Springtime and the tears of a clown

PAUL EDWARDS: As Neville Cardus wrote at the end of his great essay about Tom Richardson: "Cricketers like Richardson ought never to know old age. Every springtime should find them newborn, like the green world they live in"

"Another season, brother! I wonder what it'll bring us." For well over 20 years those words or something like them, spoken in a rich Birmingham accent, used to welcome me on some sunlit April morning, and they always brought joy to my heart.

The greeting was spoken by a burly, slightly shambolic figure, whose love of cricket was the equal of my own and yet who also knew that there were more important things to concern us. During his gloriously varied life, my friend had played a dozen competitive games for Warwickshire’s second team in the mid-1960s before deciding he did not have quite the drive needed for professional game.

He was probably wrong. Anyway, Alan Morton settled for teaching sociology at university and for playing high-class club cricket in the Birmingham League and the Liverpool Competition.

Even then, though, he fitted no mould. I'd guess few openers have cried off a match because they were needed on a mass picket-line in London and fewer still have been asked for advice by the political leaders of the Irish republican movement.

Yet for all his outside interests – when he died, he was preparing a series of lectures on Rachmaninov – my clearest memories of Mort are of him coming down the pitch in his early sixties to hit one of the sweetest lofted drives one could imagine and then timing a cover-drive so perfectly in the next over that the ball smacked against the white wall beyond the boundary at Trafalgar Road and rebounded some thirty yards onto the outfield. He smiled very quietly to himself after each of those strokes, as if reassured that the game had not broken faith with him.

But it is ironic, given the depth of my subsequent friendship with Mort, that our relationship should have begun with him being both intolerant and impatient, qualities he rarely exhibited. The year was 1986, when our club, Southport and Birkdale, was on tour in Sussex and playing its first match at East Grinstead CC.

As often happens on tours, an opportunity had been taken to promote a tailender up the order.  The experiment did not go well and Mort, who was in his usual opener's spot, was quick to show his semi-professional irritation. "I can't bat with a clown," he said, when he returned to the pavilion. The problem was that I had been the clown.

^{Southport and Birkdale CC, where Alan Morton played in the Liverpool Competition (Dave Thompson/Getty Images)}

It didn't take us long to mend any injured fences or to realise that it would take more than a skipper’s unwise experiment to prevent us exploring the interests we shared. The following morning we took a long walk under the cliffs at Rottingdean, where we were staying and it is from that day that I date our friendship. It developed into the sort of bond that does not require regular meetings for its maintenance. With Mort there was always a sense that we were picking up where we had left off.

And yes, we laughed long and hard about the East Grinstead business, for with Alan humour was never far away. Indeed, he had the greatest emotional range of any of my friends for he also understood sadness very well and never sought to camouflage it in false optimism. In my experience, he knew when to be quiet and the right questions to ask. He was happiest, of course, when his friends were successful.

When my early journalism went well and I was asked to cover a game for a national paper, he would grip my forearm in mock shock and, with a look of melodramatic surprise on his face, would exclaim: "You've made it, brother," before dissolving into delighted laughter.

And, as befitted someone who loved Tony Hancock's tragi-comedies, his capacity for perfect timing was not confined to cover drives. When an S&B slow left-armer was struck into a graveyard for three successive sixes in a Lancashire Cup tie at Bradshaw and the ball was rattling around the tombstones, all that could be heard was Mort singing the opening lines of the hymn "The Old Rugged Cross". "On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame."

Mort's career began at school but did not truly flower until he went to London University and established himself in the West Bromwich Dartmouth top order before playing for Warwickshire's second team in 1964. Much later, when work took him to the north-west, he played in the Liverpool Comp but the truth is that none of the players in that league saw Alan's cricket at its best.

It was still very, very good, of course; he was one of the Liverpool Competition's leading batsmen. His finest summers, though, were those he spent playing at Motspur Park for London University, at Sandwell Park for West Bromwich and at Edgbaston for Warwickshire.

^{The season kicks off as April comes round once again (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)}

And the game stayed with Mort even when he stopped playing for S&B's first team. You could have broken into his years at any point and found it there somewhere; cricket was inscribed as clearly into his life as the name of a seaside resort in a stick of rock. He played into his seventh decade and there were frequent signs the old magic had not deserted him.

He took on other jobs at our club, too. In the mid-1990s he was the best chairman of selectors S&B has ever had, as concerned about the selection of the third team as he was about picking the first. He attended to the interests of all players, not merely the best.

That took time, of course. S&B's selection meetings were turned into lengthy seminars; but that was fitting, because if there were a couple of cricketers in his classes at Edge Hill University, I'll wager a few bob that his seminars became selection meetings. He was a creative and thoughtful chairman: anyone who can compare a second teamer's medium-pace seam-up to the fast bowling of the West Indian fast bowler Wes Hall does not want for imagination.

And then in his eighth decade, he began what he hoped would be a cricketing autobiography. I think I was the only person outside his family to be allowed to read it:

"It is still true that cricket dominates my mind," he wrote. "Hardly a day passes that I do not think about innings I played years ago, of cricketers I admired and, frequently, of my missed opportunity to play for Warwickshire as a full-time professional. Such thoughts and happy memories of my career still dominate. At 73 almost every day involves 'cricket in the mind.'" The book was never finished. Last March 11 marked the sixth anniversary of the savage Saturday when Mort finally succumbed to a lung complaint and his many friends were left to make sense of a suddenly bleak spring.

Yet there was comfort to be had. It came when I recalled the passing of a friend's mother and his sister's suggestion that the tombstone should contain merely her name, her dates and the simple question: "Weren't we lucky?"

^{Lancashire face Derbyshire at S&B CC in 2015 (Dave Thompson/Getty Images)}

I adapted the question to my own situation and thought how fortunate I had been to share Mort's wisdom and insight, qualities which were entirely devoid of self-promotion or the belief that current players weren't up to much. In all the hours I spent with him I never heard him once begin a sentence with the words: "In my day."

I thought how I had been greatly blessed by the company of someone who was a comrade for all weathers and who, when storms were brewing, proper ones, would advise me well and reassure me with a twinkling eye that things will sort themselves out "brother".

And yes, someone who understood that the boundary was merely a white line and that what happened outside that line frequently determined what occurred on the field. So, the interplay between the two was worth a lifetime's study. One of the first things on which Alan and I agreed – but then we would – is that cricket above all games revealed character and that its appeal was fathomless.

All the same…all the same…it was no surprise and certainly no cause for shame that the sudden withdrawal of these riches prompted the tears of a clown when he heard of his friend's passing six long years ago.

As Neville Cardus wrote at the end of his great essay about Tom Richardson: "Cricketers like Richardson ought never to know old age. Every springtime should find them newborn, like the green world they live in."