Published: May 28, 2017, 09:28 AM (IST)
Edited: May 28, 2017, 02:38 PM (IST)
A Match for a Million written by Harold McFarlane may not be the greatest short story or the best example of cricket writing. However, as Arunabha Sengupta found out, it is perhaps the most curious cricketing tale ever penned.
The Captain, published monthly from 1899 to 1924, was meant for young English schoolboys of the era.
Headquartered in London, the magazine contained a collection of stories and poems targeted at the young adults, with a smattering of information about important lives, events and contemporary cricket and football results.
Perhaps today it is best known as the magazine which published the early school stories of PG Wodehouse. Much of Tales of St Austin can be found while leafing through the volumes. And of course, one also comes across the novellas that combined to form the novel Mike. This last mentioned novel documents the deeds of Mike Jackson, a schoolboy cricketing prodigy, alongside whose deeds on the field we make our first acquaintance of the incomparable Psmith.
While a Wodehouse aficionado can definitely prefer to spend his spare time rifling through the old volumes of The Captain, if he also happens to be a cricket nut, he can indeed stumble onto some incredible treasures.
There are issues with full-length features on WG Grace, with rare anecdotes, sketches and photographs of members of the Grace family … not often available otherwise. There are quite a few articles on contemporary cricket, some even penned by the likes of CB Fry. School cricket results from those bygone days form many of the fillers between the articles.
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And finally, there are quite a few full-length stories based on cricket.
That is not very rare. During the turn of the last century, the noble game was often moulded into print by authors major and minor. As we have already stated, PG Wodehouse built his plots industriously around the happenings of the public-school cricket pitches. Sri Arthur Conan Doyle took a break from the Holmes saga and Challenger series to pen Spedegue’s Dropper. Plenty of others, from Hugh de Selincourt to Siegfried Sassoon followed suit.
In pages of The Captain, one does come across all sorts of cricket stories, penned by authors of different degrees of flair, character and calibre. And in doing so, it is quite normal to come across some rather bizarre ones.
In the Christmas issue of 1899, we find one such story, titled A Match for a Million, written by Harold McFarlane.
Chimp’s Twisters
Personally, I have sampled and savoured a truckload of cricket-fiction, ranging from the hilarious ‘crime novel’ The Amazing Test Match Crime to the fruity sci-fi story supposedly penned by Garry Sobers titled Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade. There have been all sorts of subgenres, tones and variations in between.
However, I have to say that I have never come across anything quite so outrageous as A Match for a Million.
Written in the engaging and readable style of popular stories of the era, it describes the most remarkable match played by the great cricketer Du Cane.
A champion at the Varsity level and a prolific batsman in the county circuit, Du Cane had once scored 87 on a half-baked Trent Bridge wicket — generally considered his best innings. However, on the evening of the tale, the batsman sits in front of the cosy fireplace and recounts the most ‘remarkable’ innings he has ever played. And in this case, ‘remarkable’ has to be taken literally.
In a narrated flashback, Du Cane talks about a match contested on a Christmas Day. And when his companion naturally concludes that it was in Australia, where the great batsman had indeed spent a couple of fruitful winters, the cricketer replies that on the contrary it was in the northern county of Yorkshire.
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And then he launches into his macabre story.
It starts off as a slightly long-winded tale of a train journey to meet his estranged ex-fiancée. On the way there is severe snowing that makes the youthful cricketer leave the stranded locomotive and try to make the last part of the journey on foot. And thereby he spends the night with an old, moneyed farmer, who is also fascinated by the game of cricket.
The writing does suffer from being stilted at times. Not least because of the rather cheesy and needless cricketing similes.
An example reads: “A blizzard that was raging when I changed for the second time at Northattericton did not hold out any promise of fast scoring on the part of our engine.” And later: “I recognised that my mode of locomotion had developed stonewall tactics which had reduced its rate of scoring to noting per hour.”
However, the desired humour is achieved occasionally. For example, when Grace Eden, the fiancée, breaks off her engagement with Du Cane, she says, as Du Cane recalls, that “she should always follow my cricket career with the greatest interest and hoped that I should have plenty of happy lives given to me by the opposition.”
Yet, nothing quite prepares us for what follows.
The unnamed host of Du Cane turns out to be a maniac of sorts. Through a series of tricks and threats, he coaxes the batsman to play for a diabolical wager.
The host unveils a crypt in the nearby abbey where there is a huge amount of unclaimed treasure dating back to King Henry VIII. There is also an artificial indoor wicket in the vicinity.
The wager is for Du Cane to score a double hundred on that wicket against the bowling of a vicious bowler referred to as Chinn. If he succeeds the unclaimed treasure will be his. If his stumps are hit, bullets will be released to strike the batsman in the heart and the head. If, on the other hand, the batsman is leg before wicket, he will have to wrestle Chinn to death.
Things are made more complicated when Chinn is revealed to be “a huge ape of the genus Chimpanzee”.
Du Cane’s attempts to cite his amateur status to get out of the wager do not come off. And he is forced to face the bowling of this ape, in a quest to save his own life.
Du Cane recalls: “I had always been under the impression that it was a characteristic of the anthropoid apes to possess a malformation of the arm that would preclude round-arm bowling. I found, that, however, in the case of Chinn, that I was mistaken, and that he bowled in perfect style, his tremendously ling reach, as in the case of the great Australian bowler [Hugh] Trumble, rendering the flight of the ball most deceptive.”
The comparison with Trumble is perhaps the high point of the story.
Years later, another Australian, although not an off-spinner of Trumble’s stature, did have reservations at being compared to another primate. But that, as they say, is neither here nor there.
As the match progresses, the story hurtles to its bizarre climax.
Perhaps not the greatest of literature, not the best example of cricket writing, but as a cricketing curiosity A Match for a Million is quite a find for the enthusiast of the written word on the game.
