Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

113 Hotelier of Wootton Court As a club and small hotel, they offered simple meals and overnight accommodation. ‘We didn’t try to get above our station,’ says Mike. ‘Diana was a good cook and she looked after that side of things. We employed a chef for a time but, whereas he could cook, he became a bit of a pain and he left.’ Thereafter they relied on local girls and found other youngsters happy to run the bar in return for free accommodation. All members of the family were expected to lend a hand. For those attending a conference it was a normal privilege to be waited on by an ex-England captain, and it was not long before Barbara and Carole were old enough to help out. Wootton Court was an ideal place for a young family. Though Barbara says that she found it hard at first to share her parents with all the club members, she and Carole grew to appreciate the freedom and space as teenagers. ‘We weren’t all on top of each other,’ she says. ‘We could disappear upstairs into the attic and play our music at ridiculous decibels and nobody could hear us.’ Meanwhile Mike remembers Neil, who was almost five at the time of the move, soon becoming ‘the sort of lad who’d play anything. He was far more interested in playing squash or the one-arm bandits than doing his school work.’ Though cricket and rugby have always been Neil’s passions, he loved the freedom of the five acres and the games on offer, playing squash at junior county level. Carole, too, played in junior tournaments, winning the Warwickshire Girls Under-12 championship and representing the county at every junior age group. Although Mike had turned his hand to most sports – he had featured in junior tennis in Leicestershire – he had never previously had a go at squash, but he soon got to grips with the essentials and, in his forties, was playing some matches for Wootton Court’s first team in the local league. The club was soon thriving, its residential and catering facilities making it a particularly suitable venue for the Squash Rackets Association’s national training squads, at which Jonah Barrington and his trainer ‘Bomber’ Harris would frequently be in attendance. The club took on its own coach, Ros Dalton, who proved excellent with youngsters taking up the game and first fired Carole’s interest. Ros was followed by Jayne Ashton. At one time number nine in the world, Jayne held her own in the Wootton Court men’s team and later, as national coach, took the England women’s team to victory in the World Championship. Cricket teams touring the area swelled the bar profits by choosing Wootton Court as their base. Among those who visited was a club