The Art of the Potboiler

Sanctuary
By William Faulkner

There is some exquisite writing in this book. Faulkner’s prose conjures a unique world, with its own vividly recognizable atmosphere and inhabitants. Sanctuary naturally partakes of that world, which the author renders with careful and often surprising attention to pertinent details.

Apart from the great beauty of the writing and the pleasure of revisiting the world it evokes – a pleasure of which this Faulkner reader has never tired – I found little entertainment in Sanctuary apart from a few episodes of broad comic relief: the funeral in the gambling-den, Clarence Snopes, the antics of an irrepressibly dipsomaniacal infant. The characters, even the hero manqué, are unsympathetic, often repellent and mostly far-fetched. The central figure (hardly a heroine) is in a state of wild hysteria in every scene save the last in which she appears. In our post-feminist world it has become depressingly clear that the great masculine colossi of the twentieth-century American novel knew almost nothing about women; their female characters are marionettes of cardboard and greasepaint glimpsed through a fog of drink, infatuation and resentment. In Temple Drake, this tendency may well have found its archetype: though terrible things happen to her, their telling stirs no sympathy in the modern reader, only boredom and incredulity. 

There are other women in the book besides Temple, but they are nearly all stock characters – the wronged but incurably faithful wife and mother, the tart (madam, actually) with a heart, the helpful but corruptible serving-maid, all of whom were well established in fiction long before this novel was written. Only two of the female characters ring true – the hero’s sister and her elderly, waspish aunt. But they are both middle-class characters, of a type whom Faulkner would have seen many examples. The others are all demimondaines, sensationalistically but unconvincingly rendered.

Faulkner wrote this book, we are told, as a ‘potboiler’ that might make him money. Apparently it did; Sanctuary is his best-selling novel. As a piece of genre fiction, however, it is a failure: by no means the sort of book you’d stay up at night reading because you absolutely have to know what happens next. On the contrary, there were times when I had to force myself back to it. But I did return, because in spite of all its manifest failings, Sanctuary is a work of art, a very beautiful one except in the places where it fails. But it couldn't be a work of art without those failures; if it had completely succeeded, it would have been No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

A Traitor’s Testament

The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

Garbage. The author writes poorly, has no psychological insight (apparent from the second sentence of the novel onwards), and displays the outlook and attitudes of his nation and class: quasi-mediaeval, that is to say, with a thin veneer of modernity pasted on and peeling right off again.
    His hero, Amir, is a treacherous coward, and the reader who retains an atom of sympathy for him beyond the climactic scene of Part I isn't thinking at all about what they read. This is a hero with no heroic qualities. Nor is he much of a protagonist, since he rarely does anything of his own volition; even his betrayals are the circumstantial products of his own cowardice. Life just carries him along, unresisting. And there is nothing Postmodern or experimental about any of this, in case you were wondering: that kind of writing is far above Hosseini’s pay grade. The Kite Runner is a book of pedestrian construction, frothing with cliches – no Pale Fire, I’m afraid.
    Worst of all, Hosseini plainly expects you to feel sorry for his repulsive creation. He seems to think this weepy, effeminate, backboneless sentimentalist, this selfish milksop pining desperately for the love of his father, is quite a likeable chap and hard done by besides. I suppose Amir’s sissiness is meant to be a contrast to the conventional Afghan machismo of his father Baba (which Amir aspires to but lacks both the courage and the dash to emulate). In fact, Amir’s character is redolent of nothing so much as repressed and curdled homosexuality, and makes you wonder whether the author is working through some identity issues of his own.
    Part Two of the book, set in the USA, is unspeakably awful: slipshod, boring and full of the kind of bad prose that people who attend ‘creative writing’ workshops generate so easily. Its main effect was to persuade this South Asian reader that Afghan society must be just as backward, and as grimly resistant to integration with the modern world (there are no non-Afghan characters to speak of in Amir’s America), as the Western imagination conceives. By the time I finished this part I was thoroughly sick of them all: Amir, his relations (he has no friends to speak of, having betrayed the only one he ever had back in Kabul) and even, unfairly, poor suffering Afghanistan itself. I certainly had no interest in finding out how they all fared in the end, and quit reading while Our Hero was still in Peshawar, Pakistan, en route back to Kabul in a self-flagellating attempt to ‘redeem himself’. According to the spoilers I read, this effort ends in another act of treachery committed by him. Well, at least that’s dramatically consistent.
    Awful, awful, awful, awful. I wish I hadn’t read it. It seemed to confirm my already dim view of South Asian elite culture and all the hardest things I’ve ever read or heard said about Afghanistan. I could have done without the endorsement.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Inside Story

by Martin Amis

Martin Amis has been my favourite novelist for most of my life. All the same, having been forewarned about its contents, I wasn't going to read this book at all. Then I found a copy at the Colombo Municipal Library and impulsively borrowed it. 

