Young Bradman

44 School and district years published in 1928. Briefly, it begins with Walter Scougall, a county committee man, walking the New Forest. Instead of seeing the usual badgers or deer, he comes across ‘a human sight which was more strange than any in the natural world’. Tom Spedegue is practising high, and highly accurate, bowling that lands on top of the stumps. But for that chance meeting, Spedegue would never (without giving the story away) have made England’s team for the deciding Test match against Australia. Conan Doyle shows his power as a writer by making the incredible so charming. The harder story to imagine would have been what if Spedegue had perfected his new sort of bowling, and tried to make his own way with it. Would selectors have rejected it as too different; something grotesque from the woods? In a telling aside in November 1926, the Sydney daily newspaper The Sun noted Bert Watson, who made 117 for the Sydney first grade club Gordon, playing alongside Kelleway and Moyes. Watson ‘might easily have gone higher in the game if he had remained in the city. A High School teacher, he had to spend some years in the country districts, and this, of course, did not do him any good’. Life outside the city was so obviously unfit for progressing at cricket, readers did not need telling why. Bradman’s extraordinary season in the Southern Highlands had gained him an invitation to the first hurdle, but no more. Now he had to jump it.