Just a bit of background for those not steeped in Sussex cricket: Alan Ross was the cricket correspondent for the Observer and life-long Sussex man like my father. This poem was written after watching the great Sussex and England wicket-keeper Jim Parks score 188 against Kent in 1951. It triggered thoughts and memories of Jim’s father who also played for England. My aunt, Vanessa, actually remembers Jim buying a cornet from her a bit later in the 50s when she was a Walls ice-cream girl at Eastbourne cricket ground. J. M. PARKS AT TUNBRIDGE WELLS by Alan Ross Parks takes ten off two successive balls from Wright, A cut to the rhododendrons and a hook for six. And memory begins suddenly to play its tricks: I see his father batting, as, if here, he might. Now Tunbridge Wells, 1951; the hair far lighter, And body boyish, flesh strung across thin bone, And arms sinewy as the wrists are thrown At the spinning ball, the stance much straighter. Now it is June full of heaped petals, The day steamy, tropical; rain glistens On the pavilion, shining on corrugated metal, The closeness has an air that listens. Then it was Eastbourne, 1935; a date Phrased like a vintage, sea-fret on the windscreen. And Parks, rubicund and squat, busily sedate, Pushing Verity square, moving his score to nineteen.  Images of Then, so neatly parcelled and tied By ribbons of war - but now through a chance Resemblance re-opened; a son's stance At the wicket opens the closed years wide. And it is no good resisting the interior Assessment, the fusion of memory and hope That comes flooding to impose on inferior Attainment - yesterday, today, twisted like a rope. Parks drives Wright under dripping green trees, The images compare and a father waves away Applause, pale sea like a rug over the knees, Covering him, the son burying his day With charmed strokes. And abstractedly watching, Drowning, I struggle to shake off the Past Whose arms clasp like a mother, catching Up with me, summer at half-mast. The silent inquisitors subside. The crowd, Curiously unreal in this regency spa, clap, A confectionery line under bushes heavily bowed In the damp. Then Parks pierces Wright's leg-trap. And we come through, back to the present. Sussex 300 for 2. Moss roses on the hill. A dry taste in the mouth, but the moment Sufficient, being what we are, ourselves still.