Netherland. Joseph O’Neill

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СКАЧАТЬ me, as I paused on 19th Street two decades later, was the memory of lovely solitary cycle rides, on sunny and tranquil mornings like this one in Chelsea, through the fragmented brilliance of the woods around the HBS grounds, my red Gray-Nicolls bag resting between the handlebars of my bicycle, a lambswool sweater slung over my shoulders. Lacoste polo shirts, bright V-necked sweaters, brogues, diamond-patterned Burlington socks, corduroy trousers: I and men I knew dressed that way, even as teenagers. Then came a second memory, of my mother watching me play. It was her habit to unfold a portable chair by the western sightscreen and to sit there for hours, grading homework and occasionally looking up to follow the game. Although always friendly, she rarely spoke to the other spectators scattered along the boundary’s whitewashed planks, which, laid end to end, distantly encircled the batsman and marked the edge of his innings’ impermanent heaven. Your innings might be over in a second, as a life in eternity. Out, you trudged off miserably, irrevocably dismissed into the nothingness of the non-participant: the amateur cricketer does not enjoy, as the baseballer does, the glimmering prospect of numerous at-bats. You get only one chance, in the blazing middle. When neither fielding nor batting, I and a teammate or two would embark on a rondje – a stroll round the field – smoking cigarettes and acknowledging various parents and interested parties. My mother was known independently to many of the boys at the club because they were current or former pupils of hers.

      ‘Dag, mevrouw van den Broek. Alles goed?’

      ‘Ja, dank je, Willem.’

      We were cordial, somewhat arrogant young men, in accordance with our upbringing.

      My cricket career at HBS dwindled while I studied classics at Leiden University. When my first adult job, with Shell Oil, returned me to The Hague at the age of twenty-four, I had grown away from my club. I would not play cricket again until years later, when I went to London to become an analyst at D——Bank and joined South Bank Cricket Club, whose home, at Turney Road, was near Herne Hill, in the south of the city. On marvellously shorn Surrey village greens – the smell of grass when mown in May provokes in me pangs of emotion that I still dare not dwell on – we battled gently for victory and drank warm beer on the steps of ancient wooden pavilions. Once, after a shaky start to the season, I booked a private net at Lord’s. An elderly coach with the countenance of a butler fed balls into a bowling machine and declared, ‘Good shot, sir,’ each time my bat connected with one of the long hops and half-volleys the machine amiably spat out. All of it was agreeable, English and enchanting; but I quit after a couple of seasons. With my mother no longer watching, cricket was never quite the same again.

      Rachel came to Turney Road once. She approached on foot across the green blankness of the sports ground. My team was fielding, and for an hour she sat by herself on the grass. I could sense her boredom from a hundred yards. Between innings, when the teams drank tea and ate cakes and sandwiches, she and I got together. I brought her a cup of tea and sat down with her, self-consciously detached from the rows of players seated at the main table. ‘Sandwich?’ I said, offering her one of mine, a gluey, cheesy thing that only a starving player could bring himself to eat. She shook her head. ‘How can you bear it?’ she blurted. ‘All that standing around.’ I smiled regretfully. Not wanting to spoil my afternoon, she said, ‘Although you do look nice in that hat.’ It was her only attempt at spectatorship.

      To my surprise, my mother continued attending matches at HBS even when I no longer played. It had not dawned on her son that following his progress might not have been her main purpose. Though comfortable at the club, my mother never discovered the talent for jolliness that animated many of the older characters for whom the place was a home away from home. The clubhouse, with its billiards tables and borreltjes, was not for her. At stumps she would fold up her chair and make her way directly to the car park, smiling at the many familiar faces she saw. Only now do I appreciate how for her, too, there must have been balminess in the sights and sounds and rhythms of a full day’s cricket, in which unhurried time is portioned out by the ticking of ball against bat, and only now do I ask myself about the thoughts occupying her mind as she sat there with a red blanket over her knees, sometimes from eleven in the morning till six or seven in the evening. She was unrevealing about such matters. When she spoke about my father, it would only be to mention a small fact or two – how his job at the air ministry had bored him; how he liked to eat raw herring, slathered in onions and dangled vertically into the mouth, in Scheveningen; how he loved Cassius Clay. My father, Marcel van den Broek, was significantly older than my mother. She was thirty-three when they married, in 1966, and he was forty-three. In January, 1970, my father was the front-seat passenger in a car travelling near Breda, in the south of the country. There was an accident and he flew through the windscreen. He was killed. I was not yet two.

      So I walked directly from 19th Street to the storage unit by Chelsea Piers where our loft furnishings had been dumped, and searched around for the cricketing gear I’d brought with me from Europe and which it had never occurred to me either to throw out or to use. The Duncan Fearnley trunk was in a corner at the back. The latches flipped up with a snap, releasing that bitter marmalade odour of neglected cricket apparel. It was all there, the old kit: the Slazenger Viv Richards batting pads with stuffing leaking from the seams; thick-fingered, sweat-darkened batting gloves; unwashed white socks; an anti-erotic jockstrap; and my HBS sweater, moth-eaten and shrunken, with the red V between two black Vs at the neck and, over the heart, two black ticks emblemising crows. I pulled out my old bat. It was more cracked than I remembered. The traces of long-gone cricket balls still reddened its blade. I gripped the worn rubber-sleeved handle with bare hands and crouched into a batting stance. Seeing a fast half-volley land by some boxed books, I strode with my left foot to the pitch of the ball and dreamily smashed it.

      I checked my watch. It was not too late to catch a taxi to Staten Island.

      When I arrived at Walker Park, I thought I’d come to the wrong place. There seemed no room, in the grassy opening visible from Bard Avenue, for cricket; then I saw the orange-pink batting track and realised, to my dismay, that this must be it.

      I had made the mistake of being punctual. Except for two figures out in the middle of the field, who laboured with a metal hand-roller on the track – during the week, the locals heedlessly scuffed the clay – there was nobody around. I waited by the clubhouse in a state of discouragement. A full hour after the appointed time, a few more Staten Island players showed up. Umar, my sole contact, was not among them. The metal hatch to the basement was opened, and out of it were fetched plastic chairs, a couple of tables and, dramatically, the twenty-five-yard-long coconut-fibre matting, rolled into a giant bulging cigar-like cylinder. Six men carried the mat out to the middle, bearing it aloft on three stumps. The visiting team suddenly appeared, hanging around in the ominous aura that always surrounds opponents before a match. I decided to walk over to the home players hammering pins into the loops that fringed the mat. ‘Umar told me to come along,’ I announced. There was a brief discussion among the more senior men. ‘Speak to the captain,’ one of them said, directing me back to the clubhouse.

      The captain, baffled by my presence, told me to wait a while. Now some of the players had changed into whites and were taking practice catches. Most of the home team appeared to be Indians. They spoke a rough English, to my ears barely comprehensible, that I took to be foreign to them. It wasn’t until later that I understood they were West Indians, not Asians, and their speech – a spiky dialect of grammatical short cuts and jewel-like expressions I’d never heard before – was conducted in their first and only language.

      After a few secretive consultations between the captain and one or two others, it was suggested to me that I come back some other week and play a friendly match; this I did. I continued to play for the rest of the summer. Because my availability coincided with the cycle of away games, every fortnight I found myself going by taxi to Queens or Brooklyn or hitching a ride with teammates to more faraway destinations. We rendezvoused on Canal Street or in Jersey City. The minibus pulled up and a hand hung out of the passenger-seat window, inviting a slap. ‘Wh’appening, Hans, baby?’ ‘Whassup, Joey. Hey, Salim СКАЧАТЬ