‘When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.’ A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.

When I think of this paragraph, perhaps the most perfect paragraph in English literature, it conjures up two images for me – Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons eating strawberries and drinking champagne in a verdant and sun dappled field in the Oxfordshire countryside and the first day of the cricket season at The Parks in early Aprils, bright blues skies but hands too cold even to sign autographs.

(As an aside, I’ve always felt that Hemingway is a writer of perfect sentences rather than perfect books – A Moveable Feast is the perfect exception to that rule).

There was no false spring in 2020; just a smooth sublimation from a bitter winter into the most English of early summers – weather taken straight from The Darling Buds of May – and, while keeping ‘from making engagements’ was no trouble, so too were we robbed of time spent with those ‘very few that were as good as spring itself.’

During this third lockdown, a situation almost unimaginable just over a year ago, while it is something I have oft prided myself on, I have been finding it harder and harder to think positively, overwhelmed (as I am sure so many others are) by the magnitude of the loss – both collective and personal – the interminable cold exacerbating the intensity of feeling; not of ‘lost time’ in the Proustian sense but rather time stolen.

I’m reminded of the quotation by Kierkegaard that ‘life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forward,’ feeling that, perhaps, the hardest thing about grief is that it can paralyse you at the very moment at which you most need to carry on.

And then, out of nowhere March 29th, the first day of the relaxation of measures in place since December, was the hottest March day for 53 years. A week later, temperatures had plummeted to -5 degrees Celsius – it was the definition of a false spring.

On the evening itself I found myself drinking a cider in a verdant and sun dappled field in the Oxfordshire countryside, the light stretching languid into its extra hour, having finished the first cricket nets of the new season.  In that fleeting moment, it felt like ‘there were no problems except where to be happiest’ and I was with fellow cricketers, people amongst whom I have always found ‘the very few who are as good as spring itself.’

It felt like the purest form of nostalgia: ‘nostos’, returning home, and ‘algos’, pain; memories both comforting and jarring, of what remains and of what has passed. We had left rural Oxfordshire after my mother became ill when I was 15 years old. We moved to Cambridge, a fresh start in a town of architectural splendour at its epicentre, deposited incongruously onto the drab bleakness of East Anglia, famed for its big skies which, unlike their namesakes in the American Midwest, always struck me as close and oppressive rather than full of possibility.

We swapped a 400 year old converted cow barn, formerly owned by Cripps the Carrier, later made famous through his fictionalisation in RD Blackmore’s eponymous woodland tale, for a 20th Century terraced two up two down in an urban cul-de-sac. A convenient 30 second walk from Domino’s Pizza, it was close enough to the train station to be any generic commuter town to the north of London.

Village life, nestled between the Chilterns and the Cotswolds, was seemingly stuck in Laurie Lee’s imagination, full of thatched roofs and the smell of log fires, the one amenity a 17th Century Marlstone pub (brook babbling quietly beyond sight at the end of the garden), frequented in days gone by Waugh (Evelyn, not Steve). There he had drowned his sorrows in the aftermath of hearing news of his third class degree before falling asleep in an abandoned caravan – sans horse – in what would later become the car park.

CS Lewis and Tolkein too had lived in the village, later inspiration for Barley in Susan Hill’s The Magic Apple Tree, and no doubt drank copious ales with fellow Inklings while looking across the symmetrical fields, alternating in colour, of Otmoor below – evoking Narnia and Middle Earth, it was the inspiration behind Lewis Carroll’s chess board in Through the Looking Glass.

Gordon lived opposite, then 90 years old, the sole occupant of the stone walled cottage, itself a relic without the modern trappings of electricity or indoor plumbing. He was a man who, conversely, had seen so much of history and yet so little and would later die in the same room in which he had been born.

Life as children revolved around the village bonfire and picking blackberries in the autumn, walks to the hollow tree and building snowmen in the bleak midwinter, later warming ourselves next to an open hearth and congregating by the village pond to fish for tadpoles in the spring.

Summer was given over to cricket and it was in our tiny garden that my father and I learned to play the game together; time equally given to searching for errant tennis balls hit across the road into Gordon’s overgrown wilderness of a garden. It was here that I made my highest ever score, 600 not out, some of them not run while he was answering an important phone call. Hard to believe that that life existed only 20 years ago.

