Stories behind Books: One More Run

by Mayukh Ghosh

“What’s the next one going to be called?”, someone asked.

By then, Stephen Chalke had written and published two books.

Runs in the Memory and Caught in the Memory.

The person who asked the question had some suggestions: “Stumped for a Memory? Run out of Memories?”

“No,” Chalke said, “I think I’ve done enough cricket memories. Time to move on to something new.”

Chalke had interviewed Bomber Wells for Runs in the Memory, and he loved the book. They knew each other well.
Chalke once again got in touch with him.
“It turned out that he was writing a novel – a vast sprawling story about a pair of brothers. He was hoping to become the Dick Francis of cricket, and he rang to ask me if I would publish it. I took it away to read, it was an enormous number of pages, and I just couldn’t see how it would sell enough copies.
I said to him, “Why don’t you do a book of stories about your own playing days?”

“Right,” he said, “we’ll do that.”

So suddenly, without ever quite saying I would, I was writing a book with him.” 

Early one, after they had only two sessions, Bomber suffered a bad stroke. His wife Mary rang Chalke to give the news:
“Bryan’s had a stroke. It’s quite a bad one. I’ll understand it if you don’t want to carry on with the book.”

Eleven weeks in Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. But Bomber recovered.
And Chalke took to spending a morning a week with him. The rich fund of stories flowed.

In Chalke’s words, “It went on for months, and I had no idea how I was going to shape all his stories into a coherent book. Then one day he asked me, “Are we doing a book, or what?” That forced me to sit down and think it all through. I came up with the format of a match remembered within a current match, and suddenly the whole thing flowed out easily.”

The match remembered was Gloucestershire v Yorkshire at Cheltenham in 1957. Sam Cook’s benefit. A nostalgic trip to the 1950s and about the cricket played in those days. And about the cricketers who played that match.

Used copies can still be found for not a lot of money.
The book, I believe, best epitomises Stephen Chalke’s work over the last couple of decades.

Chalke doesn’t seem to disagree: “Some people think it’s my best book, and I can see why. Bomber was such a free spirit, always seeing the funny side of things but also with a wonderfully sharp way of expressing his opinions. I have never come across anybody else like him.”

One More Run is an underrated gem. Any serious cricket tragic should not be without it.

It was published on July 3, 2000.

P.S.   I asked Chalke about Bomber’s autobiography Well, Well, Wells! and how much overlapping material can be found in One More Run.
This is what he had to say about it: “ Well, Well, Wells was written by Bomber himself.
There is a fair bit of overlapping material, but there are also some different stories.
Bomber was a great one for exaggeration, and I tended to avoid the stories that would seem too far-fetched to a modern reader.”

The book is not that easy to obtain. There were only 500 copies printed when it appeared in 1981 and, when copies do come onto the second-hand market, they can fetch £60 and more.

Strange to say, I have never owned a copy – and Bomber didn’t have one, either!!

I like to think that my book is the better one, but I guess that’s for others to decide.”

And then added a delightful anecdote to sum up Bomber, the man.

“There was one occasion when somebody lent Bomber his copy of ‘Well, Well, Wells’, and Bomber lent it on to somebody.

When the chap asked for his book back, Bomber couldn’t remember who it was that he had given it to – and I finished up having to buy a copy on the second-hand market.

Life with Bomber was always fun.”