Cricket
Quiet evenings in the front bar of the local pub forged for the author a companionship based on a love of sport and literature, and a tantalising connection with Samuel Beckett. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Bar tales of Samuel Beckett
He preferred the pub when it was quiet, which was the early afternoon, and sometimes he stayed long enough for the golden hour to kiss those sitting in the front bar. At the Union Club Hotel, in Melbourne’s Fitzroy, there’s a time of day in certain parts of the year when that front bar is drizzled with a glorious light.
Peter was already an old man when I first met him about a decade ago, and whether bathed in golden light or not, he always sat upon the same stool. There were other constants. His heavy tweed jacket, for example, which he wore irrespective of the weather. Upon the bar before him was always his book, newspaper, pot of Carlton Draught and tattered Akubra.
One of those books was a biography of Dickens; another time he was reading the first volume of Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. I remember that well. Peter always spoke very quietly, regardless of his passion, but his excitement about Churchill’s prose was obvious. He insisted on reading me a paragraph. “Please,” I said, and the lines he shared were Churchill’s description of the barbaric murder of Edward II. “For the King a more terrible death was reserved,” he read. “He was imprisoned in Berkeley Castle, and there by hideous methods, which left no mark upon his skin, was slaughtered. His screams as his bowels were burnt out by red-hot irons passed into his body were heard outside the prison walls and awoke grim echoes which were long unstilled.”
I can quote that because I remember the poker, and I have the four volumes in my study. That it’s uncertain whether this was, in fact, how Edward II died, was immaterial – Peter was insistent upon the quality of the prose. “No one writes like this anymore,” he told me.
That this quiet man felt he could read to me was made possible by several superficial things. When I saw him at the bar, he was often engaged with The Age’s cryptic crossword, and I told him I’d bring a copy of The Saturday Paper so he could try that one too.
He’d grunt his appreciation when I left a copy before him on a Friday evening, and I’d order us some draught. He was never impressed by this paper’s cryptic. They were too easy, he’d say, and I’d shrug.
Despite its undemanding puzzle, he never begrudged my delivery of the paper, and for many weeks I’d arrive at the pub with his copy in hand and we’d talk about the book he was reading or about the Collingwood Football Club, with which he seemed engaged in a volatile relationship of admiration and disgust.
Then he told me about taking Samuel Beckett to a game of cricket.
As far as I know, Samuel Beckett is the only Nobel Prize winner with a listing in cricket’s statistical almanac, Wisden. In fact, when he died an austere obituary was recorded right there. “Samuel Barclay Beckett, who died in Paris on December 22, 1989, aged 83, had two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925 and 1926, scoring 35 runs in his four innings and conceding 64 runs without taking a wicket.”
There’s the popular caricature of Beckett: the ascetic with the granite face who gorged upon Schopenhauer’s pessimism, claimed an ambition to “stupefy myself with useless words” and warned a lover not to ask him to prise his heart open because “nasty black stuff would come out”.
So it’s pleasing to think of this strange lyricist of anguish as also a man greatly tickled by games – cricket, rugby, chess. He swam, cycled and played golf and tennis. As a young man he boxed fiercely; as an old man, when he struggled to sleep, he would play in his mind the first few holes of Dublin’s Carrickmines golf course. At the first international Beckett festival, in 2012, there were alongside the theatre and readings several sporting events.
In the 1960s, Peter told me, he was an editor at Penguin’s London office. In this capacity, he was asked to chaperone Beckett to Lord’s to watch a Test match. The writer’s British publisher at the time was Faber & Faber, and so I wondered perhaps if Peter’s hospitality was part of a design to poach him. Peter was unhelpfully vague on the details.
Still, I thought, what a remarkable privilege it was to take Samuel Beckett to a game of cricket. He enjoyed company, especially when it involved drink, but he was always wary of public scrutiny. He mostly opposed biographies of him, pleading with prospective writers that his life was nothing but his work and that he was a “very dull dog” and poor subject.
Beckett withdrew from public attention and ran from the Nobel Prize itself in 1969 – he declined to accept the award in person. His French publisher at the time, Jérôme Lindon, told newspapers Beckett was “grateful” but “annoyed at the publicity”. “There was apparently no pleasure in it at all for him,” Lindon said. “If it were anybody else… But there is no affection in him. He had no need either for the notoriety or for the money.”
So here was dear Peter, escorting the man to Lord’s, where they would drink in the wan English sun and admire the gentle cover drives of Geoffrey Boycott.
I don’t believe in premonitions, even when I’ve experienced them. The first I remember came in the form of a dream when I was about 16. The dream was another chapter in a series of recurring nightmares I’ve experienced from a young age and which continue today, involving various aircraft catastrophically stalling or exploding in the air.
I’m never a passenger, always a witness, and one filled with impotent foreboding – I know the plane’s doomed well before its engines whine or the wings crack or the whole thing ignites. My anticipation and its uselessness is a fundamental quality of the dreams, which are recalled less for what happens than for the oppressive humidity of dread.
Anyway, on this particular night I dreamt a Harrier jump jet – a military plane unique for its ability to launch vertically – hovered ominously above our surreally roofless house, which was hosting a dinner party. I looked up toward it and knew it was doomed, and likely us too. Sure enough, it began to vibrate aggressively before shattering and raining fiery debris upon us.
I woke terrified and soaked in sweat and turned my radio on for comfort. It was set to the BBC’s World Service, to which an ABC station would transfer during the night, and at that moment there came breaking news: a Concorde had just crashed into a small hotel and restaurant in an outer Parisian suburb.
My other premonition was that Peter was dead. It was the second year of Covid and, having spent the majority of the previous year in lockdown, Melburnians were enjoying a reprieve from isolation. I met some friends at the Union, and we sat outside and spoke as I think most people at that time spoke when physically encountering friends they’d barely seen in a year: feverishly.
One of the bartenders we knew was on a shift break and he joined us. I asked him about Peter and he told me he had died a few months earlier. He wasn’t sure if it was Covid, but he thought Peter had been ill for a while. I mumbled my regrets.
Then I asked him: was Peter an editor for Penguin in London in the 1960s and did he ever take Samuel Beckett to the cricket? I’d always had my suspicions about the story. There was the Faber & Faber thing, but the brightest red flag was when I asked Peter, some months after he told me the suspiciously vague story, whether I might interview him about it. Peter’s response, I thought, was one of nervousness and horror. Happy to help him save face, I left it there.
Privately though, I wondered: was Peter a fabulist? The bartender couldn’t say, definitively, but he thought he’d heard a few tall tales over the years when a few pots of Carlton Draught had gone down. Not that it matters, he said: Peter was always a gentleman.
And so, I may never know. In fact, I don’t want to know. I’m happy for the story to hang suspended in the bar’s soft golden light, the light that seems simultaneously to evoke promise and goodbyes.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 19, 2025 as "Tales from the bar".
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