Notebook
A cricket team of Young Australians (young equals under nineteen) has just finished a tour of England. Their play has been so proficient and so exciting to watch that several cognoscenti have • opined, not altogether frivolously, that it the 'grown-up' Australian side were sent home and replaced in the remaining Tests by their juniors, the Australians would have -a far better chance of retaining the Ashes. The tour was sensibly and imaginatively got up, Providing for the YAs to play on the finest grounds, both public and private, in the kingdom, and allowing them plenty of Opportunity to look over the sights and the sites of England. Not everyone, however, has exhibited good will. Certain English headmasters, for example, refused to let their boys away for long enough to play in three-day matches against the YAs, with the dreary consequence that all matches were limited to one day only. Shabby behaviour, this, but rather what one expects, these days, of headmasters, whose sole object (except at the greater public schools) appears to be to discourage, discredit and destroy talent. What surprised me much more was the attitude of some of the county clubs, which were mean about releasing their young pros (or whatever one flow calls them) for distant fixtures against the YAs and did not always come up to scratch when entertaining our visitors, I am sorry to say that my own county club received them with a horrid attack of 'the sullens': no trouble was taken to generate a sense of occasion (rather the reverse), there was next to no prior advertisement, not a single bar was open anywhere on the ground (not even in the pavilion), and score-cards were distributed as sparsely and as shiftily as if they had been pornographic tracts. Why such a drab welcome for the boys from down under ... and this from one of the most successful and generous of cricketing counties? Short answer: too much else going on. What with the John Player League and the Benson and Fiedges Cup and the Gillette Cup and the adult Australian tour and the extra one-day Tests !Ind the dear old County Championship itself, spectators are beginning to reach saturation and ground staffs exhaustion.
Reading through the contributions of eminent old Oxonians to the recently published collection of memoirs, My Oxford, I was milleh amused by the many affectionate references to Oxford as it was during the War: cold, dirty and underfed, but neverthetra less curiously cosy, a private-minded and
hidey-hole in a hideously bustling vvorid. The same, of course, applied to Cambridge. As a child living there during the early 'forties, I found it more attractive than at any time since. The great thing was that one had the whole marvellous place to oneself. One could spend an entire morning in Heffer's basement with elegantly bound classical texts and arcane dissertation on series and matrices as one's only (very soothing) company. One could walk the length and breadth of King's and meet nobody —except possibly Donald Beves, on his way out to a black-market lunch. (Of course he wasn't a secret agent: he was far too good-natured — he once lent me fifty pounds — and far too lazy.) Although the wartime scaffolding, erected round the chapel as an air raid precaution, was depressing and unsightly, it was almost infinitely less depressing and unsightly than peacetime students.
On a recent cruise in Greek waters, I acquired an antique intaglio ring — antique, alas, only in the sense that the engraving on the bezel. stone is a copy of a Hellenistic engraving. This is of a goddess, almost certainly Aphrodite, who is either putting on a necklace (both arms being raised) or holding up a looking glass in her left hand and arranging her ringlets with her right. On the right side of the goddess is a Greek Iota, on the left a Lambda and a Gamma juxtaPosed, A love stone? The letters on either side being the initials of the names of the two lovers? Objection: while many Greek names, both for boys and girls, begin with Iota, Lambda-Gamma (in that order) seems a most unpromising, indeed impossible combination. But wait: if the goddess is holding a mirror, Lambda-Gamma, in that mirror, become Gamma-Lambda, first two letters of several common Greek names, so that 'Iota' (lason, as might be), looking over the goddess's right shoulder, sees in the
glass the face of Aphrodite next the initial letters of his true love's name Glyceia, perhaps, or (if we allow a contraction) Galataea. A charming conceit? Or a load of old rubbish cooked up by me, to make up for having paid about three times over the odds to a Greek jeweller?
The Somerset House exhibition of pictures, mainly portraits, by Graham Sutherland ; was mildly disappointing, I thought — except for the studies made by Sutherland in preParation for his famous portrait of Somerset Maugham. One of these was so ferociously disagreeable (like a diminutive version of Christopher Lee's Count Dracula) that I fell to wondering whatever the old rotter himself must have made of it at the time. My guess is that he merely smiled thinly and, just possibly, tittered. For one of the few pleasant things about him was that he was under no illusion of being pleasant. He would probably have relished his resemblance to the Prince of Vampires — and even, perhaps, decided to have a go at it. himself, if some of the stories one hears of. him are half way true. Verbum satissapienti.
Connoisseurs of human folly will have relished the Gay News case. It is hard to say who comes out of it looking the silliest — the man who could compose such a ludicrous poem, the editor who thought it worth printing, or the interfering woman who took the trouble to nose it out and draw the nation's attention to what it would otherwise have ignored almost totally. Yet none of these, I think, wins the palm for absurdity: the biggest ass of all is the law. I was brought up on the old adage, De minimis not curat lex: the law does not concern itself with trifles. But a more trilling affair than this trial I cannot recall. That grown and learned men should be required to debate and pronounce on Kirkup's drivel, and then to assess the scandal, which it has purportedly caused to Our Sovereign Lady the Queen, in terms of ready money, is enough to make an alligator go gay.
Diners in London beware, if, in certain West End restaurants, a personable young lady from the cashier's desk or the cloakroom is allowed to take a phone call 'from her boy .friend' on one of the central telephones; you can be tolerably certain that she is giving the caller a rundown, in a simple code, of the more opulent eaters present and a rough estimate of the time at which they will depart. This enables the caller to decide . whether and when it is worth taking post in the street outside to pick the pockets of those who emerge. To judge from the tolerance which I saw displayed by one head waiter at having his main telephone used for such 'lovers' of chat over a full ten minutes of peak booking time, he must have been getting a rake-off.
Simon Raven
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