It's been emotional
'A Season in Sinji' (J. L. Carr, 1967)
Emotional suppression is a trait often associated with the English middle classes. Recall the quiet desperation behind the eyes of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter (1945), or Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins’ stiflingly restrained minute of flirtation in The Remains of the Day (1993). In each case, characters are thrown into situations (often involving an unwise love affair) that should naturally trigger an intensely passionate emotional response. Yet, instead of throwing their arms around one another and declaring their undying love, they remain silent, their emotional outbursts limited to an incautious glance or a faintly squeezed hand. The affair usually remains unfulfilled.
J. L. Carr knew that, when it came to portraying emotions, less really is more. In his post-Great War novella, A Month in the Country (1980), the two main characters appear to be very much in love, but the social conditions of 1920s rural England restricts their physical contact to little more than a brief brush against one another while admiring the view from a church window. In his earlier novel, A Season in Sinji (1967), Carr explores the reverse of this idea. What if, rather than love, the intense emotion in need of restraint was hate?
The story is set largely in the eponymous RAF base, located somewhere on the coast of western Africa.1 It is the middle of the Second World War, and British seaplanes are flying out on missions to track and eliminate U-boats prowling the Atlantic. The protagonist and narrator is Tom Flanders, an RAF photographic technician from a Yorkshire farming family (closely based on Carr himself). A cricketing fanatic, Flanders spends much of his fairly dull six months in Sinji organising games between his own rag-tag groundcrew team and sides drawn from the other British military bases dotted along the coastline.
Flanders’ efforts are constantly frustrated by a junior officer named Turton. Arrogant, vindictive and shamelessly manipulative, Turton feels compelled to dominate every situation he encounters. For example, while stationed in Devon (a few months before their posting to Sinji), Turton spots a barmaid with whom both Flanders and his friend Wakerly are enamoured. Within seconds, Turton has made it his objective to become her lover. His swift success annoys Flanders, whose attitude to romance is admittedly rather ambivalent, but it almost breaks the lovesick Wakerly. Later, after joining them in Sinji, Turton singles out Flanders and Wakerly - as well as their unfortunate NCO - for relentless humiliation, having earmarked them back in England as potential enemies in his quest for self-promotion.
It’s in the realm of cricket, however, that Turton earns Flanders’s unadulterated hatred. Flanders adores cricket, the game filling an important emotional gap in his character. Consequently, Turton’s pig-headed interference in the cricketing world aggravates the otherwise aloof Yorkshireman. In Devon, Flanders joins a local side and acquits himself well, both as a batsman and a team player. Turton smells an opportunity and promptly joins the team, leaning on his private school credentials to persuade the captain that he understands the game. For all his boasting, Turton’s sporting skills turn out to be rather lacklustre, garnering disgust from Flanders. Undeterred, Turton pushes his luck even further after arriving in Sinji. Envious of the success of Flanders’s team of misfits, Turton pulls rank to appoint himself as team captain, demoting Flanders down the batting order. An atrocious cricketer, Turton’s management of the team results in slaughter at the crease. For Flanders, who spent the previous six months carefully husbanding his team from victory to victory, the result is crushing.
Constrained by military discipline, Flanders cannot respond verbally or physically to Turton’s transgressions. It wouldn’t be his style anyway, as Flanders is rarely open with his emotions. Instead, he frames his anger in the only way he knows how: the narration constantly drifts into elaborate soliloquys on cricket, with his criticism of Turton being recast in cricketing language. See, for example:
‘Utter confidence is everything when you’re playing to win. Everything! (I’ve seen it on a bowler’s face and then you have to beat him, really let him see the middle of the bat, crack down with all your weight on his mistakes, break him. He knows it, the field knows it, even back in the pavilion they know it: it’s will against will: it’s what makes cricket the game like no other game.) But she was eighteen and hadn’t experience to see through him.’
Flanders’s cricket-based worldview reaches its zenith during the fateful game under Turton’s captaincy. As the batting order is whittled down, Flanders remains at the crease, the lone defender of a castle that has long fallen to the enemy. Turton, seeking to save face as captain, yells from beyond the boundary for Flanders to retire. Flanders refuses. He stands steadfast until the light fades and the umpires retrieve the bales. The team may have been annihilated, but through cricket Flanders has gained a moral victory over Turton’s megalomania.
Emotional release hits Flanders eventually, as the otherwise subdued book reaches its surprisingly dramatic finale. All the same, when this response does arrive, it feels unsettling coming from the otherwise tight-lipped, buttoned-up Flanders. His channel for emotional release has never been speech, nor physical expression. It’s cricket, pure and simple.
A Season in Sinji is a fine novel. For all of Carr’s fluent if mystifying use of 1940s jargon, it remains a profoundly relatable book, with its exploration of human insecurities and the limits of social accepted emotional expression still hitting hard today. It would be a mistake, however, to read A Season in Sinji - or indeed any of Carr’s novels - as an example of Anglo-middle-class emotional restraint. Emotion is plentiful throughout, bubbling violently beneath all the starchy salutes and aimless square-bashing. It’s just that it takes cricket to summon it to the surface.
Carr saw service in the RAF in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and the Gambia during the Second World War. Sinji is a fictional location, based on his experiences of all three.