Happy Families
By . J. P. W. MALLALIEU, M.P.
IONCE played rugger against a girl and, thirty years later, this girl startled the games-master at her son's school by asking him why he encouraged threequarters to pass in their own twenty-five. But, for all practical purposes, rugger is a game for males. So, despite Dick Kerr; is soccer. On the other hand, girls not only play hockey but, to judge by my slight experience of mixed hockey, play it more effectively than men, partly because their genius for the game soared above pettifogging restrictions laid down by the rules. So I labelled hockey a girl's game.
Then I saw our men's England hockey trial and was fasci- nated by the speed df the game and the astonishing skill of the players. It is difficult enough in cricket to field cleanly a well-hit cover drive even when you are using your hands. But these hockey-players, using only their sticks, trapped even bouncing balls, travelling as fast as anything to be seen on a cricket-field, with accurate .ease. Their passing, too, was so- easily graceful. I remember how one of the centre halves, facing what must have seemed like a forest of legs and sticks, stroked a forty-yard pass through it-all into an open space and how there a flying winger ran alongside the still fast-moving ball without touching it until the right second came for a cracking shot at goal. After that day I began to think that hockey was a man's game after all.
But last Saturday I decided that it was neither a man's game nor a girl's game. I went to the Varsity hockey match, and, because Beckenham is a place which the Ministry of Transport wishes to conceal and whose neighbourhood is almost entirely occupied by strangers in those parts, I arrived at the ground some twenty minutes late. I was at once puzzled by the absence of sound. Something, obviously, was going on. A long line of cars, two pig-tailed schoolgirls standing on the saddles of their bicycles and looking over the fence, the heads of a group of spectators who, I found later, were on what literally was a "stand," all showed that. But, for all the excitement that was generated, it might have .been an open-air chess match that was taking place within. However, just as I went through the gates, there was a sudden shout, and I felt at home until I found that the shout had heralded a Cambridge goal.
There were more shouts for more goals—Cambridge scored six and Oxford three—but for most of the game the noise from the crowd was no greater than the noise that might come from a suburban drawing-room at tea-tune on Sunday afternoon. There were the occasional facetious injunctions—" Come on Cambridge, pile on, the agony ! " or that most depressing of all forms of would-be encouragement, "Pull . yourselves together, Oxford ! "—but in general this was the quietest sporting crowd I have ever mixed with. One of the umpires who controlled the game, with an instrument like the hooter of an American railway-engine, made far more noise than the spectators did.
As I say, I was at first puzzled and distressed by this sound- lessness. But, by and by, the atmosphere seeped into me so that when a Cambridge back hurriedly hit the hall into touch, I no longer felt the urge to shour " Windy ! " and when Oxford scored a goal I no longer wanted to throw both hands above my head and yell. Instead, as though long practised in the hockey spectator's art, I was able to turn coolly to my neighbour and say: "Playing a trifle better now, don't you think, sir ? " to which he replied "Quite." - This passivity of the crowd was certainly not due to dullness in the play. The game was not very skilful, and, in the end, the Cambridge victory was too easy but it was always interest- ing and sometimes intensely exciting. A more likely cause was the atmosphere of the ground in which the game was played. The respectable brick houses in the tree-lined avenue outside, the dignified elms within the ground itself, the gentle mist rising from the untenanted cricket-field, the soft rosiness of the winter sun—all encouraged discretion and put raucousness out of place. It was like being in the home of kindly but not intimate friends, where restrained behaviour comes naturally even to one's own children.
But there is more to it than just atmosphere. Hockey, it now seems to me, is not a one-sex or a one-generation game. It is a family game. In most middle-class families every mem- ber has sometime played it—the father and mother while they were at school, the growing children now they are at school, the very young children op the sea-shore during the summer holidays. It is the one game they can all watch knowingly together. It is true that the three babies in perambulators whom I saw on the Beckenham ground last Saturday showed no conspicuous interest, at least while I was watching them, but their very presence emphasised the family nature of this game. With hockey there is no question of father slinking 9,way after lunch to watch the match while mother minds the baby at home. Here it's "father goes, we all go." And that includes grand- mother as well. For some minutes I stood behind an elderly lady, her grey hair kept tightly in place by a hair-net. She complained rather airily about the Oxford forwards. "They are fouling far too much," she said, which stamped her as a devotee of mixed hockey where fouling, within reason, seems to be part of the rules. Her even more elderly male com- panion tried at first to dispute in gentle tones, but gave it up when his grandson pointed out that the rule which the old man was trying to quote in defence of Oxford belonged, not to hockey, but to rugby football.
There they all were together, schoolgirls in those drab gym- tunics, schoolboys flashing colour from caps and blazers, young couples with an eye on the game and an eye on the perambu- lator, middle-aged couples side by side with their children, elderly couples for the most part side by side with their memories. They were there together, young and old, men and women, on equal terms. They were there linked as individuals by personal affection and bound together as a crowd by common interest in a game. - - The afternoon went by, the rounded sun began to pale and the mist added new layers to itself until the umpire tooted for the last time and the game was over. But, when I reached the . gate and looked back, I saw that the players had not yet left the field. They were standing, sticks on shoulder, in the centre of eager family groups, discussing with their grandmothers just why that weakness developed in the Oxford defence and hear- ing from young cousins how important it really is for the defending side to mark closely at the twenty-five bully-offs. No doubt, in time, they all got home to crumpets for tea and a big log fire. .
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