Postscript . .
LANCASHIRE at Lord's once moved Francis Thompson to poetry: he'd have had a job on this week, with 'Yorkshire Clinch the Title' on the evening-paper bills opposite the synagogue and, inside the ground, his red-nosed run-stealers flickering to and fro only to the extent of 87, all out, and Middlesex making mincemeat of a side that had beaten Yorkshire twice in the season, ,which ought to have made them champion county emeritus. There was a cold wind and a grey, Boudin sky, with only a handful of spectators, even late enough in the day for them to have dropped in after the office, as enthusiasts used to do when there was still a sort of magic about the game, and myth-makers among its players. Now, it was all so melancholy and, at the same time, so soporific that some of the old gentlemen near me managed to sleep in the sharp air, and under the occasional raindrops, without even bothering to huddle together for warmth.
The truth is that the spectators and the enthu- siasm for cricket have become too smaU for the setting and the traditions of the game. Inside the Memorial Gallery at Lord's are the bats and caps of legendary heroes, but outside are mean little handbills stuck on the walls, saying: HELP YOURSELF AND THE MIDDLESEX COUNTY, CRICKET CLUB BY ENTERING FOR FOOTBALL POOL AGENTS REQUIRED: COMMISSION PAID MIDDLESEX COUNTY CRICKET WELFARE. ASSOCIATION Could anything be more humiliating?
I came back to rummage in my memory and the dictionaries of quotations for a phrase that I could have sworn I once saw in a Saki short story, about the widow who had lost her husband at a cricket match: so many inches of rain had fallen for so many runs, and it was supposed he had died of excitement. I couldn't find it, but a colleague told me the story of W. E. Glad- stone's unwonted visit to Lord's, where he broke a day-long silence only to ask his host how big was the ,ground. 'Oh, a dozen acres or so,' he was told. 'That,' said Mr. Gladstone, 'seems ex- cessive.'
Nowadays, even more so. In a few years' time, I suppose, the remaining county cricket-grounds will be as rare as polo-fields, and most of those we know have been turned into car-parks. But we shall go on calling it our national game for another generation or so. Across two columns, down half a page. in very large type, goes the announcement the Johannesburg Star, from which a rei sends me a cutting, that the policy of the pany that makes and sells Wall's ice-cream the 'since its inception has been and continues to to employ European Salesmen on its ice-e vans operating in European Areas.' 1 suP the Africans can think themselves lucky they're graciously permitted to eat anything white as ice-cream, even if it does have to sold to them by their fellow-blacks.
Professor C. M. Yonge's new book on 0.1's which Collins publish at a guinea—less than, price of a dozen of the best—and bang on: appropriate date, clears up a mystery that always baffled me. In Mayhew's time (when 9 Weller was saying that poverty and 0Y always go together) Colchester natives were a penny in London. Today, the best and biggest are 28s. at Madame Prunier's excel fish restaurant, and at Wiltons in King SI where Mr. Marks sells only one magrnfi size and sort, they are 305. a dozen. Fr° farthing each to half a crown! Has any ‘)1 article of food in this country gone up by times, even in a hundred years? The prof gives the reasons: overfishing; pests and Ps sites that came in with imported brood oYst and pollution. In 1864, 500 million oysters sold in Billingsgate albne: now, the British-oyster harvest is down to eight and a million, of which a third are relaid Portug An even more ghastly thing is going to haP in Holland, where the new dykes across mouths of the Scheldt are going to del completely the breeding places of the Zee oyster—to my mind, the finest oyster in fur and they can say what they like in Colelics Just before native oysters came in. I , drinking a native wine—a 1959 Oxted Se Villard—at an open-air luncheon last day on the Surrey hills. At the privately Viticultural Research Station, Rockfield Oxted, Mr. Barrington Brock. a research clic by training, and managing director of 3 sperous firth of instrument-makers, is ex' menting with fifty or sixty varieties of and bottled 400 bottles last year of quite 531' wine, labelled, 'Grown, ripened, fermented[ bottled at Oxted.' This is not to be confused' 'British wines' made of imported pulp or 1:. Mr. Brock's wines are not for sale, but his are: would-be vignerons should write Pc price list and two books on Outdoor Gr4 Cold Climates and More Outdoor ulot (6s: 7d. each, post free). The English cliff. milder than the Rhineland's in winter. 10 sunny in most summers, is only marginal!) able for wine-growing, but the sturdy new110 now being developed in other coldish e0Ij —Germany, Champagne, the Italian TYr°i Canada—may make' all the difference' pi , $ where do you think are possibly the,bes' in England for wine-growing'? London gar
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