Not that I’m saying anything against CRICKET in particular. You can do many things with a bat. But there are many more things you can’t do. And all these other things are bound to be left outside your reach in the long run, if you get taken up by cricket. Because, you see, you don’t take up cricket—you think you do, but you don’t; you get taken up. You think you are going to do what you please with a bat, but the fact is, the bat does what it pleases with you; you think it’s your servant, but in reality it’s a master who drives you along the way he means to go—or rather, the only way he can go (that is, hitting a ball). It’s perfectly true that you can play well or badly; but, play as you like, you can’t help your faculty for inventing something outside bats and balls getting rustier all the time. And it’s true that cricket saves you the trouble of inventing those other games; that’s just its drawback, I say. No getting out of the rut! With the bat in your hand, you can only do what it allows you to do. Which is a good deal; but not half as much as if your hand were empty.
And what Mr. P. said of ball-games applies to all the others that are played with things. Say you want to have a go at WRIGGLY-WORM. Right! But you can’t mark out a pattern in chalk if you have no chalk to do it with. That’s clear. And you haven’t always got a lump of chalk in your pocket; now, have you? And then you feel about and turn them inside out and find you have not only no chalk but nothing else—absolutely nothing at all; not a top or a marble, no, not even a konker or a nicker or a bus-ticket. And then?
Why, then, if you can’t invent something different, something jolly well altogether out of your head, where are you? Because, of course, you’ve got to play something or other—unless you want to be a soppy fathead. And our youngsters don’t want to be soppy fatheads. What’s more, they aren’t. They try a good many things, and often they succeed; but they couldn’t be that, even if they tried; which they don’t.
POSTSCRIPT. Aunt Eliza writes to say that she can’t explain what the boys mean when they say “Obobé”, but she feels sure it must be “something not quite nice”. Thank God, there’s one thing she can’t explain. For my part, I think these words like Obobé and A-lairy and Widdy are the queerest thing of all, about these sports. And what’s queerer still are the names like Salmon Fishing and Cold Pies and Blue Boy, that make sense but have nothing whatever to do with the games.
She also tells me that the song of London Bridge is broken down goes back to “bloodthirsty rites of foundation-sacrifice” (read it in some book, I daresay, and so thinks it must be true), and that Fie Sally, Cry Sally “originated in early water-worship”. Early water-worship be blowed. Late beer-worship is more my style. But Aunt Eliza knows too much, anyhow; so much, that I shall have to ask her about the originating of the game of DUCKING MUMMY, and whether it makes her think of a certain good old custom. Then she says that Here we come gathering nuts in May is “a relic of Marriage by Capture”, and some more stuff of that kind. No doubt; no doubt. Aunt Eliza thinks a good deal about Marriage by Capture—to judge by her talk, at least. Nobody ever tried to capture her, you know. And nobody ever will, I don’t think.
THE
ARDEN PRESS
W. H. SMITH & SON,
STAMFORD STREET, E.C.
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation has been standardized. Spelling has been retained as in the original except for the following: