I must have been about 12 to 13 years old when on a fairly sunny August afternoon Paul, the grandson of one of our neighbours, who used to come and visit his grandparents every summer for 3 or 4 weeks, and I had decided to play a game of cricket in his grand-parents back yard.
The back yard was a mirror reflection of our back yard, shaped like an ‘L’., made up of two boxes, one large and one small placed, one on top of the other.
The larger box that was towards the front of the property with the smaller box towards the back of the property.
If you entered the backyard through the door that lay at the end of the stone slabbed passageway, that run along the side of the property, you would be standing in the bottom left corner of the larger box.
To your right would be the main back door that led into the Kitchen, between the two doors was a rather large window. The window was made up of a large single rectangular window. Above the large window were two smaller windows hinged at the top and could be independently opened by pushing out the bottom of the window and fastening the latch to hold them open.
Through this window you could see the dining room, in the middle of which was a large rectangular dining table surrounded by four chairs one on each side. Above the middle of the table was the main light made up of four small crystal glass bowls on a wire and chain chandelier.
On the opposite side of the room, you could see an old antique wooden sideboard upon which where several cut glass bowls and glasses. Above which hand a large mirror with a gold frame.
Next to the door that led into the Kitchen was another window similar to the first window but slightly smaller in size.
Next to the Kitchen window was another door that led into the utility room next to the door was a small square window.
Opposite the door to the utility room was an outbuilding consisting of an outside toilet and tool shed.
Between the utility room in the kitchen where the steps up into the back garden, these steps were l-shaped and after the first five steps they turned to the right up another nine steps that lead to the garden at the top of the steps, turning to the left was a path that led to the back door. The garden was laid mainly to lawn with a small flower bed between the path and the neighbour’s wall.
As the steps were not very wide we decided to use the steps as the wickets, and drew a chalk line about 3 foot in front of the dining room window, which acted as the crease. The distance between the wicket and crease was about 12 feet.
We used a tennis racket for a cricket bat and an old tennis ball for the cricket ball.
To score you could either try and hit the ball over the backyard door towards the road for six or try and hit the ball behind you and up into the back garden for four runs, or otherwise you just run from the wicket to the crease to score 1 run.
You could be either be bowled out or caught out. The bowled-out rules were rather simple as the bowl only hand to hit one of the bottom four steps for the batsman to be out.
However, the rules for being caught out were slightly more complicated as you could be caught out in one of two ways. If the ball was caught directly after having been hit by the batsman was out. However, if the ball hit the wall before being caught then it was considered to be half a catch this meant that you had to catch the ball twice off the wall before the Batman was out.
Paul won the toss and decided to bat first. Paul scored about sixteen runs, comprising of two sixes, a four and a couple of singles, before I managed to bowl him out.
I scored about ten runs, two fours and couple of singles before I was caught out.
Paul then started his second innings and was playing well scoring over twenty runs, with three sixes and a couple of fours before I manged to get him out with two half catches.
I then went into bat for my second innings, and I manged to score quite a few fours and a couple of singles.
It was all going well until Paul’s grandmother came out and told Paul that his dinner would be ready in about 5 minutes, and he would have go in soon to eat his dinner.
At this point I was trailing Paul by about 10 runs and with only a few balls left before the game ended I decided that the only way I was going to win the game was by hitting a couple of sixes.
So as Paul bowled the penultimate bowl, I decided to go for the first six. To my amazement I managed to hit the tennis ball which I saw bounce off of the side wall hit the top of the door frame and just toppled over for the first six.
If that six hadn’t been scored then the game would have probably ended as I would not have been able to have beaten Paul’s score, however as I had scored the six, however luckily, it give me the determination to go on and try and score the second six.
This is were everything started to go pear shaped.
Paul, also wanted to win so, knowing that the only way I could win was by scoring a six, he was thinking of the best way to stop me scoring the said six. He apparently had decided that the best way to do this would be for him to bowl down his right side, my left, hence cutting of the angle for the six to be scored.
As Paul was preparing to bowl I could see what he had in mind, so thinking quickly ( which has always led to my downfall) I decided to quickly turn my body through 180 degrees and swap from holding the bat right handed to holding the bat as a left hander would. I man aged to achieve this quite quickly and thus was able to swing the bat with full force aiming to hit the ball well over the top of the back door for the winning six.
However, in changing from right handed to left handed I may have lost a little power in the swing part of the stroke, I lost a lot more in the directional part of the stroke.
On leaving the tennis racket the ball shot straight for the large pane of glass of the dinning room window. Whilst I was hoping that the tennis ball, being a lot softer than an actual cricket ball, would not break the glass and just bounce off of the glass. That may mean I lost the game but better that than to break the window.
Any hope that I may have had of the ball bouncing off of the window, died when I saw the ball hit the centre of the large pain of glass and the whole pane shatter and start to fall out of it’s wooden frame.
I did not wait to see the glass hit the floor, as I was already legging it through the back door, and I run home as fast as I could. I run up the side alley to our house through the back yard, straight through the kitchen up the stairs and into my bedroom, where I tried as best as I could to bury my self as deeply as possible into the bed, hopefully not to be found again.
Unfortunately, I was found, by my mother who had been made aware of what had happened by Paul’s grandmother. To say she wasn’t happy would have been a massive understatement.
As it turned out the tennis ball had not just broken the window, but had hit one of the small glass light shades breaking off a small wedge of glass.
This was would have been bad enough, but hitting the light shade must have deflected it slightly because it then went onto hit the mirror hanging on the wall opposite the window, causing it to fall off of the wall and smash into the glasses on the side board breaking most of them.
After hitting the mirror it had rebounded and bounced on to the dinning table knocking over the flower vase which toppled over and spread, water and flowers all over the floor. But at least that didn’t break!
Apparently, it didn’t end there, because after hitting the vase, the ball bounced back against the already cracked window, further breaking the glass scattering it all over back yard, the ball, which had followed the glass eventually came to rest at the bottom of the steps up to the back garden.