Gilbert: The Last Years of WG Grace Page 3

  To his credit Kortright kept his head down and batted on sensibly, accumulating runs from bad balls and blocking the good ones, with Grace doing likewise at the other end. So bonded had the two men become in their fierce resilience that with 20 minutes to play Grace walked up the wicket between overs and held out his hand. Without hesitation Kortright shook it. No words were spoken, their eyes barely met, but their antagonism had been entirely extinguished by their increasingly extraordinary batting partnership.

  It was four minutes before seven o’clock when Lockwood returned at the Pavilion End. Kortright took strike, the low sun in his eyes. They’d batted together for nearly an hour and a half now, almost exactly doubling the total, and Kortright had scored 46, easily the highest score of the innings. The first two deliveries were straight, quick, well-pitched up and blocked by Kortright with solid defensive strokes, the second presenting such a formidable defence that W.G. let out a spontaneous, ‘Oh, well played, well played’ from the non-striker’s end. The third ball was slower, pitching on a length outside off stump. Confident now, the job all but done, and perhaps sensing a rare opportunity for a half-century, Kortright swished at the ball, catching it low on the bat and watching in horror as it curled through the air to disappear into the huge, safe Yorkshire hands of Schofield Haigh running around from cover. Kortright looked at the sky and roared his frustration. The crowd, spellbound and silent until now, broke into loud applause in appreciation of the result but also of the remarkable effort of the last pair at the wicket.

  As he walked slowly from the wicket, dragging his bat behind him, Kortright still couldn’t meet Grace’s eye.

  ‘I’m sorry, Doc,’ he said, ‘I thought it was one to hit.’

  ‘Well played, Korty,’ came the reply. ‘You played your natural game, I asked for nothing more.’

  With that he took Kortright’s arm and the two of them set off for the Pavilion, disappearing into a cheering throng of three-piece suits, watch chains and straw boaters. They eventually reached the gate, went up the steps together through a forest of silk hats and disappeared into the Long Room. Making their way to the dressing-room, still arm in arm, they found the rest of the team waiting for them, standing and applauding to a man. The doors on to the balcony were open and the applause and cheering from below washed up over the balcony in waves.

  ‘Come on, Korty,’ said Grace, ‘out we go.’ He knew the Essex man would be blaming himself for losing the match but, if he was honest with himself, he’d have played exactly the same shot. He’d have timed it better, of course, but he wasn’t going to blame the man for it, Korty wasn’t a batsman and had already played out of his skin, and Grace was determined nobody else would blame him either.

  He ushered the Essex man on to the balcony where the crowd gave them a huge reception. Finally, Kortright broke into a smile and waved. The Doctor did likewise. In different ways he and Kortright had finished the game either side of fifty.

  Saturday 12 November 1898

  There was a knock at the study door. ‘Come in,’ he said, and the door opened.

  ‘Ah, hello, Porritt, have a seat.’

  Only the most eagle-eyed would have noticed the slight stoop to Arthur Porritt’s shoulders on entering the room. When the publisher James Bowden had asked him if he’d care to undertake the writing of W.G.’s memoirs he’d been as delighted as he was excited. This was a terrific opportunity. Everyone knew W.G. Grace; there was barely a person in the land, let alone a cricket enthusiast, who couldn’t identify him by his immense height, girth and beard. So great was his reputation and so well-known his unique appearance that he was almost, in the public sense, a caricature of himself. That was what motivated Porritt: that people only knew the caricature. If everybody knew W.G., how many could say they really, truly knew W.G.? Here was the best opportunity yet to look behind the curtain of the public face and share the real man with the reading public, his motivations, his methods, his beliefs, his hopes and dreams and desires, so that they might know what lay behind the familiar façade of cricketing genius. Yes, Porritt thought, he was the man for the job. As an interviewer of some experience he was just the fellow to extract the great man’s innermost thoughts. Far from being a trite memoir of platitudes and statistics, this book would be a landmark of biography. While the name W.G. Grace on the spine would guarantee sales, Porritt had set out to make this a book of genuine substance, a book whose content would ensure its longevity rather than a brief burst of publicity and sales before a plummet towards the back shelves of the antiquarian book dealers. This, this, would be a keeper.

