Shadows On the Grass

by Simon Raven

  ‘I’ll take the pavilion end,’ William said.

  ‘Right you be, Mogg,’ said the nonentity, ‘stumps at six?’

  ‘If they’re still at it.’

  Although Yearling Matches were normally of two innings, for some administrative reason (a temporary shortage of pitches, I think) this game was to be of one innings only. Saunderites, having won the toss, elected to bat; and Hodgsonites, pursued by VSHR’s almost hysterical clapping, now took the field.

  There is no need to dwell on the Saunderite Innings. A bad team in a bad year on a bad day, they finicked and fiddled and fluked some 43 runs, leaving Hodgsonites two clear hours to pass this wretched total on a gentle wicket. Pundits of either House were forecasting a victory to Hodgsonites by at least six wickets, while VSHR pranced back and forth in front of the pavilion like Minnie Mouse doing a tap dance in an early Disney.

  ‘We’ve never had the Yearling Trophy in Hodgsonites,’ he was saying to anyone who would listen, ‘at least not in my time as Housemaster.’

  ‘“The man that once did sell the lion’s skin,”’ said Mogg as he passed Sniffy on his way out to the wicket, ‘“Was killed with hunting him.”’

  ‘What did you say, William?’

  ‘, sir,’ said William. ‘Sophocles. In the vernacular: you never know your luck till the wheel stops turning.’

  ‘Very true,’ said VSHR: ‘one must walk humbly under the gods. But you won’t deny – now will you, William? – that we’re off to an excellent start.’

  ‘It is not my business to analyse or comment on the play,’ said William: ‘merely to regulate it.’

  And with this he flicked his fingers for the nonentity, led him swaying on to the pitch, and took post with his back to the pavilion, a lean and faceless spectre when regarded from where Sniffy was sitting among his darling Hodgsonites.

  ‘Mogg was being rather tiresome,’ Sniffy said to the Hodgsonite Captain, ‘I fancy he’s one of those people who don’t like it when their friends are doing well.’

  ‘I know what you mean, sir,’ said the fourteen-year-old Captain of Hodgsonite Yearlings. ‘I’m afraid he’s not the only one on the ground. All cricketers are like that, you see. None of us likes anyone except himself to make more than two.’

  ‘Gracious, such cynicism,’ said VSHR ‘It reminds me of what they say about Maurice Bowra. If you get knighted, he’ll never speak to you again. But if you’re sent to prison, he will come and feed you enormous cheques through the bars to help you when you are let out.’

  VSHR always assumed in conversation that you knew as much as he did (e.g. who Maurice Bowra was) and was on the whole well liked for the assumption.

  ‘Good luck, good luck,’ he now cried, rising and clapping his hands above his head as the Hodgsonite opening pair left the pavilion. ‘Smite the uncircumcised Philistine.’

  There was a cascade of giggles, during which the Captain and Vice-Captain managed to settle Sniffy down on his seat in a more or less orderly manner.

  ‘Please keep still, sir,’ said the Captain. ‘It makes the batsman nervous if there’s movement in the pav.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, what have I done?’ moaned Sniffy, rolling his eyes in a ghastly fit of contrition.

  ‘Nothing, sir, nothing at all. But please to be still from now on.’

  The first ball was a full toss which hit the Hodgsonite No. 1 on the shoulder.

  ‘How’s that?’ said the bowler facetiously.

  William gently raised his finger.

  The Hodgsonite Captain and Vice-Captain looked puzzled; but such was William’s prestige as an Umpire that the event was allowed to pass.

  ‘Must have been dropping fast,’ said the Vice-Captain. ‘One can’t get the trajectory right from here.’

  ‘Me miserum,’ keened Sniffy. ‘Eheu, eheu, eheu.’

  ‘Never mind, sir. Lots of good men left.’

  The next good man sent his first two balls ballooning over the pavilion for six. VSHR wriggled like a four year old.

  ‘Over a quarter of the runs already,’ he said.

  The batsman now called a shortish run to extra-cover. As he was lowering his bat to run it in over the crease, Mogg stepped sideways and forwards, causing him to swerve and crash into the bowler, who was waiting behind the stumps. As a result of being barged by the batsman, the bowler fumbled extra-cover’s return.

