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

49 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al with That Test Match; a Tale for Boys. It covers the entire career of Paul Rignold from playing in the Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s, via country house and county cricket and Test experience in the West Indies and Australia to that vital final Test at the Oval. Another later example was Eric Leyland (1911-2001). A prolific author of ‘masculine’ adventure stories for boys, thrillers for adults and, under varied pseudonyms, tales for young girls, he included at least one cricket book in his long listings. This was The Cricket Week Mystery, published in 1950. An important novel relating to the closeness of school friendships was EF Benson’s David Blaize (1916). The author was actually born in a public school – Wellington, where his father, EW Benson was head and later installed as Archbishop of Canterbury. The author himself attended Marlborough, upon which Marchester is faithfully based. He is possibly better known for his deliciously camp series of ‘Mapp and Lucia’ stories, televised by the BBC during 1985- 86, featuring Prunella Scales and Geraldine McEwan. In David Blaize the amity is the rather more convoluted relationship of a younger and older boy. David, the blond- haired thirteen years old, is befriended at Marchester by the handsome Frank Maddox, the school’s leading batsman, but no slouch as a scholar. Their housemaster, Mr Adams, calls them David and Jonathan, a biblical epithet much bandied in and around this type of book and thinking at the time. Former winners of Sunday School prizes such as Eric, or, Little by Little may remember the story of the intimate friendship of David, son of Saul, King of Israel, and Jonathan, son of Jesse of Bethlehem. When David hears of the death of Jonathan, he mourns deeply, saying ‘your love to me was more wonderful than the love of woman’, although the theological jury is still out on whether that meant a Platonic or a sexual relationship. It came to be used constantly to elevate the pure character of the friendship of two young men