  Except it wasn’t really working out that way. While he had been delighted to find that Grace had terrific recall and a comprehensive collection of records and statistics at his fingertips in books, annuals and journals, it was when Porritt tried to coax him beyond the bare facts of his achievements, to get beneath the skin of the Champion, that the problems began. There was nothing. He was a blank canvas presented as a finished work. Whenever he tried to push his subject for more detail, more nuance, more W.G., he’d be greeted with nothing more than a few rapid blinks and the reassertion of the basic facts just established in a manner that suggested Grace believed the writer had temporarily lost his hearing.

  Perhaps today would be different, he’d thought. Today he wanted to talk about Grace’s 100th hundred, made three years earlier against Somerset at Bristol in Grace’s 47th year. Surely such a milestone would elicit more than a cursory summary and give the book some depth. W.G. watched as Porritt opened his briefcase and took out his notebook. He rested his hands on his stomach and swung gently back and forth on his chair. He liked Porritt. It was a good job he did, too, as this book business was becoming a frightful chore. He wasn’t sure why anyone might want to read a reworking of his playing career when such information was available elsewhere – and he’d covered quite a lot of the same ground in Cricket seven years earlier – but the money he’d negotiated from the publisher was more than enough to warrant passing a few afternoons in Porritt’s agreeable company. The man did ask an infernal amount of silly questions, though.

  ‘How are you this afternoon, Doctor?’ asked Porritt.

  ‘Oh, not too bad thank you, Porritt,’ he answered. ‘We’re settling into the house now and living in London isn’t all that different to what I’m used to.’

  ‘London County has you well provided for here, Doctor, it’s a beautiful house.’

  ‘It will suffice for now, yes. Sydenham is convenient for my son Charles, too, as he is to study engineering close to the Crystal Palace. Now, shall we begin?’

  Much as he enjoyed Porritt’s company he did not wish to prolong the encounter with small talk.

  ‘Annie will bring us some tea presently.’

  Porritt crossed his legs and smoothed his notebook against his thigh.

  ‘That’s most kind, thank you. I thought this afternoon we might talk about your hundredth century, Doctor, if that suits?’

  ‘A memorable day, Porritt, a memorable day indeed,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair. ‘Now: it was a match against Somerset, at Ashley Down, would have been three years ago in May. They batted first; I think we lost the toss but we bowled them out for around 300, I took five wickets, one of their openers got a hundred. Fowler, I think it was, but I’m sure you can check that. We had to bat for about an hour, I think, at the end of the day and lost two early wickets but my godson Townsend and I saw us through to the close.

  ‘Come the next day we put on more than 200, if I recall correctly, and I think I do, before Charles was out just short of his century. I went on to get 288 and we won the match by nine wickets.’

  He sat back in his chair, pleased with himself. It was an important landmark and one people would be interested in: Porritt would be able to put a little flesh on the bones, but he was pleased with what he remembered of it off the top of his head.

  Porritt was looking at him, expectantly, as if he would continue. There was a tap at the door and
Annie brought in the tea tray, placing it on the table between them.

  ‘Thank you, Annie,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ echoed Porritt, before looking back at him with the same expression of expectation.

  ‘Annie came up to London with us from Bristol,’ said Grace. ‘She’s practically one of the family, aren’t you, Annie?’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ she replied shyly as she left the room, ‘it was most kind of you to keep me in your employ.’

  ‘We also inherited my wife’s elderly Aunt Caroline,’ said Grace in a low voice, raising his eyes to the ceiling to indicate her presence upstairs, ‘but you can’t have everything, I suppose. Don’t write that down, Porritt.’

  The journalist smiled.

  ‘I’m sure she’s as fine a lady as your wife, Doctor,’ he said. ‘But back to the subject of our discussion, if I may. Your hundredth century. How did it feel to reach that astonishing milestone?’