Being, myself, an ageing writer somewhat troubled with premonitions of mortality, I knew I was risking my peace of mind by taking up a largely autobiographical work by an another, older writer similarly troubled: particularly a ‘novel’ that is largely about other famous and well-loved writers growing old and senile, losing their talent and dying of horrible diseases. Luckily, that’s far from all there is to Inside Story. It also contains, for instance, quite a lot about the author’s love life, which appears to have been rich, variegated and wildly successful, and later about his wives and children. There is also quite a bit about his parents’ love lives and those of their contemporaries (Philip Larkin being singled out for detailed treatment; there’s even a photo gallery of his girlfriends). There are various meditations on Jewishness – ethnic, literary and political – and about the ‘threat’ of radical Islamism, which was the green hill on which, early in the century, the author chose to crucify his political reputation; he appears to have learnt a few lessons from that experience, and rather more from the experience of his friend Christopher Hitchens, who (as we are reminded several times in this book) energetically supported the US invasion of Iraq.

Amis claimed that Inside Story is a novel. This is a bit of a joke, and though I don't doubt parts of the story have been fictionalized, it is definitely a personal memoir. I suppose one of its ancestors is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, although the feeling-tone of that book is very different. The autobiography, fictionalized or not, is ‘interluded’ (as he puts it) with some writing about writing, included for the benefit of aspiring novelists. These are mostly observations about style, and although I did find many of my own concerns as a writer addressed among these interpolations, I got the impression that the insights being shared were really quite personal to the author and his very distinctive style – aesthetic choices, in fact, which some of us might resolve very differently.

Leaving aside these masterclass moments, the main burdens of the book are old age, death and dying. Standing or slumped in the queue for the exits we meet Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Larkin, the author’s father and of course his best friend, Hitchens, whose personality and long-drawn-out demise (and Amis’s palpable love for him) dominate the book. I happened to be dealing with a mild but nasty respiratory infection while reading Inside Story, and at one point I had to put the book down because of all the extra-literary anxiety the description of Hitchens’s ordeal was causing me. Long, long ago, while still a teenager, I read Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and it triggered in me a very real bout of anxiety/depression. Such is the power of literary suggestion. Inside Story wasn’t nearly so devastating, but Amis’s detailed description of Hitchens's case and treatment rattled me so much that I had to stop reading for a few days. Still, I went back and finished the book in the end, and was rewarded for my pains when the narrative overcast lifted towards the end, the sun shone through and the novelist's art somehow made it all all right. 

The other and greater reward was, as always, the privilege of sharing Amis’s thoughts and the wealth of worldly insight vouchsafed the reader over the course of the telling. As I said, he is my favourite writer, and one whose mental space has always seemed to me a larger, better stocked, more elegant and dignified extension of my own.

(Originally published on Goodreads)

Is Sheet Music Obsolete?

How to visualize music accurately: A ProTools screenshot. 

One properly learns music through the ears and body, not the eyes.

Musical notation is, in essence, a method of recording music for later reproduction. It is a woefully primitive method, largely unfit for purpose. Of the four elements that make up a musical sound – pitch, volume, phase and timbre or tone colour – notation only records the first with any accuracy, and even then can only do so in relation to a reference tone (A above Middle C = 440Hz). Volume is rendered very roughly, in words – forte, pianissimo, etc – and symbols like < or > (‘turn up’ or ‘pipe down’ respectively): absurd. As for phase and timbre (the latter is the most basic perceptual aspect, apart from loudness, of any sound, musical or not), they are all but ignored. Being told what instrument to use to play a given part in a piece is all the timbral information you’ll ever get.

