I don't like cricket

Driving back into town, I would often see Clarence waiting for me in the window seat of the pub, his 6' 5" lanky frame folded up so his knees were almost under his chin. He liked to keep a lookout.

I think that one of the reasons he liked me was that I was probably the only person who could effortlessly understand his Jamaican way of talking, unaltered by all the years he had been here since arriving as a teenager. He would often turn to me to translate after several exasperating attempts to get a point over to one of the other regulars.

He had chronic heart problems and told me that he had been used as a pioneer for radical new surgery, showing me massive scars on his chest from neck to solar plexus. One day he got back from a check-up and said that the doctor told him that he now had a pig's heart. I said he may have a pig's heart valve, but not the whole heart. He liked the idea of the whole heart and insisted that his story was true.

I put his trust to the test once. He was an Admiralty driver. He drove a huge black limousine for high-ranking naval officers who need a lift from station to station and he sometimes brought the car to the pub. He didn't drink much at all.

One day I asked to borrow it to see how it performed. He gave me a long, hard stare and without a word he tossed the keys on the table in front of me. I got in and drove it up Lansdown hill toward one of the many MOD camps which used to exist in Bath following WW2. About half way up I realised what I had done. If I had been spotted he would have certainly lost his job and would probably have been deported to a country he had not seen for about 40 years. I returned the car and the keys as quickly as possible.

I asked him to come to Hamburg with me, but he quietly refused. I kept asking him until he finally admitted that he believed that they would not let him back into the UK if he should ever leave it. At the time I did not believe him, but recent events have made this the most likely outcome. He was Windrush generation.

Clarence loved cricket. One Saturday night the phone rang and I heard him ask in a falsetto voice and his idea of an English accent, "Is Mr Stephenson there please?"  I said, 'Hello Clarence' and he said "How you know it was me?"

He was one man short of a cricket team and asked if I would play the next day. I said I had no interest in cricket and hadn't played since school days. By way of a challenge he accused me of being scared of the ball, but I did not give in and stayed home that Sunday.

That night the phone rang and another member of the cricket team told me that Clarence had dropped dead on the field with a massive heart-attack.

A few weeks later I played a cricket match in his honour and the very first ball was a full sixer batted straight at me from a distance of 15 feet. I did not get out of the way. It hurt. I wanted to prove to him that I was not scared of the ball.