I sit in self-isolation. The sun streams through the window, the first iris has flowered in the garden and a blackbird sings cheerfully from a neighbour\u2019s elder tree. And I think, is this now to be my summer, locked up? A summer without country walks, without the early sight of bluebells in the woods? A summer without lazy evenings in a pub garden? A summer without cricket?<\/p>\n
Today I might have been watching an early game at my local club, catching up with the winter\u2019s news. But, apart from a few out-of-work builders replacing the pavilion bar, the ground is empty, as it will be for weeks to come. There won\u2019t be \u201csomeone running up to bowl\u201d when a modern-day Philip Larkin flashes past on the train. There won\u2019t be the distant cry of \u201cOwzatt!\u201d when they unload the ambulances in the adjoining hospital.<\/p>\n
I might have been on my computer, catching the live stream from Somerset\u2019s match at Taunton, keeping up with all the scores, hoping to see the first flowering of a new talent. In years gone by, I would have been getting out my whites, looking forward to renewing the company of old friends, dreaming of scaling new peaks of achievement. To play cricket is to know the rhythm of the summer\u2014from those days of fresh hope in spring through the long afternoons when the year\u2019s harvest becomes clear, on to the falling of the leaves and the last packing of kitbags.<\/p>\n
It is a game with its roots in a pre-industrial England. A game best enjoyed with a warm sun on the back, yet reflecting an English character shaped in a cooler, more changeable climate. A game full of ritual that generates a philosophical outlook and a self-deprecating humour. A game with a magical rhythm, a slow-moving ebb and flow in which the quiet passages can be every bit as intense as the moments of action. As the Scandinavian girlfriend of a teammate once observed, \u201cI sense, beneath all this English calm, there beats a great passion.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cComplete the following quotation by George Mikes,\u201d Jeremy Paxman asked on University Challenge<\/i>. \u201cContinental people have a sex life, the English have . . . what?\u201d It was a hot-water bottle, but the first contestant on the buzzer had a different idea. \u201cCricket?\u201d she suggested.<\/p>\n
Cricket does not have the hold on our national imagination that it had when I was a boy. It is a long time since I heard anybody use the phrase \u201cThat\u2019s not cricket\u201d when they thought something unfair. In our faster-moving, more commercialised society, it has struggled to compete with the brasher, more cynical appeal of football. Yet cricket is still there, still a key reference point in our sense of the English summer. \u201cThere can be no summer in this land without cricket,\u201d the arch-romantic Neville Cardus once wrote.<\/p>\n
When Britain declared war in early August 1914, cricket carried on for a while. Then news of the first deaths came across the Channel, and the mood changed. \u201cBE MEN,\u201d W.G. Grace thundered in a leaflet. \u201cDrop your playthings. Drill with rifles.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the Second World War cricket was seen as a force for maintaining public morale. Large crowds attended charity matches, and off-duty servicemen were encouraged to play. Bill Edrich, the great England batsman, flew low-level bombing raids over Germany and, on one occasion, returned from action to an afternoon\u2019s cricket at Norfolk\u2019s Massingham Hall. \u201cEvery now and then would come the old, accustomed cry\u2014\u2018OWZATT?\u2019\u2014and one\u2019s mind would flicker off to joking with a pal and one saw again his machine cartwheeling down, flaming from nose to tail. Then a ball would roll fast along the green English turf, and in the distance the village clock would strike and the mellow echoes would ring through the lazy air of that perfect summer afternoon.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was the England he was fighting for, the same England that the writer E.W. Swanton was dreaming of in Thailand. A prisoner of the Japanese, he held tight to his battered 1939 edition of Wisden<\/i>, the cricketers\u2019 bible, organising talks and quizzes in the few moments of rest.<\/p>\n
We live in a different England now, an England in which the greatest passion for cricket can be found among those whose families have come here from the Indian sub-continent. Our sense of ourselves is changing, as are the landmarks of our summer. No longer the Wakes Weeks at crowded seaside resorts but the Glastonbury Festival and the Notting Hill Carnival.<\/p>\n
Yet cricket is still a part of our national identity, reflecting some of the better elements of our self-image: calm in a crisis, believing in fair play, able to cope philosophically with the vicissitudes of life. It is only one aspect of our identity, perhaps a declining one, but it retains a deep resonance for many. Played by more women and girls than ever, you will find well over half a million people on cricket grounds every weekend in summer\u2014playing, umpiring, making tea, spectating. And there are many more following the game at home.<\/p>\n
A summer without cricket? In the seasons after the last war the crowds flocked into the grounds, deprived for too long of their national game. I am already starting to know how they felt.<\/p>\n