I was also hoping he would go into his fractured friendship with Berkmann. More compelling is the idea that a man with months to live would spend his days writing about playing cricket badly. The idea that clever men with better things to do devote their spare time to playing cricket, badly, has become familiar. One wonders if they have a common antecedent, a Highgate master with a weakness for cricket and a nonchalant turn of phrase.
It's also a close relative of Berkmann's style, which has all those qualities and more soul. Thompson's prose is vividly conversational, rolling along with hardly a colon or semi-colon, and it can be very funny. It's a collection of match reports and anecdotes - stag-night stuff, usually involving feckless team-mates, fearsome opponents, massive hangovers and blithe exaggeration - held together by a voice. The problem is that one club cricket book turns out to be much like another. Sketching each stop with deft relish, Thompson almost launches another genre - the picaresque comic memoir of sporting incompetence. And the world tour carries him away from the village greens of England to take in Singapore, Buenos Aires and Antarctica. When Berkmann left to start a splinter club, Thompson carried on captaining Captain Scott, so he has several more years of club memories to milk. It made it harder for his tale to shake off Berkmann's shadow. Thompson opted to say very little about his predicament, showing admirable stoicism - Captain Scott with a hint of Captain Oates - but questionable literary judgment. This book was thus a race against the ultimate deadline. Thompson was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer last spring and died in November, aged 45. But there is one crucial, brutal difference in the course of their lives. They even wrote books together, churning out forgotten stocking-fillers that rejoiced in the titles of Fatties, Beardies and Baldies. The Captain Scott XI is shaping up as club cricket's answer to the Bloomsbury group.īest friends from the age of 10, both educated at Highgate and Oxford, both turning their comic gifts into careers and sharing the captaincy of their club, Thompson and Berkmann may strike the reader as virtual twins. Another founder was Harry Thompson, who became a television comedy producer, novelist and biographer, and eventually wrote Penguins Stopped Play, about the club's attempt to play on every continent of the world.
In fact, it defined the genre - the comic memoir of sporting incompetence - and sold so well that Berkmann wrote a sequel, Zimmer Men (2005). His book about the club, Rain Men (1995), is widely regarded as a classic of the genre. One of the founders was Marcus Berkmann, who became a comic writer.
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