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

59 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al Mike was given his 3 rd XI colours and played for the Second Eleven against the Gentlemen of the County but then there is what the author calls ‘a slight imbroglio’ when his house captain, the insufferable Firby-Smith, runs him out in the Wain’s House versus Appleby’s House encounter. Next he pretends to have ‘a crocked wrist’, when he learns he has been chosen for the 1 st XI, displacing his brother Bob, but chicken pox strikes and he finds himself playing against the Incogniti. However, Bob is dropped for his poor fielding and Mike gets his 1 st XI cap. Firby-Smith continues to pester him. Mike dodges house fielding practice at 6.30 a.m one morning and his house captain deals him out six strokes with his swagger stick. Firby-Smith persuades Burgess that Mike is a ‘slacker’, at which, as Wodehouse in characteristic non-PC. manner suggests, Burgess felt ‘much as a bishop might feel if he heard that a favourite curate had become a Mahometan or a Mumbo-Jumboist’, and he is dropped forthwith. His friend and counsellor, Wyatt, has to leave school and Mike creeps back in to the 1 st XI for the game against Ripton, tantamount to the Eton and Harrow fixture. On a damp pitch with the sun coming through, Ripton win the toss, bat and total what on the day is a useful 166. The match is described, wicket by wicket, in elaborate detail by PG Wodehouse. Two chapters and 23 pages are given over to the game, which ends in a win for Wrykyn, as Mike, after a fine stand with his brother Bob, leads Ripton home to a last wicket victory with a score of 83 not out. That more or less ends this half-volume. Cricket abounds. When the Jackson’s sister, the mischievous Marjory, writes to Bob at school, she includes the first-class scores of Joe and Reg Jackson and then, in an inventive postscript, describes the book she is reading: ‘P.S. I’ve been reading a jolly good book called ‘The Boys of Dormitory Five’, and the hero’s an awfully nice boy named Lionel Tremayne, and his friend Jack Langdale saves his life when a beast of a boatman who’s really