Forgive me

We are wont, some of us, to view cricketers from before our own lifetimes through an intoxicating, part-delusional nostalgia that bathes mythologised figures in a far softer light than they might well have been seen in by their own contemporaries

Lord Cowdrey, for instance, the consummate latter-day gentleman-cricketer to a sentimentalist of the game born long after his pomp, was castigated by many of his own generation - by veterans and war widows in particular - for citing a foot injury as his reason for not taking up National Service after Oxford, a foot injury yet not severe enough to preclude him from playing cricket quite brilliantly for over 30 years

Yet a graceful apparition does he remain

When Compton died, my school's pavilion took on a far more golden glow for my knowing that he had raised his bat to the admiring straw hats on the steps leading up to it on his way back from a dash at the wicket and then taken tea inside with adoring young lords and sons of lords, exempt from boundaries of class

Care I that he had four wives?

I see Hendren's smile though never I saw his face, melt at the imagined peak of Spooner's cap and shudder afore Spofforth charging in

I am pressed down, unable to breathe at St John's Wood, though were I to die there, I would have no place among its dead