On being a girl Kemp and the game of cricket

My earliest memory of Test Match cricket is being excited about visiting Nana and Grandad Kemp in their bungalow. Mum and Dad must have been distracted and didn’t notice me running into the house. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark as I dodged the big dark brown box which dominated the sitting room. ‘Get out of the way of the television,’ Grandad Kemp, Uncle Bobby and Jip the dog snarled in unison. My parents sat me down and gently told me, ‘You just don’t do that sort of thing here’.

And then there were the Summer Olympics at Scotney’s when us cousins played cricket while the grown-ups did boring morning things. I wasn’t allowed to bowl because I was a girl and I wasn’t allowed to be wicket keeper either. I was always deep cover i.e. somewhere in the stinging nettles in the ditch or beside the swimming pool (oh yes, girls were allowed to swim). And when it came to batting? While the Aussies may claim to have ‘invented’ sledging in the early sixties, I’d argue that cousin Michael was its chief practitioner by 1968. Invariably he got me out, l.b.w., for a duck.

Of late, there’s been much written about the Barmy Army. ‘Boorish and chauvinist’ Dominic Lawson calls them (he of, ‘It’s no criticism of women to point out that they are physically incapable of propelling a cricket ball at 90 mph,’ fame). Stop being so namby-pamby Lawson. You ain’t seen boorish chauvinism unless you were raised a female Kemp.

I guess the biggest difference is that we kept our drinking strictly après-cricket. Drips of vodka and gin slipped scrumptiously into the cans of generic cola as soon as the grown-ups had drunk enough not to notice. Stephen and Alan teaching us the F-word (and advising us to use it whenever possible in front of our parents ) as we listened to their tales of the zombies which lived on the disused railway line at the back of their house.