3- My Father’s House
I have absolutely no idea how I became obsessed with the game of cricket but it has influenced my life massively from a very early age. It’s the sort of game you either love or hate with equal passion and as so much of it is played in the mind the average club cricketer is never far from some form of mental breakdown at some point in the English summer.
Even more of a mystery is the almost unbreakable bond with a little cricket club just a stone’s throw away from my parent’s house hidden away from view jealously guarding it is very own “Secret Garden”.
As Brent alludes to in his foreword somehow the club simply gets into your blood, under your skin and never leaves your heart and head. How does anybody find a passion in a tiny little cricket club so all encompassing? Okay so Kylie Minogue rivalled it for a while but even she had a shelf life.
From my experience cricket like other sports that require an element of skill and brain power – unlike hoofing a bag of wind up and down a field before falling to the ground as if you have been shot and rolling around like a wild horse – seems to be a game that is cherished and passed from dads to lads down the generations as if you born into it.
Sons and daughters follow mums and dads from match to match and pick up skills almost unwittingly as whole summers seem to unwind spent with bat and ball. Sadly, with almost no school sport taught in the state system today, the technical skills needed for cricket are in serious decline save for those lucky to have access to either a private school or a club and good, dedicated and thick-skinned coaches.
My Old Man… Was Not a Batsmen
Strangely, I cannot claim any real parental inspiration for my love of cricket but without my mum and dad it would have been so much harder to stick at as they ferried me all over the place as a kid and, without being over bearing, took a real interest in junior life at the Villas.
Once we got a bar my dad thought all his birthdays had come at once and has barely left the place since. Consequently, largely because he would not have known where to start, my dad has never attempted to tell me how to bat or bowl.
That’s definitely been a good thing when I compare with some of the parents I have seen over the years manically bellowing instructions as they frantically paced the boundary edge having, in many cases, never ever crossed the white line and taken part themselves.
However, had I taken an interest in pigeon or rabbit shooting I do believe I may have ended up an Olympic marksmen or an SAS sniper and maybe my later obsession with all things culinary would have had a much earlier start with game dishes a speciality.
My dad and his mates were apparently rather adept game hunters in urban Bradford during the post war years with the local pigeon population under annual threat of extinction. Of course young lads had to go out and feed the family…blah, blah, blah.
Personally speaking, I believe it’s a good thing not to have a father desperate to relive his youth through his son’s exploits on the sporting field. This is a very kind way of saying that, to this day, my dad does not know one end of a cricket bat from the other.
On the flip side he hardly misses a game and is a season ticket holder in Critics’ Corner where the whisky flows freely as does the commentary on life every Saturday afternoon.
The Factory
Growing up can be tough as we all know and I strongly believe there is a lot of truth in what shapes your early relationships with your parents is influenced heavily by what shaped them as young people. The lineage perpetuated from generation to generation is hard to break and so perhaps it’s just as well that that train will stop here in my case.
We can both be very stubborn – which would really have a negative impact on my mother and my brother and get us both nowhere as I was growing up – and it is fair to argue that some still await signs of progress in that department.
There were regular clashes particularly when he would come home from working long hours at a local engineering company tired, wound-up and pretty hacked-off. This was tough, uncompromising but highly skilled work – unlike wearing a suit and waffling for a living as I did for 25 years – that I would witness first-hand many years later in an ironic twist of fate.
Shortly after he retired I won some business financing some new machinery on behalf of Barclays at the plant where he had worked for some thirty years. I was intrigued to visit this place having dropped him off many times so I could borrow the Capri for a day’s cruising many years earlier.
Looking back no wonder I never copped off in Ford’s version of a yellow stretched coffin with Elvis on the Eight-Track – which for younger readers was a tape bigger than VHS videotape which you rammed into a player in the dashboard and prayed the tape would not snarl up.
I am not sure I would have lasted thirty minutes in the oppressive factory conditions I observed as I toured this dirty, noisy and soulless shop floor. With hindsight, I can see he was not only exhausted physically but much more so mentally and with a temperamental kid waiting at home life must have been a blast
Granddad Harold
So as a young lad it is fair to say I was clueless as to how most people have to earn a living and probably remain so to this day. We clashed on many an occasion, but to his credit I avoided broken bones although I probably deserved a few. The net result was that we had what could best be described as a tense relationship.
Over many years I’ve gained a better understanding that only time can reveal to you. There were clues as to my dad’s hopes and aspirations for both my brother and I – not only in what he was trying to make sure we avoided but in what I can recall of my few memories of his dad, my granddad Harold, who clearly fancied himself as a bit of a lad.
To say he was a bit of a free spirit would be the kindest thing but I get the feeling that I may have inherited some of that approach to life. One of my last memories was seeing him leaving a bookies shop in the centre of Bradford and hopping straight into the nearby pub.
Ye Olde Crown was infamous for topless shows to which I and many of my peers visited as a rites of passage in our early years if only to see that tattooed, obese women were not that great looking in the buff no matter how many pints we had.
Neither did I share granddad’s skill sets as a trained painter and decorator, indeed most times I have ever tried my hand here I have generally inflated the cost of any task by at least three times given my complete ineptitude and wastage of materials.
Looking for clues from my other granddad is equally unhelpful as my mum recalls him as working himself into an early grave so hard was life in those days.
My two grandmas were simply two of life’s grafters, working hard and saving hard too and I guess that having seen how hard life was for my grandparents you get a very early respect for the colour of money and a complete distrust of the modern day “champagne mouth, lemonade pocket” brigade.
Both sets of grandparents left this Earth with little more than they entered except for shaping respective generations to follow into seeking a better life and offering an idea of what was right…and not so right.
