One day, after near decapitation by a leg-side slog that went for six, I was addressed by Ellis thus: ‘And what does tha’ think tha’rt playing at? Tha’ stand theer as if the hairs of thy arse are tied together.’
Many years later, when I was celebrating my fiftieth birthday in Australia, a group of friends recorded a sound tape to send to me. Athol Carr, a dear friend of mine who was organising the tape, gave the microphone to Ellis. ‘What’s this?’ he said.
‘It’s how you contact Mike in Australia,’ said Athol, whereupon Ellis put the mike to his ear and bellowed, ‘Hello, Mike, your old friend Ellis speaking.’ O, rare Ellis Robinson.
Dickie Bird and I had played for a season or two when we were asked to the Yorkshire nets for a trial. In those distant days only men born in Yorkshire could play cricket for the county. It was the most exclusive cricket club in the world and, by common consent, one of the best. The dream of every Yorkshire child was to wear the White Rose of Yorkshire and we grew up believing that an England cap was second best.
I had an unhappy time. I remember it as a grey day at the county headquarters at Headingley in Leeds. I wanted to play for Yorkshire, of course I did, but deep down I knew I hadn’t the confidence or belief to convince the coaches. I was further chastened by the presence of Fred Trueman and Brian Close, the new young stars of Yorkshire cricket at the time. I admired and envied their swagger. By comparison I felt a phoney. I didn’t bat well and wasn’t invited back, but it wasn’t until much later that Dickie Bird told me what happened.
I was in a net taken by Arthur ‘Ticker’ Mitchell, the Yorkshire coach, and a man whose opinion counted. Mitchell was watching me bat when he turned to Dickie and said, ‘Is that lad a mate of thine?’
Dickie said we played for Barnsley together.
Mitchell said, ‘Does he have a job?’
Dickie told him I was a reporter on a local paper. ‘A reporter, eh,’ mused the coach. Then he said, ‘When tha’ gets a minute, tell thi’ friend he’d better not give up reportin.’
That was the end for me, but not for Dickie, who went on to play for Yorkshire and Leicestershire before taking up umpiring and becoming one of cricket’s most beloved and respected figures.
Shortly after the Yorkshire nets another youngster joined us in the Barnsley team. I was batting at the other end when he made his entrance at number three. He was fifteen or sixteen, slim and wearing a pair of National Health spectacles.
‘They’re sending in short-sighted midgets now,’ the bowler remarked to the wicket keeper, just to make the batsman feel at home.
The third ball he received the new player rocked on to the back foot and played a most perfect drive between the bowler and mid off. The ball streaked to the boundary. It was a shot of almost classical execution.
‘What’s his name?’ the bowler asked, with grudging admiration.
‘Boycott,’ I said. ‘Geoffrey Boycott.’
Geoffrey was different from Birdie and me. We hoped we might play for Yorkshire, he knew he would play for both the county and for England. From the earliest days he worked at the business of being a professional cricketer. He wasn’t the most greatly gifted player in our team – we had a player called Hubert Padgett who made the business of playing cricket seem the easiest and most enjoyable pastime in the world – but no one in my experience worked harder at a game or analysed what was needed with more diligence and intelligence than Geoffrey.
There were times when the three of us would sit on the balcony at Barnsley and look over the sweep of the ground to the town in the distance, and wonder what the future held. None of us could have imagined the future, except perhaps Geoffrey. He became what he set out to be, one of our great openers, for Yorkshire and England. Dickie went on to become one of cricket’s most trusted umpires and treasured characters and I ended up being attacked by Emu. I often sit and wonder where it all went wrong.
12
THE GIRL ON THE UPPER DECK
The moment I finally decided I would rather be Neville Cardus than Len Hutton came when I moved from Barnsley to Doncaster. The two towns were only twelve miles apart but moving away from home, getting a flat of my own for the first time in my life, was a declaration of how serious I was to climb the beanstalk of my ambition. In the mobile world of today, where young people take it for granted that they will cross continents and get to know far-flung places as well as their own backyards, a move of twelve miles would not be seen as a significant journey. But in the fifties, where I came from, it was regarded as a radical departure.
