Tag: Indian

Remnant #2 – It’s Just Not Cricket

On By Mick CanningIn Cricket, England, Fiction, India, writing30 Comments

Another piece from the hard drive that was intended to become part of a novel set partly in India and partly in the UK in the nineteenth century. Although an entirely fabricated event, all the cricketers here of both teams were actual cricketers of this time. The England team is made up of players from South East England counties, and the Indian team with players from the first Indian tours to England in 1886 and 1888. This match, though, is entirely fictional.

Image: cricket matches in progress on the Maidan, Kolkata.

It was the 13th August 1887, and a cricket match was in progress on the Higher Ground at Tunbridge Wells. It had begun two days previously, with a forecast of fine weather for the whole of its three-day duration and the visiting team, on losing the toss, had been asked to bat first. So far, the match had gone perfectly according to script. The touring Indian team had been bowled out for 117 under sunny skies, the United England XI, under The Honourable G R C Harris, the Kent County Captain, had scored 293 in reply, Harris himself top scoring with a magnificent 109, then the Indians had rallied to 236 in their second innings, a lead of exactly 60. The watching citizens of Tunbridge Wells had applauded politely and dutifully, expecting the openers to knock off the required runs before tea.

It was then that the weather changed.

As the United England openers walked out to bat, the skies suddenly darkened and a few drops of rain began to fall. The umpires looked up, Square Leg umpire wandered across to consult with his colleague, then the rain ceased. The clouds, although fat and dark, refused to release any more rain, so Square Leg umpire wandered back to his mark and the opening batsman took his guard. As he marked out his crease, a light wind whisked away the dust from his scratching bat and the crowd immediately noticed that they had begun to sweat. It was a warm, humid wind, blowing from left to right across the square from the opening bowler’s perspective. The old India hands amongst the spectators looked around in an unconscious, puzzled recognition.

M D Kanga, opening bowler for the touring Indian team, was not particularly fast, but he possessed the ability to swing the ball into the right hander. As he ran in to bowl the first ball of the innings, the wind strengthened slightly. He reached the crease, banged down into his delivery stride and released the ball, which started towards the batsman’s off stump, then curved through the muggy air and struck the batsman on the pad dead in front of leg stump. The batsman, back in his crease and looking to play to cover, was clearly LBW. Kanga and the rest of the Indian team went up in unison to appeal and the umpire, sheepishly, had no choice but to give the Honourable G R C Harris out, first ball. There was a scattered applause from the spectators, which was followed by an appalled silence as Arthur Shrewsbury, England Captain, was clean bowled by Kanga’s second delivery. The England IX were 0 for 2 and Kanga was on a hat trick.

To the relief of the spectators, the Sussex batsman and fast bowler J B Hide kept out the hat trick ball, blocked the next two deliveries, and then opened the scoring with a beautifully struck four back past the bowler. Tunbridge Wells heaved a collective sigh of relief and the world jerked back into motion.

Alec Hearne, Kent opening bat, had watched this carnage from the other end, and played the first ball of the next over carefully back to the bowler. Dhunjishaw Patel, the Indian Captain, bowled old-fashioned, fast underarm – surprisingly difficult to bat against, with its variations in pace, line and length, and with pitches still often fairly uneven. His second and third balls, too, were defended back, until a looser delivery popped up in front of the batsman, asking to be put away. Gratefully he walloped it towards the boundary and called Hide through for a couple of runs. A misfield handed them a third run, however, and the fifth ball was faced by Hide, who also defended carefully. A single off the last ball meant that Hide had kept the strike for the next over. 8 for 2.

Kanga’s next ball went for four, while the second was blocked. As the score went into double figures and the batsmen carefully pushed the score on towards the sixty-one needed for victory, the crowd began to smile again around the boundary edge. 12 for 2 became 14 for 2 and as Kanga came in to bowl the last ball of the over, Hide raised his bat in anticipation and began the pace forward towards the pitch of the ball. As he did so, and exactly at the point at which the bowler released the ball, a small boy in the crowd jumped up directly behind the bowler’s arm. There was no time to call a halt and as Hide quickly tried to refocus his attention on the ball and adjust the stroke, the ball took the edge of the bat and dropped into the waiting hands of first slip. 14 for 3.