The Grammar School
So it’s fair to say at home we had our differences not unlike many father and son relationships. The start of a period that was to severely test an already fragile paternal relationship and, in direct contrast, see the beginning of my almost total dependence on Villas for sanctuary over a long period, was my first major failure in life at the tender age of eleven. As foul ups go boy was it a big one.
As a young lad I think I was quite a bright kid at school, either that or the rest of them at St Francis RC Primary were as thick as posts. I was also showing traits of that stubbornness I referred to earlier, together with a desperate need to be the class prankster as if to dumb down evidence of my intelligence before the future armed robbers and drug dealers of Bradford – my classmates – in effect rumbled me.
The clever kid always ends up with his head down the toilet and I was desperate to avoid this as their notion of a shampoo and rinse was not shared by me.
One of the ways I placated the mob was to effectively sedate them by reading novels to them, sort of Richard and Judy tame The Mob as few of the future gangsters of my time could read anything other than BMW and Mercedes.
A very popular book at the time was the martial arts tale Enter The Dragon which I was holding a reading for one day except that this was not the actual real lesson and the teacher was insistent I listen to her instead.
Assuming I had the protection of the mob (The Swain House Mob, descendants of the Ant Hill Mob) I carried on until a whack around the ear made me reassess my situation pretty quickly. Dear old Mrs Wood could middle a skull better than I could a cricket ball. Now that’s teaching for you Mr Gove!
I simply loved “Frannys” and I think it was probably where I first sampled cricket and certainly developed a love for sport in general. It’s a pathetic state of affairs now that the opportunities for primary school kids to learn and play a sport are so limited and so dependent on where you live or if your are fortunate enough to go to private school.
One day I gained access to the kit room and at the age of ten the sight of a storeroom full of brand new Gray Nicolls bats and Reader balls could not have been bettered by the presence of a naked woman. At least I had a vague idea how to hold a bat.
On the recommendation of the school, my punishment for being slightly less stupid than the rest of my peer group was to have to sit the entrance exam for Bradford Grammar School, an independent school, which in those days provided some thirty assisted places.
Hundreds of kids sat this exam each year for the chance of a free education worth in today’s money close to six figures in tuition fees. There was no way I wanted to sit the exam; I simply did not want to go there.
This was despite the fact that, Maria Cummings, the love of my young life, would be just over the wall at St Joseph’s Girls School as in those days the girls and boys were split up at eleven.
It was like dangling a carrot then having it snatched away just as the carrot started to twitch into life.
A Better Life?
My mum though, sensing an opportunity she had never had as a bright young woman, was keen for me to try and my dad obviously wanted me to take any chance I had to escape a career path similar to his own.
However, it should have been clear to him from my inability to fathom out even an Airfix modelling kit that the engineering tradition was not a mantle I would carry in the family name. I could barely figure out how to get the top off the glue.
To this day I cannot believe that I passed that exam. Most of it was multiple-choice, a lot was simply unfathomable to me and I sat and gazed most of the time at the other poor apples of their mothers’ eyes stooped over their desks trying their best.
It was sunny outside, that much I remember, and I was playing footie with Duck that afternoon on the cricket field. I was quietly confident that I had screwed up any chance of donning the brown uniform of BGS as I left the admittedly beautiful school grounds and headed back to Villas and a kick about with my recently acquired Adidas Beckenbauer’s.
Initially I got a letter saying that I had not made the cut – good – but that I was on a reserve list – not so good. Then, as the Bee Gees would wail many years later, Tragedy!
A letter arrived on my eleventh birthday informing me that I now had a place after all and my first instinct – which I regretted not carrying out for years to come – was to burn it and begin a vigil by the post box until September awaiting the comfort of St George’s Middle School and more anarchy with the Mob.
On reflection I know it was a huge honour for my school – doubly so because another boy, John Flanagan, was also selected and I fully expected him to be Prime Minister by the time he was fifteen – but I was gutted.
For whatever reason, I simply could not accept that I was going there…in truth I never felt I was good enough.
Hard Times
All I can remember of the time I spent at BGS is grief and I think I cried my eyes out for a year. My mother spent a fortune on expensive uniforms and sports kits, money that to my shame she would never have spent on herself.
She even had to spend more money on bus fares making sure I would actually go there by walking me to the school gates for fear of me bunking off and ending up wandering Lister Park…not advisable then or now.
As for my dad I’m sure he simply could not understand my ingratitude especially having to pick me up after Saturday school straight from another morning’s hard grind at “The Factory”. It was a great opportunity that I don’t doubt but try telling that to the most miserable kid in England so I blew it in monumental style and left Bradford Grammar School.
Not even the fabulous cricket facilities could change my burning desire to leave the place and so I rejoined my old pals at St George’s at least resisting the up and coming drug cartel.
For a while things were great, I even had woodwork classes making the worst toast rack ever which survives at my mother’s insistence to this day as a memento to my total ineptitude at anything practical. As for metalwork my toffee hammer collapsed at the first whack and the factory was not for me after all.
As far as my dad and I went, the bricks were down. Even at this young age I felt a massive sense of personal failure and embarrassment. I was totally humiliated and as a result I cut myself off and wrapped myself in a protective shell.
If I have given the impression over the years that I’m too independent for my own good this was probably where it all began. It was my way of dealing with it and from thereon the impact on my confidence was enormous; I never did ask Maria Cummings out…lucky her.
The only place I felt I belonged for a long, long time was Villas. It was a meeting place, a playground, a potential courting arena and very soon a chance to establish an identity by finding something I could do reasonably well and put that huge year of underachievement behind me.
Without it, I am not sure which way I would have gone, but in a sense the club saved me by offering me an outlet at an early age and I suppose the desire over many years to put something back started way back then.
Strangely, even at this early age, “Seeds” had been planted.
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