My mother gave me an eiderdown and Fair Isle pullovers. She obviously thought Doncaster was near the North Pole. My father muttered something about it being a long way for him to come to watch me play cricket. I couldn’t convince him I was changing jobs, not cricket clubs. And I dare not tell him I had more or less decided to stop playing Yorkshire League cricket. It would have broken his heart.
I chose Doncaster because, in those days, it was a journalists’ town. Two evening and three local papers were printed there, which meant that, along with the one or two vigorously competing freelance agencies, there was a press corps of more than forty. It was also a well-known stepping stone to Manchester and the national dailies, and even at that stage I had my sights on Fleet Street. Doncaster was a pleasant place to live and work. It straddled the main north–south highway, the A1, the Great North Road. It was the centre of the South Yorkshire coalfield, and steam engines were made there for a railway system of which it was a key junction. It had a racecourse, a decent football team, one or two agreeable pubs and a few good-looking girls.
I met one on a bus and married her.
I remember the very moment I first saw Mary Heneghan. I was on the upper deck of a double decker travelling from Doncaster to the mining village of Tickhill. I was with a colleague, Denis Cassidy, who went on to run a very successful freelance agency. We were on our way to a meeting of Tickhill council, when this tall and slender girl with reddish gold hair and a red duffel coat sat behind us. Denis, who was good at chatting up, introduced us. When I turned to look at her I remember thinking I could gaze upon that face for a long time without tiring.
She said she was a teacher on her way to earn some extra money with a keep-fit class in Tickhill, which was taking place where our council meeting would be held. After the meeting we wandered into her class of exercising women and she shamed us into joining in.
I told Denis Cassidy I might be in love. He said I should call her. I said I didn’t have her number. He said she told us which school she worked at so what more information did a trained journalist require? I said I was too shy to ring the school. He said, ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, I’ll ring for you.’ And he did, pretending to be me, which is how I came to date Mary for the first time. Pathetic really, and yet the start of a partnership lasting fifty years.
At that time I was fantasising I might break into the big time as a theatre critic. I was much influenced by American critics Dorothy Parker, Wolcott Gibbs and Alexander Woollcott. I imagined myself employed by
The New Yorker
magazine, swapping epigrams with James Thurber, S.J. Perelman and Ogden Nash at the Algonquin Round Table. This is what I confessed to Mary in order to justify taking her on our first date to the Elmfield House Players production of
Thark
at the Doncaster Arts Centre.
She forgave me and, even more admirably, in the ensuing fifty years, has never mentioned my review, written to impress her. It started: ‘Struggling for an introduction I resort to a pun with the thought that at least Ben Travers would appreciate it if I say the success of his play rests on the two bawd shoulders of Sir Hector Benbow and Ronald Gamble.’
I was working for the
Yorkshire Evening Post
, edited by Jack Dibb, a large and furious man who gave the impression of constantly being on the brink of exploding. One lunchtime, after one of my theatre reviews had upset an amateur actor who ran an antiques shop in town, the hapless man turned up in the street outside our office brandishing a cutlass and challenging me to a duel. I thought we might ring the police. My editor suggested I hire a sword and accept the challenge, which would certainly make a front-page story. He wasn’t joking.
For someone who neither drank nor smoked and appeared to be a well brought up middle-class girl, Mary fitted easily into the boozy, cursing, seditious group of journalists with whom I shared my life. Often she subsidised us. When we had drunk away our pay, she would fill the glass. She was alive with exuberance and energy, and laughed and danced her way through life. She was unlike any girl I had ever met and I was enchanted by her. So were my friends. At that time none of us realised the amount of deprivation and tragedy she had dealt with in her short life.
