Amid the lashing rain and flat plains of a Norfolk
childhood DJ Taylor relished the exploits of a local hero
I turned up the autograph album only the other day. Begun in 1972 and abandoned a year later but, given the constraints of milieu – ie; a compiler who rarely set foot outside sequestered Norfolk – impressive in its scope. The ex-England football captain Billy Wright is there, tapped by my father on a League Cup final trip to Wembley, and Brian Clough – old Big ’Ead proving a lot more amenable to pre-teen stalkers than portly Geoff Hurst. Pride of place, though, belongs to a single, lavender-tinted page towards the front of the book. Here, bunched together – they were all garnered on the same afternoon, possibly even in the same couple of minutes – lie the signatures of three England internationals: Peter Parfitt, Bill Edrich and Clive Radley. In fact Radley has written what looks like ‘Clive Gatling’, or maybe ‘Clive Glazebrook’. It didn’t matter. The man signed. I was there.
He was a nudger, a steerer,
a clubber, a rooter-about
in the rough
The occasion was a charity match somewhere out on the Norfolk flat, in the late summer of 1972, between an Edrich Family XI and a Lord’s Taverners select that included, as well as some serious cricketers, such luminaries of stage and screen as Roy Hudd and Dad’s Army’s Ian Lavender. The serious cricket and the celebrity slapstick alternated from one over to the next, and devious manipulation ensured a 272-run tie. Radley, inevitably, was out first ball, scooping a good-length delivery into the arms of a grateful mid-on. At least I got to speak to him. “I go to your old school, Mr Radley”, I announced in my 12-year-old’s quaver. “Who’s your form-master?” the great man affably lobbed back. “I don’t know. We’ve got a new one coming in the autumn,” I returned. And that was that.
For about six or seven years, all through the clamorous 1970s, Clive Radley was my cricketing hero. The reason for this 7.45am swoop on the sports pages of the Telegraph every day between May and September to check the Middlesex score was simple local patriotism. Radley was an Old Norvicensian, the only former Norwich School boy, so far as I knew, to make any kind of fist of professional sport. Testimonies to his early prowess lay everywhere. Mr Ninham, the French master, had played in the same 1st XI as him and remembered his practice sessions: setting up a wicket at one end of the playground at the start of the lunchbreak and retiring from it, undefeated, half an hour later. Every day. Lounging in the library, as dense Norfolk rain beat upon the window, I sometimes used to look up accounts of school games played in the late 1950s: a meaty demonstration of just how prodigious teenage cricket prodigies can be. He was an allrounder in those days, bowling twisty leg-breaks, and a specimen match report might run: Norwich School 202-3 declared (Radley 147 no), Gresham’s 58 (Radley 7-20) . . .
As a teenage cricket fan, I subscribed to the Corinthian ideal. Boycott was a dour northern clogger. My opinion of Ian Botham I took from my father – “a yob . . . but you’d like to have him in your team.” I favoured gentlemanly tacticians like Mike Brearley, elegant ex-public schoolboys who swayed into the ball as it rose and got by on deft square cuts and effortless glances. Curiously, Radley’s style was light-years away from these I Zingari-sanctioned exemplars.
He was a nudger, a steerer, a clubber, a rooter-about in the rough, a scamper-down-the-pitch merchant. He was also, at least in the period when I took an interest in him, probably the best occupant of the first-wicket-down spot in English cricket. Each September, as the home Test series ground to a close, when the pundits of Test Match Special chewed over likely additions to the winter touring squad, Brian Johnston or EW Swanton would suavely opine that surely it was time for the name of CT Radley to be added to the upper order.
Even in my mid-20s I turned to the
sports pages to ensure that reliable
Clive was doing the business
Somehow it never was. He made the Test squad in 1977-78, at the advanced age of 33, quite by chance – drafted in from a nearby coaching appointment when Mike Brearley broke his arm in Pakistan. My father instantly composed a letter to the local paper asking them (superfluously) to confirm that this was the first O.N. call-up in history. Memory insists that he was a fixture for the next couple of years, but alas the stats confirm a bare eight Test appearances (average 48, high-point an eight-hour 158 in his second Test against New Zealand) until Rodney Hogg hit him on the head in a warm-up game on the following winter’s tour and put him out of international cricket for ever.
Domestically, though, there was another decade to come. The career-best 200 against Northants was struck as late as 1985. Even in my mid-20s, with the Middlesex XI full of upstart youngsters one had never heard of, I still made a point of turning to the sports pages to ensure that reliable Clive was doing the business. Not long back I found a picture of his 60-something figure at the crease on the Middlesex website: grey-haired, stouter, but not in the least gone to seed. It produced the same sensation as the sight of Martin Peters, brought out on to the pitch at Carrow Road a month or two back to preside over the lottery draw: one of those titanic ghosts from childhood, a molten god forever rampaging over the endless greensward, next to whom a file of debased modern descendants can only finick and fret.
DJ TAYLOR is a novelist and critic and former ornament of the Captain Scott Invitation XI, where his career batting average was a modest 5