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

5 Part One: Incidence Introduction; It’s Runs That Count On the morning of 4 September 1939, there being no school because of the outbreak of war the previous day, I walked up the ‘brew’, the man-made hill that bridged the railway and the canal, to the newsagency and sweet shop. My mission was to buy a big boy’s comic, that is, one with a lot of reading. The selection was not wide-ranging. I settled for The Rover , priced tuppence, was enthralled by it and bought it weekly for years. Having typed this memory, I began to fear it might be a jumbled remembrance. Would a junior schoolchild have turned away from the genuine comic of strip cartoons and lightweight captions to such a format of several longish stories with just a few illustrations? So I was much relieved when I turned to the foreword of my copy of The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s . The writer, Brian Alderson, is the leading expert on children’s books and the founder of the Children’s Books History Society. He was given a copy of this famed novel on his eighth birthday. Possibly we were both children of the classical word-based culture that was born during the second half of the 19 th century. Possibly we missed out on the later more visually aware and picture conscious culture of the 20 th century where children’s literature sometimes seems to be more visually dominated. Brian Alderson and I were born within a year or so of each another and thus the notion of a seven year old, as I was then, opting for what is now termed the ‘story book’ type of comic is believable enough. It may be that I might, using the argot of school-associated literature, have been charged by my comrades as being ‘a bally swot’ or even ‘a confounded bounder’ but at least I could not have been found guilty of being ‘a dashed fibber’.