Hide stamped off furiously, to be replaced by the number five, W A Humphreys of Sussex. The steady procession of returning batsmen continued then as Hearne decided to take the fight to the Indians, aiming a huge hit at the first ball of Patel’s next over, only to pick out the man at deep mid off. 14 for 4. Henderson, in at number six, survived the rest of Patel’s over, leaving Humphreys to face his first ball from Kanga; straight and fast, kept out. The second swung in sharply – blocked. The third on off stump and edged through slips for two. The fourth blocked. The fifth swung out, again taking the edge but this time taken at second slip. One ball left and the new batsman, Ford of Middlesex, was able to leave one that was too wide. 16 for 5.

The next six overs saw a recovery that saw the score climb to 36 for 5 when, off the last ball of the over, Ford mistimed a drive and was bowled off his legs. 36 for 6.

F Hearne, brother of Alec, usually opened the batting for Kent and was down at number eight for this match, as he had been used as the opening bowler. With only twenty-five needed to win, he decided to swing the bat after taking a couple of balls to get his eye in. The first went for four, the second took the edge and the wicket keeper took a fine catch diving away to his right. 40 for 7.

Pentecost, the English wicket keeper, often batted down the bottom of the order for Kent. In fact, between himself, W Hearne (another brother) and A B Hide of Sussex, there was fierce competition for the number eleven spot. The crowd had begun to get nervous again. He survived the last two balls of Patel’s over, then for the next over Patel took off Kanga and brought on Shaparjee Bhedwar. Bhedwar began by sending down a bit of a loosener which Henderson, playing completely down the wrong line, allowed to cannon into his pads for another LBW decision. W Hearne kept out the next ball, but played all around the third and looked back to see middle and off stump knocked back. A B Hide came in last, to a deafening silence, and kept Bhedwar at bay for the rest of the over. 40 for 9.

All at sea against Patel, Pentecost attempted to block the first ball of the next over, only to see it miss off stump by a whisker and his bat by a country mile. He therefore slogged at the next one, which shot away through cover enabling them to run two. The next one clipped his off stump, the bails came off and it was all over. United England IX second innings all out for forty-two and the Indian tourists had won by eighteen runs. There was a little polite clapping around the ground, but the general feeling was one of anger. The reporter from the local paper sat writing and then crossing out lines in his notebook, his mouth a thin line. The spectators were leaving faster than was usual, but in the refreshment marquee there were heated voices raised.

A Warning To Other Writers

On By Mick CanningIn A Good Place, Fiction, writing26 Comments

Oh, this sodding book.

I…no, first, a little bit of context.

Those of us who call ourselves creatives, why do we create? Why do we have this need to make things? I know the usual answer is we write / paint / carve / whatever it is we do, because we have to, because there is something inside of us that needs to find an outlet. But what is that something? In my case, as well as a storyline it is frequently a place where I have spent some enjoyable time. It provides me with a comfortable setting in which to tell a story.

Most of what I do, certainly the work I feel is my best, my most successful (in the sense of expressing what I want to express), falls into that category. My long poem The Night Bus, for example, was the result of a thirty year (admittedly intermittent) search for a way to record my experience of a long bus ride across Northern India into Nepal. I attempted prose and paintings without success, although through this I did develop a style of painting I went on to successfully use on many Indian paintings, and had long given up on the project when chance showed me a way into the poem. The poem I completed succeeds in conjuring up (for me) the impressions and feelings I had on that journey; I can relive the journey again by re-reading the poem. Whether it conveys anything of that to other readers, I naturally cannot know.

And my stories, too. I look through Making Friends With The Crocodile, and I am in rural Northern India again. I re-read The Last Viking and can easily feel myself on an island off the west coast of Scotland. This is not to imply any intrinsic merit to my writing, other than its ability to transport myself, at least, into the setting I am attempting to describe.

These stories are a composite of three basics: a setting, as mentioned already, a storyline – and again this needs to be something important to me, or I find it pretty well impossible to put my heart into it, and strong, convincing, characters.

It is useful, then, to know where lots of my writing comes from, and what shapes it, what drives it. I have long suspected that this is frequently nostalgia and, recognising that, have wondered whether this might be a bad thing. Nostalgia, after all, has a rather bad press…does it just mean I am living in the past because I am viewing it through rose-tinted spectacles? As a way of not addressing issues of today I should be tackling?

