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

94 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man exercise, recollecting that the pre-1914 era was a time when boys of eleven, twelve and thirteen were already working long hours with relatively few opportunities for relaxation. Of course, by the 1940s, when the new-style story books grew in prominence, the school-leaving age had been raised to an obligatory15 years of age, with a minority staying on until 16 and perhaps longer. This meant that many of us at that later stage found some balance between playing games at school and maybe for local clubs and watching the glorious triumphs of Manchester United and Lancashire CCC, all the while also finding the time to read about football and cricket in the Rover and Hotspur. Thus the more realistic Thomson approach, whereby professional sport was liberally portrayed in the pages of their publications, was a definitive but not too critical a break with the precedent of story comics. One advantage of this in a more demotic era was that ordinary youths were jettisoned to fame through sport, an encouraging thought for the thousands of ordinary youths that read of their exploits. While the chances of a working class lad going to a fee-paying school were negligible, neither were the opportunities to become a professional footballer or cricketer plentiful. Even so, a few did manage it, so that, while still escapist, the context was not quite so dream-like as the faraway romance of a boarding school. One did actually play football and cricket, so the vision of running out alongside Johnny Carey at one Old Trafford and opening the batting with Cyril Washbrook at the other was a relishable if unreliable one. Besides which, enjoying a snug, exceedingly warm-hearted and heartening domestic hearth (Beryl Bainbridge was certainly correct in my case about novelists needing a distressing childhood; I would be unable to write a novel however hard I tried) I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being away from home at boarding school, much as I devoured the literature about them. In the same frame of mind, I enjoyed the war stories in The Adventure and The Hotspur , but I never fancied being in the firing line. That said, there is evidence, some of it from