Shadows On the Grass

by Simon Raven

  ‘I see. And his only chance of surviving that long is a shortage of players. So he’s decided to get me out of the way for a start.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Oh, James.’

  ‘It serves you right. You’ve given him the chance. You were in an impregnable position as far as cricket went – but you’ve gone and lost your name with all this stupid pissing.’

  ‘You didn’t mind it.’

  ‘I was brought up on a farm. And of course Hedley doesn’t give a damn either – he’s far too upper class. But your behaviour, if denounced with suitable moral fervour and deplored with sanctimonious reference to the innocence of Peter May, could certainly disqualify you from playing for the XI for the rest of the season – making a better chance of a permanent place for Hedley.’

  ‘All those days out with you and Ivan…I couldn’t bear to miss them.’

  ‘Well then. If you promise me to pull yourself together from now on and hold your water like a man, I think I can arrange matters.’

  ‘Oh James. How?’

  ‘The thing to remember, old man, is that Hedley is keen on his Colours rather than on actually playing in the side. He is not a cricketer at heart.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because he is not sentimental. All real cricketers are sentimental men.’

  A day or two later Hedley appeared with his wrist in a heavy bandage. It was announced that he would not be able to play cricket again that season, but that in recognition of his services already rendered he would be awarded his Colours as Honorary Twelfth Man and allowed, as such, to accompany us on all our away fixtures.

  ‘Which means,’ said James, ‘that when Tony Rimell comes to make up his lists at the end of July he’ll have to make the 1st XI up to Twelve. Eleven chaps in the side – and Hedley comes extra. Twelve Colours are not really in order. I had a terrible task persuading Tony.’

  ‘But surely…it is rather bad luck on Hedley, not being able to play any more.’

  ‘I have already told you. He’s not that keen on playing. So he was quite happy to go along with my little scheme and wrap up his wrist in a bandage.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Also, he was relieved that he’d have no further reason for doing you down. He hadn’t really fancied that. Although he may not be sentimental, he isn’t a shit.’

  ‘No. Only a fake.’

  ‘Not even that, perhaps. He desired his Colours so much that he was prepared to give up leading the House Platoon to victory in the Arthur Webster Competition; because obviously if he’s not fit for cricket he’s not fit for Corps. You know how much the Arthur Webber meant to him in terms of prestige. Yet he was prepared to give it all up to make sure of his cricket Colours – so perhaps,’ said James, ‘he is a sentimental man after all.’

  I am afraid lest I have given rather an unfair impression of Peter May, who has so far figured in these pages as a po-faced booby who batted like an automaton. What I should now like to make very clear is that Peter, as a man, had intelligence and a good deal of charm; and that as a batsman, so far from being a robot programmed always to select and play the most efficient stroke possible in the given circumstances, he had an individual brilliance which often led him to select and play the most satisfying and beautiful, even the most spectacular, stroke possible in the given circumstances – and sometimes in direct defiance of them.

  Of the latter gift, more in a moment. First a little tale to demonstrate the fundamental good sense and sensibility of the man.

  Although he came to Charterhouse in the Autumn of 1942, Peter May was still under fourteen in the summer of 1943. He was therefore still young enough to sit for a junior Scholarship, and indeed too young, by the Headmaster’s decision, to play for the School Cricket XI, though the cricket master, the Captain of Cricket and George Geary, the professional, were all convinced that he was good enough.

  Peter accepted the Headmaster’s decision with equanimity and played with great content for the Under 16 XI…where he learnt a great deal more about cricket than he would have learnt, at his age, in the 1st: for the master who ran the 1st was a nice but nugatory sort of man, whereas R L (Bob) Arrowsmith, who ran the Under 16, had a rare gift, reinforced by picturesque and memorable utterance; for impressing the necessary disciplines on talent, or even (as in Peter’s case) on genius.

  However, the substance of this anecdote lies, not in the benefits which accrued to Peter through being kept down for a while, but in the interpretations which were variously made of the matter. It was known that it was the Headmaster’s veto which kept Peter out of the XI, but it was not known on what moral or social ground the veto was based. Some said the Head Man had judged Peter to be in danger of injury if he played among boys so much older, some thought that the danger was not of injury but of Peter’s own conceit or others’ insalubrious attentions; some opined that the Head Man did not want a Lower School Hero round the place nor yet an object of envy, and some that he was afraid the Press would get hold of the story and run annoying articles about a thirteen-year-old prodigy. On the whole, however, the view which prevailed was the most pedestrian: the Head Man, it was generally asserted, did not want Peter’s work to be interfered with and his chances of a junior Scholarship impaired by the demands of the many whole-day and away matches which, even during the war, were still played by the 1st XI.

  In the event, Peter did not win a Junior Scholarship. I remember hearing at the time that he came very near it but that his performance was somewhat tenuous and lacked flair. The general and immediate view was that Peter had got ‘the worst of both worlds’; that having been denied his pink 1st XI cap in order that he might win intellectual laurels, he had in the end been crowned with neither. The obtrusive were not slow to express this sentiment to Peter himself. I was the first.

