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By Root 329 0

my name down for cricket. I thought I would be a bowler and needless to say I wished to bowl very fast. I took a long run and not infrequently at the end lost control of both the run and the ball. I did not last on any side. But the effort was not wasted. I lost some of my selfconsciousness. It takes some doing, after all, to put on the absurd garb of the cricketer and to walk with a straight face to the middle! Hok and his supporters scoffed at my new character. I did not mind. I had my compensation in the astonishing number of boys who, in spite of my obvious failures, accepted me as a sportsman. While I was ‘nervous’ I was in fact unsure of myself. Seeing myself as weak and variable and clinging, I had looked for similar weaknesses in others. This was the cynicism I now arrested. The discovery that many were willing to take me for what I said I was was pure joy. It was like a revelation of wholeness.

I do not wish to claim too much for the playing fields of Isabella Imperial, or rather – to diminish the grandeur and destroy the comparison the plural unavoidably evokes – its somewhat ragged cricket pitch. But it was there that I acquired a certain composure and a certain attitude. I could not at the time formulate that attitude. But it was an attitude, I now see, towards the fact of an audience. And it was this. An audience is never important. An audience is made up of individuals most of whom are likely to be your inferiors. A disagreeable confession; but I have never believed the actor who says he ‘loves’ his audience. He loves his audience in the way he might love his dogs. The successful public performer in whatever field operates, not perhaps from contempt, but from a profound lack of regard for his audience. The actor is separate from those who applaud him; the leader, and particularly the popular leader, is separate from the led. My later career as a public speaker and handler of men surprised many and was seen by some as a violent breaking out of character. It did not appear so to me. The public speaker was only another version of the absurd schoolboy cricketer, selfconsciousness suppressed, the audience ignored, at the nets of Isabella Imperial.

Alas for theory! Alas for abiding fears! Attend to the sequel. A chance for athletic distinction, as I thought, presently offered itself. The occasion was the annual Isabella Imperial sports. It was clear to me that I stood every chance of winning the hundred yards, the two-twenty and the four-forty in my group. The reasons were special and are now not quite clear in my own mind. It had to do with the entry date or my birthday or a combination of both – one day or so either way would have made all the difference; and to this was added the fact that the kindergarten of Isabella Imperial, abolished some years before, then briefly revived, had just been finally abolished and the toddlers incorporated into the main school. For them there were two groups, one under eleven or under ten the other under thirteen or twelve. It was in this last group that a unique chance had placed me. And in this group I was like a giant. Because of the stop-and-start intake of the kindergarten I was competing with children who were fifteen or eighteen months younger. The childish, blotted signatures of entrants on the notice-board confirmed this happy fact.

I took up athletics. I made my mother get me running shorts and I practised assiduously in the college grounds in the afternoons. I imitated the older athletes. After a practice run I did not simply stop. I ran myself down slowly, reining myself in, so that at the end I was like a dancer, elbows high, lightly clenched arms extended and working in rhythm with the high-lifted legs. It amused me to see my juvenile rivals, a scramble of brittle little limbs at one end of the playing field, also practising in this way. They too rubbed themselves down with Canadian Healing Oil or Sloan’s Liniment, like me, like the older athletes with developed, hairy legs.

My new character did not pass unnoticed at home. It was put down to the influence of Cecil