This yearning for nostalgia, though, is a desire for something we see as better than what we have now. To write passionately about something it needs to be something I feel strongly about. Obviously this can also be something we find frightening or abhorrent – dystopian warnings about the future or anger about injustices, for example – but even in those cases the familiar provides a cornerstone of safety, even if only by way of comparison.

This is also true when I paint. I am not someone who can paint to order – if I’m not inspired, it does not work. A number of difficult commissions have proved that point to me. I paint what I like, what moves me. After all, whatever I am creating, it should be foremost for myself.

That book, then…

I began writing it about five years ago for all the wrong reasons. I had self-published Making Friends With The Crocodile and decided my next story should also be set in India, and as a contrast decided to write about British ex-pats living in a hill station in the foothills of the Himalaya. I wanted to write about India again. The trouble was, I had no idea what story I was going to tell. I had no stories that might slot into that setting I felt in any way driven to write; it just seemed to feel appropriate at the time. I was pleased by the reception the first book had and felt I ‘should’ write this one.

What could possibly go wrong?

I spent time putting together a plot, with which I was never wholly satisfied, and began writing. Really, I should have seen the obvious at that point and bailed out. But I carried on, and twice reached a point where I thought I had the final draft.

My beta reader then proceeded to point out all the very glaring faults.

So twice I ripped out a third of it and chucked it away, then re-plotted the second half of the book and got stuck into the re-write. I’m sure you can see part of the problem at this point – I wanted to hang onto as much of the story as I could, instead of just starting completely afresh. And now here I am trying to finish the final draft for the third time, as my February project for this year. And it’s just not working for me. But at this point, after well over a hundred and fifty thousand words (half of which I’ve discarded) I just feel I’ve invested too much time and effort in it to abandon it now. Somehow, it has to get finished. I do have an idea for a couple of quite drastic changes which I’ll try this week, but unless I feel I’m making some real progress I’ll then happily put it aside for a while and concentrate on next month’s project: painting and drawing.

And, to be honest, if it eventually ended up as a story of less than ten thousand words, and if I felt satisfied with it, then I’d take that as a result, now.

And the moral of all this? I’m sure there was a point after a couple of months when I knew I shouldn’t have been writing this book. I should have binned it there and then and saved myself a lot of fruitless trouble, but stubbornly ignored the warning signs.

A Busy Time in West Bengal

On By Mick CanningIn A Good Place, lockdown, travel, writing23 Comments

For the last couple of months, during Lockdown and its easing, I have spent an awful lot of time up in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal.

bookshop (2)

Okay, that’s not strictly true, but for most of that time I have spent my working day revising, re-writing, and editing A Good Place, my novel set in a fictitious hill station there. I have some new characters to weave in, some old ones to remove, and the story line to alter in several major ways, including a different ending.

I finished the first draft some nine months ago, but there were parts I didn’t feel entirely satisfied with then, and my beta reader unerringly picked those out for major revision. I then spent a while thinking about the story line and took out nearly all the final third of the book and chucked it.

That left me with a lot to rewrite.

Much of the problem stemmed from the fact that after I published Making Friends With the Crocodile, which is set in an Indian village with peopled with all Indian characters, I wanted to write a novel dealing with the British who remained behind in India after partition. A kind of balance to my writing. That was all well and good, but I began writing the novel before I was completely satisfied with the story line, and the more I wrote of it the less I liked it. So I kept changing the story line as I wrote rather than doing what I really should have done, which was delete the whole thing and go away and write something completely different, waiting until I knew what I really wanted to write. But I’m now content that I have the story I want to tell, rather than Just A Story.

Consequently, I have been virtually living in West Bengal during these days, inevitably leading to yearnings to be there in person. Which does nothing to ease the feelings of frustration at enduring the travel restrictions of Lockdown.

050a

However, one of the advantages of having several projects on the go at once, which I always have, is that I can switch to another for a while when I need to. Last week, then, I spent one day giving a final edit to a short story which gave me the opportunity to spend the day (in my head!) in rural Sussex, which was very welcome. Especially as that is somewhere we can get to now, with a minimum of hassle.

And A Good Place? I’m glad you asked. I think I’m close to finishing the second draft, which will be a blessed relief.

Just so long as my beta reader doesn’t throw her hands up in horror when she reads it…