But will it matter? Will it affect us how people live on this earth in 1990? We shall not be here to see them. They will be unable to distract and confuse and harass us with their intelligence or stupidity. It is only our egotism that makes us humbly prostrate ourselves before them. It is considered unworthy in a writer to address himself to the men and women of his own generation. But surely it is more sociable in us to wish to be of service and entertainment to our friends than to their grandchildren, who may develop, for all we know, into singularly unpleasant persons. Personally, I would much prefer my books to be read now by my contemporaries, by people I know and like, than by strangers when I am dead, with my books incidentally out of copyright.
George Moore has protested that each man finds heaven in his own way, claiming characteristically that he himself discovered it in the bedroom of that mistress who was so faithless and so constant. And I could produce, as a witness in his defence, a parson of my acquaintance who has discovered heaven in the gallery at Lord’s. A small, wizened, weather-beaten parson, in a long chesterfield coat that looks in the sunlight sadly green; a guinea-pig, I suspect. For if he has a flock it can be rarely shepherded.
A familiar, an unmistakable figure; I do not know his name, though we have chatted together once or twice. He carries always with him a little black notebook in which he enters every score of over fifty that he has ever watched. When a wicket falls and a new batsman walks down the pavilion steps, he takes out his book, verifies the newcomer’s identity with the aid of the scoring card and telegraph and proceeds to examine his record. “Ah, yes,” he says to his companion, “Miles Howell; a number of good innings he has played. Let me see—99 against Kent. I remember it; the silly fellow! Ran himself out: an impossible run. I don’t think he will ever make a hundred for Surrey; he gets so nervous in the nineties. Just the same at Lord’s in that big innings of his. He could have got the record easily; only another two runs. Then he flings away his wicket. After being missed, too, three balls earlier.”
An old man he is, nearly eighty. During the war I used to wonder if I should ever see him again, whether he would be able to survive, at his age, four years of rationing and air raids and overwork. And no cricket. Very lonely, very much at a loose-end he must have been. Very many hours he must have spent studying that small black book of his, wondering whether the good days would ever return in his lifetime.
But he was there on the 16th of May, on the first morning of the Notts v. Middlesex match at Lord’s. And his little black book was in his hand. “Ah, yes,” he was saying; “A. W. Carr—now the last time I saw him play was against Surrey on the Tuesday before the war. Thirty he made, if I remember. And out to a remarkably good catch, too, in the slips. They brought a telegram to him while he was batting, recalling him to the colours, I expect. A month later he was wounded.”
I think that more than anything else, the sight of that old man in that Armistice summer, reassured me of the changelessness of the human heart, of its stability under altering conditions. And I think it was on that day I first appreciated the native wisdom of that old man.
Before the war I had always felt that he was sadly neglecting his duty to his congregation. He watched cricket all the week; he thought cricket all the week; what could he find to say to his flock on Sundays? But I learned on that first day of post-war cricket that as long as you see life steadily in terms of something, you can acquire a true sense of human values, and that county cricket is as serviceable a spade as literature if you would unearth the absolute.
Someone, I half think that it was Flint, had just missed Saville rather badly. The old man shook his head. “Poor, poor,” he muttered, “and they were a bad fielding side in the eighties.” Suddenly I saw the parson’s life in relief. He had seen life in terms of county cricket. He had seen in the varying fortunes of the field as surely as has the historian in the rise and the crash of empires, the arrogance and impermanence of success, the courage of despair, the vanity of ambition. He had seen men rise to fame and sink into mediocrity. Counties had had their hour. There had been the years of Surrey’s domination, then of Yorkshire’s, then of Kent’s. Middlesex was now the rising power. There was all history in his recollection of “Nottingham’s weak fielding in the eighties.” And I felt that he would be able to give true wisdom to his flock on Sunday; he would not be easily misled by the shouting in the market-place; he would have a sense of values. He would have a norm with which to judge the traffic and confusion of modern life. We are children, he would say, with the child’s right to choose such toys as please it; or rather, perhaps, we are in search of some trumpery half-crown clothes-peg on which to hang the sixty guinea fur-lined coat of our immortal natures. One must have a peg; but it is the coat, and not the peg, that matters.
And so back upon my traces. Habits are good things; a framework gives purpose to one’s life, and cricket and football make as good a hat-rack for literature and romance and friendship as the routine of a civil servant or a bank clerk or an income-tax surveyor. There must be a background for bright colour, and that is mine.