In June this year, David Frith lost his beloved Debbie, with whom he had spent 62 blissful wedded years. This is a very special and very personal piece scripted by the doyen of cricket writers in the memory of his charming wife and lifelong source of inspiration.

We were very young when we married in 1957, and we had 62 sweet years together, so a sense of thanksgiving should now be outmanoeuvring the grief. But it isn’t, not yet. Nonetheless, having been offered a bit more space in How’s That!, I sense an opportunity not only to pay tribute to my beloved Debbie but to salute her contribution to cricket. For whatever notice was ever taken of the 30 or more books that bear my name (many dedicated to her) and a collective total of just on 300 editions of The Cricketer and my own creation Wisden Cricket Monthly (the original version), there is a very significant hidden factor: the loving support that Debbie unceasingly provided. It wasn’t just the thirty or forty thousand cups of tea or coffee that she smilingly served across all those years (almost everyone I’ve spoken to since her death last May has recalled her beautiful smile). It was also the understanding that she showed when I was detained at this desk long into the night, on top of the absences at Lord’s and Headingley and Sydney and Calcutta. And it was also her heart-felt sympathy when dark manoeuvres brought an end to both those magazine editorships.

We met in her hometown of Ipswich, Queensland when I was serving in the Royal Australian Air Force, and we married a year later. Her induction to cricket came at Hurstville Oval, the long-ago home ground of Bradman, O’Reilly, Lindwall, Morris and O’Neill. Mid-afternoon I saw her sitting alone on the hillside near the sightscreen. Suddenly she was on her feet and in a bit of a panic. It transpired that she had been attacked by bull ants. Very painful. Soon she was watching me play at Bankstown Oval in a heatwave. Our budgerigar, in his cage, accompanied us, which my team-mates considered odd. Even odder was to slip unconscious to the turf, as I did, overcome by the heat after four (eight-ball) overs of my imitation Lindwall stuff. Debbie was beginning to understand what an unpredictable and rather dangerous game was cricket.

Our venture to England in 1964, with three youngsters in tow, turned out well, not least because Debbie adored the place (as did I back then). She liked club cricket, in an era when wives and children accompanied their husbands, and the club game was flourishing, cricket then being a staple diet on terrestrial television, available in all households.

When my years of cricket magazine editorship opened up in 1972, Debbie soon proved herself a trusty proof-reader, which is a rare art. And in that pre-email era she frequently answered the phone, her sweet voice contrasting with the “screeching sheilas” who now dominate television. Her occasional visits to Test matches, alas, were only intermittently pleasant. I cringe now to recall her shivering all day in the Tavern Stand at Lord’s, her ears assailed from behind by one of those know-alls in a panama hat. It was a happier experience to catch sight of her lovely face on screen when the BBC camera once picked her out. And she was reading WCM. Another time Debbie sat next to Mick Jagger, whom I knew. Amazingly, he offered scarcely a word all afternoon. On more warmly remembered days she enjoyed the company of the wives of Geoff Lawson and Zaheer Abbas. And at one Lord’s Taverners dinner Debbie sat alongside Eric Morecambe and talked to him about diet disciplines necessary if one had a suspect heart. Between wisecracks, the beloved joker seemed to take in the advice.

My country girl was embarrassed whenever I teased that she was surely unique in having been kissed (chastely, of course) by John Arlott, Don Bradman, Denis Compton, Ian Botham, David Gower, and E.W.Swanton.

I’ll limit the name-drops to one more: HRH Prince Charles was privileged one evening to step on Debbie’s toe on the dance-floor. Then again I might as well slip in one more: when I played in an Anglo-Australian match at Windsor, as the Queen departed the scene and everyone turned their gaze back to the play, Debbie happened to look back as Her Majesty got into her car - and their eyes met for some little time. It was Debbie’s on-going delight at that moment, recalled from time to time through all the years that followed - and by way of payback for all the effort she expended on my cricket-writing behalf - that continues, with so many other memory snippets, to warm my love-torn heart.

(This piece will also be published in How’s That)