Seize the Day (36 page)

Look, here's a menu from a dinner-dance at the Grand Hotel in Manchester in November 1946, the evening being rounded off with the seasonal Pouding de Noel with Sauce Rhum. No etymological wrestling needed that night, even for the uneducated. I note that post-pud, my godfather proposed a toast to the King and the Royal family, followed by a few well-chosen words from my grandmother. Public speaking was a baton taken up by my mother, who declaimed at dozens and dozens of dinners, sometimes in rhyme, usually with wit, often with an edge and certainly with a full glass. She was definitely a character. She was much loved by my friends for her
joie de vivre
, sense of humour, intellect and eccentricity, and she had the ability to see through the vainglorious and denounce the charlatan, sometimes to the point of embarrassing bluntness. She could also be belligerent, dogmatic and dismissive. She was one of the ‘Oh get on with it, stop feeling sorry for yourself' school, the ‘We don't talk about things like that in public' brigade and the ‘I'll keep your feet firmly on the ground' tribe.

My mother was also highly capable and unflappable in an emergency. There was a ghastly accident across the road from us when a lorry knocked down and killed a young girl who was cycling with her mother and sister. Taking charge, Mater was first on the scene, coping with a distraught mother, a panicking truck driver and an almost
delirious sister. The lorry had virtually run over the girl's head, but my mother was at the front, organising, keeping everyone calm and on a firm rein and dealing with the trauma, before the emergency services arrived. Exceptional. On the other hand she could be downright offensive. I was probably about fifteen and girls were beginning to filter into our crowd. One of them, not a girlfriend, came to call for me one day, and clearly didn't meet with my mother's approval, for as we were leaving, and within earshot, she flared her nostrils, raised her eyebrows and hissed, ‘I don't think so, do you?' Reminiscent of Lady Chetwode's supposed comment about John Betjeman, her future son-in-law, ‘We invite people like that to tea, but we don't marry them.'

Latterly she imagined scenarios. Here's a typical example. The telephone rings. I run down the corridor to answer it. Pretty normal stuff. I'm possibly breathing slightly more heavily than usual. ‘Hello.'

It's Mater. ‘We don't say “Hello”, we give our number.'

I've had that one since I was four years old. I still haven't learned. ‘OK.' I'm still breathing deeply.

‘Oh, I've clearly interrupted something of a personal nature.'

I have to disappoint her. ‘If you really want to know, I'm playing table-tennis.'

‘Oh, it's none of my business.'

‘Maybe not, but I'm still playing table-tennis.'

‘Hmph! And how do play table-tennis by yourself?'

‘It may come as a cataclysmic shock that I'm not proficient enough to play by myself.'

‘There's no need to be rude, just because I've caught you out.'

‘Caught me out doing what?'

‘Whatever you were doing.'

‘I was playing table-tennis!'

‘Hmph, that's what you call it, is it?'

‘Would you prefer ping-pong?'

‘There's no need to be funny.'

‘I'm not. I'm playing table-tennis.'

‘What, with one hand, while you're talking on the phone along the corridor?'

‘Well, clearly I'm not playing now because I'm talking to you.'

‘So who's the girl you said you're playing with?'

‘I'm not playing with a girl.'

‘Oh well, it's clearly none of my business.'

‘If you really want to know I'm playing with some friends.'

‘You don't get out of breath playing table-tennis.'

‘You do if you play properly. Anyway what did you call for?'

‘Oh, it doesn't matter if you're … “busy”.' Click.

Mingling with the Calthorpe motor, the speeches, the football write-ups et al. is my great-grandfather's
Gospel According to St John, Active Service 1914–1915
. This small book of some seventy pages also carries the words ‘Please carry this in your pocket and read it every day'. It has a personal message from Lord Roberts dated August 1914 urging my great-grandfather, and others, to ‘put your trust in God'. There are eight hymns at the back, including ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross', ‘Rock of Ages' and ‘Abide with Me'. The final page is a ‘Decision Form', a declaration to be signed with both name and address, the confession beginning, ‘Being convinced that I am a sinner…'

