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

127 mother. Daphne du Maurier provides an even stranger and perhaps instructive figure. According to Margaret Forster’s biography, she exemplifies many of the girls of the day who, irked at being omitted from the masculine hierarchies, became a tom-boy, a word dating from Tudor times but which gained mightily in traction in both American and British circles in the 19 th century. She called herself ‘a half- breed female...with a boy’s mind and a boy’s heart’, forever pretending to be Eric Avon, ‘the splendid, shining captain of cricket at Rugby.’ She appears to have had a tangled sexual nature and all this may have informed her novels, but the main point is, however briefly, to remark that the quest for ‘eternal boyhood’ also effected and reflected on girlhood. Probably it affected cricket, as well. I stumbled clumsily on the premise of protracted boyhood when researching for a study of WG Grace and before I had come across Cyril Connolly and associated tracts. He was constantly described by contemporaries and early biographers in boy- like terms. What charitable writers called his ‘foibles’ were often boy-like, as were his frequent tantrums. Even Viscount Cobham’s opinion that Grace’s was ‘one of the dirtiest necks I’ve ever kept wicket behind’ has a hint of the Just William. His very greed for and obsession with sport and his monopoly of its processes reflect a boyish nature. The journalist and Graces’s amanuensis Arthur Porritt wrote ‘there was something indefinable – like the simple faith of a child – that fascinated me. He was a big grown-up boy’. An old friend of Grace told the writer Bernard Darwin that WG ‘was just a great big schoolboy in everything he did,’ while Grace’s friend Colonel Philip Trevor said he was ‘a great big baby’ and very reliant on his mother. Bernard Darwin’s own conclusion was that WG Grace ‘had all the schoolboy’s love of elementary and boisterous jokes, his dislike for learning, his desperate and undisguised keenness, his guilelessness and guile, and his occasional pettishness and pettiness, his endless power of recovering his spirits.’ WG Grace never came across as an emotionally impassioned man, with few women seemingly involved in his life The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching