There is one story about Bush which illustrates my point. In the following summer half we played Marlborough at Marlborough, and won by seven or eight wickets. When we returned by bus long after lock-up, the only way into the house was through the front door. No sooner was I inside than Bush asked me how we had got on. I told him we had won, and what the scores were. He then asked me how many I had made. When I said, ‘Sixty-something not out,’ he looked at me for a moment in that stodgy way of his and said in a slightly mournful tone, ‘Oh dear,’ which was what he tended to say on almost every occasion. It hardly felt like a vote of confidence, and our relationship seldom progressed beyond a state of armed neutrality. It must have been my fault, because all of those who spent their full five years with Bush adored him. He clearly became an outstanding housemaster, and a great friend to his charges.
The 1956 cricket season at Eton was a joy. I teamed up as an opening batsman with David Barber (known as ‘Daff’), and together we formed the most amusing, successful and noisiest of opening partnerships. It was unceasing ululation as we negotiated quick singles, and seldom, initially at any rate, were we of the same opinion. We played one match against Home Park, a side largely comprised of Eton beaks. One of them was a housemaster called Nigel Wykes, a most remarkable man, who had won a cricket Blue at Cambridge, was a brilliant painter of birds and flowers, and had Agatha Christie’s grandson, Matthew Pritchard, a future captain of Eton, in his house. He was known as ‘Tiger’ Wykes, and he fancied himself as a cover point, where he was uncommonly quick with the fiercest of throws. In the course of our opening partnership, Daff pushed one ball gently into the covers and yelled, ‘Come five!’ We got them easily as Wykes swooped in and threw like a laser back to the stumps, where the middle-aged wicketkeeper was nowhere to be seen and four overthrows was the result. That year we played Winchester at Eton and came up against the fifteen-year-old Nawab of Pataudi, also called ‘Tiger’, who even at that age was in a class of his own. Like his father, he went on to captain India. He didn’t make many runs that day, but the way in which he got them told the story. As luck would have it, I caught him behind in the first innings and stumped him in the second. Sadly, that year’s Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s was ruined by rain.
I had the luck, though, to be chosen to keep wicket for the Southern Schools against The Rest for two days at Lord’s in early August. I managed to do well enough to secure the same job for the two-day game later that week, also at Lord’s, against the Combined Services, which was a terrific thrill. The Combined Services were run by two redoubtable titans of the armed forces: Squadron Leader A.C. Shirreff, the captain – Napoleon himself would have envied his ever-pragmatic leadership – and his number two, Lieutenant Commander M.L.Y. Ainsworth, who had reddish hair, a forward defensive stroke with the longest no-nonsense stride I have ever seen, and a voice that would have done credit to any quarterdeck. They had under them a bunch of young men doing their National Service, most of whom had already played a fair amount of county cricket, including Mel Ryan, who had used the new ball for Yorkshire; Raman Subba Row (Surrey and then Northamptonshire), who went on to bat left-handed for England; and Stuart Leary, a South African who played cricket for Kent and football for Charlton Athletic. Then there was Geoff Millman, who kept wicket for Nottinghamshire and on a few occasions for England; Phil Sharpe of Yorkshire and England, who caught swallows in the slips; and a few others.
We batted first, and at an uncomfortably early stage in the proceedings found that we had subsided to 72 for 6, at which point I strode to the crease. Before long Messrs Subba Row and Leary were serving up a succession of most amiable leg-breaks, and when we were all out for 221, I had somehow managed to reach 104 not out. It was quite a moment, at the age of sixteen, to walk back to the Lord’s Pavilion, clapped by the fielding side and with the assorted company of about six MCC members in front of the Pavilion standing to me as I came in. It all seemed like a dream, especially when I was told that only Peter May and Colin Cowdrey had scored hundreds for the Schools in this game. To make things even more perfect, if that were possible, Don Bradman saw my innings from the Committee Room, and sent his congratulations up to the dressing room. When we got back to Norfolk, I remember Grizel being particularly keen that I should not let it all go to my head. ‘You’re no better than anyone else, just a great deal luckier’, was how it went. I played my first game for Norfolk the next day, against Nottinghamshire Second Eleven, and made 79 in the second innings.
After that, a few people thought I was going to be rather good, but they had failed to take into account my navigational ability – or lack of it. The following 7 June (1957), in my last half at Eton, when I was captain of the Eleven, I was on my way to nets on Agar’s Plough after Boys’ Dinner when I managed to bicycle quite forcefully into the side of a bus which was going happily along the Datchet Lane, as it was then called, between Upper Club and Agar’s. I can’t remember anything about it, but Edward Scott, who ended up supervising and controlling the worldwide fortunes of John Swire’s with considerable skill, was just behind me. Rumour has it that I was talking to him over my shoulder as I sped across the Finch Hatton Bridge and into the bus.
The bus was apparently full of French Women’s Institute ladies on their way to look around Eton, which I suppose gave the event a touch of romance, but I lay like a broken jam roll in the gutter until the ambulance arrived and carted me off to the King Edward VII Hospital in Windsor. No doubt a good deal of zut alors-ing went on in the Datchet Lane. One mildly amusing by-product of this story is that I still come across Old Etonians who were around at the time, all of whom were the first or second on the scene and several of whom called the ambulance. It must have been quite a party.
Queen Charlotte and a Milk Train
After an accident like that, what next? Well, the immediate future was none too happy. As I lay in my hospital bed, prayers were said for me in both College and Lower Chapels at Eton. The power of prayer may never have been better illustrated for somehow I continued to breathe. Or maybe it was just that the Almighty couldn’t face me yet. Tom and Grizel, after coming down to Eton for the Fourth of June celebrations, had high-tailed it to France and were somewhere in the Loire, but no one knew quite where. Various SOS’s were sent out on the wireless urging them to return as quickly as possible. Grizel told me some time later that on that very day they were in Chartres, and after lunch they went to the cathedral. As I have already said, Grizel was a down-to-earth, on-my-own-terms, not-to-be-shaken member of the Church of England, and was ever mindful that a brace of Blofelds had long ago, or so rumour had it, been barbecued by Queen Mary. Inside the cathedral she did something she had never done before, lighting a candle in one of the side chapels and plonking it down with all the others. It was getting on for half past two, just about the exact moment at which I bicycled into the bus. This was just too much of a coincidence. Unaccountable things like this do happen. What goes on in the subconscious? Who controls these things? Was Grizel’s God ticking her off, through me, for lighting a candle in a Roman Catholic church? Or maybe He was telling her that she had the chance to save my life. Is that too far-fetched? Whatever the truth is, there can be no logical explanation for what happened.
Of course they came back to Eton as fast as they could, hoping against hope that they would find me alive when they got there. My brother John also rushed down, and nobly stayed for a night or two in my room at MNF’s. It must have been beastly for everyone – except, that is, for me, who was blissfully unaware of anything. There cannot be anything much more boring than endlessly going