I could fill a book with historical accumulations from the family. As for photographs, our lot were queuing up as soon as Fox-Talbot exclaimed, ‘I've just had a negative thought.' Shots of my great-great-grandparents and some of their peers, looking fairly sombre, in keeping with the period, various cars that would now be worth a fortune, unidentifiable folk, my grandfather dressed in whatever daft garb he thought would look hilarious for the camera. In his finest comedic moment in a ballroom somewhere, he takes Elvis literally, as you may recall from
Chapter 2
, and is the only one on the dance-floor waltzing with a wooden chair. My grandmother's fox fur can be seen draped round his neck in this rather splendid snap. Also caught on camera are a procession of family dogs resignedly adorned with hats, necklaces and sunglasses, my mother and my grandmother in full flow at
some of the aforementioned speeches, my great-grandparents standing upright and proud for the camera, my great-grandfather sporting his waxed moustache, my father the boy chorister looking cherubic outside a church, youthful cricket teams now almost a century old, for whom the Great Umpire's finger was raised long ago, snaps of pipes, firmly clenched in white teeth, boating parties on the Thames, ancestors taking off across heathland with a pack of upright-tailed beagles, Army boys in khaki shorts, a headless relative on a carousel, another playing a banjo in camp, friends lifting the casing of Bluebird, which held the Land Speed Record, back onto its wheels. Why? I have no idea. I wish I'd discovered a lot of these photographs when there were folk around to answer questions. There are photos of weddings, dinner parties and a thousand other events captured and frozen in time, that pose more questions than they give answers.

I have fairly complete histories of the two main houses I've owned. The Aldermoor at Holmbury St Mary had been built in the early 1860s for Henry Tanworth Wells RA, whose best-known paintings include
Victoria Regina
, depicting Victoria being informed that she was now the monarch and
Volunteers at the Firing Point
. Wells's circle included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, John Ruskin and William Frederick Yeames. He also hosted the fifth Earl Spencer, and William Gladstone was a not infrequent guest while Prime Minister. Wells's closest confidant was the Gothic revivalist architect George Edmund Street, who designed the law courts and who almost certainly had a major hand in designing the house. The Wells and Steet families also intermarried. In the '20s and '30s, the famous Harrison sisters, Beatrice, May and Margaret, performed regularly in the drawing room, around the time Beatrice was enticing some poor unsuspecting nightingale to sing along to her cello in her garden at Oxted, for a clutch of patient BBC sound engineers. It was a privilege to walk in the footsteps of these people who'd contributed much to our country. In ‘Elizabethan Dragonflies' I wrote, ‘The Jekyll-haunted gardens now are mine, I walk at will down long, untrodden tracks.'
The house's 23 acres and twenty-two rooms were full of history, with the oldest tree, a yew, being dated at something like 600 years old. Makes one wonder what was on the spot at the time. The property was 850 feet above sea level and, despite being some 25 miles from the coast, from the top windows, when the conditions were right, one could see the Channel glistening through the Shoreham Gap. There were a few cracking parties at the house that may well have rivalled those of Victorian and Edwardian incumbents. How often do you see Rick Parfitt from Status Quo and David Cassidy wiping the spinach and gruyère quiche from their mouths to join Beatles tribute band, Cavern to knock out a few favourites? Or David Grant and his girlfriend Carrie disappearing for an hour or two into the azaleas only to re-emerge as an engaged couple, eventually marry and live happily ever after. Or the guy who did the catering spending fifteen minutes warning his staff of the dangers of walking into the plate glass doors in the conservatory only to do it himself five minutes later and break his nose? Or the Marquess of Worcester and Lord Johnson Somerset with a mouth full of vol-au-vents singing along to the Tremeloes playing live by the rhododendrons? Those were fun days and I wish I'd kept the house and not listened to my ‘advisers'. Years after I sold it for £550,000 it went for something like £4.5 million. Any ‘sight' would have been good; foresight, hindsight, second sight, insight.

Then there was Little Brinsbury Farm, dating back to 1195 when the stronghold belonged to Brynis. Thomas de Brunnesbury and his delightfully named wife Celestrial lived on the site from 1327 until 1377, but the first mention of the building that I bought is in 1618. I have a list of the incumbents from then right through to World War One, a fascinating swathe of history.

