Harold Pinter & Gaieties Cricket Club
Harold Pinter & Gaieties Cricket Club
The past is a mist – or so Harold Pinter asserted in his bleak late comedy Moonlight, about marriage, death and football referees. Back in the days when
Pinter’s beloved Gaieties CC toured the North East of England (2019 is my 38th season for the club), on one occasion at Gateshead Fell (in the North East) we
actually played in a proper mist. Summer had apparently evaded Newcastle entirely. Visibility was down to about twenty yards. If the ball was hit off the
square the only sure way for a fielder to know it was heading his way was Pinter’s imperious baritone barking his name from slip.
Founded in 1937 by Lupino Lane, noted vaudevillian headliner at the (longdemolished) Gaiety Theatre in The Strand, Gaieties CC plays wandering Sunday
cricket around what used to be called the Home Counties, but is nowadays referred to rather more prosaically as the M25 Corridor. I began (slowly) to get
to know Harold when I joined Gaieties as a nineteen year-old in 1981. He’d made his own debut in 1969 after taking his son Daniel to Alf Gover’s legendary indoor cricket school for some coaching. * Our association began in a shared passion for cricket (“certainly greater than sex,” he famously asserted. “Although sex isn’t too bad either”). With time that association became a deep friendship and the richest possible influence.
Peering into the mist of those early years, I dimly see myself arriving at the City Road ground of the Honourable Artillery Company, the sole cricket ground
situated within the Square Mile of the financial district. I’m proudly sporting my school First XI blazer, a sartorial eyesore of black and white zebra stripes. In
those days some Gaieties players thought public schoolboys needed bringing down a peg or two, and they comprehensively mocked my blazer. I decided
never to be seen in it again and the following week I gave it to a thrift shop. It’s about 1.30pm, half an hour before we’re due to start what is our first match
of the season. HAC sits smack on the northern boundary of the Square Mile. Next door Bunhill Fields burial ground is home to the tombs of William Blake.
Once through HAC’s gates, however, there is a shocking and unexpected sight. Instead of men in white at catching practice, before me is an incongruous scene of coordinated military preparation. Battle-dressed soldiers swarm the forecourt, drilling and checking equipment. Plumes of diesel fumes and the din of roaring engines choke the turbulent air. Armoured vehicles, Land Rovers and tanks occupy the parking spaces usually reserved on Sundays for cricketers,
umpires and spectators. Adjacent to the freshly white-washed sight-screen, furiously still, stands Gaieties’ Chairman and umpire Harold Pinter, aged fifty-two, swathed in the black that was his trademark, his Mount Rushmore countenance a silent rictus of incandescent fury. The agreement was, after all, to gather in combative innocence for a game of cricket. Instead we were confronted by the concretely brutal reality of Prime Minister Thatcher’s messianic mission to re-take the Falkland Islands from General Galtieri. Pinter barely uttered a word all afternoon, seething impotently at the unthinkable juxtaposition of the thing he
loved most – cricket – and the thing he detested most: human love of warfare. Perhaps it nudged memories the two trials he endured in 1948 for his
conscientious objection to National Service. On that occasion (the public record informs us) he told the Court: “No responsible man shall tarnish his soul by
joining such a stupid, sorrowful organisation as the army.” He was eighteen years old.
The entire match was played to a competing soundscape of barked orders, parading boots and throttled vehicles, the din reverberating eerily off the
surrounding buildings, drowning out batsmens’ calls and bowlers’ cries of ‘Howzat!’ Powerless to prevent any of this, Harold smoked his black
Sobranie, tipping back the contents of a hip flask as he stalked the boundary rope muttering the occasional “Christ!” No longer trusting of his eyesight, Pinter stopped playing regularly for Gaieties not long after that. Even after his playing career had ended, he liked to describe himself as ‘a promising batsman.’ In his day he captained, and fielded at second slip. As a (promising) batsman he always walked to the wicket with the intention of starting cautiously. But, although he could drive powerfully, and sometimes hit the ball straight for six (occasionally off the back foot), he never mastered the art of relaxation at the crease and frequently gave his wicket away, a frustrated victim of the classic rush of blood. Indeed the scorebook never lies, and the one for 1970 tells us that in the first six games he scored 0, 0, 10, 1, 10 and 0.
As a schoolboy Harold idolised Yorkshire and England’s star batsman Len Hutton. Like Hutton (the first man of humble origins to captain England), he
believed that when you get your opponents down you should drive them into the dust. Go for the jugular. Finish them off. When he was out in the middle he
rarely spoke to an opponent. It was not in fact in him to give his opponent an inch at any game, be it cricket, tennis, or bridge. On the sacred field of combat
banter was sacrilege. After he stopped playing he umpired regularly. I’m not absolutely certain he ever studied the rules, but he took that role very seriously
indeed. His concentration was fierce. He demanded silence on the field, and sometimes off the field as well, occasionally at the cost to small children of
confused tears. He indulged no back-chat with the bowler, and only infrequently succumbed, quite involuntarily, to the temptation to raise a partisan finger (once, legend has it, when no Gaieties fielder had appealed). Pinter vehemently detested losing. Defeat always resulted in wrathful, impotent
rage. One year, after a Harold Pinter XI had managed (against The Guardian) to translate certain victory into ignominious disaster, we stood together at the bar
waiting to be served. The silence was intimidating. I couldn’t handle it. Like an idiot I attempted consolation: “Well, it’s only a stupid bloody game.” On the bar
sat a reddish brick containing non-safety matches for smokers. He very slowly wrapped a vast hand around its rough edges: “If you don’t shut up, I’ll put this
brick through your skull.” I shut up.
