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       2 ‘A Very Quiet Boy’

      There can be few more depressing streets in England than Milton Terrace in the village of Fitzwilliam, near Wakefield. Several of the two-storey, red-brick properties are boarded up or derelict, while the shell of a burnt-out car lies along the gutter. Many of the local residents seem without jobs or hope. Truancy among the children is rife, police drugs raids common.

      Number forty-five, Milton Terrace, is now as bleak as the rest of the houses in this brick-built warren of despair. Yet this neglected edifice was once home to one of Britain’s greatest sporting legends. For almost forty years Geoffrey Boycott lived here, from his early childhood until his mother died in 1978. But when Boycott was growing up in Fitzwilliam in the forties and fifties, the same air of abandonment did not hang over the street. With most of the men working at the local Hemsworth colliery – now long closed – there was a strong sense of community and neighbours knew each other well, a spirit also engendered by the much closer family ties of that era. As Boycott wrote in his own Autobiography in 1987: ‘As I have got older I’ve realized that growing up in a community like Fitzwilliam did me a lot of good. In many ways I was lucky to experience a sense of belonging and togetherness which seems to have been lost in so much of life nowdays.’

      Geoffrey Boycott – his straightforward Yorkshire parents dispensed with the frivolity of middle names – was born in Fitzwilliam on 21 October 1940. At the time of his birth, his parents did not actually live in the village but in neighbouring Ackworth. In Britain of 1940, because of the lack of antenatal facilities, home births were usually a working-class necessity rather than a fashionable middle-class lifestyle choice. So Geoffrey’s mother, Jane Boycott, delivered her first-born in the home of her parents in Earl Street, Fitzwilliam. He was a healthy child, weighing eight pounds, ‘a smashing little kid with curly blond hair’, in the words of his friend from Ackworth, George Hepworth, who remembers visiting the newborn Boycott.

      Both Geoffrey’s father Tom and his paternal grandfather Bill were employed in the local pits. As president of the Ackworth Working Men’s Club, Bill was a figure of some standing in the local community. The Boycott family originally hailed from Shropshire but had come to West Yorkshire in 1910 in search of work in the coal industry. One Fitzwilliam resident, Arthur Hollingsworth, remembers them both. ‘I worked on the coalface with old Bill Boycott, he were a grand chap. Geoff’s father Tom were also a gentleman. He were a roadlayer down pit, and he used to look after ponies. He were a quiet chap, very harmless, never liked to cause any friction. Never did much talking either, unlike his son.’

      When he was three years old, Boycott’s parents moved from Garden Street, Ackworth, to Milton Terrace, Fitzwilliam. Though money was short, his childhood appears to have been happy. He indulged in most of the pursuits followed by boys of his age, cricket and football in the street, trainspotting, going to the pictures, playing with his two younger brothers Tony and Peter. ‘He definitely had ball sense from an early age,’ says George Hepworth. ‘I was five years older than him and I remember once, when he can only have been about two or three, I nipped over the wall, took his ball out of yard and then played with it in the street with his cousin, Gordon Naylor. It was only little plastic football, but he created such a fuss, running to the gate and demanding it back.’ His aunt, Alice Harratt, remembers him as ‘a quiet boy, pleasant and polite, who kept himself to himself, and always tried to avoid trouble. He was bright as well, and was very neat, always smartly dressed. He became a choirboy and altar server in the Anglican Kingsley parish church.’ One of his Milton Terrace neighbours from boyhood, Bernard Crapper, recalls a less angelic side of Boycott: ‘Everybody got into fights in those days. We had a gang in our street and a couple of streets down were the enemy. We might throw a stone at them and they’d throw one back. He could look after himself, Geoff. It was the way we were all brought up.’

      Much of Geoffrey Boycott’s outlook on life was shaped by his upbringing. The long hours and permanent danger endured by his father inspired his famous work ethic and titanic self-discipline. It is also probable that the intensity of Boycott’s ambition was fired by his desire to escape the austerity of a Yorkshire mining village. Sensing early on that he had a special talent for cricket, he could not afford to squander it and thereby lose the opportunity to build a new life for himself. ‘It’s better than working down pit,’ Boycott often used to tell fellow professionals, when they complained about their lot. And Boycott’s delight in luxury and the accumulation of wealth is understandable in a man who lived in a house with an outside toilet until he was 25.

      But the mining background cannot entirely explain the peculiarities of Boycott’s character, that strange mixture of toughness and sensitivity, boorishness and charm, passion and dourness. After all, many others in the cricket world grew up in exactly the same sort of environment: Fred Trueman, Dickie Bird, Harold Larwood to name but three. When I put it to Doug Lloyd, an Ackworth local with long experience of Boycott, that economic circumstances might provide a clue to Boycott’s attitudes, he exploded: ‘We all went through those experiences, work down pit, outside toilets, we’ve all been brought up that way round here, not just Geoffrey Boycott as he likes to make out. Everybody in this area has been in the same position, learning to rough it. When I left school, what did I do? Went down pit. Boycott didn’t. He worked in an office. He were really quite fortunate.’

      Part of the answer to the riddle of Geoff Boycott lies in the huge influence his mother Jane had over him. Theirs was an intensely close relationship, so close that Boycott never considered leaving the family home while she was alive. Even when he was an international sporting star in the seventies, she still washed and ironed all his laundry. ‘I owe it all to Mum,’ Boycott has often said, and there is no doubt that Jane doted on her eldest child, doing everything she could for him. Not surprisingly, he says that he resembles his mother much more than his father, believing that he inherited her characteristics of fortitude and resolution. ‘She was a very, very determined lady, with a lot of inner strength in a quiet way,’ he has said. ‘She would never be easily got down.’

      Boycott may have also inherited his notoriously sharp tongue from his straight-talking mother. Local Fitzwilliam newsagent Harry Cordon told the Yorkshire Post in August 1977, the day after Boycott scored his hundredth century: ‘His mother comes in here a lot, a marvellous lady, but like everybody in this part of the world, she’s not averse to calling a spade a spade. I suppose Geoffrey himself is very much like that, and that’s why some people may not have taken to him.’

      The attention that Jane lavished on young Geoffrey may have had a number of paradoxical consequences. One was the feeling that,

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