The Summer Field

5 Chapter One Chimneys and Fields ‘To me cricket is an English game that is designed for play on the village green, one boundary the pub and another the churchyard. Reasonable tolerance should be shown in sharing the outfield with the local fauna, poultry, cows, sheep, goats, dogs and suchlike that, after all, have squatters’ rights on the space.’ Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Morgan, Peace and War: A Soldier’s Life (1961) Though at the time we had to pretend otherwise, we can admit now that the show to open the London Olympics of 2012 was shallow and narrow- minded. In fairness, such a spectacle could not say anything meaningful – or even say anything , as most of the watching world did not understand English. Hence all the music. Yet why so little sport , given that England has given so many to the world? And why show cricket, not an Olympic sport? Early on, villagers were fielding on a piece of green between their cottages – like hobbits out of Tolkien – to an under-arm bowler, as if in the early 1800s. Smoking chimneys rose out of the ground. The actors rolled up the grass; their fields became factories. Such genuine drama summed up the shock to the people, and the violence against the land, in the Industrial Revolution. Though the cricket was staged and brief, and we can argue how authentic it was, it has probably never had so big an audience. No matter that many of those watching on television could not put a name to it, and that to the crowd everything was even more ant-like than the usual cricket in a stadium. Cricket was there not for its own sake but, like the dancers around the maypole, as a shorthand way of showing a leisurely country about to be torn apart (and we can also argue how historically accurate that was). English people have long settled in towns, yet cricket has stuck to its countryside roots. The Hull architect and watcher of Kirkella club, George Thorp, took the tram on Saturday, May 24, 1913 to the terminus and walked through the village of Anlaby. A lady directed him ‘into a beautiful lane flanked by magnificent elms and beeches’. He reached Tranby Croft, then a big house, now a school, and went in the wrong entrance, ‘but was kindly received by two gardeners, one of whom thought as I had come so far I might as well go the whole way, gladly leaving his work, the oldest accompanied me till the cricket field was in sight.’ Even city-folk, against the evidence, hung on to the game’s country origins. In January 1933, Rushcutter Bay Oval ‘became a village green’ according to the Sydney Morning Herald , when the Navy played the Press. Three thousand people watched Jack Hobbs