Snapshot: Our cricket families’ extended family

Cricket can be a notoriously family-unfriendly game – taking Dad (usually) away for the best part of a Saturday or Sunday. In 1985, the London team Millfields – gritty bachelors who were beginning to morph into families – faced the task of continuing to play and yet keep their families together.

One club member, Paul, on a walking trip with his partner Chris along the edge of the North York Moors on an idyllic summer evening, looked down on a tiny cricket field and thought it would be wonderful if our team could play there. A man on a tractor in a nearby field answered Paul’s inquiry by pulling a card out of his top pocket – he was the secretary of the Kildale cricket club.

Thirty two years later, the Millfields families who made that first week-long tour playing village teams in and around the Eskdale valley near Whitby are still going there every July. That first tour was great for the cricketers, playing six games on the trot. But for the children, it was no exaggeration to say it was life changing. From the restrictions of their confined London lives, they couldn’t believe they were allowed to run by themselves up the green lanes and to stay up impossibly late in pub gardens after post-match drinks and meals.

They made friends among themselves – playing on the boundary, exploring each other’s accommodation, the woods and moors, and, above all, the seaside at Whitby.

The children looked forward to renewing their Yorkshire friendships each year and it was remarkable how they always immediately rekindled their once-a-year friendships.

At the end of each tour, tears were shed and throughout each winter next year’s “Yorkshire” yearned for. Families grew, more children came along, some moved to other parts of the country but continued the yearly meet-up, some drifted away, and some families dissolved. Some of the original players have been given out by the great umpire in the sky.

The tour helped to save and enhance a separated dad’s relationship with his daughter, fighting through the family courts to establish the tour as a regular holiday. Her Yorkshire “family” became a regular part of her life.

Now she goes with her partner and her own two small daughters, who, in their turn, are beginning to understand the excitement of playing with a gang of new friends, racing around in the freedom of the moors and dales, and a motley crew of friendly adults.

Generations of cricketers have come and gone – the village hosts generously taking time off work to play, providing lavish Yorkshire teas and having a drink after the game.

The key Millfields players now are the babies and toddlers who slept in tiny sleeping bags around the dining room floor at the last-night dinner on that first tour, and some who were not even born. This cricket tour has given a generation of young adults a network of friends and an extended family that now stretches across the country.

Andrew Broadbent

Playlist: A biblical story … set along the Tyne

You Belong to Me

“See the pyramids along the Nile / Watch the sunrise from a tropic isle / Just remember darling all the while / You belong to me”

It was years before I found out the name of this song. I first remember hearing it when I was about four. Dad picked me up from nursery and took me to the wholesalers in his butcher’s van. It was winter, pouring with rain and pitch black. Dad sang all the way. He was singing as we crossed the bridge over the River Tyne into Newcastle.

I felt so cosy, safe and loved there with him in the van as he sang.

A few days later, at nursery, we heard the story of Moses and had to do a drawing of the story. I settled down to work. I drew the picture of Moses in a basket, hidden in the bullrushes by the Nile with – in the background – the iconic Tyne Bridge which, in my child’s mind, were the pyramids along the Nile. My teacher asked about the picture and I explained that I had crossed the Nile with my dad in the van, a couple of days before.

Dad also sang this song as we drove to my wedding and when he died I couldn’t get it out of my head at his funeral: “Fly the ocean in a silver plane / See the jungle when it’s wet with rain /Just remember till you’re home again / Or until I come home to you / You belong to me.”

Julie Leitheiser

We love to eat: Rhubarb Crunch pudding

Ingredients
100g self-raising flour
150g porridge oats
200g brown sugar
125g butter or margarine
Ground cinnamon
500g stewed rhubarb that has been allowed to cool

Butter a 24cm flan dish. Combine the flour and porridge oats. Rub in the butter or margarine and then the sugar. Spread half the crumble mixture over the base of the dish and press into place gently. Cover with the stewed rhubarb. Sprinkle the surface with cinnamon, one to three teaspoons according to taste. Cover with the remaining crumble mixture and press gently into place. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180C for about 45 minutes. The pudding should be light golden. Leave to cool and serve warm. Can be made in advance and reheated next day.

This delicious pudding is best served warm with double cream. It is a great favourite with my family, especially in the summer when rhubarb is plentiful. The recipe dates back to my school days when I was 11 or 12 and is written in a small blue exercise book in large, neat joined-up writing.

It was the mid 60s and I was a day girl at a convent school in Surrey. I had a two-hour journey from our dormitory town, involving a bus, a steam train and then a mile walk at the other end.

My father grew prodigious amounts of rhubarb at the bottom of our garden. After he had cut the rhubarb with sharp ivory-handled knife, we would wear the giant leaves perched on our heads and parade round the garden.

I can picture myself, too, in my brown school uniform, with pig tails and beret, carrying sticks of rhubarb to school wrapped in newspaper. Returning at the end of the day by train, I carefully balanced the pudding I had made in a bag on my knee. I remember having to quickly shield the open bag because when we went through a tunnel, the sulphurous steam came in through the permanently open windows. It was a great relief when I managed to get home with my cooking intact, ready to be enjoyed by my family for tea.

Bridget Hall

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