9

1953

Sunday at Ten Dunoon

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to thee…

Hymn

The congregation in the Church on Dunoon Rd. thunders its praises to the Lord. One hundred metres from the Church in the lane at #10 Dunoon Rd. the tension between the imperative of play and the value of obedience gets a weekly trial. A child’s Sunday at Tendunoon was tedious, very tedious; boring, very boring. There was a general proscription against having fun. Silent socializing was tolerated preferably with well kempt individuals of proper breeding. “No ragamuffins please!”

Reading was encouraged. General reading, however, did not, in and of itself, confer upon the young reader the approbation of the significant adults, whereas reading of the proper sort, preferably classical or ecclesiastical, would guarantee the aspiring youth a favourable evaluation when the significant family adults rendered their inevitable periodic reports of the progress, or lack thereof, of the young people of the family.

Attendance at church, at least once preferably twice on Sunday, was of course, a sacred duty. This adult expectation, in direct contrast to the desire for fun and games the children reserved for themselves, would be the source of more than a few conflicts between the generations in our family. At church, notions of faith meant to me that if I persevered, I had the blessed assurance that someday I would be an illustrious cricketer and as revered as the current crop of West Indian legends. I would be able to stroke the ball as boldly as Everton Weeks and play shots as elegantly as Frank Worrell. In my prayers, then as now, I would entreat our Lord to grant me the ability to make at catch at gully from the position at first slip that I was playing, a feat too prodigious for mere mortals.

On the unwritten list of approved activities for Sundays, things physical were conspicuously absent. Meaning, the almost permanent floating cricket game in the Lane had to pause once a week for 24 hours. Or more creatively, the players would take the game to another venue out of sight and out of ear shot of the significant family adults. is meant also that, although a game may in fact be in progress at Lung-Sai’s house, residents of Tendunoon were, in theory, not among the participants since the house of our Chinese neighbours was close enough to betray the presence of Tendunooners by sounds or sights. In fact though, some rather interesting games of hide and seek were inadvertently incorporated into the cricket game, thus creating a very exciting variant of the noble sport. those hiding were of course Tendunooners, and those seeking, family members who suspected that a Tendunooner had deliberately and blatantly violated the Sunday sport ban and had illegally engaged in an activity that was specifically on the unwritten but understood list of pursuits disapproved for Sundays.

This delightful deceit provoked more than a few heart pounding moments as a Tendunooner made a hasty retreat at the approach of a car or the sight of a significant adult of the family, ducking behind any thing solid to avoid being seen, crawling under houses, leaping small fences with a single bound. And so it came to pass that one Sunday, lured as if by hypnosis, some Tendunooners did willfully and contrary to all the tenets of family spirituality, engage in a cricket game in Lung-Sai’s yard. The cricket pitch, was a narrow strip of dirt below the kitchen, a rock strewn shooting gallery where the batsman barely survived physical injury by ducking popping balls or quickly dropping the bat, by sheer reflex to protect the wicket from shooting balls, in our specialized back yard parlance, a technique called ‘digging the balls out of the dirt’. Of course we played games without any protective gear and the vagaries of the playing surface and the unforgivingly hard and heavy cork and rubber ball that we had recently discovered added to the importance of the game as a rite of passage into some other stage which, 50 years later, some Tendunooners are still waiting to find.

I had just recently mustered up the courage to face the always unpredictable top spinning, leg breaking deliveries that Lung-Sai, our Chinese neighbour served up awkwardly off the wrong foot. Coming up to bat after a brilliant one-handed catch, I had barely seized the coconut bough bat when a Tendunooner yelled an alarm to the effect that a car had just entered the Lane. The car, a brown Plymouth, was full of significant family adults and/or their intimate friends returning from the Sunday morning service. This alert cannot be ignored. Dropping the bat, the sacred willow, (it matters not that it is a coconut bough), this Tendunooner dashes purposely for the fence, while others of the same persuasion find cover behind some things and under other things. Judging the fence too high to leap with a single bound, he opts for passage between the second and third strand of the barbed wire fence. His objective is not only not to be seen playing cricket, but to arrive behind Tendunoon before the car has unloaded its devout passengers.

Going through barbed wire fences, at the best of times is an art not easily mastered, but going through under duress is next to impossible. One foot must be on the ground on the side that the Tendunooner is leaving. The other foot describes a movement through the strands of barbed wire. the traveling foot next descends to the ground on the destination side of the fence and the body weight is transferred to that foot.

The critical stage is now reached, for the fugitive must know by instinct the position of the fabric of his shirt relative to the third strand of barbed wire, and the position of the fabric of his pants relative to the second strand. Even more critical in his judgment and uppermost in the mind of the fleeing Tendunooner is the position of the scrotal sac relative to the barbed wire strand below the crotch and the position of the testicles within the scrotum.

Through the fence the Tendunooner eases frantically. Not carefully enough, unfortunately. because the fearful sound of ripping fabric issues up from beneath his crotch. “Oh oh! torn pants”. Overcompensating for the lack of clearance on the second strand, the fugitive straightens up too quickly and hears the tearing sound of fabric on the third strand. “Oh, oh, torn shirt!” The flight by now has acquired another dimension, because successful or not in meeting the first objective, that of arriving before the car has disgorged its pious passengers, the Tendunooner now faces another layer of challenges, inventing a subterfuge to explain the sudden, overnight appearance of holes in otherwise newish clothes. But that consideration can wait for further deceits. For the moment, pick up legs, pump knees, go for the backyard and try to catch your breath before being seen.

Cricket playing angels were watching over him that Sunday for when the significant adults greeted him sitting nonchalantly to cover the torn pant, and leaning against a wall, not to reveal the torn shirt, they were none the wiser about the violation of the Lord’s Day.

A week later, reading silently to while away another tedious Sunday, the Tendunooner reads a newspaper account of a fugitive through a barbed wire fence who, being pursued by the police for larceny, had ripped his scrotum on a barb and lost a testicle in flight. He sends up a silent prayer of thanks to the Almighty for the preservation of the family jewels in his retreat through the fence at Tendunoon. I’m not so sure, however, that the prayer got the attention of the Lord, because at that moment the heavenly hosts were cheering wildly as God the Master Cricketer got under a short delivery from Beelzebub and pulled it powerfully over deep mid-wicket for a six.

“Oh God! Nice shot!”
“How great Thou art! How great Thou art! Amen”.