As poorly served is that other vital component of music, rhythm, which is rendered so ineptly in conventional notation that the rhythmic scope of Western music was badly hobbled – crippled, in fact – by long dependence upon it. In the West, for hundreds of years, rhythmic complexity became the exclusive preserve of folk song and folk dance, which were propagated by ear and bodily movement rather than via sheet music. It was only through later cross-fertilization with African music that rhythmic sensibility came to be restored to Western ears. Modern musical forms like pop, rock, jazz and the blues all owe their genesis – tragically, inescapably – to the transatlantic slave trade.

What does written music still have going for it? Musical notation does convey relative harmonic information very well – again, it’s no accident that Western music is harmonically more advanced than music from other cultures – but in practical terms it is really only good for three things these days: propagating music that is ‘too complex’ to decipher accurately by ear (though this is a faculty that varies widely from person to person), rapidly teaching musicians in ensemble how to play their individual ‘parts’, and to facilitate the composition and performance of musical pieces of the crossword-puzzle variety -- things like Bach fugues or complex Serialist pieces, where geometrical or mathematical conceits are rendered in musical form. The pleasures of such music are visual and intellectual, that is to say not intrinsically musical; and thus, for very good reason, they are minority pleasures, of interest only to a cultivated few and far removed from what the bulk of humanity knows, loves and utilises as music.

Musical notation was rendered obsolete in terms of its original purpose as soon as the phonograph was invented. Now it appears doubly so. Specialist software like ProTools® captures every aspect of music visually without any need for musical notation – and allows you to edit the music too, with far greater facility than any composer ever altered a score. It even gives you the power to hear the result of your edit in real time before you press Save. Less elaborate versions of such software are cheaply available for your smartphone. Given the ubiquity of these far superior recording methods, is there still a place in the world for sheet music?

The Amis Effect: A Fan Piece

Martin Amis died last Friday. He’s been my favourite novelist ever since, aged eighteen, I first read The Rachel Papers. Eighteen was a good age to be reading a literary novel about impending adulthood, first love and the problem of having to make life-defining decisions without the relevant experience, written by an author who was only six years older, when he wrote it, than I was when I read it. Never before had I known someone to write – to speak – in a voice that, to my innocently self-regarding sensibility, sounded so much like my own. Later, of course, I would come to realise just how pretentious the comparison was; yet, to this day, when I read Martin Amis, I don’t hear his voice in my head so much as I hear mine coming out of his.

Before you wheel away, retching, a placatory word. This isn’t some self-aggrandizing exercise in smarm dressed up as an obituary. It isn’t, even, an obituary. I’m too old and lazy – besides rather conspicuously lacking in the talent – to compete with the august hommes de lettres now rushing into print with appreciations of their late colleague (I think we can take it for granted that there won’t be many femmes). Besides, Matthew D’Ancona has already written, in the New European, pretty much the same things I should have done, even making the affective comparison with the death of David Bowie that came over me the instant I heard the news. The Amis Effect Redux, I suppose; but at least it saves me the trouble.

I came here, instead, to write a short list for a couple of friends who, implicitly or explicitly, asked me to recommend something of his for them to read. One is a lately-retired English teacher whose speciality used to be squeezing the distended spawn of well-heeled semiliterates through the needle’s eye of the GCE examinations. Appropriately enough, her literary tastes run to Thomas Hardy and Alice Walker. The other friend is also a teacher, one who struggles to impart the principles of economics to English schoolchildren (I gather that the traditional method, which involved us teaching them to one another on the playground or behind the lavatories, is no longer favoured). His bread is hard-earned and although he is spending it at the bookseller’s rather than on me, I am anxious that he should obtain full value. Having heard me mention that Amis’s own literary heroes were Bellow, Nabokov and Updike, he modestly averred that he had found the road-trip in Lolita ‘tedious’.

I was a bit shaken by this confession: one doesn’t, after all, read these people for the stories they tell – imagine reading Herzog or Pale Fire or the Rabbit novels for their plots – but for how they tell them and, beyond even that, the incomparable, unspeakable pleasure of just reading their words. When Nabokov, in one exquisite sentence, makes the sight of shit coming out of a horse beautiful, questions about where the horse is going and who is riding in the sleigh it draws after it become, temporarily at least, less germane than the words themselves, which one savours – you can retch now if you want – in isolation from the narrative in which they are functionally embedded. Nabokov’s prose is full of moments of this kind, epiphanies in which the world, under his minute scrutiny (the eye of the lepidopterist), seems on the brink of revealing the mysteries at its heart. ‘Spiritual’ is a word one hardly dares utter in connection with Nabokov, whose contempt for mumbo-jumbo of any kind was scathing; all the same, I think it is the right one to use to describe the meaning he extracts, the implied essences he distils from the translucence of a melting icicle or the bereft questing of a displaced caterpillar condemned to spend its last hours endlessly circling the rim of a picnic-table. 

