The Summer Field

104 ball before the other boy was bowled. The bowler said, ‘Sorry old chap’, Wheeler replied ‘Oh, not at all’ and they walked off to applause: ‘But on the whole I think that my cricket can be described as faultless.’ Precisely because he cared so little for the game, he saw its truths: the preening indoors as important as the actual playing; the comedy in the field; and the absurd tools and clothes that had to be just so (afterwards he ‘sat in some liquid tar and permanently wrecked my virgin slacks’). Wheeler aired something seldom admitted about schools or any of life’s unavoidable institutions; that some people pass through not so much hating them – though some do; but with a feeling of indifference. What offends more? Wisely, Wheeler saw that school was best not taken too seriously; it was merely a world of its own before the world that mattered. Schooling