Summary
In a moment all was confusion. Down came a drenching rain, the cricketers dashed for cover, the lunatics began to scream, bellow and fght. One tall young man, the same B. C. Brown who had once played for Hants, pulled all his clothes of and ran about stark naked. Outside the scoring box an old man with a beard began to pray to the thunder: ‘Bah! Bah! Bah!’
–Robert Graves, ‘The Shout’When an old cricketer leaves the crease Well you never know whether he's gone If sometimes you’re catching a Fleeting glimpse of A twelfth man at silly mid-on.
– Roy Harper and the Grimethorpe Colliery BandAt the most general level, my aim in this book has been to trace the many diferent fctional scenarios into which cricket has been drawn, and to suggest how its imaginative possibilities might continue to be put to work. Paradoxically perhaps, I shall fnish with the end of the world.
Robert Graves's short story, ‘The Shout’ (1924), is now much better known for the stylish and disturbing flm version of 1978 by the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski. Its cinematography, similar in look and feel to Robin Hardy's slightly earlier The Wicker Man (1973), brilliantly captures Graves's apocalyptic story of dark magic, madness and death, and makes rather more of the cricket match, set in an asylum cricket ground, that opens the story.
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- Cricket, Fiction and Nation , pp. 143 - 148Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2025
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