The radiant girl at the centre of our merry-making had lost both her parents before she was eighteen. Her father, from an Irish farming family, had come to work in the South Yorkshire coalfield. During the lockouts and strikes of the late twenties and early thirties, he went to America and became a cop in Chicago. When he returned, Mary was the result of the reunion with his wife. He was injured in an accident at the pit, after which he was plagued with illness and died when Mary was eight. Shortly before his death, Mary was escorting her three-year-old brother across the A1 when he was struck by a car and killed. The driver was drunk. Mary gave evidence at his trial. Even today she is fearful crossing a road. Her mother slaved to get Mary and her younger sister into teachers’ training college. She died when Mary was seventeen. Mary says she died from hard work.
Once, many years after we had met and were married with three young children of our own, we were on our way in the family car to Scarborough when the children started whingeing about wanting this and that and moaning about being bored. I was passing through Doncaster at the time and took a short detour. I pulled up outside a row of scruffy houses, two-up, two-down, bathtub hanging on a nail in the wall, outside toilets. The boys asked why we had stopped. I told them I wanted them to look at a particular house in the row and tell me what they saw. They said the house looked horrible but so what?
‘That’s where your mother was born and spent her childhood,’ I said. They didn’t whinge for a long time after that. I tell that story not simply because I love and admire her but because I am also very proud of her.
It was while working for the
Post
in Doncaster that I did my first celebrity interview. I was walking down the high street for a morning coffee when I saw Jack Teagarden and Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines walking towards me. In sporting terms it was like meeting Don Bradman and Len Hutton, and about as likely as bumping into Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene in Doncaster High Street. Both men had played with Louis Armstrong; both had a reserved place in the pantheon. Teagarden was one of the great jazz trombonists and a singer of unmistakable style. Earl Hines was arguably the first modern jazz pianist, inventing a style of playing that influenced succeeding generations of piano players. To a jazz lover like me, this was the greatest moment of my life.
I introduced myself. They were pleased to be recognised but unhappy because the bus they were travelling in to Bradford had broken down and they were stuck in this alien town.
‘Where the hell are we?’ asked Mr Teagarden. He was none the wiser when I told him.
I took them to a café for a coffee. I talked to them for half an hour about their memories of the golden age of jazz. Finally, I asked them what they thought of Doncaster.
Earl Hines said, ‘All we need to know is the road out of this goddam awful place.’
I thought I would leave that quote out of my story, which I was certain was a scoop of immense significance. When I told them in the office what had happened their reaction was far from enthusiastic. Not for the first time I was confronted by the fact that my love of jazz was not shared by everyone else. As someone in the office said, it wasn’t like meeting Guy Mitchell or Elvis Presley, was it?
Jack Dibb agreed. He had never heard of them. It made about six pars in that night’s paper. It was time to move on. The chance came sooner than I imagined.
The last steam engine to be made in Doncaster was a story that attracted interest from the national press. The
Manchester Guardian
, home of one of my great heroes, Neville Cardus, sent a young reporter called Richard West. He said they saw Cardus in the office in Manchester only on the odd occasion when he would venture north to report a Hallé concert at the Free Trade Hall. Dick West was a slim, boyish-looking man with bright blue eyes and the most engaging smile.
When the ceremony of unveiling the last steam engine was over we were taken to the Danum Hotel for a celebratory lunch. I had to file my copy for the early edition, so by the time I took my place at the table my new friend Mr West had sampled the wine and was talking to a PR man from the rail industry. It was a time of much debate and controversy about British Rail and the more wine he consumed the more Dick West’s questioning appeared to discomfort the PR man. I watched with admiration as he stalked his prey. I was even more awestruck when, with his opponent now floundering, he closed his eyes and appeared to take a nap.
When he awoke I took him to a quiet spot in our office where he wrote a funny article before opening time, after which we toured several pubs and became lifelong friends. During the pub crawl he mentioned there might be a vacancy at the
Manchester Guardian
and would I fancy a job there. For all my ambition, I had never even dared contemplate a job on one of the posh quality papers. Not for the likes of me, I had thought. On the other hand, if the
Guardian
reporters’ room was staffed by people like Dick West, it might be an amusing place to work. So I said I would love to work there. He said he would have a word with the news editor, Harry Whewell, and, with any amount of luck, I might be hearing from him. A couple of weeks later, Harry Whewell asked me to go for an interview.