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Friday, May 29th, The Oval
Four hours, a bundle of time that seemed oddly relevant to me in recent times. Clive Price took four hours to drive from Brook Lane in Chester to Hanover Gardens in London. Five if Nain was behind the wheel.
Four hours of uninterrupted rehearsal was the longest I was allowed to under Maddie's careful ministration. Five, if Steve wanted to push the legal limit.
Just over four hours of schooling a day, four meals a day because heavier meals made dancing difficult. Revelations always helped me during such times. "Pattern recognition," it would say. The human brain works to recognise patterns. For my body, it was true; all of my activities came in four-hour bursts. I felt energetic for four hours, out of battery for the next four.
As part of my new obsession with finding a sport I would be good at, my Grandad and I walked five minutes over to the Surrey County Cricket Club. It seemed appropriate for us, as we lived near Oval Station. Seemed right visit a place that I passed by every single day. Going from Oval Station to the Oval Stadium only required crossing a single road. If that was confusing, maybe it needs clarification. Cricket was a sport played on a grass pitch in an oval shape. Hence the reason for Oval Station being named after the recognisable sight. A decade and a half ago, India had won the World Cup on a ground much like this one, only on the other side of the river. Revelations had nothing to say about cricket. There were only crickets when I tried to trigger memories about cricket. I sighed, jokes were not my strong suit today. The biggest reason for it sat beside me.
"You see the wicket? It's stumps, and there's these bails on top of it. The bowler is attempting to knock the wicket off to get the batter out," Grandad was saying.
My mind was stuck on why they were called stumps and bails. Were there any mystical reasons as to why, or was it as simple as the words seemed to indicate? Stumps because it was stuck in the ground. Bail because it bailed someone out? Somehow it sounded wrong because the sport was for the elite.
"So, you see the scoreboard? The bowler throws the ball; that's a delivery. Six deliveries are called an over. A bowler can deliver as many overs as they want as long as he doesn't bowl two overs in a row," Grandad said smiling, he liked to share his knowledge.
I was staring off at an old man who had none of his front teeth left, his mouth opened whenever Kent delivered a ball that Surrey failed to bat. I could watch his face to know the result of the game even though I did not know the rules. There was something sad about there being only a dozen people in the large cricket ground, though that may have had more to do with the fact it was early afternoon on a workday. Only the jobless or the retired were making their haunt here.
A retired man spoke to me, "Now, batting, that's something else entirely. Bowlers have to throw the ball with a straight elbow, bounce it off the ground. The batsman has to react quickly to how the ball bounces—that's only about ten, twenty feet between them. It's a right devil to pull off,"
My mind was on the green pitch in front of me instead of the bowlers or the batter. The grass was exactly like football pitches. But it felt so wrong with the squished ball shape it had.
"Watch this now," Grandad urged me.
Shaking off my thinking face and closing my open mouth, I watched the men in all-white shirts and trousers go about their game. The bowler sprinted a dozen feet before dipping his head towards the ground and flinging his arms forward. It was, according to Grandad, the most ordinary motion in cricket — yet to me, it looked entirely unnatural, like a man trying to mime the number four with his whole body and failing.
[Min Patel], I saw on the scoreboard. Grandpa called him a slow bowler. His ball bounced on the ground and seemed to veer too much to the left of the batsman. But Alec Stewart had judged it right somehow; his odd-shaped wooden paddle hit the ball, and it whizzed over to the shorter side of the oval pitch, bouncing on the ground until it hit the boundary.
[BOUNDARY!] a graphic played out on the scoreboard, moving from left to right in colorful display.
"If it hits the boundary without the fielders catching it. That's four points. We call it runs. You want as many runs as possible."
There it goes again—four. The number just kept following me everywhere. The next ball bounced much closer to Stewart; he seemed to wield his bat like a sword and somehow defended his wicket. The ball bounced at a crazy angle, going almost directly to the ground.
"Dot ball, that is," Grandad said going into another long winded explanation.
It was simply when no runs had been scored and ball wasn't caught by the fielders. The next ball bounced just right, and Stewart hit it out to the short side of the squished oval again. A smattering of applause rang out in the stadium—supporters of Surrey—while a lone Kent fan scowled at the low stands.
"'Kin hell," Grandad muttered, then glanced at me with a guilty look. "He's really good."
Someone within earshot scoffed. "He'd better be — he's the England captain."
"Naw, that's Atherton," Clive said dismissively.
"Not anymore, he isn't. Resigned last month. You don't watch cricket, do you?" said an older, round man with a snow-white moustache and skin more pink and red than white.
"I suppose I'm more of a football man," Grandad admitted.
"Olly." Moustache man walked towards my Grandad and offered his hand.
"Clive." He said, shaking his hand.
"Which club do you support?" Olly asked,
"Cardiff, you?"
"Fulham. You're Welsh, are ya?" Olly said with a chuckle,
#
There wouldn't be many things that united an Englishman with a Welshman; cricket seemed an odd space where the opposite proved true. Great Britain competed as one until recently when Scotland broke off to form their own national team. The Welsh were still pissed off about the team name being England, but they still supported and played for the national team. Though Clive would thump a man for calling him English, he seemed okay with supporting the England's Cricket national team. It was hard to understand the complexity of a man. My Grandad had made a fast friend, and I watched the sport with as much effort as I could in trying to understand the rules.
Endless standing on pretence seemed to be the British mark on the sport. If football was the everyday man's sport, cricket was the opposite—sport for the lords and wealthiest of gentleman. Their rules couldn't just be called rules—no, that would be too unseemly. Laws, the gentlemen had called them. I refused to sink to their level of uptight bottoms.
Stewart and his mate Butcher spent an entire hour messing up Patel. Stewart hit 80 runs and eight different boundaries, three different sixes. Butcher got his three sixes too. Three threes.
"That is hit for six—it's like a home run in baseball," Grandad said.
A revelation pounded straight into my skull. Rules of baseball downloaded straight into the my brainstem. Suddenly, cricket made like a thousand times more sense. The game was similar in so many ways to baseball, yet so different. In my opinion, the biggest difference between the sports wasn't the technical differences. No, it all came down to the time commitment. Baseball could be over within two and a half hours. Length of a movie. Cricket I was watching right now would take four days to finish. Test match with four day time limit. Ninety overs minimum played in a day.
Stewart was finally ousted by Patel, who celebrated by pumping his arms in the air. Butcher came back on for two sixes in a row and got his wicket hit. Patel had given up over a hundred and forty runs, yet the man celebrated booting the dangerous partners out of the game. His smile was bright as if he had conceded no runs. The joy on his face was of genuine triumph—a man can be beaten but never defeated.
As the hours passed, with me getting gradually more into the sport and the Oval getting filled with more and more fans, a break was called. If you had any doubts about this being an English sport, you no longer had to worry. The fielded players all went aside to one end and started to partake in tea, sandwiches, and other light snacks of their choice.
We had our own tea as well, grabbing a traditional pastry. But unlike the players, I wouldn't be returning for more cricket. My Grandad made plans to come back and spend time with his newest friend once he walked me to the theatre. Cricket didn't hold my heart like football had, but I learned a new fact about my past self. Old-Me had been a baseball fan. Were there any countries in South America that loved the sport, or was that something my old version had taken up after going to the USA? Would I also be going to the U.S. to come full circle? Hmm, I could only wish that I would go there because of my successful acting career.
In the end, I dismissed cricket as a sport for me. Something I could watch, definitely, but not something I could compete in. Test matches took so much time; practice on top would leave no free time. I wanted to be an Olympian—the highest honour a sportsman could get. Dreaming for too much? Maybe. Delusional? For sure. You needed a belief that bordered on insanity; otherwise, you would never reach the top of anything. I believed in myself, but I also believed in the Old-Me. Was there any sport that required the least amount of training or competition time? If there was one and I had any amount of talent in it, I would chase it till I was no longer young.
When we arrived back at the rehearsal hall, practice began. Our sessions had grown fewer, but the number of people attending had increased. For the past two weeks, I'd been rehearsing from 3 p.m. until 8 p.m., staying even later if I had multiple breaks in between. Each day seemed to start later, as the daytime hours were reserved for Phillip's one-on-one sessions. He was struggling with his line delivery — something about sounding too much like a reporter reading the news off a teleprompter.
