But the essential problem seems to have been ineptitude: at school, whatever the sport, Frayn – weedy and bespectacled – was always last but one to be picked. Looking back, seven decades later, he blames the ‘mangy tennis ball’ they used and the ‘feeble mockery of a bat’, too short and frail even for a five-year-old. Many hours were spent on back-garden coaching but the boy proved a serious disappointment. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats.’ If Tom Frayn had had his way, his son, Michael, would have joined this company of enthusiasts or, better still, have opened the batting for England at the Oval. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. Harold Pinter, who wrote wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. (Mar.Why is cricket so appealing to playwrights – English and Irish ones anyway? Samuel Beckett represented his university against Northants. Here is a son's proud, gently poking tribute to the remarkable qualities of an ordinary man, if only on the outside. Michael Frayn, however, was not destined to be the brilliant cricketer and wit that his father envisioned, but rather 'as dozy as a weekend motorist.' The sudden death of his mother of a heart attack when he was 12 'hardened' the author, drove him inward, and he became enamored with music and poetry, eventually attending Cambridge and becoming a journalist. Married in 1931 to Violet 'Vi' Lawson, who similarly had to quit a prestigious music school to go to work, Tom moved his family to Ewell Village, Surrey, where the author and his younger sister grew up within the stolid middle class. The Frayn clan filled a cramped house in a rough neighborhood in Halloway, North London Tom Frayn left school at age 14, marked as a 'smart lad,' gaining a clerk's wages that were needed to support the family. Thomas Frayn died in 1970 at the age of 69, largely deaf but still actively selling roofing to contractors in London, a widower who later remarried, and whose enterprising, responsible spirit bequeathed a 'fortune' to his son much later in life. A sprightly, warmhearted memoir of his dapper salesman father takes playwright and novelist Frayn (Spies) from working-class London through two world wars.

My Father's Fortune by Michael Frayn