Book Review: Ashes to Ashes PAUL CARTLEDGE

(John) Michael Brearley is, in hard fact, an oldie (present age 81).

But, for this not quite so ancient reviewer, he will be forever young: stuck in a time warp, 1981, at what he too considers the most exciting period of cricket in his life.

Then he was not, of course, merely a journeyman professional but captain of the England team that, against considerable odds, not least thanks to him, won that year’s Ashes series against the old enemy, Australia. Ashes to Ashes – as I write this, England has just drawn this year’s series.

But I hasten to reassure those Oldie readers who are not sports- or cricket- lovers that this very consciously conceived, exceptionally carefully thought-through and most intriguingly written kind of memoir-cum- autobiography is very far from being all or even mainly about cricket. Not least because, as he’s written elsewhere, cricket ‘is violence’.

Some of Pebbles is chronological. It begins with his early life and ends with deep ruminations about last things.

But, in between, the chapters are by

no means narratively organised to take him from cradle to (we hope nowhere near) grave.

The book is set, to put it another way, much more in his Mind than in his Cricket.

His thoroughly immersive Classical education was taken to the point of embarking after school (City of London) and university (St John’s College, Cambridge) on a doctorate in philosophy and a three-year stretch of university lecturing (at Newcastle).

Our hero then made not one but two quite radical changes of professional direction. First – at an unusually advanced age – into professional cricket, captaining both his county (Middlesex) and his country. Then, less expectedly, he went into psychoanalysis, of a post- Freudian variety – what he calls a ‘rum job’. Dreams figure prominently before and after the switch, as does the unconscious, but complexes less so.

His title’s metaphor is twice cashed out. He envisages the writing of the book as an exercise in turning over the pebbles of his lived self or selves to see what lies beneath – whether murky detritus and/or richer patterns or, more pithily, muck or beauty.

That formulation surely stems from the outlook of the later, psychoanalytical Brearley who, in order to practise as an analyst, had concurrently to be analysed himself as an essential part of his training.

Rather astonishingly, he was already in his late thirties when he made that second, life-determining and life- enhancing career move.

As a truly young man, he had been both prodigiously good at all sorts of ball games – not just cricket – and exceptionally good at his largely ancient Greek, Latin and Roman school work.

Happily, his long engagement with Classical and philosophical studies, which introduced him to debates about democracy, slavery, class, gender, empire and tyranny, has left him a lifelong advocate of the study of the arts and humanities.

Still, characteristically, he gives that advocacy a peculiarly psychoanalytic twist: ‘The humanities call for the development of empathy and self- awareness, for a broadening of our emotional intelligence.’

It has also developed in him an enduring love of literature, modern as well as ancient, non-Western including Indian (a tribute to his wife’s ethnicity), as well as Western – although it has not saved him entirely from committing what we Classical academics call a ‘howler’ or two.

But it would be entirely wrong to end on any sort of negatively critical or even a querulous note.

This is a truly lovely book, full of wise saws and not only modern instances. ‘Old age is not for the faint-hearted but feels better than the alternative’ strikes a chord, though it does not ring a bell.

His love of music – check out his appearances on both Desert Island Discs and Private Passions – shines through.

‘We all, with differing degrees of intensity, not only fear death but wish for it’: discuss.

His Cambridge mentor Renford Bambrough and one of my own mentors, John Crook, would surely posthumously approve their gifted, sensitive, moral, rational, courageous and intensely self-aware former pupil’s tribute to their pedagogy.

Mike Brearley plays down – unduly, I’d say – his literal captaincy roles, but of one thing I’m certain. He not only has a doctorate in people but is also the captain of his soul. O lucky man.

Paul Cartledge was Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University