Village Cricket - Tim Heald

Village Cricket, says Tim Heald, is the very essence of Englishness. We know the images it conjures up: the blacksmith and the squire walking out to bat; the vicar's wily off-spin; cattle peering over the boundary fence; home-made cake for tea; a winning hit off the last ball; stories swapped and jugs of ale shared as the sun goes down and everyone repairs to the pub afterwards. It is Rupert Brooke meets John Major. It is England, Their England. It is a tourist board idyll. But does such a thing exist?

In this suitably languid book - and in a TV series that will accompany it on ITV West Country from May 6 - Heald travels the country to see if the reality can match up. Of course, it cannot. Instead he finds a much more complicated picture from which conclusions about the state of village cricket - and by extension about the state of the nation - are hard to draw.

There are villages in which the cricket that once thrived has now died. That is no surprise, perhaps. But there are also villages where the cricket that died decades ago has more recently come back to life. In some villages it has never gone away. There are villages that are more like towns, and towns that in spirit are villages. Heald cannot make sense of it. But then he does not particularly try to.

Those familiar with his biographies of Denis Compton and Brian Johnston will know Heald to be an agreeable presence and an elegant writer whose love of the game runs deep. He may turn out to be a star turn on TV. But there is a sense here in which he is merely passing through, skimming the surface, spending too much time in some places and not enough in others, leaving large parts of the country unvisited, condensing what conversations he has into brief chunks of reported speech.

For more than half of the book Heald dallies in the beloved south-west of his upbringing, where we discover that he is a much more effective memoirist than he is a reporter. Recounting a visit to Troon in Cornwall, he tells us that a veteran of the village's all-conquering 1947 side was in the clubhouse on the day that he called by. Unfortunately Heald does not bother to speak to him. Such non-encounters are all too frequent, and as a result the book scores low on a vital element: people. When Heald finally makes it up north - a part of the country he admits he finds utterly alien - the visit is fairly perfunctory.

Heald's search for contentment through cricket - which is perhaps the real theme of the book - is rewarded in the places he knows best. He underlines village cricket's appeal to the senses - from the taste of freshly dug new potatoes that are served for lunch to an appreciation of the vernacular architecture that provides many a backdrop to the game. He loves the names of the villages he comes across and in a nice touch composes a piece of blank verse made up entirely of some of the more evocative ones.

Other rewarding digressions include a consideration of great books about village cricket - both fiction and non-fiction - though I was sorry that Heald failed to mention the classic that is The Village Cricket Match by John Parker, late father of the Sussex and England batsman Paul.

If this is a hymn to tradition, there is nothing reactionary or Daily Mail-ish about it and Heald's only real grumbles are reserved for the makers of the TV series he is working on when, for their own reasons, they deny him the chance to feature villages that he would like to. He is exasperated when the need for a piece to camera means that he has to face away from a match he wants to watch. The sheer nuisance of it all adds up to a novel twist on the concept of the book of the TV series. Heald is quite prepared to bite the hand that feeds him and one cannot help but admire him for it.

One other puzzle: the jacket illustration is lovely but why is the square-leg umpire standing at leg-slip?

Simon O'Hagan is an assistant editor of the Independent on Sunday