Rod Edmond describes a dramatic finale to the league campaign for his club side Walmer which evoked images of seasons past on the East Kent coast.
Simon Raven’s cricketing memoir Shadows on the Grass (1982), described by EW Swanton as “the filthiest cricket book ever written”, opens with Raven on the field at Worth, a small village on the East Kent coast. It’s the first Sunday of October, the last match of the season. The remains of a fair – swings, roundabouts and slides – are being towed down the road from Deal towards Sandwich: “the cortege of summer, one more summer going to its long home, as the wind over the salt marshes brought the first of the evening chill”.
Raven lived in Deal, his publisher Anthony Blond having put him on a monthly stipend if he’d stay well away from the temptations of London – gambling especially – that were distracting him from his successful and critically admired Alms for Oblivion series of novels published between 1964 and 1976. It was during these years that he’d played cricket for Worth.
I was thinking about Raven’s prelude to his memoir as I took the field at Walmer CC’s ground at Deal on the first Saturday in September. It was a perfect early autumn afternoon – bright sun, clear skies, a light north-easterly breeze – a month earlier than Raven’s elegy for the passing of a cricket year, but with something of its end-of-season feel.
Walmer, Raven’s club Worth, and Sandwich, the team he was playing against that autumn afternoon around 50 years ago, are within five miles of each other. Walmer was founded in 1865, Worth is just a couple of years from its centenary, and Sandwich is more than a hundred years old. Three neighbouring clubs along this strip of coast – with its golf courses, sandhills and salt marshes – which have survived and prospered so long, in tune with the turning of the seasons.
