Review of Mike Brearley’s Turning Over the Pebbles — A Life in Cricket and in the Mind: A second bite of the cherry
The Hindu
Mike Brearley’s book Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind
In the 1960s, Mike Brearley, having topped the Civil Services exam was interviewed for the post of British spy. The unexpected is our companion through much of what Brearley calls ‘a memoir of his mind’; his range of achievements, from the academic to the professional is astonishing. Yet, the tone of Turning Over the Pebbles: A Life in Cricket and in the Mind alternates between diffidence and confident self-awareness, contributing to its charm and importance.
The Latin word for ‘pebbles’ gives us ‘calculus’, the study of continuous change. It may not be a coincidence that it figures in the title of the book.
The novelistic descriptions of people and places here suggest that the world of fiction-writing might have lost a major figure because of Brearley’s other callings, as philosopher, cricketer and psychoanalyst. This is a book of history, of literature (the chapter on Henry James is pure gold), music and theatre too, provoking in our minds those lines from Oliver Goldsmith: And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,/that one small head could carry all he knew.
What is also remarkable about the book are the things it is not. It is not patronising or superior, it is not centred around one individual or event but radiates outwards in a manner at once inclusive. It is not a scholar posturing or a sportsman complaining. It is not about any one thing, but a story of a life — with all its lack of order and inevitability — well lived.
Brearley’s wife Mana once told a friend there were two Mikes, the cricketer and the psychoanalyst. Which do you prefer? asked the friend. “The cricketer,” Mana replied. As this book shows, the cricketer cannot be understood or cherished without the other Mike. One enhances the other.
“This book,” says Brearley at the start, “is in a sense a story of a quest, to get hold of myself, to be not too much a stranger to myself... to turn over the pebbles to see what lies underneath — murky detritus and/or richer patterns?” It is, he says, a book of second thoughts, a second bite of the cherry: not only the original experience, but a new take on it.
Open to any page, and Brearley emerges as unique. While batting against Michael Holding the great West Indies fast bowler, he relaxed by humming the opening bars of Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartet, Op. 59. While playing for Middlesex, he would sometimes write Shakespeare’s sonnets on his hand and learn them by heart. While keeping wickets for Cambridge, he kept up a conversation on philosophy with first slip Edward Craig, later Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at the university.
Asian Games champion Avinash Sable opened his season in the 3000m steeple chase with a silver in the Portland Track Festival, a World Athletics Continental Tour bronze event, in Oregon on Saturday. He clocked 8:21.85s. Asian champion Parul Chaudhary took the bronze in the women’s 3000m steeple chase in a season-best 9:31.38s. Former Asian bronze medallist Sanjivani Jadhav struck gold in the women’s 10,000m in 32:22.77s, a time which was a second off her personal best, while Seema was sixth in 32:55.91s.