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

42 The Template; The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s theological temperature is raised a little. Oliver is trying to help a chronically sick Loman, the cad who had caused him such trouble, Tibby Reed writes of Oliver; ‘He shouted, and the reader knows who heard that shout, and what the answer was.’ Loman recovers – and the author makes formal reference ‘to Him, the World’s Great Burden Bearer’, whose blood ‘cleanseth us from all sin’. There follows a concluding chapter which, likes many a Victorian novel for adults, rounds up the characters and disposes of them neatly in the years ahead. Oliver is a barrister and Horace is a college tutor. We learn this because the school Old Boys have reunited at the school to witness the annual game against the County. Oliver Greenfield’s brother, Stephen, who was a timid little new boy, hero- worshipping his brother, in the main story, is now ‘a big fellow’ and ‘an object of special awe among the youngsters’; they ‘quake in their shoes whenever his manly form appears in the upper corridor’. He carried his bat for 58 in the first innings as St Dominic’s beat the County by five wickets. Sources Quigley op.cit Morison Stanley Talbot Baines Reed;Author, Biographer, Typefounder 1960 Richards op.cit