FOOTBALL IN FICTION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23500, 14 May 1938, Page 21

FOOTBALL IN FICTION

By C. R. Allen

The sound of a football kicked for the first time in the autumn has . a peculiar poignancy. Up into the air, be it languorous with Indian summer or piquant with the first suggestions of winter, go a host of associated ideas. To the former participant these associations will be more intimate than to him who. for the most part, has served the Rugby god by merely standing and waiting. Dr Johnson has remarked that patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel. It may be that vicarious football is the last resort of the d generate. The same may be said, perhaps. of literary associations. They are the last resort of the supine, at all events. In seeking for associations round and about Rugby football one naturally turns to the fountain-head for the first mention of a Rugby football match in a work of fiction —to a book about Rugby itself. “ Tom Brown’s Schooldays ” provides us with a description of the game which will afford some of us ample scope for a meditation on evolution. How has Rugby football progressed since the following was written: —

Old Brooke takes half a dozen quick steps, and away goes the ball spinning towards the school goal—--70 yards before it touches the ground, and at no point above 12 or 15 feet high, a model kick off; and the schoolhouse cheer and rush on; the ball is returned, and they meet it and drive it back amongst the masses of the school already approaching. Then the two sides close, and you can see nothing for minutes but a swaying crowd of boys, at one point violently agitated. That is where the ball is. and there ire the keen players to be met and the glory and the hard knocks to be got; you hear the dull thud, thud of the ball and the shouts of “ Off your side! ” " Down with him! ” “ Pull him over! ” “ Bravo! ’’ This is what we call “ a scrummage,” gentlemen, and the first scrummage in the schoolhouse match was no ioke in the consulship of Plancus. But see! It is broken, the ball is driven out to the schoolhouse side, and the rush of the school carries it past the schoolhouse players. “Look out in quarters,” Brooke’s and 20 other voices ring out. No need to call, though: the schoolhouse captain of quarters has caught it on the bound, dodges the foremost schoolboys, who are heading the rush, and sends it back with a good drop-kick well into the enemy's territory. And then follows rush upon rush and scrummage upon scrummage, the ball now driven through into the School Holise quar» ters, and now into the School goal: for the School House have not lost the advantage which the kick-off and a slight wind gave them at the outset, and are slightly “penning” their adversaries. You say you don’t see much in It at all; nothing but a struggling mass of boys, and a leather tall which seems to excite them all to great fury, as a red rag does a bull. My dear sir. a battle would look much the same to you, except that the boys would be men, and - the ball Iron; but a battle would be worth your looking at for all that, and so is a football match.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle drew on recollections of his Scottish student days when he wrote an early novel called “ The Firm of Girdlestone.” This story contains a memorable description of an international Rugby game between England and Scotland. Sir Hugh Walpole, in like manner, draws upon student days at Cambridge for the matter of an early story called “Prelude to Adventure.’' His protagonist, who is in terrible danger, takes part In a Rugby match at Fenner’s. The novelist has in no other story of his that I have read more surely identified himself with his creature as when he writes of this young man taking part In what may be his last game. One has yet to leam that any dramatist has had the temerity to introduce a Rugby football match into a play. Mr Sherriff, the author of “Journey’s End,” attempted to do the same by a cricket match in “Badger’s Green.” and failed signally. Rudyard Kipling describes Rugby football as it was played at the United Services’ School at Westward Ho! in "Stalky and C 0.,” and lan Hay, in the course of those comfortable stories of his which oscillate between London and the university towns, has described more than one game. Talbot Baines Reed, who served the Boys’ Own Paper so well in his day, describes how the last remnants of a quarrel disappeared as a ball went flying through the post and over the bar from a place-kick. To come nearer home. Mr Alan Mulgan, in the course of his novel, “ Spur of Morning,” presents us with a description of a Rugby football match which caused one critic to declare that it should be included in an anthology. A word of warning to the aspiring novelist who would include a description of a football match in his story. Your circumlocutions should differ from those of the football reporter. The novelist must_ find his own synonym for the simple statement, “Smith kicked a goal.’’ It is the prerogative of the football reporter to write that Smith piloted the oval between the uprights, or that Smith registered the major points. Sir Henry Newbolt has celebrated the Rugby game in vibrant verse, but as we are concerned with football in fiction, poetry hardly comes under our purview. William Pcmber Reeve‘ celebrated the derring-do of the AH Black team of 1924 or thereabouts, but once again we must remind ourselves that this is not a matter of fact, but of fiction. It is possible, nay probable, that someone has written a ballad about an imaginary Rugby football match which would be worthy of a place beside the ballad of Chevy Chase. After all, it is the fact of the game, and not its fictional aura, which really concerns the boy who punts a football about a country green or a city reserve, when by that mysterious influence which is more potent in a way than an official proclamation headed by the royal monogram, the cricket ball Is seouestered and the football emerges. There are times and seasons for hop-scotch and for marbles. The latter game has its varying codes, so that a relation exists between the blood allev and the pigskin ball which, after all is said ana done, is the focal star of Rugby football.