Researching a book about cricket, I came across Stacy Aumonier’s ‘The Match’, a short story written in 1916, recalling a game played at the height of summer two years previously, just before the Great War was declared. The devastating contrast between ‘the clean sanity of that sunlit field’ and the battleground that followed is a familiar literary idea, but Aumonier was one of the first to employ it. He looks back with disbelief at the innocence and generosity of spirit with which the game was played, the ‘good luck’s’ and the ‘well played’s’, the kindness and the cheerfulness of all those involved, the lunch, the drinks and the farewells, and can’t believe that so many of the players have since died. It’s a loving, elegiac and painful tale.
To my shame, I had never heard of Aumonier, and yet between 1913 and 1928 he wrote more than eighty-five short stories, six novels, a book of character studies and a volume of fifteen essays. John Galsworthy regarded him as ‘one of the best short-story writers of all time . . . there is certainly no one more readable . . . he will outlive nearly all the writers of his day’. Alfred Hitchcock adapted ‘Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty’ into a 1956 television film. In this, an intrepid spinster travels to France to collect her sister-in-law from her missionary work in Paraguay. Her brother, the Dean of Easingstoke, is predictably too busy with church affairs to do this himself. ‘It was clearly Millicent’s duty to go.’ Arriving in Bordeaux, she takes a late night bath, returns to the wrong room, accidentally locks herself in, and then discovers a dead man in the bed who, it turns out, is an infamous murderer. The story has all the ingredients of either a thriller or a farce, but Aumonier manages to include both, and adds comedy to psychological insight by focusing entirely on Miss Bracegirdle’s somewhat limited point o
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Subscribe now or Sign inResearching a book about cricket, I came across Stacy Aumonier’s ‘The Match’, a short story written in 1916, recalling a game played at the height of summer two years previously, just before the Great War was declared. The devastating contrast between ‘the clean sanity of that sunlit field’ and the battleground that followed is a familiar literary idea, but Aumonier was one of the first to employ it. He looks back with disbelief at the innocence and generosity of spirit with which the game was played, the ‘good luck’s’ and the ‘well played’s’, the kindness and the cheerfulness of all those involved, the lunch, the drinks and the farewells, and can’t believe that so many of the players have since died. It’s a loving, elegiac and painful tale.
To my shame, I had never heard of Aumonier, and yet between 1913 and 1928 he wrote more than eighty-five short stories, six novels, a book of character studies and a volume of fifteen essays. John Galsworthy regarded him as ‘one of the best short-story writers of all time . . . there is certainly no one more readable . . . he will outlive nearly all the writers of his day’. Alfred Hitchcock adapted ‘Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty’ into a 1956 television film. In this, an intrepid spinster travels to France to collect her sister-in-law from her missionary work in Paraguay. Her brother, the Dean of Easingstoke, is predictably too busy with church affairs to do this himself. ‘It was clearly Millicent’s duty to go.’ Arriving in Bordeaux, she takes a late night bath, returns to the wrong room, accidentally locks herself in, and then discovers a dead man in the bed who, it turns out, is an infamous murderer. The story has all the ingredients of either a thriller or a farce, but Aumonier manages to include both, and adds comedy to psychological insight by focusing entirely on Miss Bracegirdle’s somewhat limited point of view:To be found in a strange man’s bedroom in the night is bad enough, but to be found in a dead man’s bedroom was even worse. They could accuse her of murder, perhaps yes that would be it. How could she possibly explain to these foreigners? Good God! they would hang her. No, guillotine her, that’s what they do in France. They would chop her head off with a great steel knife. She envisaged herself, standing blindfold by a priest and an executioner in a red cap like that man in the Dickens story – what was his name? Sydney Carton, that was it, and before he went to the scaffold, he said: ‘It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done.’
But no, she couldn’t say that. It would be a far, far worse thing that she did. What about the dear Dean? Her sister-in law arriving alone from Paraguay tomorrow? All her dear people and friends in Easingstoke? Her darling Tony, the large, grey tabby cat? It was her duty not to have her head chopped off if it could possibly be avoided.
