Monday 15 July 2024

Change in to white flannels, play from midday to sundown, breaking only for a cold lunch and a pint or two in the pavilion

Every summer weekend during this opulent decade, young men from the City, or the Imperial Civil Service, or the newspaper and magazine world of Fleet Street and the Strand, would take the train to some nearby provincial town, Tunbridge Wells perhaps, or Stevenage. There, they would throw their heavy cricket bags onto the horse-drawn carriage awaiting them at the station, then rattle through leafy summer lanes to the ground, change in to white flannels, play from midday to sundown, breaking only for a cold lunch and a pint or two in the pavilion, before returning to the City in the fading light of summer.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 77

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