My new favourite person in the production was Bernadene. She had this effortless glow that no one else possessed. Before landing this job, she'd worked as a dancer on a cruise ship, and I had a feeling that dancing on solid ground suited her better. Still, she could pull off moves that left me feeling like I'd just stepped off the boat. Sea legs were troublesome but I liked seeing her legs. God, I'm terrible at jokes.
Aletta Colling, our choreographer, was another story. Without meaning to be unkind, she wasn't exactly fit to dance herself — but she had more bluster and authority than Mike Dixon, Steven, and the stage manager put together. Her words were our mantra, and her timing was stricter than a watchmaker's.
James Bradley and I had a falling out. The reason why was right beside me. She danced and moved across the stage according to the choreography — except the poor girl had too many problems and kept muddling her steps. James, ever the gentleman, started deliberately getting things wrong so she wouldn't feel alone.
Aletta would sweep over, plant her hands on their shoulders, and manoeuvre them about like a pair of water jugs she carried on a yoke. I, on the other hand, had stopped missing my marks a week ago — yet! I still had to endure being shuffled about by Aletta every single time. Thankfully, salvation came in the form of our lovely dance captain, Bernadene.
Watching people like her, Steven, and Dixon at work made me truly appreciate the level of craft some people possessed. The way they could teach others exactly what to do in the fewest words and the shortest time — it felt like magic.
Holli — the girl who kept messing up her moves — eventually stopped tripping over herself. James Bradley, however, blamed me for making him look bad, as he was still failing to impress her. I was younger than James Bradley, perhaps that was why, but I felt nothing for Holli. The crush that James Bradley had—because I was not going to call him James until he had apologised—was simply unhealthy. The girl was actually a fully grown woman; she happened to be the shortest woman on set, but that hardly excused James Bradley. I didn't expect to have the troubles with him again, neither of us were Irish. But, rehearsals were ending in just two weeks. I was simply done with the entire thing; when the performances started, I would never see him because we would rotate. I'd have missed Darien, but he would be present and ready to replace either of us if we were sick.
"—six, seven, eight," Bernadene sang.
All of us stopped in our final position, thirty individual performers having danced the most amazing-looking choreography. Our ending poses had been selected well and refined. John, who played Blossom, would hold out his top hat and look at Phillip at the last beat of the music. Whereas Phillip would walk towards Blossom and, on the fourth beat, put on his hat, and by eight he'd be leaning towards John with his walking stick parallel to John's arm and hand. Me, I would just have my arms to my sides, like the ending of ballet dances. Overall, we looked cinematic. There were no other words to describe it.
Bitter and mean Aletta walked around us. The speakers no longer played music; the hall was quiet save for the heavy breathing of thirty tired dancers who had done their best and one Phillip Schofield who wasn't part of this choreography save for his entry at the end.
"Hmm," Aletta said. She poked her ruler to someone's back, straightening it.
"Right…" she continued, her footsteps nearing my position.
I felt sweat roll between my shoulder blades. How embarrassing would it be if I was the one who messed up after complaining about Holli all the time?
"Ahem—" Aletta cleared her throat. "It is acceptable," she said.
Around us, people seemed to sag in disbelief. Searching eyes met my own, shock apparent on all our faces.
"Acceptable?" Patrick asked.
"You mean that?" Rose said, her voice shrill.
"Yes, I won't say it again. That was acceptable," Aletta nodded.
People looked around for a moment before smiles blotted our faces. The cheering lasted minutes. Aletta had us perform that number dozens of times. We had finally succeeded. A loud whistle stopped us dead—Aletta had trained us well. That sound was like a whip cracking on my back. By reflex I had taken up my starting stance.
"We are done with the choreos. Next we'll be doing technicals and dress rehearsals. We're two weeks away from our first preview. Do not mess up!" Aletta commanded.
None of us cared for her harsh words this time; we were all glad to be done with this. The true challenge was just starting now. No more choreography rehearsals. Next week would be all about music again—the band and cast were about to meet for the first time. German theatre called the event sitzprobe. It literally meant seated rehearsals because we would all be sitting and doing a run-through of our entire musical performance. John had talked about the magic of the event to me and the rest of the cast who had never been in an original play. It may be surprising to most, but a good portion of the shows currently on the West End had been running for at least a year or more. The cast changed often, sure, but everything was set. Most of my fellow cast members had been replacements for previous actors on other productions they had done, so they had never gone through a sitzprobe. I was looking forward to meeting the band and seeing how many instruments I had knowledge of. Revelation, I'm counting on you.
