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

112 for the prairie or the Western Desert, how easy was it for the municipal park to be converted into Old Trafford? As wickets we had an unwanted mantelshelf – at least, I care to believe that it was unwanted – which we used to hide at dinner time or overnight in the bushes on the other side of the tarmac ‘Brownean ring’ that circled the grassed area. One had to be adaptable and imaginative. Curiously, sporting loyalties trumped ethnic or national ones. Everyone was prepared to be a whooping Indian, especially if there were home-made bows and arrows available or a guttural, goose- stepping Hun. No one could, however, bear to be recruited for Yorkshire, so ours was an eternal Lancashire practice match, with Dick Pollard for ever bowling to Winston Place. Another arc in this circle of reading and playing was that, whereas the heroes of imperial glory, the Deadwood Dicks and Buck Rogers of western adventure, the Flash Gordons of the future or, when war came, the danger-defying defenders of the realm were all grown men, many of the cricketers of which we read were boys themselves, the readier to imitate. We could be Mike Jackson as easily as Wally Hammond. That interaction of the physical reality of cricket with its cultural representation made for an urgent and dominant entity, so voluminous and constant, so compressed and inseparable in magnitude. That was the overarching impact of the game and its schoolboy literature. But at a tangent with this central theme there was a threesome of much more complex aspects. They are difficult to disentangle, such is their intimate relationship, but let us begin with Athleticism. It is well- established that the natural chain of schoolboy literature – Thomas Hughes, Talbot Baines Reed, Charles Hamilton – were believers in Muscular Christianity. Tibby Reed regarded himself as the disciple of Thomas Hughes and Charles Hamilton saw himself as the apostle of the other two. Almost all the hundreds of other writers were imbued with the same faith or deemed it opportune to incorporate its tenets in their writing. As we noted, Rudyard Kipling erred from the orthodoxy, but only in the sense that he argued that The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching