What Ho! It is the maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year, when God is in heaven and everything is right with the world. Especially for the cricket fanciers among you who also love to curl up in bed with the yarns about silver cow creamers and that prize-winning Berkshire sow. Because, in this episode of Stories behind Books, Murray Hedgcock discloses how he went about penning Wodehouse at the Wicket. (As told to Mayukh Ghosh)
When in 1949 I exchanged the sedate life of a bank clerk for the unpredictable world of newspapers, I joined those whose day’s work is all too soon recycled as tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapping.
It is this brief life of the journalist’s output that makes so many dream of producing something more permanent – a work recorded between hard covers. In other words – most newspapermen/women hope to write A Book.
The immediate need is a subject, but nothing suggested itself for me until the Nineties when I decided the many cricket references in the works of P.G.Wodehouse, which I enjoyed hugely, provided fertile soil.
Might PGW have won his Blue and played firstclass cricket at Oxford if his father’s straitened finances had not blocked the university path?
I trawled the Wodehouse archive at Dulwich College, contacted old cricketers, Wodehouse enthusiasts, and the head of the Wodehouse family, Sir Edward Cazalet.
Much research was sourced in my own Wodehouse and cricket collections, but one excursion was a rewarding indulgence, when we visited the delightful village of Eaton Soken to study the Public School Magazine, in the A & C Black archives.
I wrote a modest article for Wisden Cricket Monthly, published by my old friend David Frith, and then Tony Ring, prominent among Wodehouse devotees, and a man with a feeling for cricket, stepped in. He insisted that the project be expanded to book form, and provided the essential introductions to the publishing world.
Tony Whittome at Hutchinson approved, and was helpful throughout, although I discovered that the publishing industry moves somewhat more ponderously than does the newspaper world.
A query would be sent me about some fact or other, and I would rush back my response within hours – only to wait days, or more usually weeks for acknowledgement and further developments.
In the finish, my draft was used with few amendments other than the jettisoning of a preliminary chapter seeking to explain the significance of the public school, and of cricket, in the world of Wodehouse.
There was no official launch, such as had been considered, so W at the W was revealed to the world with the postman’s delivery of half a dozen copies one memorable day in 1997.
Reviews were generally friendly – those in Wodehouse and cricket publications extremely so – but I still resent the terse Wisden summary by Leslie Thomas that it “raised a distant smile”.
I felt I deserved one personal copy in special leather binding – duly provided by an amiable and highly skilled local bookbinder, Danillo Cooper.
This treasure was nearing completion when a building adjoining the bindery caught fire, and W at the W was rescued bearing the scars in the form of smoke blackening.
Danillo was somewhat embarrassed: “I’ve got an idea for a different binding to make up for it”, he promised – and in time, produced an edition set in a makeshift bat (he had begun with a genuine bat, but this proved unsuitable).
Tony Whittome had promised a paperback edition in due course – and 14 years later, one duly appeared. The original was augmented by half a dozen pages of “Extras”, appropriate items either spotted in later research, or advised by helpful friends.
The cover was clearly designed to grab the younger eye rather than the Wodehouse devotee or serious cricket student. It showed a batsman taking a mighty swing, the ball crashing through his bat and smashing the wicket to smithereens. Not to my taste – but there it was in popular format at last.
There is a slight problem I have never quite resolved: should the various editions be formally placed in my Wodehouse collection (approaching 300 books) or on my cricket shelves (3,000-plus)? Answers on a postcard, please……
In any case, I shall always be cheered by once spotting a Berlin bookseller’s list offering a hardback at £360. There’s a dealer of taste!