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

46 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al player or ‘peg’ for wicket. Whether robust narrative or chirpy conversation, for a hundred years school stories for schoolboys and girls were almost invariably characterised by this unmistakable timbre. What is more, no concessions were made for non-cricket lovers. The authors, such as RAH Goodyear, confidently assumed that all their thousands of readers were acquainted with the technical apparatus and niceties of cricket. Perhaps they were but, equally, for many, possibly only experienced in back-garden or back-street knockabouts these stories were where they learned about the finer points of the game. Maybe with a word in season from an elder brother or friendly uncle, the difference between mid-off, past whom Drift of Deepquay drove a ball intended for his middle peg to the boundary ropes, and mid-on would become apparent. As for the result about which all readersmust be desperate to learn, Deepquay did not win. With one needed, the ‘slapdash Popcorn’ impetuously smote theball high into ‘the long-field’, where he was superbly caught by the talented Martineau of St Sepulchre’s. The match was tied – but thereby hangs the tale. Deepquay only had ten men. Thus to the mainspring of the story, for the dependable and cool batsman Dapple had gone missing. Only in the closing section of this 341 page book is he discovered as a goalkeeper in a fairground booth. He had suffered a temporary lesion in an ‘overtaxed brain’ and lost his memory. On the penultimate page he is recovered enough to join a re-energised and fulfilled Drift ‘to set up a record first-innings partnership against St Sepulchre’s, whose bowling they flogged so mercilessly that ‘each scored a merry hundred in delightfully quick time’. It was not the first nor the last school yarn to end with two close friends sharing a big stand as a literary finale. Before examining the several better-known novels and authors of this kind, it is worthy of emphasis that there were hundreds of such books, all utilising the Reed template with writers, like RAH Goodyear, each producing scores of them. The market of books for children from quite a young age was awash with them.