The narrative zips along with beguiling charm and, like all good stories, it leaves the reader both satisfied and wanting more. Sometimes Aumonier’s push for humour verges on the ludicrous (he gets carried away with absurd names for his characters) but his enthusiasm is forgivable. ‘Juxtapositions’, for example, is a Wodehousian story of mistaken identity, in which Colin St Clair Chasseloup, an irritable club bore with only one leg, is confused with an adulterer known as ‘Limpo’ (see what I mean?). Desperate for a drink, he leaves a dreary concert half-way through and makes for the nearest club with the narrator. On their way back, the two men are invited into the home of a stranger who is convinced that Chasseloup is Limpo. Chasseloup plays along with the idea because he is keen on a third whisky and soda, unaware that he is falling into a trap. The two men are then promptly set upon, and a violent fight ensues. They emerge victorious and return to their concert as if nothing has happened, just in time for a final Bach fugue. (In the same way, Miss Bracegirdle reveals nothing to her brother about the dead man in the bed. The author recognizes that our lives sometimes include episodes that are too complicated and too exhausting to tell other people.) Aumonier’s stories often feature characters who take unexpected situations in their stride, as if they are crossing a road. There are extended anecdotes, missed opportunities, sudden realizations and recalibrations, all seen with a compassionate eye and an awareness of what makes a story sing. The Spectator reviewer pronounced ‘The Friends’, first published in 1915, one of the best English short stories he had ever read. In it, two London pub bores, White and Mapleson, spend twenty years avoiding going home. They don’t do much work either, preferring to drink their way through life. ‘During the day it would be no uncommon thing for either man to consume anything between 10 and 15 whiskies and sodas and sometimes even more: yet of neither man could it be said that he was ever really drunk.’ The friendship founders when White falls ill and is told that he must never drink again. Neither man can cope with a teetotal life and only a spectacular bender revives their relationship. White dies as a result, Mapleson is heartbroken, drinks even more, and his own death swiftly follows. Yet the story still has several pages to go. Aumonier spends it drawing attention to the consequences of their actions and its financial effect on the two men’s wives. A wry account of two drinking companions then turns into a morality tale about the consequences of selfishness that makes the reader review all that has gone before. At his best, there is something profoundly moving about Aumonier’s writing. His abiding quality is compassion. A little short story, ‘Overheard’, simply follows a waitress taking her orders in a tea-room as she is quietly dumped by her useless boyfriend. ‘The Grayles’ interrupts the complacency of a London drawing-room with a returning soldier’s account of how he won his war medal. And then there is my favourite story, ‘The Funny Man’s Day’. James Jasper Basingstoke is a popular musical-hall comedian whose mission in life, whether on stage or off, is ‘to leave behind him a long trail of smiles and laughter’. The main task of this particular day, before his two evening performances, is to attend the wedding of his old friends Katie Easebrook and Charlie Derrick, where he is the star guest (‘He told stories, he imitated all the denizens of a farmyard, he gave a mock conjuring display, and his speech in proposing the health of the bride’s father and mother was the hit of the afternoon’). Surrounding this event are all his usual quotidian tasks: rehearsing new songs, answering fan mail, wiring a hopeless old friend in Dundee fifteen pounds – an enormous sum – and taking his bed-bound former landlady a chicken and a bottle of Madeira to cheer her up. As he provides a running commentary on his busy life, telling himself to remain cheerful whatever the circumstances, his landlady makes a devastating observation: ‘You ought to have married Katie Easebrook . . . Charlie’s a good feller, a good-looking feller, too – but you would have made her a better husband, Jim.’ The insight haunts him for the rest of the day, and our sad, fat, lovely old clown is forced to take stock of the great romantic opportunity he has missed. The story has no neat twist to it, and the funny man’s final thought as he goes to bed is so generous as to be hauntingly moving. It is one of the best accounts of show business life I know. It also has an autobiographical tinge. Aumonier, having been an actor himself, was known for his wit and charm, performing his life as much as living it. Perhaps he makes it all look too easy, this desire to entertain, as if he is a dilettante telling a story that he heard at his club or at Lord’s. His lightness and facility make him the envy of those who think you have to work hard at a piece of writing, who prefer a gâteau Saint Honoré to a soufflé, but many a chef has floundered on a soufflé. There is wisdom, affection and forgiveness in Aumonier’s fiction, an understanding that ‘one lives everything down in time’ and that ‘it takes years, much training, discipline, and reflection to learn how to become a human being’. In the mid-1920s he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent his last years in a series of sanatoria. He could be lighthearted about this too. ‘The Thrill of Being Ill’ (what a title!) begins: ‘It’s no good getting a cold in the head, or any kind of absurd bilious attack. This doesn’t help you at all. Your friends regard you as a bore. The people who have an affection for you display only an impatient interest. You must do the thing properly.’ And ‘do the thing properly’ he did, dying in a clinic by Lake Geneva on 21 December 1928 at the age of 51. ‘No man had more friends, or more devoted and admiring,’ observed the writer Gerald Gould in his tribute. It would have been wonderful to have met him, and to have heard all his stories. But through his fiction, we can.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © James Runcie 2026
About the contributor
James Runcie is the author of The Grantchester Mysteries, The Great Passion and Tell Me Good Things. He is currently working on a book about cricket as a guide to life – One Ball at a Time.
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