A Rabbit Remembers

Bates's recollections of cricket, at which he was always a poor batsman (a "rabbit"), beginning with memories of playing with his grandfather George William Lucas "in the farmyard, up against the door of the old wooden copperhouse where we boiled chat potatoes for the pigs," continuing with weekly trips to watch town cricket matches with his father, and then the revelation he experienced in 1919 watching the "celebrated Denton twins...my first piece of cricket poetry."

It is was only in 1946, when elected captain of his team, that Bates enjoyed the game: "In this sweet arena of parkland, its boundaries graced by great limes and oaks and chestnuts and copper beeches, it no longer mattered that I was a rabbit. On hot, lime-fragrant summer afternoons it was heaven merely to be playing a game."

In Cricket Bag — a Miscellany for the Twelfth Man (Ed. Leslie Frewin, London: Macdonald, 1965, pp. 107-110, attached).