Frank Keating

Victorious Plum

Spectator readers Alan Magid and Timothy Straker were quick on the draw (Letters, 25 August, 8 September) to champion Mike by P.G. Wodehouse in a matey reproach to Robert Stewart’s assertion in his review of Baseball Haiku (Books, 18 August) that there had never been a significant cricket novel.

Spectator readers Alan Magid and Timothy Straker were quick on the draw (Letters, 25 August, 8 September) to champion Mike by P.G. Wodehouse in a matey reproach to Robert Stewart’s assertion in his review of Baseball Haiku (Books, 18 August) that there had never been a significant cricket novel.

Spectator readers Alan Magid and Timothy Straker were quick on the draw (Letters, 25 August, 8 September) to champion Mike by P.G. Wodehouse in a matey reproach to Robert Stewart’s assertion in his review of Baseball Haiku (Books, 18 August) that there had never been a significant cricket novel. Their testimony would have cheered not only Wodehouse himself but another notable scribbler. In his autobiography The Infernal Grove, Malcolm Muggeridge tells how he introduced Plum to George Orwell in a Paris restaurant in 1944, ‘but the two of them just talked cricket’. (Orwell had enjoyed the game at Eton.) ‘Wodehouse said he considered his best book, by a distance, to be Mike — “the ring of ball on bat, the green of the pitch, the white of the flannels, the cheers of the crowd” — at which to my intense surprise Orwell enthusiastically agreed.’

Mike Jackson first appeared as a serial in The Captain Magazine in 1907. In his Wodehouse at the Wicket (Hutchinson, 1997), devoted Plum-ite scholar Murray Hedgcock elaborates: ‘The original title “Jackson Junior” was changed when the tale appeared in 1909 in book form to the more familiar Mike. This incorporated the second Mike story, published in The Captain from April, 1908, as “The Lost Lambs”. By 1953, the two were published separately once again, this time as Mike at Wrykyn and Mike and Psmith.’ In whatever form, the story of Mike Jackson — in many respects Mike Atherton to a T, I reckon — the upright schoolboy bat deprived of his anticipated place at Cambridge because his father’s finances had fallen away, is an authentic adult novel.

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