The Nets

I walked past the Colchester cricket ground the other day and stopped when I saw these steel frames over to one side of the field. The cage-like things on the left are the 'nets', so-called because in the season they are covered with heavy netting with the nearer end open. At the far, enclosed end are stumps which a batsman defends against a bowler coming in from this end. The batsman can hit the ball as hard as he likes as most of the power of the ball is absorbed by the netting, unless he drives it directly at the bowler.

In this picture of me at my prep school, Glengorse, taken in either 1957 or 1958, I look happy in my cricketing whites. The fact is that I really didn't enjoy cricket at all, which was a great disappointment to my father who played for years and then became one of the Mombasa Sports Club's top umpires. Despite this, I was picked for the school's 1st XI.

I particularly hated practising in the nets. There was no incentive for the bowler to be kind to the batsman, so batting in them was, to a weak batsman like me, no fun and, very often, positively dangerous.

Worse, as the team's wicket keeper, I was sometimes told by the teacher who coached us to practise wicket-keeping behind the batsman in the nets. This was horrible as there was very little room between the stumps and the back net, so one couldn't stand back from them if the delivery was fast.

Inevitably, as I saw it, I lost sight of a particularly nasty ball which the batsman missed and which then bounced up and hit me square in the face. It made a bloody mess of my lips and chipped one of my front teeth.

I'm the one at top right in the team photo, the one who, perhaps understandably, is looking thoroughly pissed off.