by Mayukh Ghosh

"Raise a glass to the monarch of the counties", wrote Frank Keating.
April 2009.
The Guardian.
It was the headline of a piece written to mark the 80th birthday of a cricket writer.
I read the article much later, while trying to find out the subject's date of birth.
It didn't mention the exact date.
I was quite sure it indicated April 24 but needed confirmation.

I knew the next step: an email to Stephen Chalke.
He too wasn't sure.
Luckily, they were scheduled to meet the next day and that evening Chalke received the confirmatory phone call.
He asked the question on my behalf.
"David has just rung to confirm our meet-up tomorrow so I asked him about his birthday.
It’s April 24."

This was May 2017.
I was about to begin my quest for email communication with cricket writers.
I knew it would be tough to connect with so many people who are in their seventies and eighties, especially via email.
In reality, it turned out to be very easy.
The one regret I'd always have is that I was just a year or two late for David Foot.
By then, he had stopped using email and his memory was not working at full capacity.

Having already read his books on Gimblett and Hammond, I decided to get the rest.
A year later, I'd read all full length books written by David Foot.
He wrote beautifully.
That's the word that describes his writing best.

He idolized Robertson-Glasgow.
"My literary hero and my unattainable model.", he wrote in his essay on Robertson-Glasgow in 'Fragments of Idolatry'.
Both were masters of the short essay.
They wrote about the cricket but the highlight often was the rich sense of humanity in the prose.
No other cricket writer could come close to them in this regard.
Foot's subjects themselves reveal what he excelled at: Gimblett, Hammond, Parker, Parkin, MacBryan.

Just before he reached 80, Stephen Chalke and Scyld Berry cajoled an autobiography out of him.
He thought he was too old and too short of confidence.
He was probably right.
Despite that, 'Footsteps from East Coker' is a delightful book and better than the best efforts of most young and confident writers.

There won't be any more exquisitely written pen-sketches in cricket.
A literary hero and an unattainable model.
There will never be another David Foot.