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

45 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al and-out slogger, left to save the school’s honour. Drift overcomes his natural affable lassitude and steels himself for the fray, much of the narrative consisting of his inner thoughts: ‘He felt an impetus of heightened enthusiasm for the task in front of him. Martineau had just as much at stake and was easily St Sepulchre’s best bowler – perhaps the best all-round man on the field on the day’s play – and never the sort of trundler one would choose to take liberties with. That gave zest and sparkle to the thing, and Drift was ever a seeker after the picturesque patches of school life. Out he stepped, therefore, to a ball that was meant for the middle peg, and right lustily did he beat it past mid-off’s thudding feet to the ropes. Four! Next, he made a hard return from a good-length ball which Martineau flung himself at but could not reach. Two! A curly one, which rose awkwardly and had to be dodged in fear of a split head, brought nothing. A swifter one, which developed spin, made him glad enough to chop it close of the off-peg by the closest of shaves; nothing again! Following a bland and booby-trap attempt to entice him into a tall hit, which he leapt out to and drove smoothly to the boundary: four! Then the last ball of the over sent up in a strained silence after a burst of cheering. If he could score three from it, the game was won..’ That amounts to a page devoted to a crucial over, with a usually short, terse paragraph for each ball. The tone of the writing exemplifies the breezy perkiness of the genre. The vocabulary is extensive and by no means condescendingly banal, as with some writing for children, but it does echo the speech patterns of the pupils, incorporating their vernacular such as the constant use of ‘man’ for a fellow-