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

106 Part Two Influence Chapter Six The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching Reviewing Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm; a Memoir of Childhood Reading (2018) the writer and historian Kathryn Hughes found that to read this book was ‘to be taken back to a time when reading was not merely a gentle pleasure or mild obligation but an activity as essential as breathing. Not any old breathing either, but deep, sucking gulps made all the more urgent by the terror that the oxygen could get cut off at a moment’s notice.’ The primacy of children’s reading or being read to endured a hundred years. Cinema and then radio challenged a little, although they were also complementary. Children’s Hour , in particular, which was broadcast from 1922 to 1964, albeit by then in abbreviated form, acted as a guide with its excellent serialisations; I recall being introduced to Arthur Ransome and even shadowing a school-friend to the junior library, knowing that he was returning Ransome’s Winter Holiday , so that I could procure what was currently a hot property because of its ‘wireless’ adaptation. The major shift away from the reading culture came, of course, with the remarkable provision of television and later internet equipment. Their high audio-visual qualities have much to recommend them and are perhaps too easily disparaged by those of us who were reared as readers. This text is aimed not at being a vindication of reading as such. It is more of an analysis of the impact on cricket at large of reading about it during an epoch when reading was virtually unchallenged as the vehicle of fact as well as fiction. In terms of cricket, the amount of coverage of the game in what was an enormous store of books and ‘story papers’ was prodigious. There can be little argument about the intensity