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

128 romantically. Like Charles Darwin and other middle-class Victorians, he married a near relative, a cousin’s daughter, Agnes Nicholls, in 1873. Female first and second cousins were sometimes the only girls suitable for courtship whom men met in the cloistered atmosphere of the age. There was always the hint of familial encouragement if not arrangement, with the retention of family money and property in domestic hands a motive. The Graces’ was to be a contented and by no means cheerless marriage but one never feels that it was sensuously so. Off they went on the famous ‘honeymoon’, all expenses covered, tour of Australia, just two weeks after their wedding. What struck me as not quite ‘normal’ was that Grace constantly abandoned his young and handsome bride not just for cricket, for which he was regally paid, but on long hunting trips. He recorded how he spent many days hunting (and eating) pigeons, rabbits, kangaroo, quail, plover and goldfish. Agnes spent most of the time staying with friends in the cities. In writing about WG, I merely commented on this being unusual for the conventionally ardent honeymooner, while recording that Agnes was pregnant by her return to England. Duty done but not too passionately was my sense of an under- sexed husband. Nothing sinful, freakish or deviant about it; maybe even a less stressful approach to that fraught sentiment which often daunts and discomforts the more fervently torrid beau. By the time I came to write the foreword to Joe Webber’s massive Gracian tome some twenty years on in 1998, I had caught up with my reading and was confident enough to categorise WG Grace as an ‘Eternal Boy’. It is difficult to escape some degree of acceptance of Cyril Connolly’s perceptive hypothesis and, along with that, some recognition of the role of school-based stories of high jinks and exciting cricket matches in the cultural promulgation and justification of this psychological mind-set. It should be stressed that this is a condition, not a malady. Speaking on the topic at a Cricket Society meeting in London some years ago I was heartened by a fellow-member who, The Interlock; Reading, Playing And Watching