My first season, by Joseph Hartle
An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this extract from his autobiography, published in 1896, a retired professional cricketer recalls his first summer as a paid bowler at a gentlemen’s cricket club in the 1850s.
I was seventeen when I came to the club, a long thin lad from a weaving village with one good suit of clothes and a bowling arm that had been the talk of three parishes. The secretary engaged me at twenty-five shillings a week for the summer, and I thought myself the richest young man in England. I did not know then what the twenty-five shillings were to buy.
They bought, first of all, my mornings. From ten o’clock until two, every day except the Sabbath, I bowled at the nets to any member who cared to come down and bat, and many cared to come who could not bat at all. I have bowled four hours to a stout banker who missed nine balls in every ten and blamed the ground for each of them. I have bowled until my shoulder burned like a coal and my fingers bled into the seam of the ball. If a gentleman was bowled, it was the custom to say, ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ and I said it, though I had been at pains to bowl him.
They bought, besides, my place in the world. We professionals came in at a side gate by the roller shed, changed in a wooden hut with one cracked basin between six of us, and took our dinner at a separate table, where the mutton was the same but the conversation was not. On the scorecard the gentlemen had their initials before their names and we had ours after, so that any child could tell at a glance which of us was paid.
And yet I will not have it said that I was unhappy, for I was not. I loved the game better than my dinner, and I loved that ground: the smell of the cut grass at seven in the morning when I helped to roll it, the white figures against the elms, the sound of a ball well struck. Some of the gentlemen, too, were gentlemen in more than name. Young Mr Fothersby, who was afterwards a judge, came to me after a long morning at the nets and said, ‘Hartle, you have taught me more this summer than any master did in four years at school,’ and shook my hand in front of the whole pavilion.
In August the club played the county, and the captain, being three men short, put me in the side. I took six wickets for thirty-one runs. When I came off the field the members stood up in the pavilion and clapped, and I went back through the side gate to the wooden hut with the cracked basin, and sat down, and found that I was crying. I have never rightly known whether it was for joy or for something else.
“The writer looks back on his early years as a professional cricketer with bitterness.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.