Great play/production btw. The play is about the Second Red Scare in the 1950s.
It brought back to my mind a memory of playing Call My Bluff in an English class. That simple panel game had teams of three trying to convince the other team of three that “bluff” definitions of unusual words were actually true…and that true definitions were in fact bluffs.
Call My Bluff was “appointment to view” stuff in the 1970s – certainly in our household. Mind you, there wasn’t exactly a lot of choice back then.
The class version of the game was to split into teams of three and try to convince the rest of the class to vote for bluffs rather than the true definitions.
My team was given the word MCCARTHYISM. I must have recently learnt a passage of Hebrew in Hebrew classes with the word “machar” (מָחָר) in it. I quoted the short passage and explained that the word “machar” means tomorrow. I then strung out this small truth into a flight of fancy that there is a sect of Judaism, known as MCCARTHYISM, that venerates the future.
I know what you are thinking. The word would surely be spelt MACHARTHEISM if it had that definition. But such subtleties were probably beyond almost all of us at that age. I must have made the idea seem convincing.
When the class voted on the three definitions proposed for the word MCCARTHYISM, the true definition came second and my bluff got the most votes.
For some reason, this moment of smartarsed glory must have resided at the back of my memory all these decades, only to be revived by seeing Here In America.
But I also recall that, even at the time, I learnt quite a lot from this tiny episode. I learnt that using a grain of truth to disguise a lie (or bluff) is a very effective method of concealment. I learnt that nobody likes a smartarse, because the episode, while momentarily pleasing the teacher, did not make me popular with my class. And I subsequently learnt that my possession of a moral compass and my lack of a poker face would make me a very bad candidate for a future in bluffing.
But did we play that game in 1S, with Ian Sandbrook, or in 2AK with Miss Lynch? I don’t recall.
Still, McCarthyism is all about naming names and I have named names for both of those classes:
Although I started keeping a diary at the beginning of 1974, after just four months of that daily routine I then took a sabbatical for nearly seven months. I must have been exhausted from all that scribbling.
So May to November 1974 is a bit of an unrecorded blur, which is a shame.
Michael, like me, had grown up around Tooting Bec Common. Lord’s might be our field of dreams now, but back then, the only cricket pitch we were likely in any way to experience live once school was out for the summer, could be found on that common:
Tooting Bec Common – our field of dreams back then
1974 was the second summer of my proper cricket awareness – avidly following the major games on the TV and/or radio, wanting to catch a bit of the Sunday League match on telly if I could…
…but probably was the first summer that I and my entourage summoned the courage and sufficient equipment to venture onto the common to play.
If some of the bigger, older teenagers wanted the pitch, at that age it meant game over for us little-uns. I recall us challenging this pecking order once and returning home with bruises for our trouble. So our lot was sometimes reduced to trying to play on a relatively flat, well-shaved but ordinary patch of grass on the playground side of the common.
Just beyond the right hand side of this photo. I fancy a bowl on that.
I don’t suppose the pitch (or lack thereof) made much difference to our games back then, when we were 11 on 12. We weren’t yet physically equipped to use the full length of a pitch properly, nor were we playing with a proper cricket ball. I seem to recall using a rubber ball – heavier than a lawn tennis ball but nowhere near the weight and hardness of a cricket ball…mercifully.
I have a very clear memory of trying to emulate the players who had captured our imagination that summer; the players of England and Pakistan in 1974. The commentators had made much of Sarfraz Nawaz and the prodigious swing he was able to achieve with his bowling. We wanted to do that. Here’s a clip of one of his finest hours, the following year, against the West Indies:
My strongest memory, though, does not involve using any technique that the cricket coaches might deem helpful in making the ball swing…or for that matter in bowling with any form of accuracy or purpose.
No.
My strongest memory involves doing a little sideways jig at the start of the run up and then lolloping towards the crease to bowl. False memory had combined this unusual approach with Sarfraz Nawaz. His was a most memorable name; by the early 1980s expert marketeers were naming pop groups in similar rhyming style because such couplets are so memorable.
But I digress.
