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

61 The Outcrop; Walpole; Waugh; Wodehouse Et Al such stories and the public school system as well. Where Wodehouse called the stories ‘sinless pickles’, Benny Green termed them ‘jockstrap jocosities’ and was especially hard on Tibby Reed, accusing him of being ‘a religious huckster’. It is more likely that, as was his wont and was probably his undoing when, interned by the Germans in World War Two, PG Wodehouse made some misjudged radio broadcasts, he was the incorrigible joker. He was ever ready to poke harmless fun at anybody and anything, not excluding a school model he found congenial. In so doing, he was never as purposely satiric or carping as perhaps the more committed Benny Green might have liked. It was ever good clean fun with no malice aforethought. Moreover, Wodehouse wrote of his admiration of the stories of Tibby Reed and others and, in consequence, how he felt the urge to follow in their footsteps. CertainlyhetoldbothGeorgeOrwellandMalcolmMuggeridge, the intelligence officer who interviewed Wodehouse when he was released from wartime internment and who was later editor of Punch, that Mike was his favourite among his many books. He felt that the novel recaptured ‘the ring of a ball on a cricket bat, the green of a pitch, the white of flannels and the sound of schoolboy cheers’. In Mike we learn that ‘cricket is the great safety valve’. If you can play it a couple of times a week, ‘life can never be entirely grey’. Mike is the last and best of his school stories, all of which are replete with important cricket matches, both for school and house, tricked out with that critical dividing line as between popular sporting teachers and the converse. Undoubtedly his school yarns served as a basic training exercise for his later exquisite fiction and, in chapter six when the wheel turns from the ‘incidence’ to the ‘influence’ of such cricket stories, PG Wodehouse will make another glittering appearance. There is no more pressing argument about the prominence of school literature in this period than that, among the hundreds of books written around fictional boarding schools and their games, so illustrious a star of English Literature should choose to use the genre