"Everyone!" Phillip stood up on the only raised platform at the corner of the hall. It had been set up for the duet scene between Matthew and Phillip.
"I would like to invite all of you to join me at Langan's! I have the entire place booked. What say you?" Phillip asked, posh accent in full display, like a king offering his subjects a small bit of human right.
"YES!" "'Kin hell, of course!" "Let's go!" We were all but sheep and couldn't deny the rare treat.
Phillip smiled and hugged people one by one; group hugs mushroomed out in places like a forest after a rain. We had worked for nine weeks—bonds were forged that nothing other than hard work and camaraderie could. Theatre had a warmth; cast and crew were kinder.
"Wilf!" Phillip was suddenly in front of me, chuckling. "You were brilliant! We are going to put on an amazing show. My Tommy!"
"Thanks! It's brilliant—we will," I said in reply, slapping his waiting palms for a high five.
"You wanted to take a ride in the Jaguar, right? Vroom vroom." He made a sound. "You want shotgun?"
"Are you really asking that?" I said unbelievingly. "Course I would!"
Phillip smiled at me the same way he had done at one of the ensemble actors yesterday—a seventeen-year-old Dave who was going to voice one of the animals backstage.
"Let me get my things! Also, my grandpa," I said excitedly as a hand was placed on my shoulder. I looked up to see Mad-Eye Maddie.
She had started to watch the rehearsal more closely in the last few weeks.
"What's the meaning of this?" Maddie asked, pointedly.
"Whoa, what do you mean?" Phillip replied with a lazy smile.
"Child actors are off duty after 11 p.m.," Maddie read out from memory. It was one of the phrases I had become used to hearing.
"There's no work, dear Maddie. We're all going celebrating—I mean, Aletta's finally happy," Phillip said, his arms wide as if to encompass all the cast who had worked their butts off.
"Phillip, I've told you. You will no longer talk to ANY child actors unless you're rehearsing or on stage. I warned you!" Maddie intoned, her eyes squinted and even madder than usual.
Phillip's smile faltered, shifting into a sneer.
"Fine. You are not invited to Langan's," Phillip said and walked past Maddie, brushing her shoulders. It was strong enough to move Maddie off balance.
She only sneered in return.
What was going on? Why did Maddie dislike Phillip so much? Was she jealous of not being included?
"What was that?" I asked, anger creeping into my voice.
Maddie seemed almost shocked to see me next to her. She sighed, and her eyes lost all the madness I saw moments before.
"You, James, and Darien—all three of you will no longer be out of my sight, ever. You are also banned from attending any parties without a chaperone and your legal guardian. No hanging out with adults outside the theatre. Whether that is Phillip, Bryan, or even Bernadene. Do you understand?" Maddie asked me, her voice demanding.
"WHY?" I asked a bit too loudly.
"Why?" Maddie repeated my question. She looked down where my rehearsal bag was; she held it up at my height with one of the straps open.
As I pulled it on, she turned me over and made me look into her eyes.
"It's the law, that's all there is to it. If you go off with the adult members of the cast, I will revoke your right to work in this production." Impossibly, her eyes seemed to soften even more. "That means, if you don't do as I say, you will no longer be Tommy. We'll get someone else."
Words caught in my mouth as I tried to reply. When I drew a long breath, I hated Maddie with all my being. A small amount of power had gotten into her head, and she was bullying an eight-year-old kid. My age came into play—anger was an emotion as strong as anything else. My eyes were suddenly wet, but I did not sniffle or stutter. I stared Maddie in the eyes and called her the B word.
I said more words that no kid my age would, it was my rage that spoke those words rather than any coherent thought. Maybe shame buried that the memories of what exactly I called her then.
I remembered how Maddie had reacted to my harsh words; there'd been a faint smile on her face. It wasn't mocking, nor was it judgemental. At the time, I thought she was pleased by how powerless I was — that she enjoyed seeing me with no recourse but to throw a childish tantrum. If I'd known then what she had truly done for me, I would have thanked her endlessly. But it took years before I understood the truth. Even now, I sometimes cringe with shame at how I behaved that day.