In the spring of 2014, I persuaded BBC Berkshire at Caversham, which is where I broadcast from Monday to Friday, to let me bring in three archaeologists with their top-of-the-range metal detectors onto their vast acreage as there had been people living on the site since Saxon times and the area had never been explored. I was allowed
to head this up and wield my own metal detector. During the dig we discovered that man had been there even before that, as I found knapped flints and tools from, I would guess, the Upper Palaeolithic – over 10,000 years ago. We also unearthed some medieval tokens and a beaten silver penny from the Commonwealth period, when Cromwell's troops briefly held Charles I captive in a house on the site. The grounds yielded Elizabethan buckles, a variety of buttons worn by young Georgian dandies and ammunition from the Civil War through to World War Two. There have been plenty of coins to go with that penny from the mid-1600s, including several from the reigns of George II, George III, Victoria, Edward VIII and George V. No hint of the Romans yet, but one of our goals is to try and locate the site of the Elizabethan manor. It almost certainly wasn't on the site of the current house, which was rebuilt on a site for which we have the 1720s design and layout of gardens. Capability Brown added his expertise to the gardens, but his work is now largely undetectable. I hope we can bring in geophysics at some point. The ‘Big Dig', as the BBC have named it, continues.

M
Y FIRST INDUCTION
into the world of leather on willow was in next door’s orchard against the older and stronger neighbour Christopher Olsen. He could fling one down that whizzed past the imaginary wicket keeper and sent shock waves through the henhouse at long stop. It was, as you can imagine, a rather one-sided affair, but I took my punishment as was expected. My bowling was knocked elegantly past trees bearing the young fruits of Cox and Russet positioned at third man and long leg, and the designated tree that served as our wicket suffered many a dent as the lanky, blond bowler beat the bat time and again.

Playing cricket was one thing, but as a little boy, watching it was another. I would later reach the age where I’d sit in front of the TV with my scorecard, but in those early days the young Olsen, down for Eton and thus already brushing up on his cricket skills, would want to watch the Test Match and I voted for
Andy Pandy
or something equally feeble. It once led to an all-out fight. I had no chance of winning, but I did tear his shirt in the scuffle and went home in disgrace.

Once some of the England cricketers came to our house, of whom I only remember Denis Compton and Godfrey Evans. Why they came I have no idea. I didn’t ask then and it didn’t seem to matter. Kids just appear to accept things. They did rather generously give me a small cricket bat and a red rubber ball, the latter being eaten at one point by a thick hedge, never to be seen again. On another occasion, nothing to do with cricket, some members of what was then referred to as a Red Indian tribe, but would now be an American Indian tribe, were also guests at one point and brought me some beautifully tooled cowboy boots and a wooden tomahawk with a silver blade and green binding. Now it’s too late I want to ask questions. Why did these people beat a path to our door bearing gifts of sporting equipment and weapons of war?

The war between the Test Match and
Andy Pandy
was healed by our respective parents and forgotten completely when a Fortnum and Mason van appeared in the drive bearing a wigwam that would not have disgraced a senior member of the Cheyenne. A perfect excuse to put on the hand-sewn boots and wield the tomahawk. Mostly, though, I wore my cowboy outfit, but never for cricket. I always had to have the correct attire for the occasion. I did get a pair of Christopher’s old cricket boots that he’d grown out of, which served me well until I too grew out of them.

I once took 6-6 for Drake House in a school match. That was the peak of my career with the crimson rambler; from there on it was downhill all the way.

In 1973 Tim Rice formed his own cricket team, Heartaches. I occasionally opened the bowling and was sometimes first change, and I snatched a trophy or two as Bowler of the Year. It has to be recorded that the trophies were rather ugly, bizarre monstrosities that belonged on no self-respecting shelf or mantelpiece. They varied according to the availability of bizarre figurines on plinths being sold somewhere in bulk. Our early wicket keeper was Sinbad Coleridge, who bellowed like a rather stern sixth-former about to deliver a severe beating to
some unsuspecting new boy. I was the new boy. He was related to the poet of course, but the wrath that fell from his position behind the timbers as I dropped yet another catch was anything but poetic. He scared the life out of me. I didn’t dare tell him then. Recently I felt confident enough to confide my early fear to him.