It’s easy to see how, if your expectations are largely primed by fiction in the plain style, by the habit of reading for the story (or, worse still, by your identity-politics), you could find Nabokov tedious, or worse. And Lolita is, of course, too notorious to be read at a first pass for anything but the story. Its infamous opening sentence, moreover, is just camouflage for the author’s intentions – his obsessions: but these are adumbrated almost immediately thereafter in that arguably even better-known sentence, perhaps the most quoted of the whole novel: ‘Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.’ Again the lepidopteristic scrutiny, the painstaking dissection with the micro-forceps and teasing-needle – though we soon learn that it is not Lolita, the butterfly, who is really being dissected, but the perverted, self-deluded pouter who has devoured her.

But I was talking about Martin Amis. He isn’t like that. His novels move at a faster clip than his heroes’ – often, in fact, at a run. Not that he isn’t capable of the parenthetical discourse, the arch stylistic excursion, the vagrant rumination wilfully extended: London Fields and, particularly, The Information, are full of that sort of thing. But he doesn’t make too much of a habit of it, and besides, there’s always the humour: anarchic, sardonic, surreal in the English manner with a thick streak of the sixth form running down it – the vrai vice Anglais to snap you back to attention when your energy or intellect begin to flag. It isn’t to everybody’s taste, this humour: if you are a prig or a propagandist of any kind, a devotee of today’s obnoxious New Puritanism, say, or some kind of authoritarian revenge-fantasist, you won’t like it at all. You will be angered or offended, and I shall laugh all the harder for knowing how much it upsets you.

I’m rambling again? Okay, down to business. To the lady whose heart’s furniture has been, by her own report, traumatically rearranged more than once by Alice Walker, I offer the novels that, in a world that had the courage of its convictions, might have won their author a Nobel Prize: House of Meetings, The Zone of Interest and, of course, Time’s Arrow. The first two are, in my opinion, nowhere near his best, but all three offer the great, terrible subjects, the nightmare settings (a Soviet slave-labour camp above the Arctic Circle in one, Auschwitz in the other two), the doomed principals with their doomed principles, the lopsided auctorial rictus registering your propensity and mine for self-deception and the bottomlessness of our common capacity for evil. 

The third, however, sits high on my personal chart of The Best of Amis: a preening virtuoso piece, a showy exercise in technical contrivance that, before you quite realise what is happening, has morphed into a harrowed first-person exposition of genocide-in-progress. When she’s done with that, she’s sure to need a pick-me-up; I recommend Mart at his most generic in Night Train, with its gender-sensitivity and – gasp – likeable female narrator-protagonist. I think my friend will enjoy that one, though of course it won’t be enough, in view of what she’ll have read or heard elsewhere, to offset its author’s reputation for good old-fashioned sexism.

That accusation has, of course, been thrown at Amis so many times that it now qualifies as one of those clichés he was eternally at war against. He never really rebutted it; some things are too silly to argue about even when the consequences to yourself are as unpleasant as the consequences of this were to him. His mild response was that, as an author, he treated his male characters far worse than his female ones. I think it will more than serve (being true), but you, especially if you’re a woman with the opinion that a lot of women seem to have about men nowadays, may not. Amis’s women are, not unreasonably, women as seen through a man’s eyes. They bear no resemblance to the wax dolls and marionettes that furnished the works of male authors for most of the last century (save, of course, for Nicola Six in London Fields – the fictional fictive, the stilettoed anima, the custom-made mantrap), but they’re still women as we – we men – see them. You don’t like that, ladies, do you? You’ve apprised us as much, times without number, though your behaviour towards us often tells a different story… Then again, modern writing by women tends, more often than not, to present men as nasty, coercive, thick or just useless: male characters in ‘quality' fiction by women tend to be objects of hilarity, terror or contempt. I note this without resentment: it is simply another manifestation of the eternal conflict of interest that obtains between the sexes, a struggle in which a peaceable truce is the best we can ever hope for, and even then, the terms must be constantly renegotiated as the world changes about us.

