The smoked salmon is under the Canaletto

Paul Edwards, a former History master at Rendcomb College, has some delightful memories of cricket – and its characters – at the school

- Paul Edwards

“Do you shoot at all, Paul?”

Denis, I’ve never shot a live animal in my life.”

“Well, there’s not much bloody point shooting a dead one.”

Touché.

In the early 1980s, I taught History for four mainly blissful years at Rendcomb College, a small school in the south Cotswolds. Gloucestershire’s postcard villages – Bourton-on-the-Water and all that crush – lay some 20 miles away but from my rooms on the top floor of the old mansion which housed the school’s main building I could look across the Churn Valley, west to the village of Woodmancote, or north to Elkstone, where the poet PJ Kavanagh lived.

It was a good half-hour’s walk to The Bathurst Arms, and Cirencester was another five miles distant. There was an Irish invasion every March and the other Cheltenham Festival was an even greater delight. I was a town boy who had fetched up in the middle of the countryside. Perhaps it was not surprising that those four years changed my life.

But of course, it is people who really make the difference. For a school that had around 260 pupils and admitted girls in the sixth form Rendcomb turned out some good cricket teams. That it should have been so was partly due to facilities: “Up Top”, the playing fields, accommodated about five matches on good pitches with some ease.