The Innocent Moon by Henry Williamson

continued to spin the ball as Phillip, straw hat on head, came up to him. A bleak look came on Parkin’s face. When the spinning stopped Phillip noticed a long yellow core of hard skin down the middle joint of the third finger; obviously he spun the ball from that core, or corn.
    “Good morning, Mr. Parkin. I wonder if you would give me some hints on how to bowl, for one of Lord Castleton’s papers. I don’t in the least want to pry into your personal or business affairs, which are private to yourself. What tremendous strength you’ve developed in those fingers! Practice, practice, practice, I can see!”
    Parkin, while spinning the ball, told him how his wife had helped him to learn to bowl by going with him twice a day to the nets on the Tunstall ground to bat to his spin bowling. Mrs. Parkin helped him for two seasons, facing a dozen cricket balls sent down at a time, one after the other. She was a heroine, and he owed his success to her. He practised leg-breaks and googlies—off-breaks with a leg-break action. Success was a matter of not turning the bowling arm too much, but to spin the ball with the fingers.
    “Thank you very much,” he said, and wrote his account while sitting on one of the wooden benches at Lord’s, to the knock of ball on willow and modulated ejaculations of “Oh, well played, sir”, “Pretty to watch, pretty to watch”, etc. In twenty-five minutes the work was done, and he went back to Monks House.
    The following Sunday half a column headed PARKIN ON BOWLING appeared on the front page in the early Northern edition of the paper, and to his surprise he saw on a placard the same words, in heavy type, and under the words by Phillip Maddison. Not a word of his description was cut. The Light Car Notes also appeared as written, although Bloom had scratched the back of his head while reading the final paragraph.
    “Are yer serious about oatmeal in a leaky radiator, to get yer home?”
    “Yes. It will prevent the pistons seizing. The bit about draining the radiator on arrival, and the driver having a hot meal already prepared, is a joke. But it will delay the boiling away of water in the cast-iron jacket.”
    “Well, I don’t know what the Chief will say, but he sent yer, so I’ll print it.”
    Phillip’s other stories were (a) an interview in Nottingham with a woman who on her 104th birthday had been taken by The Daily Picture in an aeroplane; and (b) another with a parson in Lincolnshire.
    Asked how it felt to be up in an aeroplane the aged woman had replied, “Horrible!” But the Chief was interested in the aeroplane, so that would not do; and the Chief’s brother owned The Daily Picture, so when the same reply was given to the question, “How does it feel to be 104?”—“Horrible!”—Phillip had used his imagination.
    From Nottingham he had gone by local trains, changing three times, to Hogworthingham (as instructed by Ownsworth) to interview the schoolmaster-parson whose photograph had appeared in that morning’s Trident with a fierce Kaiser moustache above a condemnation of the V-blouse, a new fashion which allowed, in the hot summer, an inch or two of flesh below the throat to be exposed to air and light.
    He found the parson in a small Church school in a village. He was a mild, clean-shaven old gentleman who, hearing that the caller had had no lunch, offered him eggs and bacon, and while the meal was being prepared by his wife, showed him round the school, an ancient building of one classroom in which a dozen small boys sat on one side, and six or seven small girls on the other.
    “You were well disguised in the Trident photograph, sir, if I may say so,” said Phillip, sipping coffee with his eggs-and-bacon.
    “I fancy the reporter got that photograph from a volume of Lincolnshire Worthies, where it appeared with an article of mine written fifteen years ago,” smiled the rector. “I wore a slight moustache in those days, and it appears to have been touched