BOUNDARY

I was sitting, just watching the rain. Summer, then. Traditional English. With all the trimmings. Drop after drop, falling from the sky. Chasing one another? Or just all going down the drain together? So many individual destinies: size, shape, gust of wind, speck of dust, absorbent surface, repellent surface, trapped in a puddle, caught up in a stream, land, sea, sky – and off we go again. Well, some of us.

I was listening, too. There’s something comforting about the sound of rain. Not lashing. Not dripping. That regular thrumming on a roof that’s over you and doesn’t leak. Like listening to life going by – assuring you of its continuance without reminding you of the speed of its passage. When he was dying, and knew he was dying, Wittgenstein spent some time in a cottage in Ireland, writing down philosophical thoughts on certainty. One of those is about rain – understandable, really. If you dream it’s raining, he said, and then wake up and find it is raining – that doesn’t prove anything. [Especially not in Ireland.]

“Set in for the day?” I said, because I was aware of someone else sitting on the veranda, and they could only be English, and that’s what we always talk about when we meet.

I love verandas. Not indoors, not outdoors. A place to observe from. Conservatories get too hot, too sweaty, too close. The glass mists over, so you can’t see. I like to see. This veranda gave me a lot to see: the whole expanse of a village green, trees at the edge (oak, ash), houses around (some cottages, some Georgian, one Victorian, one Edwardian, nothing new), the main road on the far side of it with fields beyond, a car every five or ten minutes, just to remind me what century I was in.

“No,” came the reply. “They’ll play. They always play today. First of July. It’s a tradition.”

I didn’t turn to look at who was speaking. It didn’t seem to matter. It reminded me of all those conversations I’d overheard at cricket grounds when I was younger, and they used to let you in for nothing after tea. No hospitality tents in those days – anyone who was anyone was in the pavilion – probably on the pavilion veranda – and the benches were occupied by the very young and the very old, sharing their pure enthusiasms. As I’d listened, the reality in front of me had been eclipsed by the reality their speech created, then always being richer than now. Hornby, Barlow – names, indeed, to conjure with, to raise the spirits of the dead and set them flickering to and fro between the wickets, or racing across the outfield.

“Who’s playing?” I asked – no introduction needed. No names, no packdrill. If you’re there, then you should be. Brotherhood of the like-minded. Or the way it is in disasters, all in the same boat.

“The village.”

“Against?”

“Whatever the other side can muster. But our lads’ll put on a good show. We’ve got some big guns to start off our attack, but when it comes to the real breakthrough, you want to watch out for the slow left-armer. Skill, not speed. Might be expensive, though. Here.”

A newspaper clipping was placed in my hands. Brown, much folded, terrible typeface, a team photo underneath two and a half columns of statistics and a half column of rather old-fashioned prose, with words like “stalwart” and “valiant” and “determined resistance” – unacknowledged vanity deprived me of my glasses, which deprived me of the details.

A hand reached out to reclaim it and I complied.

“You can read it later. The landlord frames it every season.”

The hand gestured to the wall behind my head, and I noticed a glass-fronted frame, like a bus-timetable, screwed to the wooden cladding, between the windows.

Landlord? I thought. It hadn’t occurred to me when I’d taken shelter, but the veranda might indeed have belonged to a pub – I beg its pardon, a village inn. I’d been walking mapless for the fun of it when it came on to rain, and had taken the most beaten path (not the way I’d meant to go) out of a squelchy wood, and that had trapped me between high garden fences and squeezed me out like toothpaste from a tube on the edge of the village green, beside the inviting veranda, without any garden in front of it, that had struck me, to tell the truth, as derelict – or perhaps as part of a pavilion, and therefore public property. But when there’s so much dropping on you from the skies, you don’t investigate too long or deeply, you just take the shelter offered. “If you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it.” Perhaps the FOR SALE sign, which I thought I’d seen, had referred to the house next door. Perhaps it was the shadow under the veranda roof that made the windows seem so crusted with dust, and the interior, glimpsed darkly through the glass, so bare and cobwebby. Rude to peer in now – especially when the rain had stopped and, by the sounds behind me, the teams were preparing to emerge.

“Not much of a summer, is it?” I said, inevitably.

“Has its moments,” said the man in the ageless panama hat further down the bench. “Has its moments. Our job is to make the most of them.”

“You’ve got to think,” he continued, “how you want to live your life. Like eating eggs.”

“Eggs?” I said, looking out at the village green with some concern. The rain, it was true, had stopped, and there was warmth in the air that I was grateful for, but the result was a mist rising from the sodden ground, swirling about unpredictably, thinning and thickening, concealing and revealing unexpectedly.

“Yes. I don’t know about you, but when I was very young, I refused to eat the white of boiled eggs. Slimy. Tasteless. Insipid. My poor father had to do that, I’m afraid. They were soft, very soft. My parents, I mean, not the eggs. All changed, of course, when I went off to school. No father there to finish my egg for me, turn it upside down and draw a funny face on the shell.”

“No,” I said, “no.” I was looking across the village green, noticing things I had failed to see before: sightscreens which I’d taken for car-ports or trellises or pergolas or… something else, anyway. And a little hut, under one of the trees on the far side, with a scoreboard beside it, the kind with nails and clattery tin numbers to hang on them that an old man and a young boy, in identical flannels and open-necked shirt, were sorting into ten appropriate piles.

“Of course, you can whip it all up together and take the average, you know – omelettes, scrambled eggs. Disguise the white by surrounding it with yolk. That’s quite a good way, if you’ve got the option. But not everybody has. Some people only have a choice between the frying pan and the fire. Crack the egg – but make sure you don’t break the yolk! Or cook it too hard! Then you can have a little bit with every slice of the white. Makes it palatable, don’t you see? That, and the taste of the bacon fat.”

There was a clattering on the steps that led down from the veranda – only three steps, worn wood, unvarnished, not painted in goodness knows how many years. Cricket boots, I thought, with those little spikes to give them grip on the lush, slippery turf. I hadn’t heard the door open, but there were the players, striding out to the middle.

No, they weren’t striding. That was just a cliché left over from my expectations, or the article I’d half-read. They were hobbling. One was on crutches, and it was hard to tell whether he had a leg to put to the ground. Another had a white stick and dark glasses.

“The umpire, I suppose,” I muttered ironically to myself, but I must have spoken louder than I meant, because my companion, who was already on his feet, said, “No, I’m the umpire – somebody has to see that there’s fair play.”

Halfway down the steps, he stopped and pointed. “That’s the slow left-armer I was telling you about,” he said.

I looked where he was pointing. There could be no mistake. The man he’d indicated was elderly, but that didn’t matter. Skill, not speed. No, the problem was that one of his shirt-sleeves hung loose and empty, pinned, no doubt, to the front of his shirt to keep it out of the way. He had no left arm.

I rose, to walk down on to the field and protest. Apart from anything else, there were only five players!

Now, steps make me cautious. Once, – but you don’t want to hear about that. So I looked down, in case the wood splintered under me, and when I was safely on the ground (it was only a rough gravel track that ran round this side of the green to give access to the properties – asphalt was confined to the main road on the other side) I looked up, and saw a full eleven, loosening their muscles, chatting, tossing the ball to and fro, two umpires in white coats glancing up at the sky and exchanging a few words, and two grim, determined-looking batsmen, all with a full complement of limbs, and none of them optically challenged.

I walked a little closer, to make sure, there being no problem with my distance vision – yet – but the man in the panama hat was standing at square leg, and he glowered at me, so I refrained from crossing the whitewashed line that marked the boundary, to achieve absolute certainty (whatever that might be, if it existed at all), and simply remained where I was, watching.

There’s a cartoon by Pont, part of his English character series, showing “Fondness for Sport”. A train (Southern Region 1930s electric, as far as I can judge) is passing by a village cricket ground (I think you can see the church and the pub) and all the passengers (male, middle-aged, white) are hanging eagerly out of the windows to watch the game – or at least, that moment of the game they’ll be able to see, since delicate striations indicate that the train is moving – it’s not an express, but a proper scheduled commuter train, and they’re all on their way home, early summer evening. That was the spirit in which I stood there, watching intently, as if it had been a Test Match. Every match is a test.

The preliminaries must have been conducted elsewhere – probably inside – because there were no handshakes, no toss of a coin, just the enemy batsman taking guard, and the umpire at the bowler’s end saying, “Let battle commence,” and then the fast bowler (beefy chap, village butcher, village blacksmith) let fly.

What a barrage he sent down! Bouncers, beamers, yorkers – and one no-ball that even beat the wicket-keeper (they ran on that, though there was no need, but I suppose it meant they both got a sight of what they were up against). And what did the batsmen do? Nothing. They offered no resistance. Pulled their bats, or their bodies, out of the way at the last moment. Shouldered arms, and let the ball whistle past the stumps. Kept their heads down and waited. Wise, I thought, very wise. So they survived for seven balls.

Then the slow left-armer came on round the wicket. The man in the panama hat had a word with him, and looked across at me before signalling play, and I shuffled a pace or two closer to the boundary, to be sure I could see properly.

What a change! The timid batsman came out of his shell, strode down the pitch (no, really, strode, two full strides), opened his shoulders and hit the slow left-armer for six.

I’ve sat at the top of the seating in the old Northlands Road ground (plain boards on scaffolding) and watched Barry Richards dispatching balls on to the pavilion roof, and high over my head into the overflow car-park (if it was your Mini, would you want the dent knocked out, or certified as a sacred scar?). Never a chance of my reaching them. But this time I felt I wanted a share of the glory, I wanted to be the one that caught it. Six all the way. Nobody near. But in my foolish enthusiasm, I must have crossed the boundary, because a roar went up – no, that’s wrong: it wasn’t a crowd shouting, though there were shouts (and screams, and groans, and whimpering, and other noises I don’t want to think about, including a cry of “Jesus, make it stop!”). Anyway, I stopped short, and stumbled back, and found that I could no longer see – what I had seen for a moment, what I wished I hadn’t seen ever, people throwing themselves down, but not to stop some silly ball, falling sideways, pulled round with the force of – and nobody shouting, “Catch it!”, because they were all catching it, in the most horrifying way imaginable, except it was beyond imagination, and they weren’t wearing cricket whites, and the earth wasn’t smooth and green, but – by now, though, you’ll have got some inkling of what I had been seeing, though now that I was back on the right side of the boundary it all looked normal again, and the man in the panama hat looked me full in the face as he stepped over to pick up the ball that had, indeed, landed just where I’d expected, though I didn’t have the stomach to pick it up and lob it back in, but he did, or I expect he had to, because it was his job or his duty, or his destiny or something.

And that was when the mist started to come in again – funny round those parts, even in summer, especially in a rainy summer with heat, swirling about, with a smell in it that meant it might almost have been smoke, if I could have told, if I’d wanted to walk across the boundary again. But I didn’t. I’d been warned what would happen if I did.

And the boy and the old man were rattling up the numbers on the board with a terrible dry clattering: No. 1: 57, 470 – I didn’t bother to look at the rest of the score; I turned and walked back to the veranda, and as I went I was peppered with small hard objects – hailstones. They rattled on the roof like – like – hailstones. I know you want me to say, “like machine-gun fire”, but it wasn’t. I’ve heard it – at a Second World war re-enactment, and it didn’t sound like that at all. But that was what my imagination wanted it to be.

From the swirling mists I could hear the thwack of leather and willow, the dry rattle of polite applause and the occasional “Well played!” Nothing to be seen, and I refrained from looking. Let them carry on. It was a traditional English summer. With all the trimmings. In Buxton once, in July, they had to abandon a cricket match because of snow.

Reading’s better than looking, because it gives the illusion of understanding, so I read the framed clipping on the wall, with my glasses on this time, since there was no one to see. What I’d thought were averages were casualty figures. After the first day on the Somme, only five of the team were not out, and four of them had retired hurt. One name, I noticed, corresponded to the licensee of the pub – though the paint in which his name was written was cracked and peeling.

The hail had stopped. It was only raining now. That’s the thing about an English summer: when you know the worst, you appreciate the better. Collar up, I retraced my sodden steps to the dark and squelchy wood where I’d lost my way.

Finished 7pm August 6^th 2008