Life's great game
“My dear old thing, could you help me carry this carpet to the car?” As greetings go, it’s very Henry Blofeld. He has injured his shoulder (tripping over the vacuum cleaner while cleaning the fluffy new beige carpet in his Chelsea pied-à-terre) and he can’t lift a thing. This is going to delay my search for his inner demons.
The new carpet dominates our conversation. He says that his wife, the aptly named Bitten, will give him a hard time if it gets dirty. This causes complications when he and the photographer go into the tiny, rain-soaked garden and get their feet muddy: a trail of carpet strips has to be laid to get them back into the living room. All this takes time.
Blofeld, aka Blowers, is the fruity-voiced cricket commentator who has captivated/irritated (delete according to taste) generations of radio listeners. His descriptions of red buses on the Harleyford Road in Kennington and trains puffing into Warwick Road station in Manchester (“I try to paint the whole picture”) have been part of Test Match Special for 30 years. He, like TMS, is an institution, though, as with the monarchy and the Last Night of the Proms, one that has its critics.
In a demonstration of what Roger Scruton would consider the decline of English eccentricity, he seemed perfectly normal in the mid-70s, surrounded by the bucolic John Arlott, jokey Brian Johnston, curmudgeonly Fred Trueman and hectoring Trevor Bailey. But now, with the changing of the guard, he seems isolated and bufferish. Certainly, that’s the way his younger colleagues on TMS treat him, handing him cod emails from Hugh Jarse and Ivor Biggun to read over the air: the schoolboy anarchist, the last of the eccentrics.
Blofeld (Ian Fleming named the Bond villain after his father) is certainly absent-minded. He offers me coffee but it never materialises; halfway through our conversation he asks me how it was. My revelation of the awful truth reduces him to paroxysms of apologies and a good deal of dear old thinging. He also loses his glasses at one point, and launches a noisy, animated hunt for them. But he is much more on the ball than you might think from his radio persona: he talks amazingly quickly, has a sharp brain and quickly rumbles that I haven’t read his new autobiography, A Thirst for Life, as thoroughly as he has the right to expect. His elder brother is a high court judge and Blowers, even though he is resolutely non-academic, shares some of the quick-wittedness and astringency of the bench.
As a schoolboy – Norfolk gentry-farmer family, beastly prep school, Eton – Blofeld was a star batsman, captained the school and scored a hundred at Lord’s for the Public Schools against the Combined Services (this was the 50s, when such a fixture would have merited 800 prominent words in the Times). “I was ruthless in my pursuit of cricket,” he says. “I lived it every day of the year.”
Sadly, the great on-the-field career never happened because in June 1957 the young Blofeld was hit by a bus as he was cycling to nets in Datchet. He was knocked unconscious, his skull was broken and, even though he went on to play for Cambridge University and Norfolk in the minor counties, he was never the same player. “After the accident I became a man-made cricketer, and rather a bad one, whereas in the past I had been an instinctive cricketer,” he says.
This, I tell myself, is the key to Blowers’ anarchic approach to life: that early promise thwarted, the rose torn from the stem. “I did go on to play first-class cricket,” he says. “I got a blue for Cambridge in 1959, a bad blue, the worst since the Boer war I should think. Before the accident, everyone had thought that I might go on and play, perhaps even for England, but it’s not a thought I’m prepared to encompass now. I’ve no idea. I’m jolly lucky to have got into a job that’s the next best thing in a way. I obviously had a talent, but when I was run over by a bus my reflexes all went.” He was still good enough to score a first-class hundred for Cambridge, which is some indication of what might have been.
Blofeld, in the way of younger sons in posh families, had to be found something to do: the church was out of the question, so he was bundled into the City, which he loathed and quickly left. He considered the wine trade but decided against. (“It’s lucky I did or I wouldn’t be here talking to you now. I’d have been dead and buried years ago.”) Instead, he started reporting cricket matches and built a freelance career, writing for newspapers – notably this paper for more than two decades – and broadcasting.
He has, however, never been on the staff, never been the top man. He understudied John Arlott on the Guardian in the 70s, did all the England tours, reported the Packer revolution, but didn’t get the correspondent’s job when Arlott left. On TMS, he has only once been allowed to commentate on every match in a summer. Yet, despite my promptings, he seems gloriously untroubled by this life on the margins.
“As soon as I started writing about cricket, I realised that this was the way of life for me. Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged me away. It’s never made me much money, but it’s given me a hell of a lot of fun, and I wouldn’t have swapped it for anything. If I’d stayed in the City and kept my nose clean, I dare say I’d have made an awful lot more. What little money I ever had, I’ve lost pretty consistently. I’m hopeless with money; I should never be allowed to have a pound note in my hand really. But I’ve never thought about tomorrow in my life.”
Until, that is, two years ago, when his heart gave out and he almost died. He describes the proximity of death well in his book – and the joy he felt on returning to the TMS studio after his enforced break. He is now drinking less wine and is strictly off coffee (though I did eventually get mine), but has no intention of reducing his workload. “I’ve not the least intention of retiring,” he says. “I couldn’t bear the thought of retiring. It would drive me mad. I would drink myself to death in five minutes.”
So is he an anachronism? “I hope there’s room for one or two of us. I seem to be fairly well accepted everywhere. When you get to my age [he is 61], you do become an anachronism, or you begin to stand for things that no longer seem to be important. I hope I’m not what you would call a conscious old Etonian. I’ve always been rather flippant about it and stood for having a lot of fun. Perhaps I’ve tried to enjoy myself rather too much; perhaps I haven’t spent enough time thinking of other people. I think I’ve always been a bit of a butterfly. I’ve muddled through and I’ve enjoyed muddling through hugely.”
I protest, make a final attempt to pin the butterfly down, and demand evidence of inner turmoil. But the game is lost and we study the many paintings of his dogs on his pristine walls instead.
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