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

80 was the more extensive than theirs. He had genius of a kind, imagining a timeless closed world peopled by a group of strongly drawn characters who too were changeless. It was a fictional cosmos that hardly changed over half a century, It had a bright mythic force, with Greyfriars a planet surrounded by a hundred satellites of the same constituency; St Jim’s, Rookwood, Tipdale, Topham, Sparshot, Felgate, on and on, an endless list of circling entities. There have been many such fictional universes but few that have remained so static for so long. The Famous Five and Billy Bunter were locked in the Remove, that is, Lower Fourth Form, over the best part of five decades, with Mr Queltch forever their irascible teacher. Although not so frankly evangelical as Hughes or Reed, for he was very much less self-confident than they were, Hamilton still felt a sense of mission. He came as close as he ever did to sermonising when he wrote, ‘let youth be happy, or as happy as possible. Happiness is the best possible preparation for misery..Every day of happiness, illusory or otherwise – and most happiness is illusory – is much to the good. It will help the boy to gain confidence and hope’. However, within the static environment of the perpetual school, there was a kink in the time-warp. Serial publication slavishly followed the calendar year, with Christmas ‘hols’ and the like relevantly treated. It may seem a strange analogy, but having myself during army service come close to engagement in these hostilities, the Korean War springs to mind. It lasted three years, June 1950 to July 1953, but the splendidly sardonic anti-war television series MASH lasted much longer. Based on Richard Hooker’s 1968 novel and the 1970 film of the same title, it ran in the United States for eleven series from 1972 to 1982, a matter of 254 episodes, shown and repeated on both sides of the Atlantic. It had some changes of personnel but basically told the same story of a mobile military hospital over and over again. It meant, for instance, that eleven winters and yuletides had to be negotiated, when, in reality, there had been but three. The Flood (1) Greyfriars For Ever..And Ever