  The list of Junior Scholars Elect had just been posted in the Cloisters. Peter, having examined it, was walking away with a subdued air. I was going the opposite way in order to quiz the list.

  ‘Any luck,’ I said, as Peter passed me.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Pity,’ I said fatuously. ‘You’ve been made to give up your chance of a pink hat and got nothing in return. You’ve got the Head Man to thank for that.’

  Peter was a shy boy, who during the two and a half quarters (terms) he had been in the school had said very little indeed. Now, reluctant to speak but determined that justice should be done, he struggled to present his own notion of the affair.

  ‘I think,’ he said very slowly and carefully, ‘that the Head Man decided as he did, not to stop my cricket wrecking my hash (work) but to stop my hash spoiling my cricket. I could hardly have made much showing in the XI while I was worrying about a scholarship, but I could manage all right in the Under 16.’

  In short, Peter was attributing to the Headmaster the kindest and most sensitive of all motives: the Head Man has seen, Peter was trying to say, that the big thing in my life is cricket, and he has made sure that this has not been spoiled for me by my being too early exposed in high places while I am under other and necessary pressures.

  Whether this was or was not the Head Man’s true motive, I never found out; but it has always seemed to me that Peter’s defence of the Head Man, in the face of my loud-mouthed comment, was grateful, generous, and, for a boy of his years, exceedingly subtle.

  Whatever the reason behind the Headmaster’s edict, Peter continued to play for the Under 16 instead of the 1st XI even after the Scholarship exams were done; and in consequence I am now able, as a member of the same Under 16 side, to give an eyewitness report of an incident which vividly proclaimed the genius of Peter’s batting and also illustrated the combination of anticipation, perversity and panache which informed it.

  Not long after the conversation in the Cloisters, I was Peter’s partner at the wicket during a crisis in the Under 16 Match against Eton. I was having a bad season, out of luck and out of form, was batting low in the list, and was most unlikely to
do much to dig us out of disaster. But I could, I told myself, be of service if I could only stay there for a while, giving Peter time to gather runs. In the end, I was too feeble and too futile even to defend my wicket for more than a few minutes, but during those few minutes I saw an unforgettable sight.

  I was at the bowler’s end, while Peter was facing the very fast deliveries (for our class of cricket) of a tall and fibrous redhead called Bob Spear (later in life a distinguished judge of racing). Peter was having no trouble with Bob, who pitched the ball well up on a wicket that was fast and true; and what followed may even have been an indication of boredom on Peter’s part, an attempt to get entertainment out of doing the easy thing the difficult way. In any event, having efficiently driven the first two balls of Bob’s over to the long off boundary in the approved manner and off the front foot, Peter took a quick look at the third, which was an obvious half volley just outside the off stump, and then, instead of making another routine front foot drive, elected to hit it for four off the back foot, with the same ease and accuracy as he might have despatched a very long long-hop, midway between mid-off and the umpire… greatly to the astonishment of both, who watched the ball pass between them with huge, goggling eyes, as though it had been an emanation of the devil.

  Now the great point about Bob’s bowling, as I have already suggested, was that it was, for boys of our age, very fast indeed. The speed and coordination required to hit it, when well pitched up, off the back foot yet in front of the wicket, very hard and straight back where it came from, were only less remarkable than the perverse ingenuity which conceived and selected such a stroke. The showmanship with which it was carried off was superb, consisting in a total lack of overt enjoyment or sense of the unusual, merely in a slight shake of the head as though to indicate mild displeasure at not having lifted the ball for six instead. Anticipation, perversity, panache.

  And, of course, genuine modesty. The quiet and sometimes embarrassed manner in which Peter behaved in the midst of his triumphs reminded one of the poet Horace when he disclaimed personal merit for having written his poetry and gave credit for all to his Muse:

  Totum muneris hoc tui est

  quod monstror digito praetereuntium

  Romanae fidicen lyrae:

  quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, tuum est.

  This is all thy gift

  That I am pointed out by the fingers of those that pass

  As the minstrel of the Roman lyre.

  That I am filled with the breath of song,

  And that I please, if please I do,

  Is of thy bestowal.

  Reading these lines, one understands why everyone liked Horace. It was probably for much the same reason that we all liked Peter May.

  III

  THE GREEN YEARS

  Pittifer joe’ Potts was also a modest man. Forty years of teaching Classics and Cricket at St Dunstan’s Preparatory School at Burnham-on-Sea had made him, one might hazard, more contented and more humble by the year. And yet there was much of which he might have boasted. He was, for a start, a brilliant teacher of Greek, and managed to push enough of it into me, starting from scratch and during the single year I was at St Dunstan’s, to win me a Scholarship to Charterhouse during the summer of 1941. What was more, Pittifer Joe was a marvellous instructor in that most difficult of all strokes, the Leg Sweep. Yet he took no undue pride in these attainments, just attended quietly to the needs of his pupils, swift to correct but slow to anger – until one day in that summer of ’41 he revealed a streak of violence and brutality which, latent and unsuspected over the full forty years he had served the school, now burst over our astonished heads like Vesuvius over the lotus-eaters of Pompeii.

