Coton Home Guard on Parade by Capt. Mainwearing

When the Home Guard was formed in 1940 it consisted of volunteers that were too old or too young to be in the regular army, along with those in restricted professions.   The 1^st Coton Platoon is no exception to this.  The established mixture of grizzled veterans, callow youths and assorted miscreants took to the hallowed turf on the 26^th May to repel the insurgents from Thriplow.  It was a blazing early summer’s day with nary a cloud in the sky.  

Corporal Neil Sparnon was lovingly working on the pitch with Private Garson as assorted cadets / juniors left the playing area under the watchful eye of Captain Chandler R. (ANZACs, retired) after their latest win.  Corporal Sparnon had been deprived of his beauty sleep during the week but was not noticeably worse for wear.   The rest of the platoon began to assemble.  As well as the aforementioned sappers, Captain Kaye, Sergeant Fox, Privates Chandler (M), Akram, Kodandaramaiah, Parashar, Simmons and Scotcher along with Cadet Elmes were on duty this week.  I was pleased to note that after being put on report for being scruffy last week, Privates Scotcher and Chandler (M) had removed their facial hair.  Captain Kaye continues to flout regulations and will need to be dealt with later.

Under a white truce flag Captain Kaye accompanied the opposing commander to the wicket to negotiate the terms of surrender decide who would bat first.  For once our Captain won the toss and decided that we would have the first go at dismissing the opposition: it’s a very civilised form of warfare, this.  Both sets of troops were wearing white uniforms but Thriplow helpfully had sponsor’s names on their shirts allowing us to differentiate from our own troops and avoid any injuries due to friendly fire (as if...).

Discipline has become a bit lax recently, so the platoon was assembled for parade prior to taking the field.  After an inspirational speech from the Captain with sage words from the NCOs we were ready to play.   Corporal Sparnon and Private Garson were first into the attack.  After the match, I saw that the latter’s name had been entered into dispatches as “Garcon”.  This was presumably in the hope that he would be serving up some buffet bowling: wishful thinking on the opposition’s part.

The first casualty was dispatched by Corporal Sparnon when the opener sliced a drive to Private Simmons at point.  This was followed by Private Garson bowling the other opener.  Thriplow were looking shell shocked and tried to regroup to form a counter offensive.  It was never to materialise.  Captain Kaye rang the bowling changes and all five troopers called upon responded with wickets: 3 to Private Konandaramaiah, 2 each for Scotcher, Garson and Sparnon and a solitary victim for Chandler (M).  The wickets fell at regular interval with the shattering of stumps interspersed with some catches.  Two of these came to Cadet Elmes.  It is no coincidence that the youngest, fittest member of the team is making catches as he is the one most capable of movement towards the ball.  One was particularly noteworthy as Corporal (“they don’t like it up ‘em”) Sparnon tried to bounce out the opposition skipper.  Normally a bouncer on our pitch is accompanied by a loud thwack, followed by a curse from the square league fielder sent to retrieve the ball and a chorus of “pitch it up” from the rest of the team.  This one was distinctly nasty and the Thriplow player’s awkward attempt to play it resulted in the ball popping up on the leg side.  Captain Kaye rumbled towards it from behind the stumps and for a moment it looked like he might run Cadet Elmes into the pitch.  Somewhere in the distance a voice was heard: “don’t panic!”  However the skipper had the presence of mind to give up any pretence of reaching the ball and a diving, rolling Cadet Elmes completed the catch.  This denied the Captain the opportunity to use that hackneyed catchphrase from Dad’s Army (all together now – “you stupid boy”).  Private Kodandaramaiah took his first two catches for the club to go with his three wickets.

I would love to say these catches were indicative of the practice that we had put in.  This would not be true and Private Scotcher – who could have had another 5-for - was denied 3 times in one over with drops by Simmons, Chandler & Elmes, each in turn treating the ball like a hand grenade with no pin and getting rid of it as soon as possible.  Cadet Elmes has the excuse that it would have been a simple catch had he been eighteen, but needs a few more years growing before he could have reached it comfortably.

The innings ended with a final catch by Private Kodandaramaiah off the bowling of Private Chandler.  Cadet Elmes - on high alert having been told he was going to lead the charge in the next over - was thus denied his first opportunity to bowl in the league.  There will be others.

Thriplow were dismissed for 88.  We had no casualties to report.  In the NAAFI, land girl Aaaaajanet (don’t ask) had laid on a fine spread.  

Captain Kaye reviewed his batting options and took a fairly simplistic view of the order.  Those who had not done their duty either bowling or keeping wicket would take the lead in what we hoped would be a march to victory.  So the first five places were decided.  The bowlers would become the rearguard.

Sergeant Fox lead the way with Private Simmons.  As always Sergeant Fox adopted the policy that defence is the best form of attack and started digging trenches around the wicket (he called it “taking guard”) while Private Simmons took on a more aggressive approach.  We made steady progress with no alarms as we advanced towards the target.   Reports from the front suggested some dissent in the enemy ranks.

“This ball is still quite shiny” says the bowler.

“Well, we didn’t do much to knock the shine off” came the reply.

Sledging your own team?   Not something we would do, is it?

Sergeant Fox then drove one back to the toiling bowler who took the return catch.  This brought Private Akram to the wicket.  He carefully played himself in by watching the first ball before launching into several huge swings some of which actually connected.  We later find out that the swings and misses were purposefully played down the wrong line as a rather elaborate diversionary tactic.

The scoring rate now picked up.  At ten overs we had twenty four on the board, but the remaining sixty five runs took just thirteen more.  Private Akram was now finding the target with his swings and Private Simmons sent fusillade after fusillade to the boundary.  Thriplow threw more and more bowlers into the attack in vain attempt to stem the flow.

The scores were leveled in bizarre fashion.  Private Simmons launched a huge shot to cow corner.  A brave Thriplow trooper positioned himself under the descending ball about eight yards in from the rope (we really have one now).  Then, he seemed to make the decision that he had enough and instead of catching the ball he headed it over the line for 6.  There was a huge thump as ball connected with skull but no blood.  He staggered around for several seconds and was then escorted to the bench while Private Kodandaramaiah took the field looking very nervous in case Dave tried the same shot again.  He didn’t.  The next ball was scrambled for a leg bye and we had won by nine wickets.

Cadet Elmes, having been denied a bowl when he was next in line, was thus denied a bat in similar circumstances.

So, we had a convincing victory by nine wickets, based on a good all around team performance.  With two wins out of three we are third in the league and it’s looking quite promising.  We generally been stronger than the opposition in most areas(*) in the last two games.  Some detective work by Sergeant Lewis Fox has turned up an interesting fact about Whittlesford who beat us on the opening day.  The chap who scored all the runs against us is an ex-Cambridge County Player & has played “List A” one day games against 1^st class counties!  The game against us was his first ever for the 2^nd XI, having scored close to 10,000 runs for the first team.   No wonder, in the worlds of Private Kodandaramaiah he “knew how to play straight bowling”.

(*) except wicket keeping.