  ‘Interference with the field,’ said Mogg. ‘Possible run out there. Kindly leave the wicket.’

  ‘But I was forced –’

  ‘– Pray leave the wicket, sir,’ said seigneurial William; and once again, such was his prestige that the decision was, albeit bleakly, accepted.

  Twelve runs for two wickets. The last two balls of the over passed without incident.

  The second ball of the second over, though struck over square leg’s head quite firmly, failed to reach the boundary. The batsmen ran a comfortable three. William, now umpiring at square leg, performed a signal which no one had ever seen before, like an old fashioned piece of physical jerks but with one arm only.

  ‘Two short,’ he called to the scorers, ‘only one run to be tallied.’

  The next ball was snicked into the gloves of the wicketkeeper, who dropped it. But since the bowler had begun to appeal before the ball had reached the wicketkeeper, the appeal had to be answered – and was.

  ‘Not out,’ said the nonentity at the bowler’s end.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said William, swaying over to his colleague, ‘but I think I had a better view than you did. The catch was perfectly valid.’

  ‘But he dropped it,’ said the furious batsman.

  ‘He had the ball under control,’ William said, ‘and then got rid of it. You don’t have to hang on to it for ever, you know.’

  There was a long pause. The nonentity looked at William and William looked back at the nonentity.

  ‘Very well,’ said the latter at last, and raised his finger.

  Back in the pavilion VSHR was looking thoughtful.

  ‘Surely that catch was dropped,’ he said to the Captain, who had risen to go in, ‘even I know that.’

  ‘You could just say that the keeper had it just long enough,’ said the Captain, who was a very conservative little boy and did not believe in the perfidy of his seniors…but certainly began to a minute later, when he was given out lbw off his first ball which pitched outside his leg stump and turned sharply from the off.

  The last Hodgsonite wicket (fairly and squarely bowled – the only one often) fell for 17 runs some fifteen minutes later. As the triumphant Saunderites came in from the field, their Housemaster (and Headmaster), Mr Robert Birley, stalked majestically on to the ground, confident that he was in time to enjoy at least ninety minutes’ play. Since he loved a cricket match above all things, he was very desolate when told that play was over, even though his own House had won. He was now saluted by William, to whom, as I have said, he was well disposed, and together they walked over to console Sniffy Russell.

  ‘An extraordinary run of misfortune, sir,’ said William easily, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘It was my fault,’ wailed Sniffy. ‘I was arrogant, hybristic. I presumed. I crowed too soon.’

  ‘Funny game, cricket,’ said Robert Birley. ‘Eleanor [Mrs Birley] says her school was once out for three and their opponents made only one.’

  ‘Strange things happen,’ said William blandly. And to VSHR, ‘I thought your boys were very sporting, sir, all things considered. One or two started to protest my decisions, but I soon set them straight.’

  Sniffy’s underlip began to tremble. Tears glistened in his eyes.

  ‘Such an opportunity,’ he breathed, ‘lost, for ever lost.’

  ‘Of course,’ pursued William, ‘they had some excuse for being a bit fwactiouth. After all, the odds against so many unlucky dismissals were enormous…about the same as the odds against – what shall we say, sir? – finding a page of the Greek Testament without that dreary little w
ord autos on it.’

  The Headmaster looked puzzled. VSHR blinked, pursed his mouth, fingered a little tuft of hair beneath his underlip (which was still trembling), and marched quickly away, pausing occasionally to slap his ribs and hooting all the time with dry, savage laughter.

  After the match, Mogg and Robert Birley started pacing the boundary together, deep in discussion. James Prior and I walked away to ‘Crown’ (the school tuck shop).

  ‘You know what they’re talking about,’ said James, ‘Mogg and the Head Man.’

  ‘No. But they look pretty thick.’

  ‘The Head Man wants to make Moggie Head of the School next Oration Quarter [Michaelmas Term].’

  ‘A-haaaaa.’

  ‘But the trouble is that Jasper Holmes refuses to have Mogg as Head of Verites.’

