AND ANOTHER THING
Where the Super Sopper soaks it up and the incunabula glow
PAUL JOHNSON
There is something luxurious about enjoying, in a highly distilled form, two totally distinct — even, one might think, incompatible — pleasures in a single day. It is the kind of experience Henry James might have dwelt on at length; and, now I re-read it, that first sentence of mine has an uneasy Jamesian — or is it Jacobean? ring, as though the Master were peering over my shoulder. But to business. What I am talking about is a visit to Wormsley, the bosky estate near Stokenchurch in Bucking- hamshire, which Sir Paul Getty has turned into a twin temple of cricket and bibliogra- phy. It is only 30 minutes' drive from cen- tral London, a short turn off the M40, and the sylvan splendour, the intense agrestic or pastoral peace which descends immediately you pass the gate-posts, is itself a palpable joy. Here are English longhorns, taking their ease and eyeing you with princely con- descension, their elegant whorls of fine ivory indicating their lineage, and here are hanging woods which creep down the folds of low hills into rich pastures, nature resplendent but not without a touch of human artistry. But the cricket ground! Here indeed is a work-of art, as though Lorenzo de Medici, or, better still, Pope Julius II, had decided that Christendom must be adorned with the world's perfect cricket pitch, and had com- manded Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael to put their heads together and create it. It was the last match of the sea- son, indeed of the millennium, but the per- fect turf was still unscorched, unworn, virescent, putting Wimbledon's Centre Court to shame with its emerald effulgence. There is something majestic about a vast curving expanse of perfect, even grass; each tiny blade unique yet part of a limitless army drilled and marshalled for our delight. And the majesty is enhanced when, as in this case, a motor-mower of unimaginable width has cropped the whole into perfect oblongs, identical to a millimetre, and then recropped them laterally into almost invisi- ble squares which, like rhythmic palimpses- ts, emerge through the even aquamarine. No expense of human ingenuity or labour, no spark from boffin-land, has been spared to keep the wicket trim and usable. A nostalgic, bucolic thatch may adorn the scoring hut, and indeed the pavilion, but great contemporary machines are on hand to perform wonders. I noted a monstrous mechanical chariot called a Super Sopper, which rolls giant areas of sponge over the pitch to soak up moisture and defy the rain clouds. And near by was a huge Hover Dryer, which spins ferociously over the still- damp turf and completes the desiccation. What, are there no sticky wickets, then, on this perfect ground? It certainly invites mighty strokes, for it is big and the bound- ary far, and the batsman must swing power- ful shoulders behind the blade to earn four runs. Just beyond the outfield there is a bronze life-size statue of a master batsman showing them how to do it. It is by that formidable sculptor Gerald Laing, and let into the plinth are four exquisite low-reliefs showing the progress of the ball from bowler's arm to boundary, an elegant con- ceit worthy of this theatre of perfection.
In Arcadia, good manners come natural- ly, and the cricket was gentlemanly, though not without gritty professional skills. Since I began to attend first-class cricket in the 1930s, it has changed — at the Test-match level anyway — beyond recognition, a facilis descensus Averno, with its sulphurous and mephitic combination of armour and glaring colours, bad temper, force and trickery, umpire-defiance and worship of money won by yobbery, so that I cannot bear to watch it. But on this magic ground it has not changed at all, as is also true of the honourable village games I see in Som- erset. So I was back again at the Old Traf- ford of my childhood, when Mr Baldwin ruminated at Westminster, and titans like `Wally' Hammond made the loose ball thud contemptuously on the pavilion roof, the young Len Hutton practised his comely leg- glide, and the cerebral Hedley Verity danced like Massine up to the crease to deliver his lethal leg-breaks. Watching lan- guorously from a deck-chair, against a background of bosomy woods and black cattle, I found my ageing eyes deceptive. Was that Cyril Washbrook at the far end, slamming a long hop to the leg boundary by wristwork alone, not condescending to move his hips? Was that Big Bill Hardstaff putting a silly mid-off in terror of his life with a cover drive to make even Bradman feel a twinge of envy? And who was that behind the stumps — could it be the great Leslie Ames, fair knight of Kent? So the run-stealers flickered to and fro. The effect was histrionic, as it ought to be, for the vis- iting team had a thespian flavour, organised as it was by Harold Pinter, with familiar faces in the slips and outfield, and paladins of stagecraft such as Simon Gray and Tom Stoppard noting the finer points from the refreshment tent.
But the home team was too strong, the Roscian wickets fell fast, and, not wishing to observe the agonies of the visitors too closely, I walked up to the house, or rather to its castellated flintstone library — an eclectic gesture of architectural defiance in this grim techtonic age. What does one associate libraries with? Dust and airless- ness, the whiff of crumbling leather, motes in the fitful sunbeams, a stifling tropo- sphere of frustrated scholarship and pent- up knowledge. Nothing like that in Sir Paul Getty's sanctum of rare and beautiful vol- umes. Here are light and colour, ease and geniality. Soft leather armchairs beckon. There are no bars or wires or forbidden zones. Everything that poetic genius, or angelic wisdom, or the hand-tooled skills of master-craftsmen, carvers and painters in leather, vellum and parchment, have done to make the book the comprehensive summit of human cerebration is here at your elbow, displayed and explained, touchingly accessible. There are fragments of the oldest manuscript to survive in Eng- land, a Eusebius of about 650 AD, when the Saxons had scarce settled in the nearby Thames Valley. There is the great Caxton of Chaucer, monumental in its incunabular beauty, and the even more tremendous Kelmscott version by Morris on sumptuous vellum — 1912, hand-illustrated, of such exquisite sensibility that I would rather possess it than all the rest. Here are great treasures by the hand of William Blake, and pyrotechnic masterpieces from the unsurpassed modern school of French binders. But my heart melted before an illuminated page from a volume composed in Lorraine about 1290, where Christ the Bridegroom rescues an exquisite virginal soul from the imps of hell. How she leaps into his eager arms! How the devils try des- perately to pull her back! And how an obliging angel, from a high turret, pokes them vigorously with his pike! It is the mediaeval mind in all its ingenious and childlike fecundity, Thus feasted, in mind and eye, in sport and spirit, in sleight of agile limb and nimble fingers, gorged on the triumph of bat and pen, we returned to penny-plain London.
Previous page
