I always like to read a book from the country I’m visiting. The Gambia I was surprised to learn doesn’t seem to have much of a literary tradition locally so I was reduced to reading something not by a Gambian but at least in Gambia.
It’s about a Yorkshire farm boy who is sent to the Gambia with the RAF. He spends a long time waiting in the training camp, and when his group is finally called:
The others turned their back and pulled blankets over their heads as we’d done so many times before. No-one wanted to know us now we were for the mincing machine.
There is heavy emphasis on the fact that no one wants to go, which I found interesting. It makes me wonder if other books of that war I’ve read have largely been written by educated people, who got to be officers, and who while they weren’t enjoying the war were at least not enjoying it from the officers mess.
The farm boy has a good friend who is more upper class. This is a new experience for him:
I expect there were folks like him on The Vale but they were the sort we didn’t mix with. My grandad grouped them under the general heading of Parasites and, on Sundays, Abominations, chiefly because they came roaring in fast cars to The Lamb.
His friend is vividly, tragically evoked, and I want to go ahead and call him his ‘friend’. Wikipedia does not suggest that JL Carr was guy, but this novel sure does.
The friend is seeing a girl before they leave the UK, and she is ‘stolen’ from him by an officer. (The girl barely features; she’s clearly a plot device to move us on to the people we actually care about, i.e., the boys). Then this same officer ends up being sent to the Gambia with them. Don’t ask me exactly how, but it all ends up in a crescendo of a cricket match. The farm boy is a great believer in rules, in community, and in cricket. Here he is in the training camp, playing the local village teams:
I’d have continued to the hundred on one or two of these occasions against the horrible bowling of the village veterans but, during the War, it was put about that it was unpatriotic if you stayed long after fifty
Things get super unpatriotic in the Gambia. I can’t exactly describe to you how, as much of the book was lost on me as I don’t really know the rules, but in summary: he’ll never feel the same about cricket, community, or the rules ever again.