Perhaps I should be more defensive still with my friend the economics teacher, who will surely be on the lookout for other symptoms of privilege and patriarchy besides sexism. Having lately had cause to read an awareness pamphlet published for them by HM Government, I know that such vigilance is specifically enjoined on teachers within the British school system. All the same, I shan’t bother, because – come on – art and literature at the highest level define the bloody patriarchy and, the history of the world being what it is, cannot help but do so. Besides, he’s going to find them anyway, so let’s forget about the woke stuff for a bit and just steam in.

Thus: Money is the acknowledged masterpiece, the one that caused a sensation when published, made its author rich and famous and is now regarded as the literary distillation of life in the metropolitan West during the Eighties. If my friend is planning to read only one novel by Martin Amis, this should be the one. But if he’s willing to consider making a habit of him, as I have, I would advise saving the cream till later and starting, instead, with Lionel Asbo, which is as outrageous as Money but set in a world more recognizable to a Gen X-er than the yuppie inferno in which its predecessor was forged. Or he could try Success, which I think may be Amis’s most typical novel without necessarily being among his best.

After that, I’m afraid, my questing pedagogues are on their own. Perhaps they’ll work their way up, via some of the less successful works (Yellow Dog, The Pregnant Widow) to Other People, chronologically the first open revelation of Amis’s, ah, tender and sensitive side, but unsatisfying to me because the ending remains a puzzle no matter how many times I re-read it. Most people, though, would go straight for the biggies: Time’s Arrow, The Information, or my own favourite (preferred, though only by a hair, to Money), London Fields. Some of the nonfiction is also excellent, particularly Koba the Dread, Amis’s passionate indictment of Stalin, which led to his public feud with Christopher Hitchens (reportedly it never affected their private friendship), and The War against Cliché, a brilliant collection of critical essays and reflections. Finally and perhaps best of all, we come to his personal memoir, Experience. This deals, inter alia, with such persons and matters as the author’s father, a novelist nearly as celebrated in his time as his son is now; the stingy strangeness of Philip Larkin, who (young Martin speculates) might just have been his real father; middle-aged Martin’s discovery of a son he never knew he had; his relationships with other authors, in particular the elderly, dying Saul Bellow; and, most terrible of all, a portrait-biography of his well-loved cousin Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in December 1973 and whose dismembered remains were discovered in 1994 alongside those of the other victims of the mass-murderers Fred and Rose West. The Information is dedicated to her memory.

I haven’t yet talked about the novel I started with, The Rachel Papers. I love it, as the song says, for sentimental reasons, but it is very much of its time, culturally as well as in outlook. It’s the most blatantly autobiographical of all his novels, and one of its unexpected pleasures, nowadays, is that it contains numerous scenes played out between its twenty-year-old narrator-protagonist, an obvious stand-in for Amis himself, and his best friend, a hulking ‘city bumpkin’ who, with hindsight, is a dead ringer for Christopher Hitchens. 

What of the turkeys? Are there turkeys? Sure there are. Amis once wrote a book about Space Invaders, a now-defunct arcade game. It’s for obsessives and I haven’t read it. Dead Babies, the difficult second novel, is to be avoided at all costs. I don’t care for The Information, either (its protagonist is an unsuccessful author; you can see how that might put me off), but it does contain some of his most brilliant comic writing, the kind that has you laughing so hard you can’t see to read. Of the short-story collections, Heavy Water is uneven, as short-story collections as a rule tend to be, and Einstein’s Monsters is (are?) breathtakingly good. 

Is that all? It’s all I care to write. Like Bowie, Amis was someone I thought of as a kind of elder sibling, hero, avatar, even scapegoat: one of those icons to whom the term ‘role model’ scarcely applies because they embody not (or not just) our aspirations but some aspect of our true selves, or perhaps just an aspect of the kind of person we think we really are. There’s no need to get sentimental about this. Still, if one has chosen well, we find that, even after they have left us, these figures not only continue to live for us, but go on paying back, with interest, the representation of ourselves that we have invested in them. I chose well with Martin Amis.

The Hundredth Royal-Thomian

 

The Thomian First XI of 1979

The 1979 Royal-Thomian cricket match may not actually have been the hundredth in the series, as it was proclaimed to be, but was certainly regarded, at the time, as the most important Royal-Thomian ever played. Richard Simon’s forthcoming book, STC: The Unauthorised History, captures not only the game itself but also much of the behind-the-scenes competition, lobbying, manoeuvring and occasional skulduggery that accompanied the selection of coaches, team members and other important participants. Below is part of Simon’s description of the match.

