Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

100 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man opposite blank page has been utilised for some arithmetic scribbles of the Billy rather than Wally Bunter sort. There are twelve stories ranging in size from eight to sixteen pages. No less than five are school stories. The others are chiefly located in foreign parts such as the Amazon river, the wild west and Africa, some of them with schoolboys as the protagonists. One is a home based holiday mystery for a couple of schoolboys in a northern fishing village. The school yarns are ‘Pass it to Perry’, which features rugby and boxing at Carchester; ‘the Morton Abbey Case’, a mystery for pupils of Towermeads school to solve; ‘the Soap Sandwich’, pranks and mischief at a school harvest camp; ‘Professor Minor’, which involves the boating and rowing of Dolbury School; and ‘The Match of the Year’ by Samuel Jeans, a regular contributor of school stories. In that Samuel Jeans story Raymond Seal, a seventeen year old Australian, finds himself at St Luke’s School in mid- term, where he is completely ignored..’and at St Luke’s the business of life was cricket!’. Such was the quality of the school cricket pitch that the county played the Australians at St Luke’s but when Raymond says he is well acquainted with Alan Cutler, the Bradmanesque hero of his countrymen’s eleven, the school cricket captain, Ronald Henley, thinks him ‘batty’. When the great day arrives and Alan Cutler is perceived chatting intimately with ‘the batty newcomer’, the school wicket keeper Tom Judd and his friend Henley realise that Raymond is more ‘a dark horse’ than ‘a giddy ass’ and a few overs in the nets reveal they have a star on their hands. He is immediately drafted into the first eleven for the yearly grudge match against the recently victorious Town. ‘the high-water mark in St Luke’s circlet calendar’ and ‘not a boy was absent from the boundary line’. Once again, as throughout the whole sequence of fictional school cricket matches, much attention is drawn to the loyalty that guarantees a huge attendance at every game. Moreover, ‘for the convenience of the townfolk’ the school rather condescendingly agreed to a Saturday match of just one