Brensham Village by John Moore Page B

much who won. And especially we should mind if we were defeated by Woody Bourton who were known to us as Bloody Bourton. They had beaten us (or, as some said, their umpire had beaten us) the previous year; and we thirsted for revenge.
    But from the first ball, which took Mr Chorlton’s off stump out of the ground, things went ill with us. Sir Gerald Hope-Kingley, who was next in, ran out Mr Mountjoy, who shortly afterwards ran out himself. (‘Like two old hens scampering up and down the wicket they are,’ commented Dai.) Sammy Hunt batted for a while with the heroic determination of one who maintains a crumbling citadel against an innumerable enemy; then the wicket-keeper appealed for a catch and up went the loathed umpire’s cigarette-stained finger. Sammy walked slowly back, his bald head bright scarlet, which meant, we rightly guessed, that he was furious about the verdict. Alfie went out, had his stumps knocked flying, and returned to spread alarm and despondency among ‘the boys’. ‘He’s bowling helluva fast,’ said Alfie, who frequently employed this curious adjective. Banks, who batted next, was so cast down by Alfie’s report that he jumped out of the way of his first ball, which took the bails off.
    So far we had lost five wickets for thirty runs, most of which were byes off the fast bowler. Then there was a brief gallant stand by Briggs and Billy Butcher. Briggs for once in a way forgot his ambition to chop every ball County-fashion between the slips; he threw caution to the winds, took hold of his bat by the top of the handle as one would hold a sledge-hammer - and used it as a sledge-hammer. He had a private reason for disliking the Bloody Bourton captain: the man was Conservative Agent for the constituency. So when Briggs smote the ball, he felt that he was smiting theTories. Thus inspired he walloped it three times to the boundary and once over the willow trees: three fours and a six, twenty-four runs for Brensham, four hearty blows struck for the proletariat.
    Billy, as it happened, v/as suffering from an appalling hang-over: he’d had a bad bout which had lasted three days and hadn’t yet, we suspected, come to an end. But he cocked his cap at a defiant angle and jauntily took his guard, brandished his bat at the first ball in a devil-may-care gesture, missed it altogether, and received the ball on the inside of his thigh. It came quick off the pitch, and it must have hurt badly; but Billy only grinned, pointed his bat at the fast bowler, and called out: ‘Hey, mind my courting tackle, if you please!’ This made the bowler laugh, and brought a faint smile even to the sombre face of the Bloody Bourton captain. The next ball was a loose one, and Billy cut it over slip’s head for an accidental four. Encouraged, he began to play the fool, and his clowning provoked, irritated and thoroughly put off the opposing players, who dropped him twice and let him make several runs from overthrows. Then, unexpectedly in the middle of his clowning, the poetry appeared. Billy would have been a very fine batsman indeed if he could only have achieved the necessary coordination between hand and eye; the whisky got in the way of that. Today, however, he suddenly pulled himself together and made three successive strokes in which the timing was quite perfect. They were sublime: they were a poet’s strokes. The first was a drive through the covers which flowed like a slow river with lovely, lazy grace. The next was a cheeky glance to leg carried out as casually as if it had been an impertinent aside during a serious conversation. The third was a glorious pull off his middle stump made with a sort of despairing gaiety, a laughing challenge to the gods, a wild unorthodox defiant shot which you realized,if you knew him well, was Billy cocking a snook at the world. The ball went sailing over the brook and into the buttercups beyond. ‘Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely!’