The Blue Field (20 page)

Next day Alfie provided himself with a copy of Wisden and took it to the Manor. ‘I think I can ‘tice him,' he said with a grin, explaining that in his belief laws and rules and regulations would always prove irresistible to political chaps if dangled before them like carrots in front of a donkey. This is what he proceeded to do. He opened Wisden at Rule 22 and, remarking casually, ‘There's a fair puzzle here,' began to read:

‘
Note (f): The striker is out if the ball is hugged to the body of the catcher even though he has not touched it with his hands.
Should the ball lodge in the fieldsman's clothing, or in the top of the wicket-keeper's pads, this will amount to its being hugged to the body of the catcher.

‘Funny thing, that,' said Alfie with an expression of wide-eyed innocence, ‘for if a ball sticks in a wicket-keeper's pads, how can you say he's hugging it?'

‘I think,' said Halliday, ‘that it is one of those cases where a common phrase is given a wide interpretation to cover a large number of possible eventualities. But it's an interesting clause, certainly.'

Alfie continued to dangle his carrot.

‘Rule 44 Note c,' he said. ‘It always makes me laugh.
The umpire is not a boundary.
Just that.'

‘What?'
said Halliday. ‘Let me have a look at the book.'

‘Would you like to borrow it for a few days?' said Alfie.

‘That's very kind of you. Let me see.
The umpire is not a boundary.
Very odd. But I suppose if you scored four runs every time you hit me – I mean the umpire - it would be a very strong temptation, wouldn't it?'

Alfie, who had not failed to notice that ‘me', returned in triumph to the Horse and Harrow. ‘I ‘ticed him,' he said. ‘Now the next thing is to get him trained.' A few days later we took Halliday down to the nets to give him, as Alfie put it, a bit of a try-out. He came through this test with flying colours. Indeed he seemed to know the lbw rule better than we did ourselves. It was a good deal simpler than Company Law, he said, and the man who had drafted it knew how to express himself in plain English.

‘It just shows,' remarked Alfie on the way home, ‘how easily these MP fellows can mug things up when they set their minds to it.'

The match was fixed for the following Saturday, and we had the umpire's white coat specially washed and ironed for the occasion. Halliday, who evidently took his duties very
seriously, brought the copy of Wisden with him, and read the Laws of Cricket in the pavilion to refresh his memory. This somewhat dismayed us, for it seemed to suggest that he did not, after all, know them by heart; but he told us that even the Solicitor-General would sometimes refer to his authorities during a Parliamentary debate. We suggested, however, that he should not display the book more often than he could help before our opponents. Woody Bourton (Bloody Bourton, as we called them) were a suspicious lot, we explained; and Halliday with a most unaccustomed twinkle in his eye tucked Wisden away in his pocket.

‘The fellow who drafted those laws,' he remarked, ‘seems to have thought of every possibility. Even the most alarming possibilities. For instance,
The ball does not become “dead” on merely hitting the umpire unless it lodges in his pocket or clothing.
There's a good deal to be said for substituting the MCC for a Committee of the House of Commons.'

When Woody Bourton's Secretary came up to me in the pavilion and asked ‘Who's your new umpire?' adding rudely, ‘It was time you got a new one,' I took pleasure in saying as casually as I could:

‘Oh, he's our Member of Parliament.'

‘What's his name?' said the Secretary.

‘Maurice Halliday.'

I could see at once that he was impressed. ‘Good Lord,' he said. ‘He's the chap who's always asking Questions. A well-informed fellow, I should think; though I don't agree with him politically.' I felt that the match was half won already. When Halliday put on his spotless white coat I watched the Woody Bourton fieldsmen nudging each other; and when he walked out with measured tread towards the wickets they were so awe-stricken that they even forgot to show off by throwing each other difficult catches as they followed their captain into the field.

