Ashes Poetry

This is written over two months after the event – a lovely fortnight straight-after in Brittanny, two weeks of my right/write arm paralysed with arthritis, then a month sorting out the effects of a manic episode, intervened. (Yes, folks, yrs truly is a bi-polar, or manic-depressive. It goes with the territory, ‘All poets are mad,’ Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1640. Tomorrow I shall write Schizo-Cricket to explain all.)

I had a fairly standard route to the ground, and on the Sunday chose to treat myself to a pre-Ashes fried breakfast reading the papers, where one of the broadsides said they’d feature me. No matter they didn’t, had a chat with an African sports lover, where we couldn’t quite figure out the lack of Africans and Afro-Carribeans in the English team. All twenty-two players in this match are caucasians. It struck me walking through the parks around the Oval. Around ten o’clock they were empty. Last century in 1948 they’d be packed with kids playing pick-up cricket games ahead of the Don’s final test innings. Today, two drunk tramps sleeping it off and a rather forlorn middle-aged woman jogger past some media vans parked up by their aerial to send today’s play across the globe. Somehow both the universality and mystery of the game has dwindled. It’s a shame those camera’s didn’t pick up the game of street cricket which had sprung up outside the ground as it had emptied. There’s less enchantment, which poetry or street cricket cannot provide alone. A quality that stands apart from victory if not defeat, for to lose is not to lose all, while to win means only to win a game.

The next day I was interviewed by Radio Derby and read out the final poem Ashes. I did tell them on air it wasn’t celebratory. ‘Oh,’ said the interviewer as we were squeezed inbetween phone-ins about Derby County (’What’s black and white and slides down the table?’) ‘I was expecting something more gloating.’ I’ve never gloated in fifty-six years and I don’t intend to start now. All victories require losses.

Yes, I punched the air when the final Aussie wicket fell. Yes, I was on my feet, and Yes it was great to be there, not least because I’d been at Perth when the Australians were top-dogs last time round. But no I didn’t sing “You’re not singing anymore’ as a few middle-class wannabe mockeney supporters sang. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I told them, ‘they never sang in the first place.’

And yes, I felt uncomfortable when Ben Hilfenhaus was seranaded with ‘Deutchland uber Alles.’ I’ve not a drop of English blood (quarter Austrian, quarter Barvarian, quarter Russian and quarter Ukrainian, to be precise.) Walking back up the Vanxhall Road at the end of the first day’s play,where the Southern Cross was just in the ascendancy, I fell in with a couple of guys about my age. I explained what I was up to, gave them my name. ‘Fine,’ said one, a Scot. ‘David Fine, I knew a David Fine, a tailor in Glasgow, made me my first suit.’ That David Fine was jewish too. Twenty years ago I bought an electric kettle from a Nottingham bric-a-brac shop. Looking at the cheque the shop-keeper said ‘Which bit of Europe did they throw your lot out of.’ His name was Finer, from Lithunania. None are our real names, just those selected, like a test match squad, to avoid potential difficulties.

Where am I going here? Wars, their threat, prejudice and intolerance pull people apart, games can bring them together. That is the charm of cricket, which is why and how C L R James wrote Beyond The Boundary. ‘Those who only know cricket, do not know cricket.’

Enjoy it and best question only its circumstances.