  It happened in this wise. At the end of the Easter Term the maths master had very properly followed the call of the bugle, and the school had been compelled to employ a middle-aged temporary called ‘Wally’ Wallace. Although Wally knew little mathematics and less science, he was quite a plausible bluffer and had the wit to discover straight away which boys had some reputation at his subjects and then, as it were, to pace himself by them. If he were uncertain how to solve a problem, he would not flounder about trying to do it himself, he would set the whole class on to it and then announce that the school swot had come up with the correct answer. The school swot (‘Lotty’ Loder he was called) would then be invited to come up to the blackboard and demonstrate his solution to the accompaniment of grateful and approving nods from Wally…who, however, was calamitously found out on the day when Lotty had been introduced by his neighbour to the delights of self-abuse.

  Wally by now had such trust in him that he summoned him to the blackboard without even bothering to look at his work; whereupon the wretched child came limping forward with a huge erection clearly visible under his grey shorts and no solution to propose to his audience. After a few feeble efforts at improvisation he asked to be allowed ‘to go to the bog, sir, please’, stayed there exploring the full possibilities of his newfound hobby, and left Wally to do his own job for once.

  And a sad mess Wally made of it. However, no one complained, because we all liked Wally and those of us who were cricketers much admired his graceful batting and the excellence of his instruction in the nets. Whatever his maths might be, his cricket, in a phrase of the time, was the real MaCoy. And this it was which eventually led to his explosive confrontation with Pittifer Joe Potts.

  Wally had very properly been appointed assistant cricket master on his arrival, and for some weeks conducted himself as modestly and as prudently as a lieutenant should. The only slight trouble was that Wally was a ‘Leg Glance’ man who delighted, at the wicket as in the classroom, in letting others do the work and deflecting their power to his glory. Now, Pittifer Joe, as I have already mentioned, was a ‘Leg Sweep’ man: he believed that one should positively hit the ball and that there was something unmanly, unBritish and even unChristian in merely deflecting it. From this it will be plain that the difference between Wally and Pittifer was not just technical or even stylistic – it was fundamental and it was moral. Nevertheless, such were the efficiency and the deference with which Wally filled his subordinate role that for some weeks, as I say, all went well. Both men sensibly contrived to avoid making Leg Sweep versus Leg Glance into any kind of issue…until the day of the Scholars’ Picnic.

  This took place early every June in honour of those boys who had won Scholarships to Public Schools in the May examinations. Before the War the school had travelled to Cheddar Gorge or Dunster Castle for the celebration: in 1941 it was held a few hundred yards down the beach by which we lived. The great feature of the day was to be The Dutch Game, as we called it. For this the school was divided into fifteen groups of five boys; each group ranged in age from eight to thirteen, and spent the entire day from eleven in the morning constructing a fort of sand to resist the tide, which would begin to encroach on our labours some time around 4 p.m. The fort which was judged to have held out the longest would win the competition, and the group which the green years had constructed it would receive a florin a head – half a crown for the group leader.

  Of all the childhood games which I remember, I think The Dutch Game was the most thrilling. The tension mounting as the tide rose, the desperate reinforcements and adjustments as the first trickle lapped up some tiny channel, the haste and huddle of the final retreat within the walls of the fort (obligatory, by the rules, when the first proper wave reached the ramparts)… it is these I would choose if the gods offered me a few hours back as a boy. But matchless as The Dutch Game was, there was one other game which ran it pretty close and obviously, in the view of Lotty Loder, beat it altogether. Since his induction into masturbation on the day of Wally’s unmasking, the ingenious fellow had refined a series of subtle and varied methods which he confided and later actually exhibited to such of his acquaintance as expressed interest. Hitherto, for whatever reason, there had been no question of ‘doing it to each other’ or even of ‘doing it together’; one was simply per
mitted to watch. But the Scholars’ Picnic, in this matter as in others, was to prove a feast of revelations.

  Now Lotty Loder (who despite his auto-erotic frenzies had achieved an Exhibition to Blundell’s) was a group leader in The Dutch Game. Even quite early it was observed by Wally Wallace and others that Lotty’s fort was progressing very slowly. Wally, an oddly innocent man, could not imagine why: the rest of us could have told him that it was because Lotty kept whisking one or other of his group into the sand dunes for a look at ‘Lotty tickling his pee’, as the exercise was currently dubbed. After the third of these expeditions, this made with an intelligent and sultry ten year old, Lotty returned in a state of some bewilderment and came lolloping along the beach to talk to me.

  ‘It’s even more fun,’ Lotty said, ‘if you tickle one another. Young Hayward suggested it. I can’t think why I never thought of that before.’

  ‘I thought of it before,’ I said.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘It makes them cross. It happened at my last school and there was a dreadful row. We were told it might ruin our whole lives.’

  ‘Oh. Does it ruin your whole life if you just do it to yourself?’

  ‘No. But they’re not too keen on that either.’

  Lotty went thoughtfully away. But clearly my warning had not gone very deep, as soon after lunch I saw him disappear again with ‘young Hayward’.