But it was not until the innings started that we realized how thoroughly subdued they were. We had won the toss, and we batted first. Now as a rule the Woody Bourton bowlers, the wicket-keeper, the captain and indeed the whole eleven appeal in raucous voices at the least provocation, and often with no provocation at all. ‘
Howzat?
' they shout, in the hoarse tone of vultures clamouring about their doomed prey. ‘ HOW-ZAT?' they screech, whether the ball hits us on the legs or the arms or in the belly or in the box. There was none of that this afternoon; and the silence was so unfamiliar that some of our batsmen remarked that it was like a Test match and confessed to feeling thoroughly nervous themselves.

Halliday received only one appeal during the whole innings. The Woody Bourton slow bowler, whose antics when he appeals are generally those of a dancing dervish, asked very humbly and respectfully: ‘How was that, sir?' in so quiet a tone that Halliday failed to hear him. He therefore ignored the appeal altogether, and the bowler quailed before his impassive silence. I think the incident had a serious moral effect not only upon the Woody Bourton players but upon their own umpire; in the next over, when I walked in front of the wicket and received the ball fair and square upon my pads, I could hardly believe my ears when he said ‘Not out.'

We scored a hundred and twenty all out, and then we had tea. Vicky helped Mrs Trentfield, Mimi and Meg to cut the sandwiches and pour out. ‘The girl's getting quite human,' Mr Chorlton whispered to me. He'd been sitting with her all the afternoon on the bench underneath the shade of the willow trees, and gently teasing her, no doubt, about her politics. A year before it would have seemed almost unbelievable that these two opposite characters should find any pleasure at all in each other's company; but although they
still argued frequently and sometimes savagely there had grown up between them a sort of comradeship, almost an affection, so that strangers meeting them together often assumed that they were father and daughter. Nobody who was wise and less tolerant than Mr Chorlton, I think, would have got past the brisk, assured, humourless personality and discovered the real Vicky underneath. Perhaps the fact that he had spent most of his life with boys had something to do with it; for boys too, because they lack humour and self-confidence, wrap themselves in personalities which are not their own. At any rate he was the only person in the village who was not at least a bit frightened of Vicky, and he was certainly the only one who dared to tease her. I once heard him greet her in the village street with ‘Well, you booksy girl, what's in the
New Statesman
today?' and to my astonishment she actually laughed. It occurred to me to wonder whether Halliday himself had ever tried the effect of pulling her leg.

After tea the Woody Bourton captain came out, looking grim and purposeful, to open the innings. He was, as it happened, the Conservative agent for a neighbouring constituency, and he was also extremely argumentative; it would be very interesting, I thought, if Halliday had to give him out. The first ball pitched well on his off, he swung at it foolishly, and there was a loud click. Our wicket-keeper appealed, holding the ball triumphantly above his head, and Halliday raised his finger. For a fraction of a second the Woody Bourton captain hesitated, as if he were about to remark, as he always did on such occasions, that the ball had hit his pads or his boot or his arm or that his bat had not been within a mile of it. But there was something extremely authoritative about that raised finger; even the most determined hecklers had been silenced by it; and when he had taken a second look at it the Woody Bourton captain
slunk away to the pavilion with the air of a criminal who has been sent down for seven years and knows he deserves it.

In the next over, however, Halliday refused two appeals for lbw and this pleased us, because it demonstrated the impartiality of our new umpire, of whom we were already feeling extremely proud. We were confident that we could skittle out Woody Bourton for much less than a hundred and twenty, and perhaps we began to take things too easily, for the batsmen scratched and scraped their way into the forties before we got another wicket. Then we dropped a couple of catches, and aided by extras and overthrows our enemies poked and pottered along in what we considered a typically Woody Bourtonish way until the score stood at ninety for seven. The tail-enders began hitting, and before we knew where we were the match had drifted into a state of crisis: there was a hundred and ten on the score-board, eight wickets were down, and two hefty batsmen, the one a butcher and the other a drayman at the brewery, were scoring precious singles by means of mis-hits between their legs. The vociferous supporters whom Woody Bourton had brought with them clapped and cheered and cat-called, there was an atmosphere of authentic suspense between the overs, and the situation was obviously working up to one of those passionate finishes which seemed to be inseparable from the games (if indeed they were games) which we played against Woody Bourton. To add to the mounting tension, there was a huge sable thundercloud bearing down from the north-west, the light was bad, there was a crackle of lightning and a rumble of thunder, and I felt a cold raindrop splash on my nose.