Burly Johnny Chuter and Tim’s brother Jo often swung into action with the new ball. Jo spoke Japanese, but it was of little benefit in pavilions of the Home Counties when asking for more cucumber sandwiches. In the fielding positions you might find the aspiring, and ultimately eminent, architect Piers Gough, who would make his name re-developing London’s Docklands and receive a CBE for his services to architecture. His younger brother Orlando Gough could also be seen lurking near the boundary, ready to turn his arm. Orlando would later become a celebrated composer, writing for ballet, theatre and the contemporary arts scene. Malcolm Edwards, a very handy chap with the willow, became a major book publisher, and Mike d’Abo was and remains a superb songwriter and singer with assorted versions of Manfred Mann. His younger brother, Noel, also a bastion of the music business, I’d already known for years and he wasn’t slow in donning the colours, such as they were. Noel is a most delightful fellow who greets everyone as though he’s related to them. He probably is. In the slips and occasionally behind the wicket could be found A. W. Heath, horse-racing aficionado and my one-time band-mate in Just Plain Smith. Alongside him was the already successful lyricist, our golden-haired, slightly balding leader, T. M. B. Rice, unaware of the slew of awards and the knighthood ahead. Other lads in the slightly impertinent colours of red, pink and green were saxophone-playing Chris Brooker and my sometime room-mate Chris Pryke.

In the field Pryke kept his teeth. Behind the stumps he lost a few to a particularly lively ball. It was like a mass extraction without gas. I vividly remember the ivory shower spraying majestically from his gums to whistle their last at the feet of a surprised batsman. When we breakfasted in our room and I had the
Beano
delivered as my
morning paper, he was simply ‘Pryke’. He has since been elevated to Sir Christopher Dudley Pryke, fourth Baronet. It doesn’t mean he got his teeth back, though. Another room-mate was Mark Nicholas, Hampshire skipper turned commentator and interviewer, and one of the professionals that were winched in when the going got tough. He once confessed that he wished he’d kept up his interest in the guitar, but he’s doing wonderfully without it.

Among the finest with the willow during my main period as a Heart were big hitter ‘Handy’ Andy Rossdale, Tim Graveney, who had cricket in his genes, of course, his father Tom having captained England, and Torquil Riley-Smith, who had betting money in his jeans. Torkers lived near Borley Rectory, reputedly the most haunted house in Britain, and his own house wasn’t without its spookiness with its cambered passages and odd noises.

I was occasionally able to get away for the Heartaches’ annual
Cornish
tour, an excuse for a lads’ week away in September. Housed chez Rice or at fellow Heartache Anthony Deal’s house (there were simply a brace of Deals then; more have appeared since) the week consisted of testosterone-fuelled contests against swarthy Cornishmen from local teams such as Mannacan, Mullion and Cornish Choughs. Revered Heartaches names such as Harold Caplan, John ‘Fingers’ Fingleton, the late Dave Glenn, Jonty Horne, Peter Robinson, Richard Slowe and Nigel Cobb would appear on many a batting order, some with better stats than others, but who cared? That wasn’t the point. Actually I’m not too sure what the point was, but that didn’t matter either. Did there have to be a point? Only on the field of play, where point is situated between cover and gully.

On one night of the annual tour Tim and I would brandish guitars. Another night would be dedicated to table-tennis, then there’d be a tennis day, then a night in a restaurant. A tough and gruelling regime, I think you’ll agree. One of the most intriguing evenings was stew night at the Deals’. The meal would be peppered with Hearts getting
to their feet (where possible) and declaring that they’d like to take wine with anyone who … and there would follow a preposterous or embarrassing tagline. Was one man enough to stand and take wine, thus tacitly admitting whatever the charge was?

Of course we had awards ceremonies, stag evenings and Christmas parties. It would have been rude not to. In an amazing run of good fortune, our leader, the aforementioned golden-haired etc., has won the Personality of the Year award every year since 1973. By the most extraordinary coincidence he is also the sole judge of that award. What are the chances of that?

We recently celebrated the team’s fortieth anniversary, with several of our former presidents attending the dinner. These lads, Alan Lamb, David Gower, Mike Gatting and Mark Nicholas, can play a bit as well as swanning around for a year as president. I looked around the tent – sorry, the expensive marquee – that Tim had erected in his garden and realised that if all 100 of us had been a team, I would have been put in to bat at about ninety-seven. A sobering thought. I mentioned this to Vanessa but she had no idea what I was talking about, nor who the cricketers were, as she was engrossed in assessing the decor.

