Word: crickets
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Editor Scott was impressed, promised Cardus the top music spot. But Cardus, never robust, suffered a breakdown. To get him out in the fresh air, the paper sent him to cover the first postwar (1919) cricket matches at the Old Trafford field. He hit a century, and the Guardian appointed him regular "Cricketer...
Musical Kidneys. Cricket's Homer, a self-described bastard, was born 54 years ago in a Manchester slum. His buxom mother and her two sisters took in laundry until they learned that taking lovers was more rewarding; Neville was one of the rewards. His father, whom he never knew, was first violinist in an orchestra...
Cardus clerked for an insurance firm, learned cricket beside a rubbish dump and set himself a course of reading that would have floored an Oxford don. After listening to a light opera one evening, he discovered that his mind "retained music as the kidneys secrete water." (Now, after reading in bed at night, Cardus switches off the lamp, selects some favorite composition from his head and conducts an imaginary concert before falling asleep...
...spare time, young Cardus imitated the austere wit of the Guardian's reviews of the arts, hoping to write for it himself. In 1917, after four years of batting and bowling as assistant cricket coach at Shrewsbury School, Cardus got his wish. The Guardian's Editor C. P. Scott hired him as a reporter, and Cardus stayed on the paper for 22 years...
Though he would rather write about batons than bats, Cardus thinks that cricket expresses, in microcosm, the whole English character. "If everything else in this nation of ours were lost but cricket," he writes, "it would be possible to reconstruct [from it] all the eternal Englishness which has gone to the establishment of [the] Constitution and the laws...