  ‘Well, if I recall correctly, I brought up my century by hitting a full toss from Sammy Woods to the mid-off boundary.’

  ‘And what went through your mind as the ball went to the boundary?’

  ‘I knew it was hit well enough that I wouldn’t need to run.’

  Frustration flickered fleetingly across Porritt’s brow like the shadow of a bird flying past a window. Grace didn’t notice.

  ‘You must have been elated? Or perhaps relieved?’

  ‘I was happy, of course I was. I was also pleased that my godson was batting at the other end and was thus the first to shake my hand. With the match being at Bristol my brothers were also there, as well as my Uncle Pocock. When I reached my double-century, E.M. sent a magnum of champagne out to the wicket.’

  ‘But … surely there must be more you can tell me, about how it actually felt?’

  He was a little surprised at Porritt’s persistence. Had he not already told him he was happy?

  ‘It was my highest score since 1876, Porritt, when I made 318 against Yorkshire, so as well as my hundredth century it was a memorable innings in its own right.’

  ‘But what was going through your mind, Doctor? Were you nervous approaching the hundred?’

  Faint hackles of irritation began to rise in Grace at Porritt’s inexplicable persistence.

  ‘I can’t rightly recall,’ he said a little sharply. ‘You must understand that I am fifty years old, Porritt, I have played many innings in my time and scored a great number of runs from a great number of deliveries on a great number of pitches. I can’t be expected to give a ball-by-ball account of each of them because I don’t remember them all. They just sort of blend into one.’

  ‘Of course, Doctor, I don’t expect you to recall every ball or even every over, but with it being such an important and auspicious landmark for you, and indeed the game of cricket in general, I think your readers would very much enjoy any insight you can give them into what the experience actually felt like. People want to put themselves in the place of W.G. Grace as he was making that hundredth century, what thoughts were in his mind, what the whole experience of such a big innings and extraordinary landmark means to W.G. Grace as a man and as a batsman.’

  Grace was silent for a few moments.

  ‘I want to help you, Porritt, truly I do,’ he said, ‘but to be perfectly honest with you I did not feel anything. I had too much to do watching the bowling and seeing how the fieldsmen were moved about to think anything. It’s as simple as that.

  ‘I’d reached the late nineties and was finding it difficult to get the ball away due to some fine bowling. Then dear old Sammy Woods served me up a full toss and I drove it to the boundary just as I would any other full toss in any other game in any other situation. I don’t know what else I can tell you. I was happy, as I’m always happy to make a big score. The crowd gave me a great cheer, everyone on the field shook my hand and then I marked my guard again and prepared for the next delivery. I got my head down, my eye was in and I went on to make 288, my highest score in a long time. It was all very satisfactory and crucial to our going on to win the game convincingly. Now, will you have some tea and we shall talk of the next subject?’

  Tuesday 6 February 1899

  He opened the door from the drawing room into the garden, stepped down on to the gravel and fell to his knees. All was still but for the tendrils of cold now working their way between the buttons of his shirt; icy fingers that felt their way over his collar and down the back of his neck, that wound between his bare toes and between his fingers. Breath clouds formed in front of his face, drifting up and away into the pre-dawn. The Old Man looked up at the deep royal blue above the skeletal trees, spread his arms wide, opened his mouth and let out a guttural roar of uncontained anguish.

  He toppled forward on to his hands and tears fell on to the stones. Not Bessie, not his Bessie, please, not his Bessie. Of all the children, she had gladdened his heart the most, lifting his spirits every time she entered a room, giggling as he grabbed her and pulled her to him, planting a kiss on her blood-flushed cheek. The sun shone in his heart when Bessie was around; her smile, her laugh, the way she embraced life and then wrung it out for all its goodness and worth.