  William’s Housemaster, Jasper Holmes, a chunky, health-foodish, do-it-yourself number, much given to wearing shorts and sandals while doing it, was one of the few people who had never succumbed to William’s attractions. William, who reciprocated his dislike, once compared him to ‘one of those Shakespearean clowns: a capering buffoon, hugely pleased with himself, forever interrupting more interesting people, and quite incapable of even being funny.’ On another occasion William had remarked, ‘Jasper is the sort of man who used to join those communes in the thirties, you know the kind of thing, where they went in for raffia work or making lampshades, and all lived self-consciously and prudishly in sin. But of course Jasper would have been too boring and sanctimonious even for them.’

  ‘So,’ James Prior now continued, ‘what is the Head Man to do? His mind is made up, his word is given, Moggie has accepted the post with well-feigned modesty: but Jasper won’t budge.’

  ‘Can he be first in the School and second in Verites?’

  ‘At this very moment, I suspect, some compromise is being fudged up.’

  We looked back at the distant strolling pair. Even the Headmaster swayed when he walked with William.

  ‘Sweet William,’ I said, ‘so that’s what he’s been after all the time.’

  ‘Didn’t you know? You must have been the only person in the world who didn’t.’

  ‘I did notice…that he’s taken to coming to School Chapel sometimes instead of going off to his Papist menagerie.’

  ‘That’s part of it all. If he becomes Head of the School, he’ll have certain ceremonial duties in Chapel which the Head Man wouldn’t want him to miss – and which he himself most certainly wouldn’t want to miss, for all the grace in the Catholic Heaven. So he’s coming twice a week, for a bit of net practice so to speak. I gather that one of the ways he’s been sucking up to the Head Man is by hinting that he might just apostasise and come over to the dear old C of E. The Head Man would love that – it would make that filthy little Irish priest so sick.’

  I should say here and now, as it makes no part of my future narrative, that William did in fact become Head of the School and made a very good one. He swayed down the aisle of Chapel, hands clasped in front of his navel, with enormous dignity, conducted several labyrinthine intrigues with refinement and panache, and had his revenge on Jasper Holmes (who still refused to appoint him Head of Verites) by inventing a new nickname for him: Clara Cluck. Whether he left the Church of Rome, I do not know to this day; for although I still see him from time to time, there is something about his demeanour (the Editor of The Times, like God, is not mocked) that has deterred me from enquiring.

  ‘Anyway,’ James was saying, ‘the trumpets are going to sound and William is going to be proclaimed King in Judaea. If I were you, I should abstain from witticisms on the subject. William’s celebrated sense of humour does not embrace jokes about William.’

  We now arrived at Crown, where I bought us both ice cream and ‘red drink’ in Bloods’ Window on credit. Mr Veale, the faithful elder who ran the place, reminded me respectfully that all accounts were due for settlement monthly, and swept his cap off his head and down to his knees when I promised to pay him at the end of the Quarter.

  We then went next door to the 1st XI pavilion and upstairs to see George Geary, the cricket pro, and his assistant, Rainsford. They were both sitting over the ever-bubbling glue pot in George’s ‘shop’, George whitening a cricket pad and Rainsford trying to dry one of his calico shirts from the scant sideways heat of the paraffin ring which ministered to the glue pot.

  It may come as some surprise, to boys now at school and accustomed to cricket pros who frequent the Masters’ Common Room, that George Geary, of Leicestershire and England, was cleaning my cricket pads on my command, and was very glad to do so as he would be able to charge a shilling for it on my school bill. (Mercifully George, unlike Veale, had his accounts paid to him by the Bursar.) It will come as a further surprise to the democratic young that I called George ‘George’, or sometimes, if piqued with him, ‘Geary’, and that in theory at least he called me ‘Sir’. In fact George eschewed vocatives; but Rainsford made up for him by inserting at least two oily ‘Sirs’ in every sentence.

