THAT TEA INTERVAL.
Before the last ball of 1920 is bowled and the last wicket in a first-class match falls (as will most probably happen at the Oval this very afternoon, September 15th), I should like to let the Gods of the Game know how I propose to spend the following winter in their interests, so that when the season of 1921 is with us the happiness of the cricket spectator may be even greater than it has been in the one now expiring.
I am going to devote the time to invention. With every grain of intellect and ingenuity that I can scrape together I am going to devise a means of humanising the tea interval.
Once upon a time I was so rash as to ridicule this interruption. I drew attention to the fact that the ancient heroes of the game had been able to dispense with it. Alfred Mynn needed no Asiatic stimulant between lunch and the close of play. Even such wholehearted moderns as Hornby and Shrewsbury and Grace managed to do well without the support of Hyson or Bohea. For more than a century cricket and tea were strangers and cricket did not suffer. And so on. But the attacks were futile: the tea interval became an institution; and nothing now, one realises, can ever occur to separate the gallant fellows from their cups and saucers.
That being accepted, the problem is how to make the interval at once less harmful to the match and more tolerable to the lover of cricket; and it is on this problem that I have been working and intend to work through the arid football months. What has to be done is (a) to get the interval abbreviated; and (b) to keep the players on the field. It is the length of it and the empty pitch that are so depressing to the spectator, and it is the return to the pavilion that is so detrimental to the rhythm of the game. Neither of the batsmen ever wants the interruption, and I have often noticed a reluctance in certain members of the fielding side. As for the watchers, they never fail to groan.
Still, as I have said, it is now recognised that the craving for tea is as much a part of the present-day game as the six-ball over, and the time has passed for censuring it. But something can be done to regulate it; and I have based my efforts towards a solution on the argument that, if a cricketer is not called in from the game to read his telegram, but (as we have all seen so often) the telegram is taken out to him, surely the precious fluid that he so passionately desiderates can be taken out to him too. At present, therefore, all my thoughts are turned upon the construction of some kind of wheeled waggon, such as is in use at a well-known restaurant in the Strand, on which fifteen cups (two for the umpires) and an urn and sugar and milk can be conveyed, with the concomitant bread-and-butter, or shrimps or meringues, or whatever is eaten with the tea, on a lower shelf. This could be pushed on to the ground at 4.15 and pushed back again at 4.20 without any serious injury to the match. That is my idea at the moment; but I am a poor mechanic and should be glad if some properly qualified person—someone with a Heath Robinson mind—would take the work over.
E.V.L.
IN THE MOVEMENT.
How I came to be able to understand the language of trees is a secret. But I do understand it. It is my peculiar privilege to overhear all kinds of whispered conversation—green speech in green shades—as I take my rest underneath the boughs on a country walk. Some day I shall set down fully the result of these leaves-droppings, but at the moment I want to tell only of what I heard some blackberry bushes saying last week.
"From what I hear," said the first bush, "the cost of everything's going up by leaps and bounds."
"How is that?" asked one of its neighbours.
"It's due, I understand," the first bush replied, "partly to scarcity of labour and partly to profiteering."
"I don't see why we shouldn't participate," said another bush. "Here we are, covered with fruit, and it's all just as free as ever it was. That's absurd, after a big war. The duty of a war is to make things dearer and remove freedom."
"Of course," said the others.
"'Your blackberries will cost you more'—that should be our motto," said the first bush. "We must be up to date."
A few days later, after one of our infrequent post-bellum gleams of sunshine, I met the Lady of the White House and all her nice children returning from a day's blackberrying. They showed me their baskets with a proper pride, and I was suitably enthusiastic and complimentary.
"But do look at our poor hands and arms and our torn frocks!" said the lady. "We've picked blackberries here year after year, but we've never been so badly scratched before. It's extraordinary. I can't account for it."
I could, though.