England, Their England by A G Macdonell

Author:A G Macdonell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

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For a week or two, life in Royal Avenue was rather flat after Geneva. There was a constraint about it, a sort of grey dullness. London was formal, solid, relentlessly matter-of-fact. No one sat on wicker chairs on the pavements at 9.30 A.M. drinking sticky drinks, green and orange and purple; there were no public places to dance in all night and no one danced even until 3 o’clock in the morning, except people who could afford to patronize the large hotels, or rather who were told over and over again by their publicity agents that they couldn’t afford not to patronize the large hotels; no one published paper-covered novels at a shilling; no one sold magazines full of pictures of lovely ladies in chemises and shoes, or alternatively silk stockings and ear-rings; no one seemed to enjoy themselves, and the sun never shone.

The cricket season was over, and the great English sporting public had settled down to the contemplation of professional football. Vast crowds poured down the King’s Road and the Fulham Road every Saturday afternoon to see the matches at the Craven Bridge ground. Donald went once, partly to watch the mighty, cloth-capped heart of England, sixty thousand strong, thronging the terraces of the arena, cheering on their heroes and hurling good-natured abuse at the referee, and partly because a famous fellow-countryman was due to visit the Walham Green Wanderers on behalf of the West Riding United Football Club in the North of England. This was no less a personage than the great Mr. Jock Thompson, captain and centre-forward of Scotland, possessor of sixteen international caps. Mr. Thompson had for several years captained the West Riding United, and when that team came to Craven Bridge, Donald felt that he owed it to a compatriot to spring a bob and attend the match.

He was well rewarded, for Mr. Thompson displayed all the wizardry which had raised him to the top of the football tree, and by much swerving, dodging, feinting, and dribbling he scored three inimitable goals and brought victory to his team. No captain can do more. It is true that on that very morning protracted negotiations between the management of West Riding United and Walham Green Wanderers had been brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and Mr. Jock Thompson had left the former and joined the latter, on consideration of a trifle of fourteen thousand pounds paid by the latter to the former; and it is also true that at 1 o’clock on that very day, a special meeting of directors of the Walham Green Wanderers Football Club had unanimously elected Mr. Thompson to be captain of the Walham Green eleven. The fact remains that Mr. Thompson gave a superb display and won the match for his side, an exhibition of Team Spirit and loyalty, felt Donald, that could not have been surpassed even by cricketers.

An incident that enlivened the tedium of those October weeks was the barefaced burglary of the Royal Avenue house. A man had come to the door and had represented himself to be an official of the Gas, Light, and Coke Company.

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