The Summer Field

173 Maiden Over by Charles Hatton is not a book you should judge by its cover. A woman in white skirt and short sleeves eyes a passing batsman, her mouth half open as if she has something cuttingly feminine to say. Her collar is turned up, her neck-line plunges rather, and her red fingernails and lips match the ball she is tossing - in a disturbingly Freudian way? – from her right hand. Judging by the haircuts, and the novel’s year of publication, it’s 1955. The heroine Bobbie Spencer is the daughter of Ted, a former Worcestershire opener who runs the Jolly Cricketers Inn, at the fictional Fordbridge. We begin with Tony Hinton, newspaperman and ‘captain of a scratch touring side who called themselves the Madrigals’. His team is one short and Ted Spencer asks ‘Mr Hinton’ to ‘give my girl Bobbie a chance’, who, he explains, has mastered ‘the secret of flighting a ball’. Their host, Colonel Westcott, objects (‘dammit all, Spencer’), but Hinton would not have lasted as a Fleet Street journalist for 20 years without a nose for news (‘she should prove a mine of readable copy’) and what really matters (‘after all they were one short’). Bobbie takes seven for 12 in five overs and one maiden (a joke?). As it’s 1955, back at Ted’s pub Tony Hinton has to ask to use the telephone. He does no more than ring a story through to his paper, the Daily Monitor . She becomes front page news. From his ‘bachelor flat at the back of Southampton Row’, handy for Fleet Street, he starts managing her, partly to do a good turn for her father, partly to make himself money. Were this a 21 st century book, we would have to wade through sexual banter or lusts. Instead Bobbie meets Derek Whitely, a young taxman who has moved into a cottage in Fordbridge with his mother. A reader as alert as Bobbie’s father can spot how the book will end, one-third of the way in. Next we meet Simeon Arkwright, mill-owner and chairman of Bedlington Castle club, bottom of the Pennine League. He recalls Ted Spencer was their pro’ in 1923 and invites Bobbie (by telegram) for a month’s trial. The club secretary and mill foreman Ephraim Salter objects (‘you’ve offered a wench ten quid a match?’) but Arkwright, like Hinton, sees in Bobbie an opportunity (‘lots of folk will come out of curiosity to see a girl play, and they’ll pay to come in’). She excels, again and again, faltering only once when Derek drops by from a tennis tournament in Harrogate. Will MCC pick Bobbie for England against the visiting Australians? They don’t, and in any case Bobbie goes on honeymoon in the south of France with Derek. Sir Rufus Harris, ‘head of a large firm of chain chemists’ invites her to play for his festival eleven against the Australians. She catches them on an uncovered wet wicket and takes eleven wickets. Will she make the winter tour to the West Indies? Or will MCC ban women from the men’s game? The story ends in Fordbridge with a house-warming party at the newlyweds’ bungalow. * Maiden Over is not great literature. It’s a fairy tale – a young woman, without playing experience, shows ‘all the cunning of a Ramadhin, allied to the deceptive flight of Mailey in his top form of the pre-war years’. Instead of the obvious drama – what would men make of playing against, and with, Women