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

124 This baffled foreign observers and a few British ones as well. It was particularly puzzling when they espied working men paying their tanners to watch English lords and gentlemen, to say nothing of an Indian prince, at play. There is a relevant scene in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1874/76) where the Anglophile Russian nobility were imitating their English cousins by, for example, laying out a lawn tennis court. The more old-fashioned Dolly, Anna’s sister-in-law, is shocked by ‘the unnaturalness altogether of grown-up persons playing a child’s game in the absence of children.’ Was there another factor that contributed to this national fervour for cricket and, of course, for other sports? It seems that the concentrated density of the school experience, together with the complementary vicarious perusal of all that schoolboy literature, had possibly worked more completely than it should have done. From about the 1890s there began to be published foreign and domestic reports suggesting that the secluded all-male environment of this life-style had arrested the emotional, intellectual and physiological development of these scholars to the point of what came to be called ‘Permanent Adolescence’. Games- playing in adulthood was a mark of this condition, not least because it was stamped out firmly in schoolboy reading that it was the common heritage of youngsters so to do. The most clear-cut and elegant description of what he termed ‘Perennial Boyishness’ was Cyril Connolly (1903- 74). Himself an Etonian who, like several of his confrères , had a mixed bag of suffering and enjoyment during his schooling, his autobiographical reflections and thoughts in his Enemies of Promise , published in 1938, defined the hypothesis with glittering clarity. He wrote of the ‘puer aeternus’ , the ‘eternal boy’, one whose secluded schooling had been so concentrated that he had become petrified, in its literal connotation, in that stage of life. ‘Their glories and disappointments’, he wrote,’are so intense as to dominate their lives and arrest their development. From this it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, sentimental, cowardly and, The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching