In a recent letter to the Guardian, author Rod Edmond challenges the persistent caricature that cricket fiction by Siegfried Sassoon, Hugh de Sélincourt, and AG Macdonell exists in a “bucolic dreamworld.” Edmond, author of Cricket, Fiction and Nation, points to serious political and societal messages embedded in these works.
Sassoon’s The Flower Show Match: A Background of War
Sassoon’s The Flower Show Match is set against the backdrop of the Boer War, with recurring references to the relief of Ladysmith. The story also includes a home umpire suspected of using his wooden leg to make dents in the pitch, adding a layer of local intrigue and moral ambiguity.
De Sélincourt’s The Cricket Match: Post-War Struggles
In De Sélincourt’s The Cricket Match, a war profiteer has felled the fir trees surrounding the Tillingford ground to have them sawn into pit props. The club is struggling to recover from the war, and there’s a feeling of “melancholy certainty that each season must surely be the last.” The novel includes passing references to the Russian Revolution, and the hope expressed by the lady of the manor that village cricket will ease class antagonism is contradicted by the contempt the team’s fast bowler, a labourer, feels for her public-school son who also plays for Tillingford.
Macdonell’s England, Their England: Post-WWI After-Effects
Macdonell’s England, Their England is pervaded with the after-effects of the First World War. Its Scottish protagonist, inquiring into the vaunted English principle of “team spirit” said to characterise the national game, is none the wiser after a day spent with a motley team of metropolitan writers and publishers playing away in a Kent village.
Edmond’s letter responds to a Guardian leader on sporting fair play, which had recycled the caricature of these works as idyllic. He argues that these novels offer a more nuanced and critical view of English society, touching on class conflict, war trauma, and social change.