  The sight of her so pale in that bed, the pink rash across her stomach when she kicked off the blankets and wrenched at her nightdress, the muttering, the sweat, the fever and the gradual fading away until that moment a few minutes ago when the muttering, the twitching and the breathing stopped and she was still. All was still. The stillness spread steadily through the entire house and he had to get out, to escape the stifling nothingness. Even here, outside, the air was still and nothing moved, as if the life leaving Bessie had caused everything to stop, as if the world no longer turned, as if the last vestiges of the night’s darkness would never lift. The realisation that this day would soon begin in earnest and begin without Bessie tore at his heart. She had left the world in darkness when in life she’d carried her light everywhere she went.

  Bessie was the child who reminded him most of himself. Her infectious laughter as she’d bowled underarm to him in the garden at Downend as a child, the heart-bursting pride he’d felt watching her score a half-century at 15 years old for the Ladies of Clifton against the Ladies of Glamorgan, playing exuberant shots all around the wicket in a way that others noted was reminiscent of himself. He thought of the tears in her eyes when he’d first seen her after making his 100th century. She’d even smiled and stroked his face when he’d told her on her 17th birthday the time had come for her to stop playing cricket as it was a game for girls that was too vulgar for grown women, and she never even mentioned the subject again.

  He remembered the coldness in his stomach that day just before Christmas when first he’d realised what was causing her fever. He’d brought in a colleague for another opinion, hoping against hope that he was mistaken, but within seconds of seeing her the man had taken off his spectacles, looked away from W.G.’s imploring eyes, given one shake of his head, touched him lightly on the forearm and left without a word.

  He’d sat with her most afternoons, watching the light of youth fade gradually from her grey-green eyes, watching her become someone and something he didn’t recognise as his brilliant, life-giving Bessie. He’d tried to smile as she’d looked at him with empty eyes, tried to keep her spirits up with talk of recovery and the forthcoming season, but he knew, and worst of all he knew that she knew. He’d seen typhoid knock the fight out of people in his years of practice among the poor of Bristol; when the fight went out of Bessie, the supreme fighter of them all, when her body became so limp and her murmurs so fatigued, he knew the end was close. He’d hoped and prayed for a turnaround, that the sheer force of her personality would surge through to conquer the infection, but deep down he knew all hope was gone.

  ‘For the Lord’s sake come inside, Gilbert, this is no time to be out there.’

  Agnes’s voice quivered and cracked behind him. He heaved his bulk upright and turned to see her in the doorway, one hand on th
e frame, even in the morning gloaming her eyes visibly red-rimmed and dark. She turned and went back inside, to the gloom and stillness of the house.

  He stood for a moment, glanced up at the dark window of Bessie’s room, wiped irritably at his cheek with the back of his hand and then followed, pushing the door closed behind him.

  Sunday 28 May 1899

  He was still seething. For two days he’d read and reread the letter and still he couldn’t believe the nerve of them. He’d left it on the top of a pile of correspondence on the desk in his study but all weekend had kept returning to it, as if hoping it might say something different after all.

  ‘How dare they? How dare they?’ he railed at Agnes, who knew just the appropriate noises to make in reply. Even when he wasn’t actually saying anything he was brooding, muttering, pursing his lips and tugging at his beard. She’d seen him in funks over the years, usually regarding some umpiring decision, but this time she could practically see lightning playing about his temples. They were both still grieving for Bessie. Her death was still raw and the house still felt as though there were a vacuum where Bessie should be. Agnes knew that her husband’s anger was fuelled at least in part by the broken heart he still nursed for his daughter and made allowances accordingly.

  She’d been glad that he’d had the organisation of the new London County club to occupy his time before the season commenced; it gave him a focus. It was, of course, the reason why they’d moved from Bristol altogether once his general practice had ended with the redrawing of the parish union boundaries and he and other GPs had resigned in protest. But since they had arrived he’d thrown himself into the London County job, becoming involved in every aspect of the new club from supervising the construction of the pavilion to engaging the old Gloucestershire bowler Murch as a ground professional. He’d even seen to the lopping of tree branches that threw shadows across the wicket once the sun began to sink.