My father had a small shelf of cricket books. Most of them were ‘books of the tour’, a common form of cricket writing in the days of sea voyages and long tours when teams visiting England would play every single county, the MCC, Oxford and Cambridge, an invitation team such as H. D. G. Leveson-Gower's XI and even sometimes Minor Counties or Combined Services. My favourite among his books was Alan W. Mitchell's Cricket Companions: The Story of the 1949 New Zealand Tour, with a foreword by HRH the Duke of Edinburgh. Walter Hadlee's team of 15 amateur cricketers arrived in April and sailed home in September, having played 33 frst-class matches and a couple more of the Leveson-Gower sort. I also read and re-read the tour books of the Australian cricket writer and broadcaster Johnny Moyes, which were grouped together on my father's bookshelf and appeared with the regularity of a chiming clock. I loved the uniform pattern of these books: match-by-match accounts, scorecards of each game, summaries of how each player had performed on the tour and the camaraderie I could imagine developing over these prolonged tours.

The really odd one in my father's collection was E. W. Swanton's Best Cricket Stories (1953), an anthology of cricket fction. Why make up a cricket story, I wondered, when there were so many real-life matches to be described? The stories were strange, the characters odd and the settings quaint to a lad growing up on the outskirts of a New Zealand dairy town in the 1950s. Mike Brearley describes coming across Hugh De Sélincourt's classic The Cricket Match (1924) at the age of 10 or 11 as a ‘revelation’.