On a ladder by the pavilion, Greg, whom I had last played cricket with 18 years previously at East Grinstead in Sussex in that glorious summer of 2003 – the hottest European summer since at least 1540, when the tarmac melted on the M25 and an additional 70,000 died because of the heat (such is the asymmetry of life) – was happily given over to the task of building a new trellis. ‘Expanded slightly’ (his own words) since I had last seen him, only exacerbating the youthful enthusiasm in his face, he had been out of work for a year due to the pandemic.  

In One Long and Beautiful Summer, a short elegy to red ball cricket, Duncan Hamilton says ‘you know a man best by the sort of utopia in which he decides to live.’ And yet, there’s a delicious irony about the word Utopia, which translates from the Greek οὐ and τόπος meaning ‘no place’ as intended by Sir Thomas More (describing a society which could never exist) rather than its identical homonym ‘Eutopia’ which would translate as ‘good place’ – something More himself was keen to point out but was rather lost on those who saw his work as a call to arms rather than an expression of futility (including the Russian revolutionaries of 1917 who elevated this deeply religious man to heroic status in a world view that described religion as the ‘opiate of the masses’).

But yet, if More’s (or Hamilton’s) version of utopia cannot exist in reality, perhaps it can exist in those fleeting, almost ethereal, moments. Those moments at that one time, when all around you it feels like everything is falling apart and you wonder if you are completely broken, and yet are utter perfection.

When I made my first class debut, I felt the same frisson of embarrassment as I signed my first (and, to date, only) autograph that those 19 year olds, playing for Oxford University, would have felt signing autographs for me. We gave the generic and disparaging nomenclature of ‘badger’ to those ‘very few’, braving the bitter wind whipping in from the North Sea, who had turned up to watch us play. And, yet, it was those ‘very few’ whom we now disparaged that gave us that vaulted first class status of which we were so desirous – and now is gone.

For the proportion of our team who would describe themselves as ‘cricketers’ it often felt like a term of exclusion (myself, at times, included). You may play or watch the game but you are not a ‘cricketer.’ They were failing to see that their own lofty position was predicated on the fact that it was precisely because there were countless others, not so good as them, that defined the lofty position in which they found themselves.

But we who love the game, we are all ‘cricketers’ and it should be remembered that the game serves us just as much as we serve it. The professional game, in particular, should remember that its role is to provide for amateurs – players and spectators alike. Recent changes to the game, such as The Hundred, seem to have forgotten this – appealing for an audience who don’t already love the game in order to fill its coffers.

While I realise that there’s an argument that that money gets pumped back into the grassroots, I’ve always been suspicious of trickle down economics. What we can say, definitively, is that not only has cricket participation decreased drastically over the last 15 odd years, so too has the diversity (across race and socioeconomic strata) in the upper echelons of the sport (I won’t be drawn in here to an argument about causation and correlation…).

When I met Fernando playing in a car park in Beirut, cricket was our instant connection. He had grown up in Sri Lanka, too poor, he told me, even to afford sugar for his tea. When he arrived in Beirut in the depths of winter, his skin cracked, having never been exposed previously to the cold. In his life, he had played one game of hard ball cricket – still his biggest regret – and had been out LBW for a golden duck to one which was absolutely certain to miss leg stump.

He and ‘his guys’ loved the game. Indeed, I think Fernando may have loved the game more than anyone I have ever known. He told me about one tournament, which was due to be played on his birthday. The week before, while carrying a heavy object at work, he dropped it and broke his foot. The doctor put him in a cast and told him to rest for a month.

Turning up on crutches to spectate, Fernando found himself hacking off his cast with a knife (I have no idea from where this had appeared), playing in the tournament and, in the final, putting on 135 in five overs with his opening partner. He hit the last five balls of the innings for six and has walked with a limp ever since. Cricket, he said, reminded him of home.  Years later, I was lucky enough to visit him there.

I was talking recently to Fernando. He painted a pretty bleak existence for the South Asian economic migrants in Lebanon. Having survived a pandemic and an explosion, rapid inflation had left them unable to send money home and unable to afford a plane ticket to leave. I mentioned this story and he told me that every single time we talk he was reminded of his good memories and he felt glad and emotional and proud of all that he had achieved.

That is the power of cricket – and I hope those who run the game remember!