My research for this piece reveals that it was another Pakistan bowler whose run up had us “class of 1974” kids jigging hither and yon before bowling: Asif Masood. Here’s a clip of him bowling that year (at 2’56” and possibly other places) – dig the jig:
I would like to analyse Asif Masood’s run up a bit more. Wikipedia describes it thus:
a backward step before a loping approach to the wicket which John Arlott likened to “Groucho Marx chasing a pretty waitress”.
Whereas his Cricinfo entry describes it differently:
a bizarre start to his run-up in which he turned sideways to the wickets and leaned backwards before starting his approach.
You can judge for yourselves, dear readers, by watching the above clip. I am reminded of a Lancashire expression, which Asif Masood himself would no doubt understand now, as he married and settled in Bury after his cricket career:
‘Ere’s mi yed, mi arse is cummin.
The premature arrival of my upper torso and limbs does nothing but harm to my performance at ball sports – I’m pretty sure that the same applied to my friends on the common – but that didn’t stop us from becoming convinced that the secret of success was to emulate that run up. I’m here to tell you that we were mistaken.
Of course we didn’t want to BE these Pakistan stars; we wanted to BE the England stars. Geoff Arnold, for example, with his furtive look of teeth-gritted concentration as he ran up – we emulated that too. I cannot find a clip of Geoff Arnold bowling, but he is still hanging around at Surrey, would you believe, so you can find recent interviews and all sorts by clicking here.
Chris Old’s days of glory against Pakistan came four years later – this was the only fairly relevant clip of him bowling I could find – don’t blink or you’ll miss it:
https://youtu.be/j9KgmiGBWA8
Quite lollopy too, Chris Old’s run up. Not as lollopy as Asif’s, obviously, but enough lollop to enable the 11 year old impersonator to switch from being Asif to Old by the simple expedient of eliminating the sideways jig.
So who were the heroes of that summer of 1974? I’m not talking about the actual test match and ODI heroes – you can look them up through the above links for pity’s sake – no, I mean the Tooting Bec Common heroes. The 11/12 year olds who were performing far more exciting feats of glory. No “three test matches – all drawn” for us.
I’m struggling to remember, so will simply brain dump what little remains in my brain in the hope that it triggers some memories in others. Apologies to those forgotten or misrepresented through inclusion.
Andrew (now Andy) Levinson lived in our street and was a perennial companion in those games. Stuart Harris (no relation; one of the “Naff Harris’s” from the posh end of the road) would sometimes join us, for sure, although my diary has more to say about Stuart in the context of tennis than cricket:
I recall getting into a scrape with David Pavesi, Andy and others, when some bigger boys thought we were on their patch, but I think that might have been Clapham Common nearer to the Pavesi house, as I recall Mrs Pavesi nursing our bruises and egos after the incident. I don’t recall David venturing to join us at Tooting Bec but he might have done.
Alan Cooke would often come around to my place and I suspect that some of those games involved him.
Other Alleyn’s folk, such as Paul Deacon and Jonathan Barnett, were certainly cricket lovers with whom I watched and talked cricket, but I don’t recall playing cricket with them in the holidays. I also remember talking cricket a lot with Richard Hollingshead that summer term (another story for another day), but I don’t recall playing with him.
Lloyd Green might have joined us occasionally, as might Stuart and Jeremy Starkin, Richard and Graham Laikin…although I remember those lads for football on the common, not cricket.
What better way to get a kid like me enthused about a sport than to give it a sense of danger and prohibition. Thank you, Miss Plumridge.
To summarise, in the summer of 1974 we wanted to play cricket and we wanted to look the part. Roll the clock forward several decades and I think the following photo proves that I did indeed acquire a fair chunk of that “look the part” skill, without acquiring much, if anything, else that could be described as skill.
With thanks to Charles Bartlett for this deceptive picture of me circa 2004
But a love for a game like cricket is also a gift. I might not have been born with talent, nor could I acquire very much skill through graft or imitation, but the love of the game is certainly also a gift. And part of that love for cricket was formed as a kid, playing those silly games, emulating our heroes, on Tooting Bec Common.
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What better way to get a kid like me enthused about a sport than to give it a sense of danger and prohibition. Thank you, Miss Plumridge.