As mentioned in
Chapter 1
, the door into radio was opened mainly by my alleged bowling prowess. Moderately fast. Moderately accurate. Nothing special. Those were the days of plenty, when Neil ffrench Blake could talk record companies into supplying cricket equipment and football kit for entire teams. Some of my fellow broadcasters appeared alongside me in that rather makeshift squad, including Steve Wright and Paul Hollingdale, neither of whom could play cricket. They’d agree with that assessment. For a while I was playing for both 210 and Heartaches. For a nomadic, coarse cricket outfit, the Hearts featured in many magazine photo shoots in our unflattering red, pink and green caps, pullovers, ties and blazers. Our 1987 spread was a riot of colour … more like
Gardener’s World
than
You
magazine. There were shots of star batsmen with top crimper John Frieda and his then wife Lulu, the tea ladies with the Rices, a quality control panel comprising
Frieda, Tim Graveney and myself discussing the moistness of the sandwiches, Tim Rice leading his squad in a round of laughter at a local tavern, and a candid shot of me at the centre of something sinister in the changing rooms. The caption says I’m modelling a straw hat, but judging by the expressions, the various stages of undress and the angle of the bodies, that was clearly a palliative for the easily shocked readers of the
Mail on Sunday
. We also held our tummies in and climbed into our clashing colours for a
Tatler
magazine shoot. Had we no shame? As Shakespeare might have said,

Having presented my programme live at Windsor Castle for his seventieth birthday, my longest batting session was thanks to the Duke of Edinburgh. In July 1987 I was invited to Buckingham Palace to help start the TSB Million Mile Walk in aid of the Playing Fields Association. The charity had been founded in 1926 to protect playing fields and open spaces and provide the opportunity for people of any age to undertake any recreational activity close to their home. The Duke of Edinburgh, who had been its patron since 1947, was there to greet us and start the walk, of which a few of us were doing the first mile inside the Palace yard. As we lined up, Philip and his equerry came over for a chat. I assumed it would be about the charity, but the duke eagerly asked which roadshow week I was doing and what pranks I had lined up that year. I fleetingly thought how wonderful it would be for him to make a surprise appearance at Newquay and have Smiley Miley carted off to the Tower on some slight pretext, but the moment passed. Knowing I was a keen walker and sports enthusiast, Philip’s equerry pointed out that I was the strong man of the team. The duke jokily raised his hands in the air as if he were a weightlifter pushing the weights above his head, but a photographer caught him midway
and it looks as though he’s about to punch my lights out. I still have the photograph in case it all kicks off, to prove that he started it.

Well through this escapade at Buckingham Palace, I was seconded for another bash for the charity later that year. It wasn’t unknown for me to reach double figures when batting at number seven or eight, but this was something different. Some fiendish plan had been concocted that meant me batting non-stop for four hours for the Playing Fields Association. All I was told was that it would be ‘on the lawn’. Not a bad gig, you might think – hitting a few balls on a beautifully mown strip on a balmy summer’s day. Try it at a freezing cold Paddington Station in December, with a string of guys hurling deliveries at you non-stop. As for ‘the lawn’, that turned out to be the name traditionally given to the area between the Great Western Hotel and the station concourse.

A cricket net was set up, I put on the whites and then I was told about the prizes. Now we all know that if there’s a freebie somewhere along the line (no railway pun intended) we try harder. The reward for bowling me out was a not insubstantial voucher which would have got you a return to most places on the network. I faced one railway worker who looked suspiciously like the Antiguan quickie Curtly Ambrose and another who had a look of Malcolm Marshall, the Barbadian fast bowler who was capable of slinging one down in excess of 90 mph. There was the odd furtive-looking moustachioed Antipodean – Dennis Lillee? And that Yorkshire chap. He might have been a little thicker round the middle, but I’m sure I heard someone call him ‘Fiery Fred’. I’m not sure what record we were aiming at, I just did the hitting, but it had to be done in accordance with the rules of
The Guinness Book of Records
, so I was officially observed throughout by the area manager for British Rail’s Western Region and the National Cricket Academy’s youth development officer for Surrey County Cricket Club.

The scorers were the headmaster and teachers of Parkhill School in Croydon, as some of their pupils helped to field and got to throw
a few balls down. After four hours of forward drives, sweeps to square leg and snicking it through the covers, I emerged with the jolly creditable figure of 1,210-10. I’d faced 1,210 balls in 240 minutes and only been bowled on ten occasions. British Rail were delighted at having to hand out so few free tickets. It was billed as a ‘World Record Cricket Attempt’ and sponsored by TSB, with commuters chucking some money in the bucket to bowl a seamer or two. Well we did it, but I’ve never looked to see whether it made
The Guinness Book of Records
. If not, I still have the statistics and the verification. It may not be too late, even though the Playing Fields Association was rebranded in 2007 as Fields in Trust.