John - Following on : a memoir of teenage obsession and terrible cricket

FOLLOWING ON

To Mum, Dad and Kate

FOLLOWING ON

A MEMOIR OF TEENAGE OBSESSION AND TERRIBLE CRICKET

EMMA JOHN

There be some sports are painful, and their labour

Delight in them sets off. Some kinds of baseness

Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters

Point to rich ends.

The Tempest, William Shakespeare

Contents

It all started with the posters.

My sister Kate and I were visiting my parents. It was a sunny summers day, and we had just eaten one of our mothers over-generous Sunday roasts. These are two-meat, four-veg affairs, generally followed by a choice of three puddings, the choice being how large a piece of each you eat. Now we were outside recovering on their lawn, sprawled in those indecorous post-lunch poses you can only assume in front of immediate family, and making occasional, food-related groans.

At some stage, our father disappeared to the basement. My parents live in a thatched cottage that sits alongside the Grand Union Canal. In the absence of a loft their cold, concreted basement, inconveniently located below the waterline of the canal and thus frequently flooded, has become the repository for all the crap that family life has accumulated. Obsolete electricals, schoolbooks kept for sentimentalitys sake, the lampshade that has needed repairing for the last 20 years, and box files of family photos that never made it into albums: theyre all condemned to this mouldy oubliette.

The basement is smelly and morbidly damp. It is packed floor to impossibly low ceiling with crates and boxes that are immovable, utterly unidentifiable, and guarded by ferocious spiders. Dad is the only person brave enough to regularly venture into the basement, but even he has given up pretending to know what it contains, or why.

I cant remember why hed gone down there that day perhaps to find some garden furniture or a long-lost board game. When he re-emerged into the garden, he was dragging something huge and dusty behind him.

Look what I found!

Two gigantic sheets of cardboard were hinged together in imitation of an artists portfolio and sealed at the edges with parcel tape. The packages contents bulged pregnantly, and I knew what they were. I had made the cardboard folder, just like Id made everything it contained.

Oh God, my sister groaned. Is that what I think it is?

We slit the tape and opened it up on the ground. Dozens of sheets of coloured card spilled out, each covered in clippings from the sports pages and photographs cut out of magazines. Neatly arranged and mounted, the newsprint had been carefully protected with a layer of sticky-back plastic so that the sheets reflected the sun back into our faces. Dry little balls of Blu-Tack, some with flakes of white paint and wallpaper still clinging to them, dotted their reverse sides.

Oh, its your cricket posters! our mother cried. You used to sit up in your room for hours making those! She sighed nostalgically. You were such an industrious teenager.

She was such a nerd, snorted my sister.

Looking up at us from the ground were dozens of men, most in their twenties, some a little older. A few wore tracksuits or blazers, but the majority were clothed in the unique and instantly recognisable costume of the cricket field: the long trousers with elasticated waists, the loose-fitting collared shirt, all in an off-white shade last fashionable in the 19th century. Some of the men in the pictures were smiling and punching the air, as if something wonderful had just happened to them. A far greater number looked dejected, weary and worn out.

Their pictures were accompanied by captions and headlines that provided the context for their misery. England lose again. Englands worst day. Is this the death of English cricket? Large blocks of newsprint sought to answer this and other questions. In boxes of smaller type, names and figures were laid out in the arcane architecture of the cricket scorecard:

If you knew how to decipher the code contained in these boxes, the players morose expressions made even more sense. All of the above pictures, match reports, scorecards were mounted on sheets of A1 card in bright, confectionery colours, which gave a comically cheerful background to their prevailing message of doom.

As a teenage girl, I was in love with the England cricket team, and these homemade posters had covered my bedroom walls. They were the outward expression of my grand passion, and Id cut and pasted them together with the fastidious care of a Blue-Peter -watching Girl Guide, and the commitment of a monomaniac serial killer.

It was the 1990s, a time when the cool girls at school were concerned with whether to follow Blur or Oasis, and the less cool ones were choosing between Brian Harvey and Marti Pellow. The only men in whites considered acceptable crushes were Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman , and Kevin Costner in No Way Out . Hero-worshipping the national cricket team was, for a girl of 14, bizarre behaviour. Most of my school mates found following sport of any kind a thoroughly unengaging and pointless endeavour, although the term they preferred was completely boring. These included my best friends, who were prepared to tolerate my obsession so long as I never tried to talk to them about it.

To those who had even the slightest acquaintance with sport, however, my teenage obsession made even less sense. At that time, Englands cricketers were losers. Literally, losers. They got beaten by almost every team they played against, and often in the most depressing and humiliating way possible. Ennobling them, idolising them, and preserving memories of their less than triumphant progress under sticky-back plastic that was weird.

As we spread the posters out to get a better look, my own creativity surprised me. Among the giant rectangles, smaller, quirky shapes revealed where space had run low, and Id fashioned pieces of card to utilise every square inch of wall or ceiling, fitting them into a crazy jigsaw. Some contained only a single image a picture of the England captain training at the gym, or an advert for the beer that sponsored the teams kit. The makeshift cardboard folder itself bore a florid insignia declaring Emmas Cricket Posters, along with what Id clearly thought were witty annotations:

Contents:

44 x Michael Atherton

35 x Angus Fraser

12 x Alec Stewart

1 x Very Angry Illingworth (Ray, not Richard)

Caution: this pack includes 3 Brian Laras. Strictly no wayward bowling.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

For the first time, I noticed the peculiar and frequently downbeat nature of the images I had spent my teenage years surrounded by. Batsmen contorting themselves to avoid the 90 mile-an-hour missile intended for their body. Grim-faced men sitting on a balcony, or huddled in anxious conference on the field. A man in a suit, on crutches, waiting for his flight home. All these pictures of physical pain and sporting heartbreak. All these epithets of failure in 72-point bold type. These were what Id chosen to go to sleep and wake up next to. My sister captured the mood with her usual pith. You really were a loser, she observed, safe in the knowledge that none of the Bon Jovi or Cliff Richard posters with which her bedroom had been decorated were down in the basement, awaiting their own moment of revelation.