Like the questionable aroma of unwashed kit in a long-sealed cricket bag, the Gaieties fixture card of the early 1970’s gives off an aroma ripe with the lumpen
poetry of the great municipal era: Southern Railways; Watneys; Vauxhall Motors; Pearl Assurance; as well as prosaic suburban hubs: Camberley; Hook &
Southborough; Banstead; Elmers End; Ickenham; Ewell and Ruxley; Edenbridge, and Brondesbury. Like aboriginal songlines, each cricket ground carries a small fragment of Harold’s Gaieties myth, eternally sustained in imagination. Skippering at Guy’s Hospital, with only seven players arrived and the rest
marooned miles short of the ground in terrible traffic, Harold strode into the changing room, a cricketing Captain Ahab sighting the white whale: ‘I’ve won the
toss, and we’re fielding!’ There was no arguing with him. Fielding at Ashtead, he resigned his captaincy in middle of the home side’s innings after being called a
very short word by his vice captain during a disagreement about a bowling change. In the next match the brand new captain (promoted, at Harold’s
adamantine insistence, from vice) came to his ex-skipper pleading for advice on a crucial tactical decision: “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
Once, in the field at Dover, Harold dropped two absolute sitters off consecutive balls. When it was our turn to bat he ran out our best batsman even as he was
just a few nurdled singles short of winning the match. On the other hand, he by no means always dropped every catch that came his way. The circumstances of a very special one, pouched in the slips at Stokesley off the bowling of our Bajan quickie, Ossie Gooding, were immortalised three decades later when Harold’s friend Alan Wilkinson sent him twenty-two forensic questions, published with Pinter’s acutely authoritative answers as The Catch (as a sample here’s Question number 3: “How fast was the ball travelling?” Answer: “Quick.”). We still play every year at Sidcup – a singularly un-idyllic ground, but, because of
the tramp’s lines in The Caretaker about needing to reach Sidcup in order to retrieve his papers, one with authentic Pinteresque resonance. The fixture
almost self-destructed a few years before Harold died. The match had been scheduled recklessly close to the start of Sidcup’s rugby season. Late in the
afternoon play was subjected to savage mockery by two inebriated streakers erupting like banshees onto the pitch from a raucous rugby club barbecue.
Harold’s subsequent outrage was only mollified by written assurances from the Chairman of Sidcup Rugby Club: “Unfortunately the two members cannot
personally apologise for their actions because they have left the country. But, as President of the Rugby Club, I would like to apologise on their behalfs.
Yours, in Sport, Phil West.”
It’s summer here in London now, and Gaieties have just completed their eleventh season since the passing of their Chairman. After he died (on Christmas Eve,
2008) the club reeled. Beckett’s lines from The Unnamable haunted us: In the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. It would be futile to deny that we staggered around the M25 in shock for a couple of summers. But we knew what Harold would have wanted, so somehow we went on. (Harold had his bleak days, but his literary idol was bleaker. Once, while walking to Lord’s to watch England play Australia, Beckett’s companion remarked: “On a day like this it’s good to be alive”. Beckett’s reply: “Well I wouldn’t go as far as that.”).
Glancing up from the laptop screen I see pinned before me a small photo of a painting of Pinter batting in the nets **, commissioned by his fellow Gaieties to
express love and gratitude for four decades of devoted service. The picture was presented at a club dinner to mark his Nobel Prize. Harold was completely
bowled over, gazing upon the image of his younger self in astonishment , as close to speechless joy as I ever saw him. The next day a note arrived, absolutely
typical in its economy and precision: “A wonderful evening. Thank you. Harold.” Beneath those terse syllables flows a subterranean torrent of emotion. It was
impossible for him to grope about with words to express the intensity of his feeling for the game, for the club. There was always within him, about the things
he cared for passionately, such depth and proportion of true sentiment that he sometimes feared it might overwhelm him. He was moved. That was all.
Harold was Gaieties. Still is. Always will be. Each year at the conclusion of the last game of the season at Hampstead, in fading light, all players hushed, he spoke these favourite lines from At Lords by Francis Thompson. It’s a tradition we maintain in his honour:
For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run stealers flicker to and fro, to and fro:
O my Hornby and my Barlow, long ago.
Harry Burton, GCC Chairman
*Harold’s own assessment of his cricketing talent was always ‘a promising batsman’. Fred Paolozzi, a flyman at the London Palladium and on the coaching
staff at Gover’s in his spare time, dared Harold to put on some pads and have a bat. Paolozzi was impressed enough to invite Harold to turn out for Gaieties. Within a couple of years Harold was club captain.
**painted by Joe Hill
