23 – DAYS OF OUR LIVES
“You can’t help getting older but you don’t have to get old”
George Burns
Setting foot in an adult dressing room can be a very intimidating experience. Where do you sit, do you speak, should you speak back and how can you avoid displaying how puny you are?
These days parents have to sign a disclaimer; the first thing I heard in the Beldon dressing room was Pansy Potter cooing “nice bottom”, scaring me witless – as intended. It was character building and he still says it now.
There is quite a difference between a football and a cricket dressing room; much more time for things to happen in a cricket dressing room over the tub thumping of a football one.
Car Park Jacko
My early recollections of playing for the Villas Second Team are full of archaic characters. I was nicknamed The Blond Bomber by Haighy after I slogged a fifty one day, down the road at local rivals Thackley CC. The Sex Pistols and red food colouring soon put paid to the hair and my Grandma Ada hardly spoke to me for months.
A great character was Steve “Car Park” Jackson, son of Villas legend Ernest, tragically lost too soon. Car Park was ten years older than me around the time I broke into the side as a thirteen year old.
He was the link between us kids and the older guys. Our youth policy had yet to kick in and so the team was littered with guys clearly with one foot in the grave.
“Jacko” arose from his usual response to our cheek of “any more lip and I’ll take you out in that car park!” Current ECB Child Welfare Policy does not deal with Beatings by a Senior Player in the Car Park.
Car Park was great to be around, a robust figure – he was a builder by trade – and gave the appearance of being indestructible on the outside. Sadly, something very bad was gnawing away at him inside and none of us ever saw it. How could we?
I spent the last day he was with us, chauffeuring him and another old pal, later to become a team-mate, Johnny “Ando” Anderson, around local games one glorious Sunday afternoon. He was on top form as ever.
Dropping him off in Idle village for a few more beers, less than twenty four hours later I heard he was gone having taken his own life. It ripped a hole in the dressing room.
Hygiene
Tears were shed but life went on. Often the only cure is laughter and there was always plenty of that available.
In the early days men’s hygiene was still based on a shared bar of Imperial Leather.
Nicknames could be savage and enduring. One veteran made the mistake of hanging up a disgusting pair of soiled Y-fronts only to be known forever more as “Klinkers”, someone remarking they had “more skid marks than Le Mans”.
Pranks
Some of the best times have been the endless pranks proving we never grow up. Here’s a few of the best:
Water and the shower rooms were often the scene of many. For instance, although the shower was a touch lukewarm when you started, it is suddenly warm but somehow only on your leg. And then you notice a big fat black lad, big grin, peeing in your direction. Cue screaming fit.
Or…you know it is coming your way, a retribution of sorts. The shower room goes quiet, people move away from you and all you can do is brace yourself for the icy bucket of water. More blood curdling screams and obscenities follow.
Not all pranks involved potential heart attacks; some were more measured allowing for the clinical approach. Take the advent of Super Glue which was a huge addition to Saturday afternoons.
Veteran bowler Mike Adams used to spray spare change over the window ledge. One day somebody decided it would be funny to glue this down and watch him attempt to collect it.
The same tube of glue was used to glue a zipper on a teammate’s trousers in the “off” position, which meant he spent a Saturday night with a raft of safety pins holding his dignity intact.
Clothing was always a potential target. At Ingrow, the dressing room ceiling was UPVc panelling and Duck had rolled up one day with some fancy new shoes.
To get to the showers you had to walk out of the changing rooms and up some stairs outside giving us time to put all Duck’s gear plus towel in the middle of the field.
A frantic naked dash ensued; when he got back the treasured shoes had “gone”. As he interrogated each and every one of us he failed to notice that both shoes were glued to the ceiling, with the laces almost kissing his head. It went on for ages.
The Rat Trap
The funniest of all was the Rat Trap, the day Dave “Singy” Singleton proved beyond doubt that he was one guy you never messed with.
Singy always attracted attention but I am not sure why our opening bowler, Mark “Straw” Hey, chose him as a prank target or what Straw actually did. Revenge was assured though.
The following week we found Singy sat cuddling a huge white rat which, bad enough as it was, turned out to be dead. He stroked it, offering it around the dressing room awaiting Straw.
As usual Straw was late so Singy asked me for a bit of a favour as skipper.
“Skip will you bat first today?” he asked which was not unreasonable as it was cracking the flags outside.
“Sure mate, sound tactics!”
“Not really I just want time to get my friend here into Straw’s gear somewhere. If we’re going well will you put him up the order like he’s always asking?”
I nodded wondering what I was doing captaining a side that needed a man like Singy in it.By the time I got back to the dressing room, the rat was sprawled out on the window ledge with a lighted fag in its mouth.
We summoned Straw to get changed and have a bat. Generally when Straw went in to bat we were desperate, so it was with a look of delight that he accepted his “promotion”.
Singy had slipped the rat into his cricket trousers so when Straw rushed in excitedly to change from shorts to whites, as he pulled his trousers on there was a blood-curdling scream. The whites almost turned a different colour and he could not stop shaking for hours. As a consequence, he bowled like a pillock.
Priceless
There are fewer and fewer pranks these days, perhaps reflecting a lack of the same characters I began to see leaving the working world too. Have we become so sanitised?
When I eventually declare, I will miss the cricket dressing room above all else summed up by the words a few years ago from a teammate as the last game drew to an end and autumn approached.
“Next Saturday who am I going to laugh at? She’ll be dragging me off shopping and there won’t be a sniff of a beer. Can’t we just meet here again next Saturday and forget there’s no game?”
The pranks may be have been childish, but life is tough and laughter is free, so long as you can retrieve your new shoes. Added to that mix were the ridiculous variety of topics we used to discuss as the rain poured down with an early exit to the bar looming.
Great old stories kept us all going for years; now its head down in unison into Googleland and the silence is not golden. I would swap nothing, confident we had the best of times.
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