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

40 The Template; The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s the common mentality. Turning to the cricket in the novel, the game gets its first mention on page three with a notice that reads; ‘Tomorrow will be the final big practice when the elevens for the ‘A to M’ versus N to Z’ match on the 25 th will be chosen. ‘Sixth versus School will be played on the 1 st proxo. The School eleven will be selected from among players in the two above matches.’ One gathers from this that, like many schools at that time and as had been the case with many clubs, the cricket was chiefly internalised, with outside fixtures more at a discount, partly from travel difficulties. The match for which these games are preparation is the end of term two innings encounter with ‘the County’, shire unspecified. A chapter or so later comes the Alphabet game, which sets Oliver Greenfield against his close friend Horace Wraysford. After a poor start, Oliver rescues the A’s, although the Z’s win by two wickets in ‘a closer match than it had promised to be at first.’ The opinion offered by one young spectator that ‘Greenfield senior skies his balls too much for my taste’ might have caused George Formby and Gracie Fields to raise their eyebrows, but his innings is a step towards Oliver making it into the school eleven. The major strand of the book is the friendship and its vacillations of the popular, cheery Horace and the more serious, quieter Oliver. Against a variable background of life among the ‘Guinea Pigs’ and ‘Tadpoles’ of the lower school, the usual ration of boating and suchlike incidents, not to mention the Eric-cum-Flashman figure of the errant Loman, the action is pacy and the dialogue lively. Much is made of the missing exam paper, soon to be a stand-by in several stories, first blamed on Oliver and the subsequent loss of his cricketing place, before Loman is found, of course, to be the guilty party. There is breakdown and reconciliation but the centrality of their relationship prevails. There is bitter rivalry between the superior Sixth and the defiant Fifth, to which the two friends belong and the Sixth and School encounter, with the latter team consisting