Learning more about her father’s boyhood hero helps a cricket writer understand her father better
Tanya Aldred29-Apr-2013When I was small, we had shelves of cricket books crawling up the walls. I ate my way through most during my bookworm years, a greedy, speedy reader. But one I didn’t pull out. A small volume with a green cover: by Freddie Trueman.The pages were off-white with funny textured paper; the cover was slightly ripped about the spine: there was something just off-putting about it. So there it stayed on the bottom shelf, tight to the left, increasingly a prisoner of time.I should have picked it out, am ashamed not to have done so. Freddie Trueman was, is, the absolute hero of my dad, Anthony, who bought the book, complete with FS Trueman scrawled in blue biro on an inside page, from the Ilkley branch of WHSmith when he was 14. It cost him 12s 6d, and there was a little about the way he would deliberately tuck it back into place, like a stray hair firmly returned behind an ear, that said: this, children, this really is something.Why Trueman? Just how good was he? Where did he come from? Why did the raging fast bowler with 307 Test wickets turn into a grumbling old man of the radio? And why had he inspired such devotion in my father, a quiet man with a very different upbringing? I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions.Then in late 2011, Chris Waters, a friend from the days when he would disgruntledly follow Kevin Pietersen around as cricket correspondent of the , published a Trueman biography. It had fantastic reviews, winning a mantelpiece of awards.Here was the chance to make up for 39 years of determinedly not reading something that I definitely ought to have read. Who was Fred? Who, for that matter, was Ant?My dad was born in Leeds at the Tower Wood Nursing Home on 23 June, 1947. It cost my grandmother Jeanne seven guineas for board and lodging and five pence for laundry. Her husband, Bob, was away working in Africa and Jeanne named her bouncing boy Anthony Hugh. A telegram came back: call him Robert. So she did, on paper, but won the war – Anthony he remained.Jeanne’s mother was French, short of temper, with a liking for Craven cigarettes, and had come to Yorkshire from Paris around 1910. When her husband died young, the family were left sophisticated but broke. Bob was the son of an electrical engineer, Leeds born and bred, and qualified as a quantity surveyor by studying at night school. There are amusing sepia pictures of him wandering the moors in a tweed suit. They were very different, Bob and Jeanne, but they married in a registry office off the Euston Road in 1938 and had three children – Christine, Susan and Anthony.The family were happy in the Leeds suburb of Roundhay, but in 1951 moved to north Harrow in Middlesex – the beginning of a journey of bettering themselves. They ended up living on St George’s Hill in Weybridge, an exclusive estate in London’s commuter belt made famous when John Lennon and Ringo Starr moved in and which the Diggers had tried to turn into common land in revolutionary 1649. My poor dad, fuzzy-haired, who cried at the slightest provocation, was sent to prep school in Watford to board from ten and then onto Milton Abbey in Dorset – a boarding school of cold showers, early-morning runs and common minor cruelties.So the Aldreds of Weybridge embraced the south, but prick the surface and the white rose ran thick. They went “back home” every year, holidaying in Ilkley and Wharfedale and York. My grandfather might have joined the golf club and held court in the boardroom, but his accent stayed proper Horsforth. My grandmother baked Yorkshire pudding for lunch and parkin for sticky fingers in mid-afternoon. High tea was served with thick sticks of celery in a glass on the table and bread and butter in a basket. And young Anthony wanted to play not at Lord’s or The Oval but Headingley. He followed Yorkshire’s scores in the family copy of the box, eating two microphones.His second wife Veronica told Waters a story of Fred’s terrible anxiety that a new dog they were going to fetch wouldn’t like him. “When we arrived at the kennels, Fred started pacing around the office while the staff went off to fetch the dog, then he went to the toilet, then he came back out again, then he started fidgeting around in his chair… Eventually they brought this dog through and of course the first thing it did was bound over to Fred and lick his face, and the relief on Fred’s face just had to be seen.”Ant loves dogs too. He still mourns the last one, a daft brown thing – in tears as he dug the grave in the garden: deeper and deeper he went as if in shifting the earth he could restore the wag to the still tail.Waters’ book hangs together beautifully – the questioning, the research, the unpicking of a life lived rumbustiously, all this paints a vivid picture of Trueman. From the young Fred who loved bird-nesting with friends to the old man of the Dales who would reach for the bird book from the comfort of his armchair to identify something colourful in the garden. A flawed man, a sometimes bitter man, but mischievous, quick-witted, kind.To my dad though, all this was by the by. It was the young, fit Trueman who was everything. He saw him play only three times: at Lord’s in 1961 against Australia, when Trueman hung about for 25 in the first innings and my dad collected Tizer bottles from the grass to earn pennies at the shop; at Headingley in 1963, when he went with his cousin Christopher to all five days and saw a slightly under-par Trueman take six wickets; and at the Gillette Cup Final of 1965 when Yorkshire thrashed Surrey and Trueman took three wickets in an over. Not much to feed off, but enough for dad.”The sheer excitement of watching him, this seemingly large man starting his run and just getting faster and faster and then that perfect action and the anticipation of wondering, would he get a wicket? Childhood heroes are magic and that’s what Fred was.”Cricket wasn’t everywhere then. Test Match Special only started in 1957, and not many had televisions: heroes were in the head, imitated in the garden, not captured on the computer, ready to call up day or night.Trueman was a link to the place Anthony called home but would never live in again. He needed that. Because the boy who moved from Leeds when he was only four, who has not a single memory of living in the place, and who has the voice of a Surrey commuter, considers himself, still, a true Yorkshireman.