“LADIES’ DAY.”

Hokitika Guardian, 29 September 1923, Page 1

“LADIES’ DAY.”

CLIMAX TO CANTERBURY WEEK CANTERBURY (Eng.), Aug. 10.

The world, with that interesting instinct with which it fastens on all the nicest- events and adopts them for its own, has conte to regard the Thursday in the Canterbury Cricket Week as soinetliiiig of an international festival. Intelligent foreigners talk about it as one of those events which must- be studied by anybody who wishes to understand the mad English. The fame of Ladies’ Day is established in the uttermost corners of the earth. And yet it is so emphatically a private. even a personal, festival. Of course wo who have the honour to have our roots in Kent would not dream of being greedy about it. We arc quite glad to see all the rest of you there on the dear Sr. Lawrence ground, and wc do our best to be nice to you ; but what, what, in the name of all the thrones and dominations, do you know about it r T sat tin’s morning on one of the singularly inexorable benches of that ground. Before me the unresting drama oi the game was going forward, watched as of old by Bell Ilarrv Tower through the tall, accustomed trees. Beside me a middle aged man was instructing a. ten-year-old-son in the art of watching the best of games; behind me two bent old men were worshipping the past without failing in any way to give due honour tci the present. Every other sentence began, ns we begin such sentences in Kent, with ‘‘That ’minds me of when . . Tn my turn 1

began to remember. HEROES OF THE PAST.

There was a seven years-old-boy living on a farm four miles from this sacred and adorable place. Each year when Ladies’ Day came round the old grandfather would put on his second best suit, harness Tom, that very tubular brown pony, to the trap, and drive solemnly off in the morning. In the evening he would return. There would be a mitigation of bedtime law, and flic small boy would sit with wide eyes and insatiable ears while the old grandfather told of the game a? lie had seen it with his old experienced eyes, passing on the delight--of his one holiday of the year to those who could not share it vet.

Came other memories. There was n parson who, sitting under the tree by the far bowling screen, told a boy of twelve that the best sandwiches in the world were made by clapping hot rashers of bacon between two slices of broad. 'I here was a lad of seventeen to whom Fate with incredible bounty presented a ticket for the whole of the week

’I here was the day, one-and-twenly years ago, when Kent beat an almost undefeated Australian team bv two wickets. We carried AY. AI. Bradley round the ground shoulder high when it was all over, and then we went to cheer the Australians, but they thought we Mere gloating over them, and came and chased us away with stumps and unfamiliar profanity. There was a .succession of the great figures of the past—Alarelumt, Ratterson, who howled curly lobs, Weigall, -Mason, and then Blythe, Fielder, Hutchings. ... I could see them all. A SHRINE OF TRADITION. Ihe game was going forward. G. T. •Stevens, with Unit incredibly ugly style he Inn, developed, was pushing Woolley's cunning deliveries out of the nay of his slumps. Time has given us Hed-

ges lor Hutchings. Collins fur Fielder, Harduige lor Alec Hearnc—and a thousand motor cars in rank about the ground m here once the four-in-hands, the carriages, the perky M'agonettes, and the lumbering brakes used to stand. lint through all ihe cl tangos Ladies’ j T)ay remains tlie same. e roiurn to find all that wo over knew. We return tn find all the pmsons in Kent wearing their old air of rookie:;* wildness (reserved for this one Liy oft lie year) and buying bottles of beer in public places M‘ith a fierce, intentional depravity.

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