Brighton Beamers Cricket Club

THE CAMPAIGN DIARY OF CAPTAIN ARTHUR
21st Regiment of Heavy Horse (The Glorious Beamers)

Splendid start to season. Couldn't be bettered. First April start in twenty years. Sun blazing out of a cloudless sky like a red-faced old cricket captain in a bright red cravat with a bottle of cheap cherry brandy under his portcullis. Laid awake for nights poring over battered cloth maps, pondering the nuances of strategy. Lost the bloody toss. Strategy in tatters. Banked on batting first. Main feature of game plan. Beamers inserted. For God's sake.

Mussett thundering in from the Preston Drove end like a Bengal Lancer with a poison dart up his arse. Jonners wakes up in the first over to the fact he hasn't any pads on. Bloody ludicrous. Sort of thing that gives the team a bad name. Wandered off to the boundary like a French ferry in a Flanders fog. Fielders in hysterics. Batsmen bewildered. I know it's early in the season, but there are certain things you leave to the players' own good judgement. What's the country coming to? The chaps trust their small change to this man. My God, but it's a bad business.

The Generals stare at the strange cypher. "Another enigma?" wonders one "No" comes the reply, "It's Digital, it's all Ones and Noughts."

Newick gave it a fair old shake of the parson's breeches. Jolly fine bunch of men. Very amicable. Especially towards Bailey, who downed two early dollies, that can only really be described as Dame Dolly's Dolly Mixtures from the Dolly Farm. To be fair he made no excuses. He was in the right place, but presumably at the wrong time. Fingers caught in his lanyards. We've all done it. Made amends at the end though. Picked up a sharp one. Takes it all in his stride these days, the Little Master. Went through far worse in the Punjab, I understand. Poor fellow.

Wickets tumbled throughout the afternoon. Brigadier Benfield held on to a snorter at gulley as if he was catching a flat-nosed bullet from an Afghani jezail between his teeth. Lost a whole platoon to full tosses on the North West Frontier. Never been the same since. Bowled a few overs at the end, dragging his gammy leg behind him. Nobody could read the spin he put on the ball. Speaks seventy-three tribal languages. Encryption expert. Damned clever fellow. The enemy didn't stand a chance. Opposition, I mean. Wrong word, enemy. Sorry.

Beamers put the Newick batting to the sword. Field Marshall, the Lord Bassam, spotted his opportunity when he espied a small child emerge from a clearing and decided to let loose a cannonade of grape at the young shaver. Cave bowled line and length with increasing gusto.

The sun goes down considerably slower than the Beamers middle order.

Every ball faster than the last, until it was so fast nobody could see the ball anymore, and he disappeared into a vortex of his own making, leaving only the smoking boot prints of his follow-through, and a vapour trail from his last appeal disappearing down the long haul routes high above Africa towards the Cape of Storms. To this day, people muse about his strange going, and ask after him: "Has anybody here seen Colonel Cave?"

As the Bard himself put it, every exit is an entrance somewhere else, and with the bowlers manly work accomplished, it was time for the real sport to begin. Batting. The art of batsmanship. Swordsmen against cannon-haulers. Popinjays against badgers. Rose-petals against ragwort. Biffed a few balls into no-man's-land, but fell out of puff. The verdigris of winter seemed to have clambered over the old battlements. Anyway. 120 to win. Game seemed in the bag - like a brace of plump partridge at the Jaipur gymkhana. Then. Bloody batting collapse. Smith. Arthur. Cave. Davies. Siddens. Cut down in their prime with a rusty cutlass. Before their prime, most of them. Fifty to get. Seven down.

Jim stared at his pint. "Why that shot, why then?" Over and over in his mind the question bubbled like Oxtail soup on a medium gas..

Richard Mussett and Brigadier Benfield at the crease. Jonners and Bassam to come. A pretty pickle. A spicy pickle from the oldest pickle shop in Peshawar. My father told me that a few days after Rorke's Drift, he had the honour of witnessing the Relief of Rigby's Bottom from the basket of a hot air balloon, floating high above the veldt, with only a glass of cold champagne and Tsar Petroc XIV of Monrovia for company. The stink of cordite and the small-boned flap of amused hunting birds gave the old autocrat a migraine. The greatest rearguard action in history, my father told me. Until Mussett, that was.

For Mussett, with only a couple of bloodied sandbags for cover, let loose some of the most withering fire ever seen from his gnarled old 'Knocker', and heaved the Newick bowling to all parts of the boundary and beyond, in an astonishing display of batting, which won us the game.