Lives in Cricket No 52 - Schooled in Cricket (2nd edition)

190 father now had a newsagent’s shop in the area. Barrick’s father had sent him for coaching to Johnny Lawrence some years earlier and Algy now decided that was the thing for me.” Johnny’s coaching school was some 12 miles from Boycott’s home in Fitzwilliam. “We went off to assess the situation and found that cost was going to be a problem. The coaching sessions cost six shillings each, and the bus fare to and from Rothwell worked out at 3s 11d. That meant only a penny change from ten shillings for one Saturday morning session a week and my mum and dad simply couldn’t afford it. “Algy agreed to pay 2s 6d, as did Auntie Annie and Uncle Jack, so my parents had to find five shillings. They could just about manage that, though there were no doubt plenty of other things they could have spent the money on. The money was paid uncomplainingly, until I was old enough myself to get a job and contribute myself. Saturday morning became a ritual I lived for. “Lawrence’s cricket school was a pretty basic sort of place, a converted greenhouse with makeshift floor coverings and very Spartan changing facilities out the back. It was also the coldest place in the world on a winter’s morning, heated only by a coal-fired stove. I can still remember how we used to get there before the stove had taken the icicles out of the air, rushing to change our clothes and shivering uncontrollably. “I had to change buses at Wakefield, get off at the Halfway House pub and walk the best part of a mile to Lawrence’s place. Rain or snow, I didn’t mind a bit. Jack Birkenshaw, a young bowler later to play for Yorkshire, Leicestershire and England, lived next door to Johnny’s school and I used to knock him up on the way past so I would have someone to bowl at me as soon as I got there. “Birky developed the habit of blowing on his cupped hands to get back a bit of feeling in the icy cold of the indoor school. It stayed with him all his career. In the West Indies or on the hottest English day of the year, Jack would blow Johnny’s most famous protege – Geoffrey Boycott Speaks