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Book Of The Year Award > 2011 > Now I'm 62, The Diary Of An Aging Cricketer
Stephen Chalke; Fairfield Books
Purchase on Amazon
 Of all the writings on our summer game, cricket fiction is perhaps the most difficult to bring off. Many have tried and few have succeeded but this year sees Stephen Chalke, chronicler of the traditional County game, bring to life an aging village cricketer, conscious of the approaching end of his cricketing life and with more general intimations of mortality as well. It is the diary of a single season with flashbacks to earlier seasons but it is also the sketchbook of a life. With delightful illustrations by Susanna Kendall, this is the story of a humble cricketer, a man of our times but one who Thomas Hardy would have also recognised as a kindred spirit.
Cricket fiction is a very difficult genre, full stop and many have tried but few have succeeded in the complex art of combining a good plot with the necessary technical knowhow and making the necessarily, fairly large cast, both interesting and believable. Everyone will have their own favourites starting, probably, with Malleson at Melbourne by William Godfrey through Hugh de Selincourt's books on Tillingfold (later modernised by John Parker) and maybe ending with the traditional portion of England Their England by A. C. McDonnell. Willie Rushton, with the hilarious W.G. Grace's Last Case, subverted the genre entirely but perhaps, the finest and saddest work of in all cricket fiction may just be Bruce Hamilton's Pro. If time permits, it might be the subject of something in the series on authors currently running in the News Bulletin or possibly one of our members might like to put together a piece for a future Journal.
Now that most felicitous chronicler of English cricket, Stephen Chalke, has joined the ranks of those wishing to add a work of fiction to their output. Sensibly, he has chosen not to place his work in the realms of Test cricket but rather, at the more modest level of club and social cricket. Incidentally, it's worth a modest wager that Stephen could write a very good work of fiction set in and around County Cricket from a few decades ago.
Our hero is, as the book says, an ageing cricketer who finds himself, rather to his surprise, the captain of the third team of a village in Wiltshire, comparatively close to his birth-place. The book is epistolary, written in diary or journal form with considerable scope for flashbacks to previous matches, seasons and events in the writer's life. Were it purely a descriptive book about the trials and tribulations of a third eleven, it would have been highly successful but the reminiscences and revelations make the book a much more complex and sometimes darker offering. Philip Stone, the hero, is a man, still active but aware that the greater part of his life lies in the past and that his cricket career must be approaching an age-driven end. As a consequence, he is attempting by means of increased physical activity to prolong his time on the field as so many people of his age are doing, not just for the purposes of cricket. Judging by the number and varieties of physical mishaps he suffers, he might have done well to have followed the old maxim, 'The best way not to pull a muscle is not to have any!'
Cards on the table; this is an admirable book and improves, the further one gets into it. Whilst being wary of entering Pseud's Corner, Philip Stone is a Hardyesque character, being both a melancholic and also a non-believer who would like to believe in something beyond the bounds of the planet but is too rational and logical to follow that path. The cricket action on and off the field is genuinely credible and anyone who has played at and around the level depicted will recognise the characters and incidents shown here. A word also for the drawings by Susanna Kendall which appear throughout, as they have done with so many books from the Stephen Chalke stable. They have real charm and many readers will see some kinship with the drawings that add to the enjoyment of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books.
The book is a delightful success and can only add to the kudos that Stephen's work has attracted. Recommended – indeed, it's an essential purchase.
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