Football Rituals

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31862, 14 December 1968, Page 4

Football Rituals

The Pagan Game. By Gordon 1 Slatter. Robert Hale. Whltcombe and Tombs. 239 pp.

Schoolboy football instead of the shames and triumphs of war is the theme of Gordon Slatter’s second novel. His first “A Gun in my Hand” was well known for its barroom invective and its fine flow of soldierly language. We are not entirely let off these discharges of miscellaneous ordinance in this latest book: one chapter is devoted to a bull session at a men’s club and few even of the most upright schoolmasters in this narrative have an interior monologue quite free from the highly flavoured idiom which is the author’s signature tu n e. Ruamahanga College (which one could locate within spitting distance of Masterton) is a mixed school with a Rugby team the pride and joy and simultaneously the despair of one Punch Southam, its coach. It has a big game fortuitously i thrust upon it with the large, snooty metropolitan Wellington Grammar School (a real place but an unreal school) which expects to win as a matter of course. The novel fills exactly a week, with a chapter a day building up

the tension for the grand encounter. A good deal is made of the day itself, Saturday's match, and it is seen through the eyes of the coach, its nearest approach to a hero. This is skilfully done. Everything dragged out in Thursday's coaching session seems to get forgotten; yet some players do better in the game than any coach could make them. The game has its ardours as well as its miseries and a result which vindicates, if it does not reward, the dedication of the coach. Gordon Slatter, as in his first novel, keeps a little quirk of successful surprise for the last few pages. As a portrait of a school, children and parents, and of schoolmasterly manners and mutual jostlings, the book is not quite so triumphant, though it does show it takes all types to make a common room, from the empire-build-ing headmaster, the dourly ambitious first assistant, to the one-eyed enthusiasts for Rugby, for their own old school and for their noble selves. Tbe janitor is always the best-informed person in sight. The touches of satire are deft, but it would have been nice to have met a wellintegrated master who liked teaching.