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. 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.’

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