out.
As you can imagine, wickets fell at regular intervals in this game, so we played ten-wicket innings. I would bat until I’d been out ten times, then Dad would do the same and try to beat me. Fifty or sixty† all out could well be a match-winning score. I’m not sure who won the most games. I think that I did, but my dad would probably say that he did. Actually, why don’t I go and ask him? Or better still, I’ll ask my mum as well. I’ve a feeling that we might need an independent adjudicator.
| Me: | Mum, who do you think won the most games when we played down at Post Hill? |
| Dad: | I definitely won the most games. |
| Me: | I wasn’t asking you. |
| Mum: | Oh, I don’t know, it probably ended up about even. But it was always very competitive. Not just when you were playing cricket, either. Whatever you played together was competitive, even if you were just whanging a ball to each other on the beach. Most people just do that to play catch, but with you two there was always some sort of competition involved. |
| Dad: | That’s the way it should be. All games are competitive. |
| Me: | Did we have many arguments about the rules? |
| Dad: | No, because I was the sole umpire, so there were never any arguments. You just had to put up with that. |
| Me: | I must have won most games, though. You were useless. |
| Dad: | I wasn’t, I was absolutely brilliant. Unorthodox, maybe, but brilliant all the same. |
| Me: | You couldn’t bat for toffee. And you bowled like my mother. |
| Mum: | Erm, excuse me, Matthew. When I went down to Post Hill with you, I was going to walk the dog. I didn’t want to have to play cricket as well. |
| Me: | It was boring playing with you, Mum. I could just smack it anywhere when you bowled. |
| Mum: | Cheeky sod. |
| Dad: | My bowling was good enough for you most of the time, anyway. |
| Me: | That was because half the time you didn’t bowl it, you threw it. |
| Dad: | You’ve got a point there. I did throw it from time to time. |
| Me: | Yes, whenever there was a danger of me beating you. |
| Dad: | Well, if you’ve got a lad who can hit every ball when I bowled it, what was the point? I wanted to keep challenging you. And I didn’t just throw it, by the way, I sometimes threw it with sideways movement, so it spun as well. It was a good test for you. |
| Me: | Especially when the stumps were six feet high. And I bet when you were batting you wished that you’d never sorted out my bowling action in the garden that time. |
| Dad: | No, that was well worth the trouble. It was hard work, it took all Sunday morning, but we got there in the end. I got the run and jump sorted out, then I asked Bob Richardson about some of the more technical stuff. Bob taught at my school and he used to play in the Bradford League, so I’d ask him during the day about how to use the front arm, or how to hold the ball, and then I’d come home and tell you about it in the evening. You were a quick learner, but Bob deserves some credit. |
| Me: | Yes, he deserves some credit for me bowling you out all the time. |
| Mum: | Anyway, there were never any hard feelings when the two of you came back. You always seemed to have had a good time. And at least when you were playing down there, you weren’t throwing the ball against the kitchen wall or destroying the garden. |
| Me: | Oh yes, I smashed a lot of plants down, didn’t I? |
| Mum: | You smashed everything, even in the bits you weren’t supposed to go near. Anything with a head on it would come off. The daffodils never got near flowering, the gladioli never got a chance to come out. In the end, I just got some very low plants that didn’t have heads on them, so it didn’t make a difference whether they were hit or not. |
| Me: | I remember one time with the flowers as though it happened in slow motion. It was in the part of the garden that I wasn’t allowed to go in, but I’d been throwing the ball against the wall and bowled myself a wide, juicy half-volley. I really smacked the ball and it went directly towards some really nice flowers that you had. I knew as soon as I hit it that I was in bother. The ball seemed to travel in slow motion and it went ‘Pop’, straight against the flower, and the head fell straight off and tumbled to the ground. |
| Mum: | Funnily enough, I remember that as well. |
| Me: | Whenever I knocked the head off a flower, I’d pick it up and stick it back on top of the leaves, so it looked as though the flower hadn’t come off. I just hoped you wouldn’t notice. |
| Mum: | I always noticed, Matthew. Always. |
I’m not sure that leaves us any the wiser about who won the most games, but this is my book so I get the final word. I won the most games, but I might not have done if Dad hadn’t sorted my bowling action out in the garden. That seems fair enough.
Once I had got the hang of jumping rather than hopping, I used to spend ages practising in the garden, running in down the side of the greenhouse and bowling into a netting fence that we had. I had to be careful, though, because we lived in a semi-detached house and there was another garden right