LIONS AND RABBITS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 633, 17 August 1951, Page 13

LIONS AND RABBITS

BEHIND THE STUMPS, by Godfrey Evans; Hodder ard Stoughton. English price, 12/6. J. M, BARRIE’S ALLAHAKBARRIES, C.C. 1899, James Barrie Publishers Ltd. English price, 3/6. INCE there is only one wicketkeeper in a side (with occasional understudies), naturally fewer books on cricket have been written by "keepers" than by batsmen or bowlers. This is a pity, for the wicketkeeper sees more of the game (continued on page 15)

BOOKS

(continued from page 13) than anyone else on the field, or off it. He is closest to the batsman, with whom he can most easily exchange pleasantries, and is behind the flight of every ball that is bowled. Godfrey Evans, of Kent and England, is a very good wicketkeeper. Sir Donald Bradman recalls here that on his first visit to Australia, when Evans was second "keeper," over a thousand runs were scored against the English bowling before he allowed his first bye. Evans is also a useful bat, but above all he is a "character"’-a player of extraordinary energy and endurance, and unquenchable spirits, the sort of chap who pleases the crowd and enlivens a side, The story of his cricketing life, told here, begins with a schoolmaster’s warning, "You cannot expect to make a living out of cricket," and takes him to test cricket in England, Australia, South Africa, the West Indies and New Zealand. That the book has no literary pretensions will matter little to the cricket lover, for it is packed with experience, and is human and lively. There is valuable advice about the wicketkeeper’s job. Passion for cricket is rare among Scots. They are too serious-minded, too much occupied with that prospect of the road to England which Dr. Johnson noted. Genius, however, is unpredictable. Like countless English "rabbits," J. M. Barrie loved the game, and being what he was, he turned it to whimsicality. Sir Donald Bradman, who writes a foreword to this volume also, recalls Barrie’s joke about his own bowling, that after delivering the ball he would go and git on the ground at mid-off and wait for it to reach the other end, "which it sometimes did." This little book of forty small pages, hitherto privately printed, tells of matches played over fifty years ago in the famous village of Broadway, between sides of writers and artists collected by Barrie, and teams of artists arranged by Madame de Navarro, better known as the American actress Mary Anderson, Among

others, Barrie enlisted Conan Doyle, three Punch men-Owen Seaman, Bernard Partridge, and E. T. Reed-the novelist A. E. W. Mason, and one writer-county-player, Hesketh Pritchard. The humour seems forced and thin at this distance of time, but the personalities and setting of the game give the dainty volume a special interest. It is

a collector’s piece.

A.

M.