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

39 The Template; The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s the end of the tale as a valediction, with old friends saying their goodbyes both to the school and also to one another on parting. They normally beat their rivals to bring down the curtain on the play in a satisfactory and wholesome fashion. All of this was conveyed in The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s , culturally speaking, one of the most influential books in British fiction. My copy is dated 1971. It is, as far as I am able to judge, the last edition to be printed – and the inside back cover heralds a re-print after many years of Eric, or, Little by Little. This type of book was seemingly imperishable. A clue as to ‘Dominic’s’ endurability lies in its parodies. Our English teacher, a shade more extravert than your average grammar school pedagogue, wrote a piece for our school magazine during the 1940s entitled ‘The Fifth Form at St Metrovicks’. Metrovicks, a shortened form of Metropolitan Vickers, was the huge electrical engineering plant at neighbouring Trafford Park, hailed then as the biggest engineering campus in Europe. ‘Metros’ employed well over 20,000 workers, including over time my brother and several close relatives, and its buzzer, booming out the signals for the start and finish of work and the parameters of dinner time (lunch time for the effete), could be heard throughout the environs. The factory is long gone but the Trafford MV Cricket Club still satisfyingly persists, rather as cricket does in imperial possession now independent of the crown. A dimmer memory is of a seaside concert party sketch called ‘The Fifth Form at St Camiknicks’. Remember that this was an era when underwear was fair game for a risque giggle, when George Formby’s two most popular songs were based on the choice vocations for the dedicated voyeur , cleaning windows and Mr Wu’s Chinese laundry, and when Gracie Fields’ ambivalently titled number, Winter Draws On , was banned by the BBC. Everyone locally knew of ‘Metros’, while camiknickers, a combine, first introduced in the 1920s, of camisole and knickers, left either little or everything to the imagination. That both could be used with reference to Dominic’s was testimony to the incursion of the book into