I have very slightly kept in touch with Harold over these last years, those in which all his work has of course been much discussed. His treatment of one of my own books (The French Lieutenant's Woman) at least gave me an excellent reason to admire him, as I hope I made clear in a little essay about my feelings called The Filming of the French Lieutenant's Woman in 1981. This was published in a collection of such essays that I did recently. Only two summers ago I went near here in Dorset to have lunch with both the director of the film, Karel Reisz, and Harold and their respective wives. It was a pleasant occasion and once again brought very close to me what I regard as a kind of secret gate-key to all his work. That is his very intense and evident love of cricket. It is one fixation I share with him and is what I would like to devote most of this little chapter to. Meeting and re-meeting him somehow burrows deep into a part of me I now in general claim to keep forgotten. I should perhaps mention here that I was a captain of the game at my public school, Bedford, played for my college at Oxford (New College) and indeed was once to reach the heights of a county trial (for Essex). Unfortunately I don't dream at all any more. (Unfortunately, because I always used to find dreaming a very fertile source of imagery.) I don't know if cricket is in any way responsible for the mature playwright Pinter. I rather suspect that, as with me, he prefers to keep the odd ethos and imagery of the game deeply obliterated in the past. I used when younger to have some ability at bowling leg-cutters at medium pace. I had no great skill with the bat, but in making the ball suddenly and unexpectedly - at best, subtly - deviate in direction I could claim some ability. I wrote about all this some years ago, comparing cricket to baseball in the American magazine Sports Illustrated, and again in a book Quick Singles published in 1968 by J. M. Dent.