In 1985, I turned out for Stourbridge in the Birmingham League. Stourbridge is in the West Midlands, on the fringes of the Black Country, named for the thick seam of coal that sustained the region’s mining communities for a couple of hundred years. The locals speak a strange dialect of elongated vowels and swallowed consonants, which is recognisably English but at the same time impossible to understand.
Before the League season began, we played a single friendly match, against a team called Hagley. Hagley wasn’t in the League, but played its game at Hagley Hall, a magnificent Georgian building belonging to Lord Lyttleton. Since one Lord Lyttelton or another was often the President of the Worcestershire County Cricket Club, the grounds of Hagley Hall contained a perfectly-manicured cricket ground. That was where we played our first match in April, which I nearly called a warm-up game, except that would be stupid, because the temperature never rose above one degree.
