I would like to have gone to Canterbury last week.
The cricket would not have drawn me, for I do not really enjoy watching the game played in the middle distance. I like to be near enough, as you are in village matches, to see the colour of the players' braces, to hear the terrible oaths which burst from their lips when, as repeatedly happens, they drop a catch. No, what I would have liked to do would have been to look in on the Old Stagers. Years and years ago I played in one of their Canterbury Week productions. Mine was not an exacting role ; I may have had two lines to say, but I think it was only one. It was off, rather than on the stage that I enjoyed being an Old Stager. This, reputedly the oldest Amateur Dramatic Society in existence, was a sister foundation. A the I Zingari. The two in fact started as one over too years ago, the original idea being that members played cricket by day and acted by night. But experience proved that a good 'team was not always, can in fact hardly ever have been, a strong cast, and the I Z. gradually faded out as actors, their functions as such being taken over by the Old Stagers, who however were, and still are, I Zingari for the duration of Cricket Week. Now it is (I believe) a rule that all I Zingari shall, during that week, wear the club colours at all times and this rule is faithfully, even fanatically obeyed by the Old Stagers. For one week in the year they not only wear the I.Z. tie during the day, but they wear an I.Z. bow with their dinner jackets in the evening and when they put on tails a broad sash of scarlet, yellow and black streams athwart their snowy shirt fronts. The whole-thing is very childish in a way and I shouldn't like to have to explain it to a foreigner ; but it is an agreeable, quaint, and I am quite sure immortal tradition and it is sad that the Fountain Hotel, where the Old Stagers had a club-room full of albums and atmos- phere, stopped a direct hit during an air raid.
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