✥

Royal College, who had enjoyed a good 1979 season, were favoured to win – though the fisherfolk and market-workers of Mount Lavinia, who often ran informal books on the performance of the College First XI and First XV, loyally bet on St Thomas’s. The Royal captain, Ranjan Madugalle, was an outstanding cricketer: a star batsman with over a thousand runs already to his credit and a future Sri Lanka captain who would later serve as chief of the ICC’s panel of international match referees. Many of his teammates would also play for their country in the near future. The Thomian cohort, too, was talented, but not to the same degree; Royal, after all, was in the enviable position of being able to take its pick of gifted young players from any school within the state system. The advantage became painfully obvious when STC’s batting order suffered an embarrassing collapse with only 154 runs on the board, and by teatime on the second day Royal were able to close their innings sportingly, with two wickets still in hand, having scored 321. 

St Thomas’s batted grimly all through the last day, but before teatime they were down to their tail-enders, Mahinda Halangoda and C.P. Richards, with thirty runs yet to make. Little was expected of either player. Richards was a bowler, not a batsman; Halangoda, an able bat from a cricketing family (his grandfather had coached St Thomas’s in the Thirties), was young and fairly green. Anticipation of an imminent Royal victory brought the President and half his cabinet back to the pavilion; the Royal tents were in an uproar. Richards, joining Halangoda in the middle after Umesh Iddipily was dismissed for 29, walked out to no poetic ‘breathless hush’ but to an ear-splitting din that already had in it the audible timbre of Royalist triumph. The Royal team, Halangoda noticed, had all put on their caps…

©2023 by Richard Simon. All rights reserved.

Beginnings of the Battle of the Blues

Spectators at an early Royal-Thomian
(though most probably not the first)

Adapted from STC: The Unauthorised History 

by Richard Simon (forthcoming)

The origins of Lanka’s oldest public sporting fixture are surprisingly obscure. The Colombo Academy had, in fact, met St Thomas’s College at cricket several times during the late 1870s, but these were irregular matches in which the respective teams were captained by masters rather than boys. Thomas Keble, the great official historian of STC, preferred to call the 1880 match, the earliest to be played by all-schoolboy teams, the ‘first Royal-Thomian’.

His opinion was eventually overruled; today, ‘the first Royal-Thomian’ is generally held to have been played in 1879. The convention is justified by a contemporary Ceylon Observer article, in which it was reported that the match ‘was instituted as an annual fixture on 15 July’ that year. By preferring the earlier date, historians of Royal may claim that the series began with a hat-trick of victories by their side. 

But the teams at the 1879 game, too, were captained by masters: Ashley Walker led the Academy while the Thomian First XI was skippered by its founder, Sub-Warden Rev. Thomas Felton Falkner. It was an important fixture for the Academy, for of the two schools, St Thomas’s had, it seems, much the more formidable cricketing reputation. Academy pupils were given three half-holidays to watch the game, which their side won by a margin of 56 runs. Thomians, sadly, did not get even one afternoon off; Warden Miller, struggling to keep the College from bankruptcy in the wake of the coffee crash, had more important things on his mind than cricket.

Rev. T.F. Falkner, DSO,
captained St Thomas’s in 1879

The 1880 fixture, in which the teams comprised boys only, was played, like the previous year’s, on Galle Face Green, although the precise site is disputed. It is known that the teams arrived from their respective schools by boat across the Beira Lake – then a common mode of transport in Colombo and its suburbs, which were still clustered mainly about the lake. First in to bat for the Academy, which won the toss, was Benjamin ‘Benny’ Bawa, who would later become an eminent lawyer and father of the renowned architect Geoffrey Bawa. Young Benny was given out for three runs, but despite such an inauspicious beginning, the Academy again won the game, this time with 62 runs in hand.

Much to Thomian chagrin, the boys from San Sebastian went on to repeat their winning play the following year as well. Happily, this embarrassing hat-trick was immediately matched by their Mutwal rivals, who promptly won the next three matches in a row. Then, in 1885, came the infamous Nine Runs Match, over which Royalists and Thomians have argued ever since...

©2023 by Richard Simon. All rights reserved.