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

60 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al employed by Lionel’s cousin who wants the money that Lionel is going to have when he grows up, stuns him and leaves him on the beach to drown. Well, Lionel is going to play for the school against Loamshire, and its the match of the season, but he goes to the headmaster and says he wants Jack to play instead of him. Why don’t you do that? M. P.S.S. This has been a frightful fag to write’ Impeccably, PG Wodehouse inserts a polished satirical nugget about a ripping yarn, with foul deeds mingling with cricket and fair play, into his own ripping yarn, with its foul deeds mingling with cricket and fair play. In the second half of the germinal Mike, the eponymous hero is destined to captain the Wrykyn 1 st XI. But he finds himself transferred to Sedleigh School where he finds sport is at a low ebb. Mike sets about him to create a sportive ambience and builds a cricket team. His eventual triumph lies in leading his new school to cricketing victory over his old school. There are cricket matches with MCC and the Incogniti but when Mike goes to Sedleigh, he at first refuses to play cricket at all, preferring clandestine outings with the local village side, But, to annoy a bothersome teacher, he turns out for Outwood’s against Downing’s in a house match and scores a majestic 227. After a fight here and a prank there, the grand finale is set up for that striking Sedleigh triumph. The style is unmistakably felicitous: ‘there would have been serious trouble between David and Jonathan if either persisted in dropping catches of each other’s bowling’. This in itself makes Mike the most fluidly crafted schoolboy book of them all. The credo of Athleticism is pure and unadorned, freed by Wodehouse from even a wisp of its previous clothing in Christian theology, although the ethic of ‘manly’ sportsmanship remains constant. Benny Green, that diverting polymath who adored Wodehouse as much as he did cricket, surmised that Wodehouse was waxing critical of the original authors of