SPECTATOR SPORT
As bright as a new ball
Frank Keating
THE PASSING mention in this corner a few weeks ago of my visit to Harold Lar- wood in Australia brought a flurry of phone calls and letters asking me to forward remembrances and good wishes to the now wizened elder who will forever remain one of the most famed of all cricketers. Lar- wood is 90 in November. He is stone blind. His mind is as bright as a new ball, his face as expressive, perky and beaky as a sparrow's. I would count myself mighty lucky to come across as rewarding an interview in 1994.
By fluke, when I had knocked on his door in the middle of March, it was 60 years almost to the day since Larwood and Dou- glas Jardine's infamous 'bodyline' side of 1932-33 had embarked at Sydney for home after its cool, cruel recapture of the Ashes at the end of a series which stirred colonial passions and hatreds like no other before or since. He had greeted me with dismissive suspicion in the porch of his small, splintery bungalow in a suburb of that same city.
`I simply bring greetings from England, sir,' I said. 'Don't you "sir" me,' he bridled, `I'm plain Harold, one-time coal-miner and one-time professional cricketer.' The accent is still ripely Nottingham.
However, because that `sir' proved I real- ly was from England, he supposed I could come in — 'but no cricket questions, mind, and certainly no bodyline. I've long vowed never to talk about them old days.'
But I was in. Sepia photographs speckle the walls of the little house in which he and Lois, his wife of 66 years, have lived since they arrived from England with their five bonny daughters in 1950 and Harold took a night job in a lemonade bottling factory.
Photos fade faster than fame. There is a big team picture of Percy Chapman's happy tour to Oz in 1928-29. 'Golly, sir, I forgot you were on that tour as well.' Already the sir is ignored, and at once the blind old hero is in a reverie of faraway vigour and youth and comradeship. He catches hold of your sleeve with one hand, and with the other points at the picture he cannot see and then, with a gnarled and knobbly, but unshaking, index-finger he identifies exactly every man in the group. 'At the back there, together, our two 'keepers, Duckie [George Duckworth], dear old Duckie, and next to him my best tour chum of all; he was a wonderful man was Les [Ames] and we kept in touch till the day he died, didn't we? And, see, in front of Les is Wally [Hammond]; he was a rum one, Wally, nice as pie one day, completely ignore you the next: moods, you know . . . ' and so on through the team. Sixteen of them are dead. The 17th and last is holding my
sleeve. In the group, Harold stands, stockily strong, in front of Jack Hobbs and next to Tich Freeman. What giants were confreres of this lovely old man.
Did he mind if I smoked? 'Of course not. In my prime I smoked 40 a day if we weren't in the field.' I tapped my pipe out on a small silver ashtray. He hears the clink. 'That's my most treasured posses- sion,' he says, 'read the inscription.' You read — 'To Harold. For the Ashes. From a Grate- ful Skipper.' The blind eyes mist over again: `Mr Jardine gave me that when we got back. He was a real leader of men. He didn't relent even when we came to the fifth Test with Ashes already won [Larwood 32 wkts at 19 apiece]. As soon as Bradman comes in, I twist my foot badly. No hope of bowling. "Can I go off, skip?" He nods towards Bradman. "Not till the little bas- tard's gone. Let him think you can come back any time, so stand at short mid-off and just stare at him." Hedley Verity comes on my end. I stare at Bradman as I'm told. Second ball, Bradman whiffs, panicky head up, and is bowled. Mr Jardine signals me off for treatment. Bradman and I walk off together; neither of us speak a word.'
Larwood never played for England again. `They wanted me to apologise. But I had nothing to apologise for, did I? Anyway, it's all forgotten, nobody remembers me now.' You stay for hours, then file the interview back to London — and within three months, 60 years late, good John Major awards Larwood the OBE.
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