  While George had been famous in his day, Rainsford’s past was so totally obscure that it defied all investigation. It was rumoured that he had been, variously, a convict at Dartmoor; a prison warder in Hong Kong; a professional conjurer; a lancer; a steeple jack; and, the most probable speculation, the professional of some London Cricket Club, at that time (or at any rate up to the War) quite a common type of appointment. Whatever the truth of the matter, he was a wretched bad cricketer. For a start, he taught us to play back in the outmoded and inept Victorian fashion, with the bat alongside the rear leg and the front foot pointed like a ballet dancer’s. If I further remark that he taught us to roll the ball instead of spinning it and to stand in the field with our hands open in front of our waists (like a picture in the Lonsdale Book of Cricket); that he smelt, that he creaked, that he croaked, that he leered, that he was at once sycophantic and familiar, and that he had atrocious teeth; if I add that he looked, in his chalk-white calico kit, like a down-at-heel and drunken mortuary attendant: then you may well wonder why he was employed as a pro for all the four summers during which I was at Charterhouse and for very many more. The answer is both simple and astounding: we all liked Rainsford: God alone knows why: perhaps just because he was so ghastly. There was something almost innocent in the repulsiveness of his appearance and demeanour: no one could have looked so horrible and not done anything about it unless he were simpleton or saint.

  But if the rest of us liked Rainsford, George Geary positively loved him. Perhaps that was why he was employed, to keep the invaluable George contented; perhaps George had even had Rainsford put in his contract, so to speak. Of this at least there is no doubt: during the Cricket Quarter the two men were inseparable, together in the ‘shop’, in the nets, watching junior games for talent, sleeping in the same lodgings, fishing all day long in the River Wye on Sundays. Perhaps this last is an important clue to the mystery of Rainsford’s inexplicable appeal: for no fisherman, as John Buchan once remarked of Tiberius, can be wholly vile.

  ‘I wonder,’ Ivan Lynch once said to me, ‘where George and Rainsford go in the winter.’

  As well ask what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed among women. They were there in May and in September they weren’t: like all the best things in this world, they were seasonal.

  ‘Catch anything last Sunday?’ said James as we arrived.

  ‘A dace, sir,’ said Rainsford.

  ‘A gudgeon,’ said George, ‘mine.’

  ‘That pad of mine,’ I said, pointing to the one which George was whitening, ‘it bends at the knee. So does the other.’

  ‘Of course it do. Your knee bends so the pad bends.’

  ‘I mean it flops. The top flops right over and hangs down.’

  ‘Where did you buy it?’

  ‘From you.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Rainsford. ‘I mind the occasion, sir. It was the day the ring went out, sir, and the glue got cold, sir. Last year.’

&nbs
p; ‘Last year?’ said George. ‘And here you are complaining now.’

  ‘I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. I thought they might get better.’

  As a matter of fact the pads which George sold were famous for flopping at the knee. Everyone’s did, and it just wasn’t done to mention it, as James now reminded me.

  ‘There’s no guarantee with pads,’ James said. ‘You know that perfectly well. Caveat emptor.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said George.

  ‘Let the buyer watch out.’

  ‘You get a square deal in my shop.’

  George put down my pad and started gluing someone’s bat together.

  ‘Perhaps you could put some pads in to stiffen them?’ I said.

  ‘Put some pads in what?’

  ‘Put some pads…in my pads. In the knees,’ I said desperately.

  ‘All right. But whatever I do, you won’t get any more runs because of it.’

  ‘Mr Raven gets enough as it is,’ said Rainsford, sucking up.

  ‘Mr Raven wants more,’ said James maliciously. ‘Mr Raven’s highest score for the School this year is 43. Not enough to get him a place for the Southern Schools at Lord’s.’

  George put down the bat he was gluing.

  ‘So that’s what you’re after?’ he said.

  ‘It would be nice, certainly.’

  ‘Let me tell you a thing. If you stay at this school for another 200 years, and never get a day older, and play cricket morning, noon and night, you’ll still have no more chance of playing for the Southern Schools at Lord’s than of farting all seven verses of “God Save the King”.’

  ‘So now you know,’ said James.

  The various diversions of the afternoon had prevented my writing the Greek Prose which I was due to show up to the Master of the Classical Sixth the next morning. A L (‘Uncle’) Irvine was not pleased.

  ‘Because you fluked a Scholarship at King’s last April,’ he said, ‘you seem to think that you can ignore your work now.’

  I expressed rather casual contrition.

  ‘What you need,’ said the Uncle affably, ‘is to be punished. I have a mind to ask the Headmaster to forbid your going away with the XI tomorrow. But such punishments are for little boys.’ He paused and gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘Something…more Promethean is in order for you,’ he said. ‘Now go. And good luck for tomorrow’s match.’