It was against this Twilight-of-the-Gods background that the remarkable last scene of the match was played.

The score being then a hundred and fifteen for eight, Alfie Perks bowled to the butcher a slow ball which pitched
short and seemed to hang in the air for a moment after it bounced. The butcher began to make a terrific swipe at it, changed his mind at the last moment, and cocked it up in the air. Sir Gerald, who was undoubtedly our worst, but was also our most enthusiastic fieldsman, happened to be standing forward of point. He ran into the middle of the pitch and stood with his hands cupped ready to catch the falling ball. The doomed butcher, in a mighty voice, suddenly called his partner for a run.

Now the butcher and the drayman, between them, must have weighed about thirty-five stone. I swear the very ground shook as they pounded down the pitch. The butcher charged with his head down, like an infuriated bull, snorting like a grampus; the drayman carried his bat like a lance before him as if he were Don Quixote charging a windmill. Sir Gerald saw them coming, or more probably heard them coming, for he was still looking up at the ball in the air. He was never a very self-assertive person, and I think it was politeness as much as fear that made him move as if to get out of the way. But as he did so a great shout went up from Sammy Hunt, our captain, who still employed the majestic terminology of the sea upon the cricket-field in moments of crisis. ‘Belay, you blithering fool!' yelled Sammy. ‘Hold your course and shiver their timbers!
Catch it!'
For a moment Sir Gerald hesitated; and then, like one who sacrifices himself to Juggernaut, he plunged once more into the middle of the pitch.

But there was not one Juggernaut, there were two; and Sir Gerald, just as he got his hands to the ball, was sandwiched between them. There was a sickening thud and the three men went down in a heap together; but even as he fell Sir Gerald kept his head, and there came from his lips a last despairing cry which seemed to be literally squashed out of him, a kind of squeak such as toy teddy-bears make when
you squeeze their tummies, a small faint squeak indeed but nevertheless recognizable as ‘How's that?'

‘Out,' said Halliday, without a moment's hesitation.

The batsmen ruefully picked themselves up and stood staring at Halliday. Sir Gerald crawled upon the pitch picking up bits of his broken glasses.

‘Out,' said Halliday again.

‘Why?' demanded the drayman truculently, still waving his bat like a lance.

‘For obstructing the field,' Halliday said; and to everybody's amazement proceeded to quote
verbatim
from the Laws of Cricket: ‘
Rule
26.
The batsman shall be out if under the pretence of running, or otherwise, he wilfully prevents the ball from being caught.'

‘All right,' said the drayman, utterly confounded by this. ‘If it says that then I suppose somebody's out. But the question is, which?'

There was a long pause, and it was apparent to some of us, though not, I think, to the dazed and puzzled batsmen, that Halliday didn't know the answer to this problem. His reading of Wisden had been pretty thorough, but he could not remember any of the Laws of Cricket which covered so unlikely a situation; for the impact had occurred exactly in the middle of the pitch and both the batsmen, running from opposite directions, had collided with Sir Gerald simultaneously. If the butcher was to blame, pounding along like a mad bull, so was the drayman, charging like a lancer. It was impossible to say that one was more culpable than the other.

‘
Which
of us is out?' demanded the drayman again.

‘Both,' said Halliday firmly.

And strangely enough they went. They went quite meekly, though they muttered and murmured together and shook their heads in a puzzled way; and so the match was
over and Brensham had won by five runs. As if to finish off the drama with a good spectacular curtain there was a vivid flash of lightning and a clap of thunder and as we all raced for the pavilion the rain came sousing down.

It was very surprising, and it says a good deal for Halliday's air of authority, that not a single member of the Woody Bourton team openly criticized his peculiar verdict, and indeed the only adverse comment came from our own side – from Dai Roberts Postman who kept the score for us so neatly that it looked like a sonnet and who now complained, ‘Out of all reason it iss, and untidy will it make the score-sheet look, for two men to be out together.' He made a neat little squiggle to record his disapproval, and we still possess the score-book with the remarkable entry in it, which looks like this: