Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

12 their own games of football, and more occasionally cricket, on the recreation ground. From an early age ball games were Mike’s obsession. As a nine-year- old, he was given an expensive train set by his father. ‘But I don’t think he ever took it out of the box,’ Maurice said many years later. ‘All Mike wanted to do was bounce a ball off the garden wall for hours on end.’ Though Maurice Smith would later send his second son Roger to the local grammar school, from which he won a place at Oxford and took a first in Engineering, he decided to send Mike to board at Stamford School in Lincolnshire, where there would be every chance for his sporting talent to develop. Mike explains that though his brother was keen on sport, and the family gene emerged again when his daughter Zoe played squash for England at Over-35 level, Roger himself never played much. ‘My father thought I was the sort of person who would gain from boarding,’ Mike says, ‘and I am sure he was right.’ Stamford was to provide Mike with eight blissful years – without overstretching his father’s bank balance. It was only the extras that brought the bills up to £40 for a term’s boarding when he first went there. From the outset it was apparent that Mike was going to star in the school sports teams. In the summer of 1944, before his eleventh birthday, he was chosen to play in the Under-14 cricket side. He still remembers the excitement of walking to the station to catch the train and the special concern of the master in charge: ‘You didn’t have your own gear in those days – he wanted to make sure there was a bat small enough for me to handle.’ Mike’s captain that day was Colin Dexter, later to become the creator of the irascible detective Morse, who shared Dexter’s own penchant for the music of Wagner, cryptic crosswords and real ale. A team-mate for some years at Stamford, Mike remembers Dexter as ‘a nippy winger and an opening bat’. He relates how he went on to become a classics teacher only for deafness to make life in a classroom impossible, allowing a new career to open up Finding a small enough bat Mike with a golf club. Golf was not a game he ever took up seriously.