The Summer Field

206 Chapter Twenty-Four Into The Void ‘You have your time and it’s not forever.’ Luke Sutton To say why cricket matters to us, you have to say what cricket is. In 1943 the bomb-aimer Andrew Maitland, having survived bombing raids on Germany, went to RAF Lichfield, an airfield training mainly Australians. In his memoir Through the Bombsight he recalled some Australians threw chairs in a local pub fireplace when the landlord called time, and as ‘one young officer was being restrained as he moved in to move the clock from the mantelpiece towards the burning embers, a more mature voice was saying, ‘That’s not cricket, old man.’ If the high-spirited drinkers had destroyed the clock – not easily replaced in wartime Staffordshire – no- one would have said, ‘That’s cricket’. Men defined cricket, oddly, by what it was not. To say something was ‘not cricket’ meant that it went against values, usually taken for granted, of how a man respected another by not touching him (or what was on his mantelpiece). Or, a man respected a woman by not touching her. The Englishwoman Daisy Bates, who settled in the wilds of Australia to tend to the natives, wrote in her 1938 memoir The Passing of the Aborigines how she handled the ‘problem’ of white men having sex with Aboriginal women and causing ‘half-caste’ children: ‘an appeal from a woman of their own race and colour to play the game’ never failed. In this metaphor, cricket was not even named. She was reminding men that they ought not to do some things, even if they could, and wanted to. Lust, or any other sin, was not necessarily against the law; yet in the Australian outback, as on the cricket field, you could feel free of the everyday rule of law. Why else the different clothing, the paraphernalia of bat and ball, the peculiar words and rituals, your back to the world outside, and your own lawman, the umpire? A cricketer might use the phrase to console himself. At a Southend festival dinner in 1920, the Derbyshire captain J.F.Bell admitted his team’s bad season, but ‘they had always played the game’. He did not mean merely they kept turning up; they tried to do what was proper. Non-cricketers telling you to ‘play the game’ implied agreement on rules, as in May 1919 when the British commander Field-Marshal Douglas Haig in a widely-reported speech praised his former soldiers, ‘each one playing the game in the most unselfish spirit as true British sportsmen’, and urged employers to give them jobs. As Haig had to give the speech at all, employers evidently were not meeting their half of the bargain. The soldiers won the war while the employers made money in England; the