1990
If you look at cricket writing—I don’t mean ghosted memoirs or workaday match reports, but the considered literature of the game—you see at once that its prevailing note is elegiac. The reason for this is not difficult to grasp. Cricket is the most ephemeral of arts. Blink, and you have missed some unique moment. Even a great actor can hope to reproduce his effects, because at least he will arrive again at the same place in his script, with the same line to say. But a batsman plays his stroke only once before it becomes history. A catch is in the air only long enough for you to see it (or not) before the moment of contact (or not) with the palm. There is television, of course, to purvey a secondhand cricket, distorted in time and scale; but your favorite videos wipe themselves out, you find. Only the inner eye can be trusted, and the feeling of belonging to the crowd.
I think it is because of the transience of cricket, its central sad fact, that the cricket-lover grows attached to cricket grounds. On a dark day you can wake up and mutter their names, like a charm, to bring fine weather: Sabina Park, Eden Gardens. The grounds are not inviolate, of course. Sometimes they concrete them over and build hypermarkets. But they cannot, we think, do that to Lord’s.
I came to this game lately, or too late anyway to know much about it: unathletic, with no eye for a ball, no head for statistics and, worst of all, female. Hence my experience of cricket is the experience of a series of exclusions—and mainly the exclusion from proper understanding that playing the game would have brought. Lord’s, of course, by barring women from the Pavilion, except under certain special circumstances, perpetrates a most famous exclusion. It is one I cannot bring myself to feel very strongly about, though I wonder about the reasons for it. It is true that applications for MCC membership stretch into the next century, but that is no reason to keep out the female members of Middlesex CCC. One suspects the reasons are not administrative, but atavistic. It cannot be that these days gentlemen fear their view will be blocked by bonnets, or their concentration broken by gusts of piercing chatter about the servant problem or the price of beef. But if, as anciently believed, the glance of a woman can sour cream, it can probably warp willow, crack the pitch, cause umpires’ fingers to twitch. Such ancient prejudice must be respected. Lord’s must be taken as it is. The Pavilion has its special and masculine atmosphere, its comfortable austerity, its other-worldly air. There is no harm in preserving it for those who can enjoy it. Debarred from a convocation of bishops, one can still pray.
Outside the ambit of privilege, Lord’s is an affair of wet plastic seats and the terror of wheel-clampers. Middlesex members have their own room now, made out of part of Q Stand, with great windows that entrap a liquid green light; members will feel, no doubt, a little nostalgia for the time when they had more to complain about. Life outside the Pavilion has its pleasures. You can observe the strange rainwear and even stranger sunwear of the British. You can eavesdrop on conversations, and grow wiser thereby. (Women are supposed not to know how men talk when they’re alone. At Lord’s they think they’re alone.) You can read other people’s low newspapers over their shoulders, and be pleasurably shocked by them. You can indulge in the fascinated, horrified inspection of other people’s food. And, if I had been in the Pavilion, I would never have seen the small child who, one Sunday a couple of seasons ago, tottered down the steps toward the barrier, held out his arms as if to embrace the fielding side, the umpires and both batsmen, and cried with a beatific smile, “Daddy!”
True, you can do these things at any cricket ground; though the infant might be a one-off. But Lord’s is special: even those who hang about on the fringes of the game, hoping to come back in the next life as a leg-spinner, find themselves consoled by the sense of place, touched by its atmosphere, drawn into the game by its effect on the imagination. As I am a novelist, I could write many semi-meaningful, perhaps not wholly original things about the correspondences between cricket and fiction. Cricket—or any complex, but circumscribed and self-limiting activity—is far more like a novel than life is like a novel. So I can at least persuade myself, when guilt gnaws, that by watching cricket I am actually working, absorbing principles of form and structure and bearing professional witness to the strange machinations of fate.
It is quite usual to think of the game in terms of dramatic spectacle, but in fact a year’s cricket, or a Test series, is even more like a novel than it is like a play. The number of characters is large. Their fortunes rise, fall, interweave. People who seemed likely to occupy a line or two decide to stick around and arrogate pages to themselves, perhaps whole strands of the plot. There are climaxes, some of which prove to be illusory. Mere names flower out into human complexity; blind chance plays its part. Just as, in a novel, the fortunes of the protagonist may hang by a thread, or turn on an absurdity, so may the fortunes of a team; and behind the events from hour to hour a certain pattern emerges, which may be discernible only several years on. In a season, you can run through most of the emotions that life produces, and see most of fiction’s standard plots work themselves out.
Now, Lord’s is the place to entertain these notions. There is a concentrated quality about that arena, a special intensity, a quality of intimacy; this intimacy and intensity touch the non-participants. When you stand in the Pavilion and look at the gate through which the players go out onto the field, a slight intimation of dread flutters behind your ribs, a weak vicarious stage fright. Could that entrance ever, for anyone, become perfectly routine? Possibly. People grow used to anything. But for a moment you can put yourself into the boots of the player who walks out, you can feel what it might be like—and Lord’s has performed its trick, it has served its purpose. It has triggered the act of imagination which links together all players, alive and dead, all spectators, every umpire, every groundsman, every bat maker and program seller, tea-lady and passer-of-the-hat, and puts them at the service of the game.
So then you begin to talk of mystique, of magic, as if the bricks and the grass had something special, though you know cricket is made of people, techniques, time and weather. Again, that pervasive feeling of sadness creeps in, as if beyond the scattered applause you discern the roaring of bulldozers, the fall of a civilization; and it is true that when you discover cricket—if you are one of those people for whom there is a moment of discovery—you are sometimes seized by an irrational fear that it is too good to last, that it will be abolished by some vile government, or that you will be sent away to a country where they don’t have it. But there is no real reason, of course, why cricket should induce melancholy. It is best to get out of earshot of what Robertson-Glasgow called “the strangling fugues of senile jeremiads” and avoid the company of those who ridicule the modern game and are forever reminiscing, about Lord’s or any other ground. The best cricket season, in fact, is always the season to come.
For this reason, I like to go past Lord’s in winter. I like to be driven past and to catch in the gaps between the gray walls—which might be prison walls—glimpses not of grass but of steel, of meshes and barriers and walkways, the exposed spiny architecture of the stands: so that I can imagine it as a fortress in which is placed, for our own protection, all our virtues, enthusiasms and strengths, and all the best parts of the summer to come.